jadenPete

This is patently false.

I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before:

1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values

2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome

This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area.

Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home.

I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.

Why does building a successful business necessitate generating economic externalities? Many do, and that should be prevented, but many also don’t. And to say that those externalities are responsible for a majority of the business’s growth in all cases is just false.

I couldn’t disagree more. Most of my company’s backend code is written in Scala, and most of our engineers dislike it because the language is difficult to understand, has way too many features, and has many ways to solve the same problem. I don’t want Rust to continue down this path, and I already worry with some of the syntactic sugar and type system additions being discussed that it already has.

A language’s type system doesn’t need to model every possible type of guarantee. It just needs to provide a type safe way to do 95% of things and force its users to conform to use the constructs it provides. Otherwise it becomes a buggy hodge podge of features that interact in poor and unpredictable ways. This is already the case in Scala; we’ve discovered almost 20 bugs in the compiler in the past year.

Apple’s hardware teams are seriously running laps around their software teams. Which is odd, because historically, it’s been the opposite.

Until iPad OS actually becomes capable for complex work and multitasking, I can’t see what the benefit of strapping such a powerful chip to an iPad is.

I'm curious, how much does this weigh? I've ridden e-bikes a few times, and it's always surprising how much heavier they are than ordinary bikes. I can't imagine how heavy this must be.

It seems like this problem (differences in how humans and LLMs use probabilistic language) and hallucination are one in the same. LLMs don’t have access to information about how confident they are, so they always choose the most likely response, even if the most likely response isn’t actually that likely. Whereas if a human is unconfident, they’ll express that instead of choosing the most likely response.

Of course, LLMs can still speak about probabilities and mimic uncertainty, but that’s likely (heh) coming from their training data on the subject matter, not their actual confidence.

Humans are interesting because they employ a two-phased approach: when we’re learning, we fake confidence (you’d never write “I don’t know” on a test unless you truly had nothing of value to say), but during inference, we communicate our confidence. Some humans suffer from underconfidence or overconfidence, but most just seem to know innately how to do this.

Can anyone who works on LLMs clarify whether my understanding is correct?

The article cites Amazon prohibiting sellers from selling their products for less on other platforms as anticompetitive behavior. I don’t doubt that this is happening, nor that it’s anticompetitive.

That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. This was a big problem for my startup.

This is a negative externality, because they’re extracting value from your platform (the list of sellers, products, prices, ratings, etc.), without paying for that value. If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. One way to prevent this is to paywall your platform, but not every consumer wants to pay a subscription.

I think it’d be fair for Amazon to prohibit sellers advertising other platforms on its own, but prohibiting them from offering lower prices outside of Amazon outright definitely seems anticompetitive.

Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.

I think what bugs me about EU legislation like this is how micro-targeted it is. Why apparel specifically? If waste and a disregard for the finite-ness of natural resources is the problem, why not impose a blanket, Pigovian-style tax on all extracted resources?

I got the same feeling when they mandated USB-C on Apple devices. If the problem of waste were tackled categorically, then the state wouldn’t need to get involved in matters it has no business getting involved in.

It has to stop at some point. Eventually, the regulations will become so complicated, unknowable, and unenforceable, that they’ll have no choice but to say “this is enough” and start tackling the root of the problem instead.

This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?

I’m also looking forward to gpui (https://www.gpui.rs/) from the Zed folks.

Agreed. I don’t think easy package management is the problem, though. Rather, it’s just triggered a Cambrian explosion of packages, and now security needs to catch up.

I think the point about tooling being the problem deserves more emphasis. I'm a firm believer that the right thing to do should be the easiest thing to do. Currently, the easiest place to innovate is at the top of the stack, using web technologies and languages like JavaScript.

You can see this with languages like Rust and Go—they're some of the first low-level programming languages with actually good tooling, and, as a result, they're becoming very popular. I can pull down some code, run `cargo build`, and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.

If you want your language/library/framework/layer in the stack to become popular, make the tooling good and make it easy for folks to get their questions answered. Everything else will follow.

Really interesting stuff. Am I correct in thinking that if productivity were to rapidly increase in the service sector (e.g. due to AI) the same way it did in the manufacturing sector in the 19th and 20th centuries, that the cost of services would decrease?

Also, a side note: I dislike a lot of the popular conversation around the Baumol effect because they’re usually along the lines of “this can’t be the only reason my healthcare or education is expensive”, which is true (there are other factors at play), but the Baumol effect still explains a lot of it.

I work one of these teams! At my company (~300 engineers), we have tech debt teams for both frontend and backend. I’m on the backend team.

We do the work that’s too large in scope for other teams to handle, and clearly documenting and enforcing best practices is one component of that. Part of that is maintaining a comprehensive linting suite, and the other part is writing documentation and educating developers. We also maintain core libraries and APIs, so if we notice many teams are doing the same thing in different ways, we’ll sit down and figure out what we can build that’ll accommodate most use cases.

Happy Thanksgiving, HN!

