MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bee_rider | 2025-04-30 16:18:01+00:00
From this layman’s point of view:

It was a requirement for everybody to get insurance, along with some protections (I forget exactly the mechanism) to prevent insurance companies from excluding people who had preexisting conditions (this is a big deal in the US, private insurance companies don’t want to insure you if they think you’ll be expensive), and a marketplace website thingy that made it easy to sign up for insurance.

There was a concern that if insurance companies can’t consider preexisting conditions, people might just wait until they get sick, and then sign up for insurance. So, there was a fine levied if you don’t get insurance.

There are also some subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance, but anecdotally the definition of “subsidy” and “can’t afford” vary from state to state.

Some states sued to try to get the uninsured fine removed. While the case was going through, the fine was set to $0. Ultimately, the fine was found to be allowed (IIRC), but by the time that happened political leadership had changed a couple times and fines are unpopular anyway, so it wasn’t reimplemented (some states do have their own implementation of the fine, though).

The system was implemented and remains. You can go to a government run portal and buy insurance in the US. Whether or not it is a good deal depends on what your state decided to do around subsidies and all that.

In conclusion, it was a market-driven compromise plan which still exists and is, in fact, highly compromised.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-30 16:18:04+00:00
Also disturbing is how absolutely awful it is at basic design. You can even see it on the screenshot that the Videos on the third row aren't properly aligned.

This is one of the largest corporations in the world and they make one of the most visited sites on the entire internet look like it was someone's hobby project and they just couldn't be bothered to align things correctly. This is insane.

The YouTube Startpage is incredibly bad in so many regards. Low in information density, full of things people do not want to see and fails at basic design. Even a basic, low effort redesign would be a major improvement.
by Arbortheus | 2025-04-30 16:18:17+00:00
Django is still great.

I recently upgraded two ~10 year old aging legacy applications at work. One was in Flask, and one in Django. This made me appreciate the "batteries included" philosophy of Django a lot more.

Even though the django legacy application was much larger, it had barely any extensions to "vanilla django". Comparably, the flask application had a dozen third-party flask-* dependencies that provided functionality like auth, permissions, and other features that Django has built-in. Many of these dependencies were archived/abandonware and hadn't been maintained in a decade.

When it came to upgrading the Django app, I had one giant release notes page to read. I didn't need to switch any packages, just make some pretty simple code changes for clearly documented deprecations. For the Flask app I had to read dozens of release notes pages, migrate to new maintained packages, and rework several untested features (see: legacy application).

In my mind, "batteries included" is an underrated philosophy of Djangoo. Also, it is now such a mature ecosystem it is unlikely there will be any radical breaking changes.

Perhaps there are some parallels to draw with newer trendy (but minimalistic) python frameworks like FastAPI.

If I were building a web application I wanted to last a decade or more, Django would be up there in tech choices - boring and sensible, but effective.
by projectazorian | 2025-04-30 16:18:39+00:00
> I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best.

I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.
by dspillett | 2025-04-30 16:18:40+00:00
Compressing a sequence of any single character should give almost identical results length-wise (perhaps not exactly identical, but the difference will be vanishingly small).

For example, with gzip using default options:

me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 10M -S | gzip -c | wc -c 10.0MiB 0:00:00 [ 122MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 10208 me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 100M -S | gzip -c | wc -c 100MiB 0:00:00 [ 134MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 101791 me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 1G -S | gzip -c | wc -c 1.00GiB 0:00:07 [ 135MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 1042069 me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 10M -S | tr "\000" "\141" | gzip -c | wc -c 10.0MiB 0:00:00 [ 109MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 10209 me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 100M -S | tr "\000" "\141" | gzip -c | wc -c 100MiB 0:00:00 [ 118MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 101792 me@here:~$ pv /dev/zero -s 1G -S | tr "\000" "\141" | gzip -c | wc -c 1.00GiB 0:00:07 [ 129MiB/s] [=============================>] 100% 1042071

Two bytes difference for a 1GiB sequence of “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…” (\141) compared to a sequence of \000.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-04-30 16:18:40+00:00
> If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.

