MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by molticrystal | 2025-04-29 14:17:25+00:00
Aaron Swartz showed us why we must fight back against these laws. He has spun so much in his grave this week, you'd think he's trying to invent a new power source.

I understand the horrors and so-called purpose this new act is trying to address, but the genie is out of the stable diffusion and successors' bottle.

Just this weekend, Trump signed an executive order declaring and celebrating World Intellectual Property Day [0], the kind of day IIPA and DMCA would have their lovechild conceived, while creepy uncles ACTA, TPP, TRIPS, and SOPA/PIPA lurked and maybe even watched in the attic.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act fits right in with this family reunion, handing those in power another tool to censor the internet under the guise of protecting "intimate images." Its vague net is so wide, it'll have even more platforms spooked into nuking fair use or satire just to dodge legal heat. It's no coincidence that censorship goes hand in hand with IP laws, control the content, monitor what people are submitting. This is exactly why people are building distributed tech like IPFS or ActivityPub and federated networks to keep information flowing, not locked behind government filters or takedown ultimatums.

Before you know it, it will be obscene to disagree with those in charge.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/worl...
by trebor | 2025-04-29 14:17:40+00:00
Ignoring tariffs for the moment... No one should be shocked that Amazon would do this.

Remember back when it was controversial to apply sales tax to online shopping? The biggest lobbyist against it was Amazon, which they marketed as fighting for the market against the government. Then they got big enough to survive a reversal ... and swung the other way to weaponize the law against their smaller competitors.

They've done a lot more than this, including creating their own brands to inject into a successful niche product or segment. They did all that off of sales/product data they aggregated from all sales on their platform.

Amazon is a dirty player in the market, and everyone should remember that.
by berkes | 2025-04-29 14:18:02+00:00
No, the real problem was that it worked too good from the perspective of ad-tech and data-gatherers.¹

It relied on the goodwill of those who run these services to i) invest some effort and money to detect the DNT headers and then ii) not collect/store the data of these requests.

Back, when only a tiny portion of web-users would send these headers along, the industry was fine to implement it. If only for marketing purpose. But, as soon as they saw that it actually worked, the industry saw a threat to their revenues and stopped.

I believe a DNT2.0 that's more granular could've been a basis for GDPR, but the GDPR refrained -rightfully so, IMO- from any implementation details. For one, the GDPR never once requires some "popup", it merely states that if you are an a*hole and collect data that you shouldn't and/or send that to other parties, you should at least ask concent to do so - the idea being that web-owners would then massively ditch these services so that they don't have to nag their users.

And because the GDPR refrained from implementation details, the Ad- and surveilance industry adopted a "dark pattern" that annoys people to no end (the popups) so as to paint the GDPR in a bad light. This industry could've easily said "If we see a DNT header with level:x and domainmask:*, we'll assume NO to every tracking cookie and won't collect them". And the browser makers then could add some UI to allow users per-domain or global, or wildcard or whatever settings "set-and-forget". But alas, this industry is malicious at best and will annoy users to no end for their own agenda.

¹ edit: source: https://pc-tablet.com/firefox-ditches-do-not-track-the-end-o...
by mapt | 2025-04-29 14:18:37+00:00
Russia has been selling large amounts of long-term sovereign bonds, going into debt, at an annualized interest rate in the mid 20%'s (!). While under a looming demographic crisis featuring very large numbers of elderly pensioners being supported per young worker. A non-negligible fraction of those young workers are fleeing the country or dying in Ukraine, which further deepens demographic issues.

This is destabilizing for a variety of reasons. It's a bet on future growth that does not appear evident. It's also effectively a burden placed on the other oligarchs behind Putin, who would love to control a large chunk of a functional economy rather than controlling a large chunk of a banana republic undergoing stagflation and being heavily taxed for the privilege.

What happens when strongman Putin goes away, and occasional defenestration is replaced with factionalism? Or even sooner than that - what happens if the market becomes confident in low oil prices?
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 14:18:38+00:00
Let say “Uber for Business” is more expensive and you work for a large company that has enough business travelers where they have their own check in terminal out of SEA like where I worked when I did a lot of business travel (worked remotely and flew into SEA a few times). The time saved by both the business travelers and the reimbursement team would have been well worth the extra cost. Especially when either the client was paying for travel anyway (the consulting department) or sales was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.

Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.

I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.
by munksbeer | 2025-04-29 14:18:41+00:00
> Trust but verify is still a good rule here

I wouldn't have a clue how to verify most things that get thrown around these days. How can I verify climate science? I just have to trust the scientific consensus (and I do). But some people refuse to trust that consensus, and they think that by reading some convincing sounding alternative sources they've verified that the majority view on climate science is wrong.

