Hacker News Reader

TradingPlaceson US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007

We underbuilt housing for 30 years leading to the pandemic. This is the result of that.

New housing units per new person. Dashed line at median. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1cYTJ

TradingPlaceson Beeper's esoteric fix for iMessage access suggests why it's pushing politically

Will someone explain why people who don’t pay Apple a dime have some right to use iMessage? That seems to be at the root of all this, and it makes little sense to me.

TradingPlaceson USB-C Cures Mosquito Bites

I always go the opposite way — ice it down.

TradingPlaceson Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies

Are you under the impression that the utility business is wildly profitable? I’d like to disabuse you of that notion. Not everything is a reinforcement of your priors.

TradingPlaceson Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies

OK, last 365 days, 31% for Texas, 29% for Cali.

You can play here https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

TradingPlaceson Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies

In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).

TradingPlaceson Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies

Agreed, but you should also acknowledge that the system has produced the largest buildout of renewables. In the past 30 days, 33% of generation in ERCOT was wind or solar (mostly wind). For comparison, CAISO in California was 23% (mostly solar).

TradingPlaceson Texas power plants have no responsibility to provide electricity in emergencies

The split between retail and wholesale puts the retail arms at the mercy of wholesale. This went all the way up the line to gas providers, who just decided to declare force majeure and closed up shop. Vistra tried desperately to keep the power on, and wound up losing over $1 billion for their troubles.

Texas has a great system under normal conditions that has incentivized a ton of solar and Panhandle wind, but it is not built for severe conditions.

TradingPlaceson Ask HN: Terrified I wont find another job

The National Labs are hiring https://nationallabs.org/work-here/careers/

TradingPlaceson First look at Microsoft 365 Copilot

A few weeks ago, they renamed it "Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365.” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/cop...

TradingPlaceson GM says it's dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto because they're unsafe

https://www.wsj.com/video/ford-ceo-on-apple-google-and-elon-...

Transcript:

WSJ Joanna Stern: GM recently announced that it's ditching Apple CarPlay.

Ford CEO Jim Farley: Yeah, how about that?

JS: How about that? How does Ford think about this? I mean, are you going to follow suit?

JF: Okay, so I guess you've got two camps in the software interior car OEMs. Tesla, and now it turns out GM, and then others. We're in this other group. I think the first three software shippable content that's going to be cool for customers is not the interior digital experience. Although that will always be super important because it's a safety critical device and there's going to be a lot more going on inside a car than your phone. So the interior has to be really well done. But in terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago. So get real with it because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle. It's going to be safety, security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes. So that relationship for content is between you, the Wall Street Journal, and the customer. I don't want to get in the middle of that, but Tesla and other companies believe differently. They want to have a complete control over the interior experience, and we don't think it's differentiating. 70% of our Ford customers in the U.S. are Apple customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say, "Good luck"? That doesn't seem customer-centric. And Apple does a really good job.

TradingPlaceson US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

This is all being superseded by IIJA anyway. A lot of fiber is going to go in the ground.

TradingPlaceson Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

False advertising is not protected speech. 15 U.S.C. §§ 52-55 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid%3AUSC-prel...

TradingPlaceson Ask HN: Why haven't we seen a race to the bottom in SaaS pricing?

Because they were already undercharging. During the low rate years, investors said they wanted growth, not profits. Now they want profits. Expect a lot of consolidation and rising prices over time. Unity was a harbinger.

TradingPlaceson Tesla drivers run Autopilot where it's not intended – with deadly consequences

I only get this with Safari and Private Relay enabled. Works in other browsers fine in my experience (I use Kagi Orion as a secondary browser)

TradingPlaceson Is Grok Basically Just an OpenAI Wrapper?

"Large language models (LLM) have become state of the art in many benchmarks and conversational LLM applications like ChatGPT are now widely used by the public. Those LLMs can be used to generate large amounts of content which is posted on the internet to various platforms. As LLMs are trained on datasets usually collected from the internet, this LLM-generated content might be used to train the next generation of LLMs. Therefore, a self-consuming training loop emerges in which new LLM generations are trained on the output from the previous generations. We empirically study this self-consuming training loop using a novel dataset to analytically and accurately measure quality and diversity of generated outputs. We find that this self-consuming training loop initially improves both quality and diversity. However, after a few generations the output inevitably degenerates in diversity. We find that the rate of degeneration depends on the proportion of real and generated data.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16822

TradingPlaceson EVE Online – Down the Rabbit Hole [video]

Not 6 hrs, but I’ll take it!

TradingPlaceson EVE Online – Down the Rabbit Hole [video]

Now we need one for Dwarf Fortress.

TradingPlaceson AMD MI300 performance – Faster than H100, but how much?

*if you ignore sparsity.

TradingPlaceson Nobody wants U.S. Treasury bonds

I came here to say this. Rates are high because of Fed Funds expectations. Also, rates have been coming down since mid-October

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1bU5a

This is a terrible article from someone with no understanding of debt security markets.

TradingPlaceson Nobody wants U.S. Treasury bonds

That is the same as selling them. The redemptions are replaced by new debt that others will buy

TradingPlaceson Nvidia's earnings are up 206% from last year as it continues riding the AI wave

Nothing like being lucky and good.

TradingPlaceson X May Lose Up to $75M in Revenue as More Advertisers Pull Out

Freedom of association is also in the First Amendment.

TradingPlaceson Sweden plans new nuclear reactors by 2035, will share costs

At US scale, that is a $1.7 trillion subsidy (6.7% of 2022 GDP)

TradingPlaceson Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

The big threat imo is smaller open source models running at the edge, not on expensive GPU clouds. Their lead rn is GIANT MODEL + AZURE GPU CLOUD. Anything that undermines that is trouble, because it is so expensive. For a long time, everyone focused on training costs, but GPU inference at scale is mind-boggling. Current valuations do not seem to take this risk into account.

TradingPlaceson GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]

Media is so focused on CPUs, they are missing the fact that Apple focused on the GPU and Neural Engine for this round of chips

TradingPlaceson Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4M loss; CFO quits

This only includes 2 U2 shows, which netted $4.1 million together. Q4 will be the real first operational report from them.

TradingPlaceson Thiel's Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges

There is no control to this experiment. What would have happened to those 271 kids had he paid their tuition to Harvard, and also opened up the same access to them?

Also, what happened to the other 260 kids? I bet they would prefer that Harvard degree now

TradingPlaceson US consumer spending dashboard built on data from 50M+ cards now on Snowflake

Reeks of selection bias.

TradingPlaceson Complete Whole Earth Catalogs Archive Available Online and Free

The Whole Earth Catalog is hard to describe except that it was an attempt to make the world wide web, long before the web, in print, back in the 1970s. From the masthead:

>FUNCTION

>The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting…

>PURPOSE

>We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

>Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Whole Earth and its offshoots were leaders of the techno-optimism movement in the 1970s and 80s — that technology, devolved to the individual, was a powerful force for good. It was highly influential in the rise of the PC, including with both Apple founders, and their entire circle of Bay Area hippie-nerds.