The power of the tariff is typically reserved for Congress; the executive has declared an emergency giving itself that power, while Congress (specifically the House) has abdicated its responsibility by redefining "legislative days" to extend the length of the emergency.

> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.

Long term, maybe; short term, it'll spike inflation as the price of both raw materials and finished goods will rise to account for the tariffs.
by gadders | 2025-04-30 16:18:45+00:00
>>But ultimately the stuff we actually need to manufacture are things core to sustaining life and the military. Medical supplies, weapons, food, oil, metals, chemicals, etc.

Well and having chip fabs as well.

More generally, though, there is another variable in-between wages and cost of products, and that is profits.

Perhaps the likes of Apple, Amazon etc could maybe make do with a few less billion in profits.

I read an article (in, I think the NYT) about how, prior to Jack Welch at GE, companies used to boast in their annual reports about how well paid their employees were. The only company I know of that does this now is CostCo.
by mgkimsal | 2025-04-30 16:19:38+00:00
> but you trust Trump to know what he's doing

In 2016 that might have been a reasonable position without digging too much in to his background/history.

But we've had years of him in and out of office now, repeatedly lying. Lying about big things, small things, changing the lies, doubling down on the lies. Threatening people who question any of his lies in even the most polite/positive way possible.

Why anyone today would "trust" him on anything is just... insane.
by oa335 | 2025-04-30 16:19:40+00:00
> The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers.. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.

James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:

> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."

As well as : > "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."

As well as:

> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
by bunderbunder | 2025-04-30 16:19:44+00:00
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.

I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
by closeparen | 2025-04-30 16:19:52+00:00
It is incredibly early. Copilot and Cursor are both incapable of writing a mapping between two structs with identical fields - some of the most menial coding imaginable - because they either don’t have or won’t use basic coding mechanics like looking up the signature of a thing before writing code about it. This is the technology that should be making me 10x more productive? This honestly feels like an emperor has no clothes situation. Being charitable, maybe the hype is all from people generating code into empty projects with no existing context?
by mickelsen | 2025-04-30 16:19:54+00:00
When some of my banks issue a new card in case of loss, they keep either the same numbers (except for the expiry date or verification code) or do slight changes (last 4 numbers)

Subscriptions linked to any of these cards fail to renew, so it seems this works differently from renewed cards you receive when the original is expired or about to expire.

Maybe this is just how banks treat cards in my country, but have you seen this work elsewhere?
by xmprt | 2025-04-30 16:19:57+00:00
What I've been doing is using high audience extensions (like Tampermonkey) and getting ChatGPT to write a script for it which does what I need it to. Much more effective and trustworthy than relying on another extension developer. If Tampermonkey can't do it then I'll just write the entire extension on my own and load it as a developer extension.
by Fiely | 2025-04-30 16:20:08+00:00
In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-30 16:20:23+00:00
> You may have expected this (and if so, I hope you bought some good PUT options), but most economists certainly did not expect this already for the first quarter

Yes, they did, and the Atlanta Fed GDPNow estimate for Q1 has been negative since, IIRC, mid-February. That in Q1 we were likely in the first quarter of a significant recession that would get worse if some way out of the planned tariff apocalypse wasn't found was a widespread perception.
by geerlingguy | 2025-04-30 16:20:39+00:00
There is now a _huge_ industry of solo editors who spam YouTubers advertising "increasing revenue by re-using the content you already made!"

And 98% of it is just grabbing popular snippets of long form videos, cropping them slightly, and overlaying some bubbly animated text (or worse, just closed captions but with a bright font).

It's almost as annoying as the deluge of people who email and say "we can auto-translate your content into 20 languages!"
by magicalist | 2025-04-30 16:20:55+00:00
> For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.