The same can apply for almost anything. How can I verify dietary studies? Just having the ability to read scientific studies and spot any flaws requires knowledge that only maybe 1 in 10000 people could do, if not worse than that.
by rickydroll | 2025-04-29 14:19:21+00:00
> A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night.

Utility companies gave away streetlights, security lights, etc., because they would raise the electricity usage generated at times of lower demand. This minimized the need to spin up and spin down generating plants and let them make money on what would have been otherwise wasted power.

Nighttime lighting doesn't consume all of the excess power generated at night. Utilities have cleverly shifted power consumption loads to later times through TOD pricing for residential and industrial customers.

It's no secret that I'm a big advocate for turning down lights at night. Increasing dependency on solar and batteries would make running electricity-intensive processes and industries cheaper during the daytime and reduce the need for baseload power at night.
by Retr0id | 2025-04-29 14:19:33+00:00
> "Why not just use recursive functions"

One great reason not to use recursive functions for traversing trees is that you can allocate your own stack data structure rather than relying on the call stack itself. In most languages/runtimes, the call stack has a maximum depth which limits the depth of trees you can process, usually on the order of thousands of stack frames.

Managing your own stack usually produces weirder looking code (personally I find "naive" recursive approaches more readable) - but having it as a first-class language feature could solve that!
by Xmd5a | 2025-04-29 14:19:37+00:00
Tree traversal primitives (clojure.walk):

(defn walk [inner outer form] (cond (list? form) (outer (with-meta (apply list (map inner form)) (meta form))) (instance? clojure.lang.IMapEntry form) (outer (clojure.lang.MapEntry/create (inner (key form)) (inner (val form)))) (seq? form) (outer (with-meta (doall (map inner form)) (meta form))) (instance? clojure.lang.IRecord form) (outer (reduce (fn [r x] (conj r (inner x))) form form)) (coll? form) (outer (into (empty form) (map inner form))) :else (outer form))) (defn postwalk [f form] (walk (partial postwalk f) f form)) (defn prewalk [f form] (walk (partial prewalk f) identity (f form)))

Another reason why this perlisism holds:

9. It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.

"Let's move on."
by yojo | 2025-04-29 14:20:15+00:00
That’s pretty much the floor for an Electron app.

If you’re a small shop or solo dev, it is real hard to justify going native on three platforms when electron gives it for (near) free. And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle.

There are alternatives like Tauri that use the system browser and allow substantially smaller bundles, but they’re not nearly as mature as Electron, and you will get cross platform UI bugs (some of which vary by user’s OS version!) from the lack of standardization.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-29 14:20:52+00:00
Let's POSIWID this for a second. Perfect accuracy isn't the goal here, nor does it meaningfully contribute to the goal. The goal is messaging, it's about drawing a line in consumers' brains between the price increases and Trump. If it were me I'd just take the pre-tariff price, work out a post-tariff price and then assign the blame for the difference between them to Trump. No one is gonna check up on this, and it has the narrative on its side. Even Trump's supporters acknowledge that his tariffs are gonna raise prices, they're just integrating that fact by saying it's for the greater good and it'll bring manufacturing back home and put a chicken in every garage and a car in every pot and all of that. Amazon just wants to hammer him on this because even after Lord Bezos bent the knee, donated tons of money and used his power to manipulate the media in favor of Trump Trump still went ahead with moves that will consolidate his own power but cost his nobles a ton of money.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-29 14:20:54+00:00
I think including the taxes on fuel would be good, as it'd show people the ridiculous amount of money they're paying to maintain the infrastructure their cars use (though fuel taxes often don't come close to covering road maintenance).

Such a system could get complicated quickly, though, and showing the profit margin also wouldn't be of interest to many salespeople. Making fuel price total up to €2.09/L is easy if petrol were only taxed at €0.7891/L, but the 21% VAT being applied to the total sales price after the per liter tax (and the 9% profit margin) makes the math a tad more complex.

I don't think you could call those taxes "hidden" though. Anyone can look up how much tax they pay. It's not like taxes are sent out in secret to gas pumps every day.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-29 14:21:07+00:00
Yeah I have to eat my words. Keir Starmer is a terrible example given how much he's banging on about "open border policies" and "small boats". A few tens of thousands - often of the most needy refugees - come in small boats. It's a capitulation to the far right and I reckon it's going to blow back in Labours face much as some of Blair's policies did.

