MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-04 14:18:21+00:00
A bunch of the tariffs still haven't even taken effect (despite his repeatedly saying they were hitting at midnight when he made the announcement Tuesday—I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out Wednesday that that was bullshit, but I still was).

This continues to mostly be harm from him just constantly going back and forth on the notion. It can get so much worse if he sticks with it this time.
by kelipso | 2025-04-04 14:18:29+00:00
The numbers are cooked up. See https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-... from above.

Basically if you ignore computers, there was zero growth in manufacturing sector. If you take computers into account but ignore processing power increase, there was zero growth. So pretty much the only driving force in the manufacturing sector for the last 20 years was Intel, AMD, Nvidia. This is even with the increased productivity per person in manufacturing sector (so there was also massive reduction in employment).

It is highly concerning and the numbers were very much cooked up.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-04 14:18:45+00:00
Even if I don't particularly like the individuals, it did feel like some people involved felt compelled to be there, even if they didn't really want to be... Rex Tillerson comes to mind. I can't imagine Trump's moral character sat well with a literal boy scout. John Kelly was another no-nonsense member who seemed steady & driven by a motivation that, agree with or not, was defensible vs. the current batch's motivations. Surprise - he didn't last long either.

If there are anyone on the (currently) winning side in this Congress who aren't a bunch of greedy, self-serving boot lickers they better step up soon. I can't imagine someone like John McCain would remain silent in this environment. Best case scenario: history will forget most of these assholes; if not, it will not be kind.
by spencerflem | 2025-04-04 14:18:49+00:00
I agree we should do all that right now- but I will say a huge number of problems in our society right now are caused by a prioritization of profit over social stability which is inherent to capitalism.

One thing that convinced me is that we don't need to get rid of markets even- just make it so that its not a extremely small pool of unelected shareholders making all the major decisions affecting our lives.
by vladms | 2025-04-04 14:18:52+00:00
I have seen people consider the outcome is one of "candidate A wins" or "candidate B wins" (so binary). I do not fully agree, but practically it seems to be a good approximation - as in 30 years nobody reached something significant, and there was only one instance in 1872 when the 3rd candidate had more than 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_third-party_and_indepe...)

Any of the supporters of "candidate A" or "candidate B" will have a vested interest to model it this way, because it can mean more votes for their candidate.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 14:18:58+00:00
Yes! I'm not sure what the your intended upshot here is, but those absolutely would be beneficial changes in behavior and are perfectly in line with prevailing recommendations of ways behaviors need to change to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and related recommendations more broadly in line with environmental conservation and public health.

Far from a counterpoint, they testify to the reasonableness of the request in this instance, of stepping away from factory farming, because it belongs to a class of similar and well respected recommendations. Getting people to actually change their behavior is an important issue, and the purpose of recognizing it should be to reckon with it in a serious way rather that use it to tee up complaints about hypocrisy that seem to imply the futility of doing anything.
by 9rx | 2025-04-04 14:19:12+00:00
> How much time do we need?

A few years will start to show if what AI is producing is a lability, or if it is just fine, methinks. If you haven't felt any pains from its legacy cruft by that point, it isn't apt to magically appear a long way down the line.

> If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish.

When Archytas propelled a wooden bird with steam, the first recognized step towards building the rockets that got us to space, what usefulness was found in that?

It offered a basic foundation on which we were able to consider other solutions and the concept in general. But couldn't you say that is, at very least, where we are at with LLMs right now too?
by themaninthedark | 2025-04-04 14:19:23+00:00
They probably are.

It's like the claim that pharma had tripled the price of a 100 year old drug(insulin) that the inventors had sold for only $1 and were now charging $450 a month for it.

Then you dig into the claims and you find out that, the original insulin is still available, it's new formulations that have the higher cost.

>Until now, the only so-called “Walmart insulin” you could get for a lower price (roughly $25 to $35 per vial) was the older, human versions of insulin — R (or Regular) insulin, N (which is Novolin, aka NPH insulin); and a 70/30 mix of the two other types. Those formulations have been around since the early 1980s, but they work much differently and are seen as much less reliable than the analog insulins that first started appearing in the later 1990s. https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/walmart-relion-novol...