On the other side of things, they're using an economic model based on keyword searches for woke language in grant descriptions, and yet you felt compelled to comment to urge skepticism and "just ask questions" only about this study?
by scudsworth | 2025-04-30 16:21:36+00:00
- Supporting Wikipedia’s moderators and patrollers with AI-assisted workflows that automate tedious tasks in support of knowledge integrity;

so, a chatbot on top of some tooling probably

- Giving Wikipedia’s editors time back by improving the discoverability of information on Wikipedia to leave more time for human deliberation, judgment, and consensus building;

extremely vague, but probably the "train a specialized ai on our own corpus to answer questions about it" style bot helper? these make stuff up left and right too

- Helping editors share local perspectives or context by automating the translation and adaptation of common topics;

automated translations would be a big step in the wrong direction

- Scaling the onboarding of new Wikipedia volunteers with guided mentorship.

you can't do "mentorship" with ai in any real way. all in all seems a box checking exercise for their ML officer.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-04-30 16:21:54+00:00
> Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job

It was a combination of US soldiers returning home after drawing government pay while fighting abroad, rationing limiting what could be purchased by those who remained home, and the one-two-three punch of the GI bill subsidizing land purchases, the interstate highway system effectively creating the American suburb, and process improvements from the war making automobiles drastically cheaper.
by mjr00 | 2025-04-30 16:22:06+00:00
The API mandate notably specified what rather than how. "It doesn’t matter what technology [you] use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter." In some ways it's quite the opposite of CEO mandates to use AI, which specify how you must build things (using AI!) rather than what.

The equivalent of the API mandate for AI would be if CEOs were demanding that all products include a "Summarize Content" button. Or that all code repositories contain a summary of their contents in a README. The use of AI to solve these problems would be an implementation detail.
by mstade | 2025-04-30 16:22:08+00:00
Others have responded more eloquently than I to this, so I won't. All I will say is I never equated tariffs with central planning, but I can see how from context you drew that conclusion. Tariffs aren't the only thing the republicans are doing under Trump, and taken as a whole the current administration smells – to me at least – a lot more politburo than the free trade champions of yesteryear. (Well, more like decade at this point.)
by cryptonector | 2025-04-30 16:22:32+00:00
Malthusian predictions have two parts, one of which is proven time and time again, and the other which has yet to be proven but on the basis of which horrible things are justified:

1. population growth leads to food production improvements which enables more population growth, 2. catastrophic failure must result eventually when we really run into the planet's human carrying capacity.

Malthusians like Paul Erlich are the boy who cried wolf. They are always wrong when they cry "wolf!", but who knows, maybe someday they might be right ("someday we will be right" is their message).

So far we've only seen the inverse of Malthusian catastrophes: population collapse.

We've seen population collapse twice in recorded history, perhaps more:

- the Roman empire - now, almost everywhere

Malthusians like mr. Erlich might argue that the reason we're reaching population peaks (followed by collapse) is precisely due to their efforts. Perhaps. But population collapse is not all that fun either. Yet even today we have a great deal of political pressure from some quarters to do things that will speed up the collapse rather than slow it.
by michaelbarton | 2025-04-30 16:23:11+00:00
Exactly. Olympic athletes in one sport have a much higher chance of being an Olympian in another. It’s not that they inherently “sporty” that makes the difference but they’re willing to put in the 100s of hours of training and get up at 5am regularly. You could say it’s discipline that would make them a good SWE?

See: https://www.nine.com.au/sport/olympics/olympians-who-changed...
by daveguy | 2025-04-30 16:23:18+00:00
Currency manipulation - No. Inflation concern.

Relocation of mfg - years long process won't help the shelves or the prices.

Retail margin - yeah... retail will balance price hikes to avoid hitting profits with not pricing too high to further reduce demand. This is just one of the reasons prices will go up. It will reduce the demand to less efficient and profitable levels, but won't increase the supply. Shelves will be sparsely filled with more expensive items.

US based engineering and design -- analogous to mfg. Not a near term solution.