I mean, look, my position is that "far right" is a meaningful concept even if it's somewhat nebulous at the edges. And as far as I can tell, Wikipedia is well justified in its mention of far right influence on the riots. And the Wikipedia page defining the concept of far right is pretty cohesive and compelling. I don't think that simply wanting low immigration makes someone far right. But immigration control is a massive point for the far right because it's a low hanging fruit. It's easy to scapegoat immigration as the principle cause of crises in housing, cost of living, and the NHS. Lots of people are tempted to point fingers at the "other" in times of insecurity.

PS Does a policy/narrative stop being far right as it becomes more popular? Maybe in an "Overton window" sense, but obviously not at a global and historical level. Mussolini becoming popular in Italy did not mean he was no longer a far right fascist.
by miek | 2025-04-29 14:21:08+00:00
There is research supporting the benefits of remote work (less distraction, increased productivity, etc.), and there is research appearing to confirm the negatives. One excerpt from a study at MS[0] "Our results show that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network of workers to become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts."

Gallup [1] found that far fewer workers felt respected while remote during the pandemic. I thought it was wild to see the huge uptick (31%) year-over-year in SEC whistle-blowers. [2]

Research of this type is challenging, especially because it's difficult to source the volume and quality of data needed from businesses. I'm sure we could find weaknesses in any study for or against.

Hybrid might be the best of both worlds per HBR, see [3]

Honestly I'd love to see a solid refutation of the benefits of in-person work, so that I could use it for leverage the next time my remote job is at risk of being converted back to in-person.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4 [1] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workpl... [2] https://www.proskauer.com/blog/bloomberg-sec-receives-record... [3] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/22-063_639195cc-...
by bluGill | 2025-04-29 14:21:10+00:00
For starters they more or less blindly went with their candidate until forced to change. I don't know who should have seen Biden was no longer competent, but the signs should have been there - those people should have made Biden resign a year before the primary season started.

Of course the republicans are just as guilty as democrats in letting their people keep running as they get old in office.

I have a personal policy of never voting for someone who has held the office more than 1 time. If more people would do this we would solve a bunch of problems. (2 terms is a good number if you like the person since they have some experience in the second term). This also means I oppose too small districts in local issues - if there are not several people interested in running for the office than either it shouldn't be elected (why do I elect my country treasurer - it shouldn't have any power), or the district is too small.
by bevelwork | 2025-04-29 14:21:12+00:00
Initial impression is good.

Few feedback items:

1. Its hard to get a sense of what task is being worked if you migrate back to the main page then come back to a running task. You kind just have to figure it out and hope its still running.

2. I wish you could opt into a global `git diff` view. Saying here's what we modified in the last iteration.

3. Also for local runs I'd greater prefer if it'd prompt confirmation before executing something I haven't seen yet. Essentially on a real piece of code you'd have to make sure you're 100% in a sandbox so you don't bork things for other developers.

4. ctr+c killing the current operation definitely happened on accident trying to copy another prompt.

5. It'd be really nice if it was git-aware. E.g. when files are finalized they're committed to whichever branch and uncommitted files are considered work in progress.
by berkes | 2025-04-29 14:21:15+00:00
Yes. But "these websites" will then be prosecuted, their owners cannot enter the EU ever again without the risk of severe penalties, they cannot do business in the EU and can and often will, lose access to many services that do want to stay on the good side the EU (i.e. will see their google ads blocked, their stripe frozen, their hosting closed etc)

Edit: what I'm trying to say is: this "technical" problem has a real and working "solution" that's not technical at all: law and enforcement. Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does. There will always be malicious, scammy, malware, criminal and illegal webservices around. But it makes it very hard for malicious actors to do so and make money.
by pentamassiv | 2025-04-29 14:21:19+00:00
A few days ago I tried ordering a bottle cage for my bike from the US. The price was 22.95€. At the checkout, they added a "Tariff Recovery fee" of 1.84€. On top of that, they charged 60.25€ for shipping. The grand total was 80.04€.

I stopped trying to buy stuff from the US, because there's always a ton of added costs
Learning Delphi
by pkrzysiek | 2025-04-29 14:21:30+00:00
Hi, I’m a third-year CS student and I received a proposition from the company I applied to — they offered me to learn Delphi and complete a project for them as a requirement (though I’m not sure what exactly yet) for my summer internship. Do you know any good (free) courses or books that introduce the language? I’m most interested in project-based courses, but I doubt something like that exists for Delphi.
by heisgone | 2025-04-29 14:21:38+00:00
There is certainly a usefulness in separating government spending and private spending in our economic health measures. For one, measures like GDP are often used to evaluate the confidence and the general well-being of our economy. High Government spending tend to indicate the opposite, as Keynesian economics would mandate. More so, it invite manupulation of those measures by politicians, who can increase deficits to boost their "success". When it comes to spending like Education, those should be fairly constant relative to the population, in a developed country. We also have other mechanics to discuss their health status since they are largely public funded and subject to political debate. Perhaps a good measure would be the GDP minus public deficit minus credit card debt increase.
by organsnyder | 2025-04-29 14:21:41+00:00
The preppers can only buy themselves a small amount of time, though—no more than a year or two. Eventually, their stockpiled supplies will run out, or some piece of equipment will need a replacement part.

