MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IIAOPSW | 2025-04-09 14:44:47+00:00
This leaves a lot unanswered. Why didn't any other trains tip over? Was the severe weather localized to such an extent that there was only a single train anywhere exposed to it? If I pick a random section of track to park a train what are the odds its in a completely open field with no structures or trees to shelter it from the wind? How often does wind cause derailments in general? Were the containers unusually empty or light weight at the time?

Freak incidents can be interesting to read about, but only when they solve the mystery of the unforeseeable and improbable circumstances which caused it.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-09 14:45:22+00:00
Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point? Not only are the new trade policies irrational, it's quite possible that they're intentionally irrational as a bargaining or maneuvering tactic. We're not going to reason or argue our way out of this one.

As I commented yesterday, there's a playbook for reshoring that's being totally ignored:

First you invite industry to reshore via subsidies and preferential access to government contracts. If necessary, the government must directly invest in new firms. (They already do this in a very small way with In-Q-Tel and others, so it's not totally beyond the pale. For a time there was even a US Army VC firm.) If you talk to a Chinese factory owner or mine boss, many of them will tell you that they got their start with a >$2M direct investment from their government.

Second you gradually tighten the screws on foreign finished products, not industrial inputs like metals, plastics, ores, etc.

Third you streamline export paperwork requirements and relax things like ITAR.

Then, when that's all humming along and the factories are working, you can launch blanket tariffs to protect your nascent industries, if need be. But you must exempt necessary industrial inputs from tariffs.

It's possible that personnel problems can, to some extent, be solved with automation.

But, anyway, the playbook's being torn up and read backwards, so it's all moot. We're just going to have to ride the tiger and see what the world looks like in a few months.
by skrebbel | 2025-04-09 14:46:08+00:00
> This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks

I was with you until this line. I've never seen a codebase where Not Invented Here Syndrome resulted in a stack that "antagonizes root cause analysis" in any way. I once worked at a C++ shop that had NIH'ed a supposedly thread safe string class, and it wasn't pretty.

There's plenty mature robust tech out there, and the chance that your own inventions are equally free of quirks and edge cases as battle-tested frameworks/libraries/databases that have had 1000s of eyeballs on them sounds quite unlikely to me, regardless of your programming skill.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 14:46:28+00:00
Honestly I could do without any news at all!

My father is profoundly addicted to consuming news media in every form possible. Never a day went by in my childhood without him hiding behind the daily newspaper (and then relating back all he read) and tuning in to every news on every TV channel. It was single-minded and exhausting, even compared to my own voracious and indiscriminate addiction.

I’ve never wanted to hear irrelevant shitty news stories. They are all 100% geopolitical gossip and only designed to control us, pacify us and/or engender F.U.D., and also to sell advertising.

News media has nearly nothing to do with what an urban human needs to get by in daily life.

The days that pass without me being lured in to some shitty RSS feed of clickbait, those are good days. I prefer to go to primary sources today so I simply keep open a tab on weather.gov, Google Maps for traffic or transit schedules, and YT channels from the Holy See & the People’s House for ceremonies and press briefings. Also the Wikipedia Main Page keeps me informed about the latest global obituaries and really big deals.

People are being led around by the nose by shitty 24/7 news cycles that consist 99% in stuff that’s bread & circuses. Living our lives should never depend on what’s on TV.
by flessner | 2025-04-09 14:46:44+00:00
Happens in programming as well, often even by developers.

The "copilot experiences", that finishes the next few lines can be useful and intuitive - an "agent" writing anything more than boilerplate is bound to create more work than it lifted in my experience.

Where I am having a blast with LLMs is learning new programming languages more deeply. I am trying to understand Rust better - and LLMs can produce nice reasoning to whether one should use "Vec<impl XYZ>" or "Vec<Box<dyn XYZ>>". I am sure this trivial for any experienced Rust developer though.
by jstanley | 2025-04-09 14:47:09+00:00
> Before we implemented this, we played entire games with not a single stick piece in over 100 pieces

Are you sure there wasn't some other bug? There's a 6/7 chance of not getting a stick piece, which means for 100 pieces in a row there's (6/7)^100 = about 1 in 5 million.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-09 14:47:55+00:00
I have always had trouble keeping on top of email, but probably as good as anything? I don't use a Bluetooth keyboard, but I use a USB keyboard (ZSA Voyager) and a Bluetooth mouse (Logitech MX Anywhere 3S) and it works well for me. For some reason I have to re-pair the mouse often, but I think that's on the mouse side. My headphones have no trouble staying paired.
by explodes | 2025-04-09 14:47:55+00:00
Human society has been optimizing for the wrong thing since 20,000BC.