Advertising -- it doesn't matter how much you tell people to go buy shit if they don't have money and/or the prices are too high.

Why are you still apologizing for Trump's absolutely incompetent policies?
by jtbayly | 2025-04-30 16:23:28+00:00
I can’t think of other examples, but this exact problem is a constant frustration for me on multiple sites. I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen.

As to the reason, at least with Youtube and Facebook, the answer is obvious: they want to increase their ad revenue by claiming additional “plays” or “interactions” or whatever they want to call it today. I remember realizing several times over the years that I had been conned when I paid for ads. The top-level numbers looked good, but when I dug in, I realized they were all faked.
by Yizahi | 2025-04-30 16:23:30+00:00
My homepage on 14" laptop has degraded from 12-16 previews (4 in row) to 9 (3 in row), lately since around late 2024 has a whopping 4 (four) previews. Amazing evolution. Such courage.

Also there are bugs there, and after some magic combinations of clicks I sometimes see 9 grid, or even rarely a 16 grid. Though it lasts only for one session and I can't ever reproduce the bug. So the support is there, they made it shitty on purpose. And I even pay for that crap :(
by shayway | 2025-04-30 16:23:38+00:00
Though the lasting benefits to my mood and mindset are worth it, I find the actual 'trips' from psychedelics to be very uncomfortable, so I would be interested in being able to skip that.

Anecdotally, I've began experimenting with taking mushrooms immediately before going to sleep. It doesn't seem to have as much of a lasting effect as taking them during the day does, and if I take them too long before bed it can be difficult to fall asleep, but other than that it's been working well. No significant changes to my sleep or how rested I feel, other than more vivid dreams than usual.
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-30 16:23:43+00:00
Coincidentally, Nathan Fielder is currently doing an entire season of The Rehearsal based on the premise that a number of flight crashes occurred after the co-pilot failed to contradict or take controls from the pilot.

> Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due to pilot error. He discusses this with John Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommended roleplay simulation to improve pilot communication.

Really good season so far!
by dehrmann | 2025-04-30 16:23:48+00:00
Why would the US and EU losing manufacturing be bad?

> How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?

What worries me more is that the US has been funding global military security through deficit spending funded by foreign investors (who got their dollars from US trade). We're cutting legs off that stool, so we might see more wars and a declining dollar, never mind fewer cheap imports.
by eightys3v3n | 2025-04-30 16:24:02+00:00
Here is your comment should you wish to copy it and try again: I never run into a business that doesn't exist on Google Maps and I rarely run into incorrect hours. I constantly can't find businesses that I'm looking for on OSM and they never have correct hours.

I use OSM for many directions, after looking it up in Google Maps and copying the plus code because it doesn't come up in OSM reliably.
by mjmsmith | 2025-04-30 16:24:36+00:00
Around the same time, or maybe even earlier, some random company sent me a junk fax every Friday. Multiple polite voicemails to their office number were ignored, so I made a 100-page PDF where every page was a large black rectangle, and used one of the new-fangled email-to-fax gateways to send it to them. Within the hour, I got an irate call. The faxes stopped.
by bluGill | 2025-04-30 16:24:41+00:00
I have a background in human machine interaction and I can tell you without even being there to tell you that a lot of changes didn't have proper UX design work done on them.

Now they did have AB testing and likely are better at the metrics Google cares about: making money. However they are worse for users in ways that real user testing would catch. Again though, real user testing would likely cost them money.
by kunzhi | 2025-04-30 16:25:01+00:00
I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement.

I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around.

What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.
by TMWNN | 2025-04-30 16:25:37+00:00
> Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume.

I wonder if the operating system[1] has turned out to be the ultimate expression of Steve Jobs's quote about Dropbox: "feature, not a product". A means to an end, with the end being where all the value is.

Everyone talks about Microsoft retaining the rights to market DOS independent of the IBM license being the most important business deal of all time, but Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more important in retrospect.

[1] I wrote "Unix", but of course Windows has been de facto free, even when not purchased with a computer, for some time