I'd much rather focus on "prepping" by building social resiliency, instead. The local community I'm plugged into is much stronger together than anything I could possibly build individually.
by danielvf | 2025-04-29 14:21:41+00:00
I see a lot of comments here and in the other thread talking about Amazon's high profits on retail sales, so I looked up the last earnings report.

For the year of 2024, Amazon made a 5.5% operating profit on non-AWS revenue. This is before taxes and, I think, before leases on buildings and property.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2024/q4/...
by Balgair | 2025-04-29 14:21:44+00:00
My company isn't backfilling positions anymore and we had a ~10% company wide layoff about 2 weeks ago. My team was told to use AI to fill in the roles that were lost on the team [0].

What's changed in the workflow is a lot really. We do a lot of documentation, so most of that boilerplate is not done via AI based workflows. In the past, that would have been one of us copy-pasting from older documents for about a month. Now it takes seconds. Most of the content is still us and the other stakeholders. But the editing passes are mostly AI too now. Still, we very much need humans in the loop.

We don't use copilot as we're doing documentation, not code. We mostly use internal AIs that the company is building and then a vendor that supports workflow-style AI. So, like, iterative passes under the token limits for writing. These workflows do get pretty long, like 100+ steps, just to get to boilerplate.

We're easily 100x more efficient. Four of us can get a document done in a week that took the whole team years to do before.

The effort is more concentrated now. I can shepherd a document to near final review with a meeting or two from the specialist engineers, that used to take many meetings with much of both teams. We were actually able to keep up and not fall behind for about 3 months. But, management see us as a big pointless cost center of silly legal compliance, so we're permanently doomed to never get to caught up. Whatever, still have a job for now.

I guess my questions back are:

- How do you think AI is going to change the other parts of your company than coding/engineering?

- Have you seen other non engineering roles be changed due to AI?

- What do your SOs/family think of AI in their lives and work?

- How fast do you think we're getting to the 'scary' phase of AI? 2 years? 20 years? 200 years?

[0] I try to keep this account anonymous as possible, so no, I'm not sharing the company.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-29 14:21:45+00:00
> "Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together."

There were historical precedents, like the printing press, which was hoped to bring morality and education to the masses but brought penny dreadfuls and yellow journalism along with it, and radio / television, which was hoped to bring culture and education to the masses and brought us soap operas and more yellow journalism along with it, that should have clued geeks in about what humanity would do with computing. Technology can't solve humans being human.
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-29 14:21:49+00:00
Seems to have been for CSS and SVG bandwidth golf. The article mentions it being for this site: https://grid.iamkate.com/

According to the bottom of it, it can get quite a few views each day, so bandwidth savings may visibly effect hosting costs. The main CSS file is only 5kb compressed/15kb uncompressed, so it seems to have been part of a larger effort in minimalism.
by davidvgilmore | 2025-04-29 14:21:59+00:00
That's probably fair. My only defense is that we are on a shoestring budget and I'm not a designer ...

I admit our branding isn't great. But heck - we pivoted twice in 18 months on just a pre-seed and still have half our cash left.

Hopefully we'll be able to grow and afford a better logo later :)
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 14:22:08+00:00
> Sales tax cannot be per-calculated, since it is charged on the total sale.

Most of the developed world pre-calculates sales tax.

If McDonalds charges you $10.32 in Australia, the government gets $0.84(8181812...) of it. Rounding isn't an issue because you don't write a check for each individual $0.84(8181812...), you pay them the aggregate amount on a regular basis.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-29 14:23:04+00:00
I trust cutting edge models now far more than the ones from a few years ago.

People talk a lot of about false info and hallucinations, which the models do in fact do, but the examples of this have become more and more far flung for SOTA models. It seems that now in order to elicit bad information, you pretty much have to write out a carefully crafted trick question or ask about a topic so on the fringes of knowledge that it basically is only a handful of papers in the training set.

However, asking "I am sensitive to sugar, make me a meal plan for the week targeting 2000cal/day and high protein with minimally processed foods" I would totally trust the output to be on equal footing with a run of the mill registered dietician.

As for the junior developer thing, my company has already forgone paid software solutions in order to use software written by LLMs. We are not a tech company, just old school manufacturing.