To that end, the future I want doesn't focus so much on money, but on needs. Letting a market dictate "needs" is clearly not working for the betterment of humanity a whole. While it helps with progress, I believe there is an upper limit when human behavior is brought into the equation.
by zie | 2025-04-09 14:48:23+00:00
> It would be interesting to compare to, say, OpenBSD, with its apparently numerous security and defense-in-depth features.

I'm not sure that would be a very fair comparison. A lot of OpenBSD security comes from just skipping giant swaths of stuff. Advanced filesystems are non-existent, Bluetooth is non-existent, etc.

I haven't done a count lately, but I would guess the Linux Kernel alone is larger than the OpenBSD base system. It's simplicity is a huge security feature. Provided you don't need some of those features.

I'm not saying this as an OpenBSD hater or anything, I run OpenBSD on at least one machine.
by vessenes | 2025-04-09 14:49:02+00:00
OK, I’ve read the website, the spec, and JavaScript and python clients and servers. Here’s a quick initial reaction.

1. This is in the “embrace and extend” type area vis-a-vis MCP — if you implemented A2A for a project I don’t think you’d need to implement MCP. That said, if you have an MCP server, you could add a thin layer for A2A compliance.

2. This hits and improves on a bunch of pain points for MCP, with reasonable relatively light weight answers — it specs out how in-band and out-of-band data should get passed around, it has a sane (token based largely) approach to security for function calling, it has thought about discovery and security with a simple reliance on the DNS security layer, for instance.

3. The full UI demos imagine significantly more capable clients - ones that can at least implement Iframes - and reconnect to lost streaming connections, among other things. It’s not clear to me that there’s any UI negotiation baked into this right now, and it’s not clear to me what the vision is for non-HTML-capable clients. That said, they publish clients that are text-only in the example repo. It may be an area that isn’t fully fleshed out yet, or there may be a simple answer I didn’t see immediately.

Upshot - if you’re building an MCP server right now, great —- you should read the A2A spec for a roadmap on some things you’ll care about at some point, like auth and out of band data delivery.

If you’re thinking about building an MCP server, I’m not sure I’d move ahead on vanilla MCP - I think the A2A spec is better specified, and if for some reason A2A doesn’t take off, it will only be because MCP has added support for a couple of these key pain points — it should be relatively easy to migrate.

I think any mid-size or better tool calling LLM should be able to get A2A capability json and figure out what tool to call, btw.

One last thing - I appreciate the GOOG team here for their relatively clear documentation and explanation. The MCP site has always felt a little hard to understand.

Second last thing: notably, no openAI or Anthropic support here. Let’s hope we’re not in xkcd 927 land.

Upshot: I’d think of this as a sane superset of MCP and I will probably try it out for a project or two based on the documentation quality. Worst case, writing a shim for an exact MCP capable server is a) probably not a big deal, and b) will probably be on GitHub this week or so.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-04-09 14:49:13+00:00
We elected an idiot. He's raising tariffs on America's greatest allies and ruining our credibility to the rest of the world too. China sells a lot more things to Americans than America does to China (because America is very wealthy), which is called a "trade deficit" (there's some old history here, back during the colonial era when Great Britain and France and Spain wanted gold and silver reserves, they came up with this theory that whichever country has the most gold and silver coming in and the least going out wins), and he thinks that that trade deficit means China is taking advantage of the US.

A lot of people have pointed out that they have a similar "trade deficit" with their grocery store and don't feel even a little taken advantage of.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-09 14:49:23+00:00
I've never searched for an image from a stock vendor the way one would prompt a generative model. The stock vendor's metadata/keyword about its images were never that in-depth.

Also, you're implying that a generative system is so fast that it could create so many variations of your prompt to fill in the search results page in an acceptable time. That's a joke
by nottorp | 2025-04-09 14:49:37+00:00
> To know a tool well, you have to know:

> its history: who created it? Why? To solve which problem?

> its present: who maintains it? Where do they work? On what?

I'm not clear on that. Why does the person matter? So you can check if their political views align with those of your tribe, or what?

But then, I never read the user names on HN comments I reply to, and I guess the article author does. Maybe even keeps files on them...
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-04-09 14:49:38+00:00
You’re essentially just claiming price gouging without saying as much because otherwise the economies of scale would not exist (which anyone with any knowledge of how the economy works knows does in fact exist). “Smaller number of larger players with greater buying leverage as well as lower marginal costs leads to higher prices for consumers” is just using a lot of words to say “evil corporations are price gouging”, which is not true.
by jssmith | 2025-04-09 14:49:59+00:00
We've been focusing on indexing but query rewrites are probably next.

It looks like LLMs can do a pretty good job at generating ideas, particularly if you prompt them right.