But the new stuff works better, is faster acting and allows a freer lifestyle.

I agree that there is a problem with the pharma industry but lying about the problem to try and get change is not going to help the cause.
by Muromec | 2025-04-04 14:19:32+00:00
>It's even worse when paired with the ability for a local authority to go bankrupt when it can't cover the bills and be forced to sell off major capital assets (e.g. buildings, sometimes of significant public interest like concerts halls, leisure centres and other community venues).

Which may be perceived as a actual goal of this mandate if you have enough of tinfoil in your hat.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-04-04 14:19:59+00:00
I am very curious if the current wave of mystery distributed (AI?) bots will just run javascript and be able to get past proof of work too....

Based on the fact that they are requesting the same absolutely useless and duplicative pages (like every possible combniation of query params even if it does not lead to unique content) from me hundreds of times per url, and are able to distribute so much that I'm only getting 1-5 requests per day from each IP...

...cost does not seem to be a concern for them? Maybe they won't actually mind ~5 seconds of CPU on a proof of work either? They are really a mystery to me.

I currently am using CloudFlare Turnstile, which incorporates proof of work but also various other signals, which is working, but I know does have false positives. I am working on implementing a simpler nothing but JS proof of work (SHA-512-based), and am going to switch that in and if it works great (becuase I don't want to keep out the false positives!), but if it doesn't, back to Turnstile.

The mystery distributred idiot bots were too much. (Scaling up resources -- they just scaled up their bot rates too!!!) I don't mind people scraping if they do it respectfully and reasonably; taht's not what's been going on, and it's an internet-wide phenomenon of the past year.
by jmathai | 2025-04-04 14:20:00+00:00
I'm neither an economist or mathematician. But I'm smart enough to observe my surroundings. I observe that the middle class is shrinking rapidly. Wealth concentration is increasing rapidly. Income has not kept up with the price of goods. And it's increasingly difficult for working people to accumulate wealth.

Can you point me to other theories which articulate the cause of my observations?
by throwaway63467 | 2025-04-04 14:20:02+00:00
Does anyone think they’re doing it on purpose to profit from short selling stocks? I mean they peddled two sh*tcoins right on Inauguration Day so it doesn’t seem too far fetched they would intentionally tank the stock market as well. It’s hard to see any other angle to this ridiculous policy. If you know where stocks are going you can profit regardless whether they go up or down, and making them go down is easier than making them go up, as a president.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-04 14:20:33+00:00
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.

That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.

Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.

Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.

Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.

Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.

The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.

For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-04 14:21:00+00:00
I don't mind '0' == 0 when it's used for scripts and dumb stuff. That's literally how shellscript works, and I love shellscript, so I can't complain about that.

But I would never use shellscript to build an entire business's user interface with a giant shellscript framework. That would be insane. A language that was designed as a throwaway scripting thing for doing some miscellaneous tasks, and never designed for full application purposes? No sane person would use that for a business's core product.

Right?
by anon291 | 2025-04-04 14:21:03+00:00
For some reason Britain's migrant population is disproportionately reliant on government services. This is a common talking point in American politics, but doesn't seem a common one in English politics, but in England the data is pretty incontrivertible, whereas in America it's a bit harder to ascertain.

This is because America's alleged welfare queens are undocumented, whereas Britain's are there legally and the government actually has very good data on which groups are a net boon and which are a net draw on the economy.

I'm not a Brit and I could care less at the end of the day, but it does seem kind of bonkers to me to be importing people while your own country suffers.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-04 14:21:38+00:00
I don't think the public opinion is as dire as it seems. He has a very vocal cult following, but the real swing in the election was politically disaffected people who are just really hard to reach. This is sad but the good news is that it's just a matter of reaching them — and MAGA is clearly and demonstrably failing on the number one issue for the vast majority of voters which is economy.
by adusal | 2025-04-04 14:21:53+00:00
Just to be clear, GitMCP isn't a repository management tool. Its sole purpose is to make documentation accessible to AI in ways the current tools do not (e.g., semantic search, not necessarily limited to a repository), with minimal overhead for users. GitMCP itself is a free, public, open-source repository. The tool doesn't have access to PII and doesn't store agent queries.
by incomingpain | 2025-04-04 14:22:10+00:00
I havent checked on UK in awhile. Lets look at it together. objective observer pov.