This article seems sensationalized and lacking evidence. Layoffs alone (especially when so much of the industry did them) doesn't seem sufficient to explain today's outage, especially when we know so little of the technical details behind it. It's disappointing that The Register didn't wait until we had a postmortem from AWS before jumping to conclusions.

What benefit do skills over beyond writing good, human-centric documentation and either checking it into your codebase or making it accessible via an MCP server?

Rust's choice of constructs also makes writing safe and performant code easy. Many other compiled languages lack proper sum and product types, and traits (type classes) offer polymorphism without many of the pitfalls of inheritance, to name a few.

I’ve considered running an email server on my personal domain for some time, but the effort of changing my email hasn’t felt worth it to me, given how many services I’ve signed up for with my current email (a Gmail address). Is anyone aware of any strategies to make this easier? It’d be nice if I could set up forwarding so services would automatically use my new email, but I’m not sure if something like that exists.

I think when the answer becomes more important than the journey, AI tools become more valuable. Want to figure out why a bug is occurring? Tools like Claude Code can be great for this. Implementing a new API or feature? You’ll have to read all the code it wrote, and if you’re like most software engineers, you’ll be faster at writing code than reading it. So you might as well just write it yourself.

This has helped to explain why, at least for me, LLMs have been more useful for reading code than writing code. I’m also just reluctant to submit the code it’s written on my behalf without making hundreds of small adjustments, but I think I’ll need to get over that, as I wouldn’t be so nit-picky a junior engineer were completing the task.

I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.

Support for garbage collection is really nice to see. Previously, it’s been very difficult to do garbage collection in WASM because you don’t have direct access to the stack, so traditional approaches like stack scanning haven’t been feasible.

Git is great, but it doesn’t solve the problem of removing unused dotfiles. For that, I use a custom script that accepts a configuration file mapping each file/directory to a package on my system. Then, when I remove those packages, I’m notified to delete its dotfiles.

I’ve found this helpful for evaluating new packages without cluttering my home directory. It’s especially helpful when using many packages that don’t respect the XDG Base Directory specification; they tend to dump dotfiles directly in my home directory, so keeping it clean is important.

IntelliJ has always been extremely slow for me, even on my beefed up mobile workstation for work.

It’s refreshing to see an editor that’s built with performance as a priority.

It's amazing to me that, in the US, we're discussing deregulation and privatization of so many functional and working parts of the government apparatus (the United States Digital Service, public broadcasting, the post office, etc.), when deregulation of the housing market would probably do the most for public good. Distortion of the market, which includes outlawing SROs, jacks up housing prices and indirectly perpetuates so many societal problems:

- Homelessness, which likely worsens mental health, increases drug usage, reduces tourism, creates a massive eyesore for everyone else, etc.

- Lack of disposable income—if folks are spending more on a rent or mortgage payment, they're not spending as much on goods and services.

- Inequality—artificially constricting the supply of housing creates a game of musical chairs, where some inevitably get left out and, because of that, can't climb up the social ladder. It also favors incumbents who already own homes or received their parents' home.

- Sprawl—zoning restrictions stifle the construction of high-density housing, which makes cities inaccessible, increases car dependence, negatively affects the environment, etc.

This is an off-topic and low-quality comment, but the animated dots on the background of this website made me think I had dust on my device for a second.

It’s always puzzled me that so many languages have their own build systems and package managers. Why aren’t programming language-agnostic build systems like Bazel and Buck more popular? It seems so strange that every new programming language essentially has to reinvent the wheel multiple times, inventing a new build system, package manager, formatter, linter, etc. I wonder if we’ll ever see something like LLVM for these technologies.

From reading the article, it sounds like the main driver for AI-generated laws is the demand for increasingly complex laws. Assuming that overly complex laws are bad, I wonder if this could be solved by a check on the length of bills. Perhaps an amendment that if a bill can’t be read at some speed in soms amount of time, it has to be split up?

Although, I wonder if complex laws are a feature, not a bug, of a polarized system and far fewer compromises would be met if bills were forced to be shorter. That could induce gridlock and increase both the frustration we’re currently seeing with the legislature and the increased pressure on the executive to legislate.

Merry Christmas!

Up until I was about 10 years old, my family would drive to my grandparents’ house every year to celebrate Christmas Eve with my extended family. We’d track Santa using the NORAD Santa tracker (which, by coincidence, reports Santa being in San Francisco as I type this) and open presents from my grandparents.

One year, I got a Kindle Fire, which was the first computing device I called my own. Because I didn’t have my own computer and the family computer was usually being used, I did most of my early programming on the Kindle by downloading an app called AIDE that allowed me to compile Android apps on Android (of which the Kindle ran a modified version) and sideload them. By the time next Christmas had rolled around, I’d built my first complete Android application—a graphing calculator complete with support for basic algebraic expressions, trigonometric functions, and a page that explained what every supported mathematical function did and how it worked. I was so excited to show my cousins and grandparents.