After that, you have to: 1/ make sure that the SQL produces the same results, 2/ see what the query planner will actually do with it, 3/ see whether it improves performance.

As you point out, the data makes a difference, so you need production data statistics, at a minimum, to do this well.
by pkal | 2025-04-09 14:50:34+00:00
The IRC bouncer Soju uses scdoc and this has been personally annoying, as I refuse to install it just to build semantically less expressive documentation than when using the very well documented (https://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/mdoc.7.html) mdoc format. I asked the maintainer if they were interested in a contribution to translate it, and they just dismissed it out of the box.
by _huayra_ | 2025-04-09 14:50:44+00:00
This is indeed interesting, but FYI this is a BSL-covered project with somewhat onerous times: only one instance per service (i.e. don't scale out, if I understand correctly) [0].

[0] https://github.com/ClockworkLabs/SpacetimeDB?tab=License-1-o...
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-09 14:51:06+00:00
Interesting! I never thought about the issue being the reader treating it as just strings and making that an ill-fit for the problem domain.

My bugbear with man is that the only way to find a particular flag is via string search, so if I want to find out what "-c" does I'm going to bounce off of every hyphenated word starting with "c" in the file. Turns out `mdoc` makes it extremely easy to find those flags (they're all `.It Fl <whatever>` macros), but by the time it gets all the way to `less` that detail has been squeezed right out of the file.

Emacs manpage display is like 90% of the way there but lacks a function to "find flag in file;" I should look into how hard that would be to hack in.
by 9rx | 2025-04-09 14:52:02+00:00
> The guy who wants to build his own ORM for his no-name company's CRUD app is wasting everyone's time.

I once unfortunately joined a project where an off-the-shelf ORM had been selected, but when development was well into the deep edge cases started to reveal serious design flaws in the ORM library. A guy wanting (perhaps not a in a joyful sense, but more not seeing any other choice) to build his own ORM that was mostly API-compatible was what saved the project.

This was a long time ago. The state of ORM libraries is probably a lot better today. But the advice of ensuring that a library is SQLite-grade before committing to it does rings true even for simple CRUD ORMs. Perhaps especially so.
by jgtrosh | 2025-04-09 14:52:06+00:00
My dream competitive Tetris game is based on the cooperative mode in Tengen Tetris, with two players on the same board and separate scores. However, it's a bit hard to promote cooperation and not suicide as soon as there's any disadvantage. A possible workaround is to have two simultaneous 1v1 games (same seed), and count all four scores independently.
by Cerium | 2025-04-09 14:52:16+00:00
It is a passthrough cost because of the business models. In this example the importer (Nike) is paying the cost, and then retailers are buying the product from them at a price that includes the tariff. The retailers don't care why the shoe is $75 or $50. A retailer is concerned that there are customers willing to pay a price which enables them to make a profit. For most retail businesses that price needs to be about 2x cost of goods.

Until you get to extremely high-end goods this multiplier system works fairly well to accommodate the various costs the business has. It is an assumption that there are many business costs that scale linearly with sale price. In reality not all do, but there are many: insurance, return costs, loss, and customer service expectations all scale with dollar values.

Edit: if we switched from an import tariff to a foreign goods sales tax we could avoid this particular problem.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-09 14:52:18+00:00
>so they can sell it back to you via “search.”

>transfer your private textual data to them

Who is "they" (or "them") in these sentences? It's an open protocol with 50 partner companies, which can be used with AI agents from ~anyone on ~any framework. Presumably you can use this protocol in an air-gapped network, if you'd like.

Which one of the 50 partner companies is taking my data and building the moat? Why would the other 49 companies agree to a partnership if they're helping build a moat that keeps them out?
by noisy_boy | 2025-04-09 14:52:19+00:00
> but you would have better luck with novel work from an experienced passionate coder. Uni trained or not.

I have not learned CS at university (maths & stats graduate who shifted to programming, because I can't help myself loving it). I work with engineers with CS degrees from pretty good universities. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I write better code then a lot of them (and some of them write code that it so clean and tight that I wish I could match it). Purely based on my fairly considerable experience, there is basically little correlation between degree and quality of code. There is non-trivial correlation between raw intelligence and the output. And there is a massive correlation between how much one cares about the quality of the work and the output.
by rayiner | 2025-04-09 14:52:19+00:00
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries.

We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

What seems most likely to me in the future is that the US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now. Dominating finance and services won’t mean anything when both the IP and the physical products are being produced somewhere else.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-09 14:52:21+00:00
Self sufficiency is just not a credible argument here.

This is about consumer footwear, not agriculture (nor all of manufacturing).

The US (and most other nations that can afford to) is perfectly used to throwing ~$20 billion at the sector to keep local agriculture operational.