GDP growth: basically 0% for years. You're stagnating and losing economic time. Bad news.

Unemployment looks to be rising but overall not terrible. Participation rate seems high, grandma and grandpa still working it seems?

Interest rate of 4.5% is rough. Housing is problematic.

Balance of trade is negative, you're getting poorer.

Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy.

Consumer confidence hasnt been positive in 10 years.

corporate tax rate of 25%? personal income tax of 45%. sales tax of 20% Yikes.

Seems to me the UK government is holding the economy back with far too high taxes.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-04-04 14:22:29+00:00
I don't know that the argument stands with "feelings of achievement". I agree that you can't justify a moral infringement by taking pleasure in it, but upthread you were trying to distance the motivation from virtuous ones like curiousity and activism. Being driven by achievement is absolutely a virtue. I'd argue it's the same virtue that drives curiousity, and you've essentially just said exactly that ("the feeling of solving a puzzle is a 'rush of power'" s/power/achievement).
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-04 14:22:41+00:00
Thank you for the summary.

Funny I was looking for some data from NOAA a few months ago and I ended up giving up. Their website has become a mess.

I remember doing the same a few decades ago it was pretty straightforward, if I remember correctly there was a well organised anonymous FTP server and you would connect and transfer what you needed.

So why not seeing this as an opportunity to go back to a simple, cheap and effective system? how hard can it be to serve those data with HTTP on a web server?
by darepublic | 2025-04-04 14:22:42+00:00
I am a saddened that so many people on HN interpret this poem only as a literal critique on their favourite new toy. And only engage with it on that level. To me this poem was like drinking a distillation of a lot of the sadness and uncertainty and over-excitement and fatigue and burn out of the astoundingly swift technological march of the last decade. And yes, ofc LLMs. I don't have to be completely in agreement with the tone of the poem to appreciate that.

when I see a kid alone playing video games all day... and the parent, instead of trying to speak to their child, engage with them, mediates this problem through the use of an app with time limits... to me there is a lot of sadness in that. Putting up virtual glass panes between each other more and more.

^ the source of above is somewhat funny though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvsYm4vfM6Y
by sapiogram | 2025-04-04 14:22:54+00:00
No, that's a mistake in the article. The variable is still captured by reference, but `let` is causing it to be re-declared on every iteration of the loop, not mutated.

The following code prints 1, 2, 3. It wouldn't do that if the variable was captured by value.

for (let i = 0; i < 3;) { setTimeout(() => console.log(i)); i++; }
by perrygeo | 2025-04-04 14:23:05+00:00
The last time the world was at +4C was the mid-miocene, 16 million years ago. Sea levels were 40 meters higher than today. The climate was so wet that grasslands grew in what is now desert. Gigantic mammals roamed everywhere. Human ancestors were still living in trees. Antarctica had coastal forests and was home to the only glaciers on earth.

If anyone can read that paragraph and think "Not bad. But what about the stock market?", they've completely lost the thread.
by horsawlarway | 2025-04-04 14:23:29+00:00
This is roughly where I've settled as well.

Economics likes to present the facade of a hard science with equations and rules - but macro economics simply doesn't work the same way as physics, and pretending that your equations are going to be a crystal ball has so far proved mostly bullshit.

Too many things depend on decisions made by actors acting under very complex and dynamic social constraints, rather than predictable rules.

The end result is that several decades after something happens - we're ok at examining the social/political influence of the time on macro economics, but that insight doesn't do much for us now because circumstances are changing at a pace that has rendered any intuition utterly obsolete.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 14:23:41+00:00
At this point we're trafficking in tediously obvious truisms. This is Learned Sage Warns Powerball Not As Much After Taxes territory. I don't think anyone imploring us to change agricultural practices is unaware of these fundamentals about human nature. Presenting them in this context as if they represent a counterpoint implies that there's a fundamental futility to even trying, which I think takes the convo in the wrong direction.
by dariosalvi78 | 2025-04-04 14:23:44+00:00
the problem with this is that most browsers employ persistency rules for OPFS that are not very transparent, at least for the user, or not very predicable, at least for the developer. In other words, a user can find his/her data wiped out all of a sudden.

