AI persuasion at scale, bots trading six-figure portfolios, and a RAM crunch that could stall your next upgrade—today’s HackerNews.fm digs into how quickly the future is arriving, and who gets to steer it.
We start with a new paper arguing that elites can cheaply shape public opinion as AI slashes the cost of personalized persuasion, then move into a real-money experiment: five LLMs given $100K to trade stocks for eight months. Along the way we examine whether “servant leadership” is overrated compared to radical transparency, why RAM prices are spiking for everyone from homelabbers to hyperscalers, and what happens when Postgres becomes embeddable and fully in-browser. We close with OpenRouter’s massive “State of AI” report built on 100 trillion tokens of usage data, dissecting which models people actually use, for what, and how they perform in the wild.
Stories covered in this episode:
1. Elites Could Shape Mass Preferences as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs
- Rank: #1 | Points: 545 | Comments: 522
- Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04047
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145180
2. We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months
- Rank: #1 | Points: 233 | Comments: 184
- Article: https://www.aitradearena.com/research/we-ran-llms-for-8-months
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154491
3. Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership
- Rank: #1 | Points: 409 | Comments: 194
- Article: https://entropicthoughts.com/transparent-leadership-beats-servant-leadership
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147540
4. The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All
- Rank: #1 | Points: 345 | Comments: 365
- Article: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/ram-shortage-comes-us-all
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151578
5. PGlite – Embeddable Postgres
- Rank: #1 | Points: 541 | Comments: 105
- Project: https://pglite.dev/
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146133
6. State of AI: An Empirical 100T Token Study with OpenRouter
- Rank: #2 | Points: 171 | Comments: 72
- Report: https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai
- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154022