We did not do this for literally every industry in the past because we had (and have) neither the idle workforce to do this, nor does the local population want to do the work (even for slightly uncompetitive wages), nor do consumers want to pay for the difference.

My personal prediction is that people will realize this pretty soon with the consequences of the Trump tariffs manifesting and the whole thing will be rolled back and scaled down, with pretty much nothing to show for it.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-09 14:52:26+00:00
> Usage of singular 'they' in contexts where more specific pronouns were available was unusual until very recently

It was used whenever gender was ambiguous or needed to be protected. Now with people openly identifying as non-binary, there is not a more specific pronoun, that person doesn't consider themselves that gender. You would be referring to them as something that is not what they want to be called, and is not what their social circle refers to them as. It's confusing, especially if you know what to call them but choose not to because you're offended.

> I don't think it's unfair characterize this as an offensive move, waged by one side in a 'culture war', that was done without regard to collateral damage

I would wager, based on the disproportionate and melodramatic language, this has never actually affected you. But you are likely consuming media that tells you everyone is going to draw and quarter you if you mess up a pronoun. This is not the case. Trans people just move on, they're used to it. It literally happens all the time.
by briandear | 2025-04-09 14:52:58+00:00
> We don't want a corporate, faceless box store coming in with no stake in our community.

Who is “we?”

If the community wants Washington General, then they’ll shop there. If they want the lowest possible prices, they’ll shop at Dollar General.

What it sounds like is that Washington General wants effectively a tariff on Dollar General so people won’t shop there. Because if it’s strictly “what’s best for the community,” then the community will decide what they value.

It sounds like Washington General doesn’t want the community to be able to make that choice. If nobody shops at Dollar General, then they’ll close it down. Not that it matters, but I despise Dollar General-type stores: generally cheap junk, so I personally chose the more expensive specialty store: but I can easily afford to do that. The Dollar General ICP is a person that doesn’t have a lot of disposable income. So it’s a bit arrogant to suggest that people without a lot of money should be subsidizing someone’s business just because it makes people feel better. That’s a luxury many people don’t have.
Show HN: Comparing product rankings by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity
by the1024 | 2025-04-09 14:53:01+00:00
Hi HN! AI Product Rank lets you to search for topics and products, and see how OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity rank them. You can also see the citations for each ranking.

We’re interested in seeing how AI decides to recommend products, especially now that they are actively searching the web. Now that we can retrieve citations by API, we can learn a bit more about what sources the various models use.

This is increasingly becoming important - Guillermo Rauch said that ChatGPT now refers ~5% of Vercel signups, which is up 5x over the last six months. [1]

It’s been fascinating to see the somewhat strange sources that the models pull from; one hypothesis is that most of the high quality sources have opted out of training data, leaving a pretty exotic long tail of citations. For example, a search for car brands yielded citations including Lux Mag and a class action filing against Chevy for batteries. [2]

We'd love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think! What other data would you want to see?

[1] https://x.com/rauchg/status/1898122330653835656

[2] https://productrank.ai/topic/car-brands
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-04-09 14:53:10+00:00
I thought the end goal is to make something that's way more than human in capabilities.

The thing is, if we produce something that is worse than humans (and right now LLMs are worse than humans with good search indexes at hand), there's not much point doing it. It's provably less expensive to bear, raise, and educate actual humans. And to educate a human, somehow you don't need to dump the whole internet and all pirated content ever created into their heads.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-09 14:53:24+00:00
Say what you will about Windows development, but back in the 90's the MSDN reference documentation that Microsoft shipped for Win32 and MFC was quite good. Almost gold standard good. That, plus Petzold and Prosise, and you pretty much could answer any API question you had without even going online.

Yet, we had engineers who would still just hunt and peck and stumble guess until they either accidentally got it working or they'd ask a more senior guy for help (who would always first say: did you read the documentation?) There was no excuse back then, the documentation was good and accurate, and if you followed it, it worked. Were there hidden dark corners of Win32? Sure, but the 99 percentile developer never needed to even go near them.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-04-09 14:53:42+00:00
Preferences are independent of rationality, surely?

If a guy with a finite lifespan has a preference for autarky, expansionist military invasions, racial hierarchies and a secret police regardless of the consequences and then rationally pursues those preferences in ways that are likely to bring them about before his death of old age, the guy doesn't qualify for the category "delusional" and instead fits into one of the moral categories.
by thesz | 2025-04-09 14:53:51+00:00
> Symbolic AI like SAT solvers and planners is not trying to learn from data and there's no context in which it has to "scale with huge data".

Actually, they do. Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) learns from conflicts encountered during working on the data. The space of inputs they are dealing with oftentimes is in the order of the number of atoms in Universe and that is huge.