Here some info: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...

There is also a discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222328

You can use the file system API as an alternative, which is permanent, but it's slow, requires the user to remember where the file was stored, and not recommended for things such as databases.

This makes the whole purpose of it a bit pointless in my opinion. What is your experience with it?
Show HN: I vibe coded WikiXplorer – GamePad for WikiXplorer in 20 minutes
by IbnUlAdam | 2025-04-04 14:23:56+00:00
Just dropped WikiXplorer – GamePad, a fun, fast-built companion for WikiXplorer that lets you explore Wikipedia in a gamepad-style UI. Coded the fun project in just 20 minutes using v0 and Next.js, and it’s live on Vercel. It’s a playful experiment to make Wikipedia feel more interactive and scroll-friendly. Would love feedback and ideas.

Thanks
by epistasis | 2025-04-04 14:24:09+00:00
Nobody has come up with anything halfway rational to explain this behavior. The closest, the so-called "Mar-a-lago Accord", is filled with so many holes that it cannot be a coherent theory. (See, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDKbWA1NzY for an explanation of it and why it's obviously wrong).

One thing that dictators reliably do is tank the economy to destroy the middle class, which consolidates power for them. That's the most coherent motivation that I have bene able to find.
by stephen | 2025-04-04 14:24:21+00:00
Do queue operations (enqueue a job & mark this job as complete) happen in the same transaction as my business logic?

Imo that's the killer feature of database-based queues, because it dramatically simplifies reasoning about retries, i.e. "did my endpoint logic commit _and_ my background operation enqueue both atomically commit, or atomically fail"?

Same thing for performing jobs, if my worker's business logic commits, but the job later retries (b/c marking the job as committed is a separate transaction), then oof, that's annoying.

And I might as well be using SQS at that point.
by gnfargbl | 2025-04-04 14:24:35+00:00
I'm in my mid-forties and I think the LLM revolution is amazing.

It reminds me of the dotcom era in many ways: a genuinely transformative technology which is currently no more than maybe 20% of the way into realising its potential; a technology for which expectations have been hyped up to maybe 200% of potential; and a technology around which a stockmarket bubble has formed.

I'll leave the rest of the LLM story to the reader's imagination, but to see this slightly fragmented and ossified mind it's extremely obvious what happens next, and then what happens after that, and then after that (which is when we get to the really good bit). So no, I'm not bored, and I'm not tired. I'm as happy to be working in technology now as when I was a younger man. Happier in some ways, even.
by anon291 | 2025-04-04 14:24:53+00:00
> But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity.

Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation?

Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist.

We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc.

In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 14:24:58+00:00
It does get much easier to throw up your hands and dismiss "the other side" if you dehumanize them and think of them as just a mass cult.

I actually agree that most of the people involved with politics are pretty cult-ish (especially the die-hard MAGAs), but I refuse to believe that 60 million people in the US are like that. Maybe it helps that I live in a very red area so I have regular and routine contact with a lot of people who I know voted for Trump but are generally and genuinely thoughtful and contemplative, but have different opinions/conclusions on the best solutions than I do. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant to assume that you are always right and someone else is always wrong.

Changing minds isn't easy, and it isn't fast, but it is clearly possible. Else how do you explain the shifts back and forth? Bush 41 -> Clinton -> Bush 43 -> Obama -> Trump -> Biden -> Trump? How do you explain the relatively rapid swing from opposition to support of gay marriage?
by tosser0001 | 2025-04-04 14:25:07+00:00
Unlike previous market turmoil (2008, 2020) where the U.S. at least had established global trade order to lean on for the recovery, this feels like the U.S. could be entering a period of sustained damage. I don't see how the U.S. recovers from this in anything like he near term. Americans will have to get used to a long stretch of low economic growth.

The global trade order is going to be reconfigured, but not in the way the Trump thinks. The U.S. is throwing up a wall around itself, but the rest world will continue with the current regime and likely move away from the U.S. permanently.

What's sad is, the Congress could simply revoke the ability for Trump to single-handedly make these tariffs, but they appear too cowed to do anything about it.