MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thechao | 2025-04-15 14:24:25+00:00
When I was studying economics, my macro professor used to belabor the point that post-WW2 US socioeconomics was a highly unique (and special) time-and-place; and, it is a mistake to generalize economic theory from that time-and-place.

So... here goes: rather than proclaiming a "housing crisis", maybe we're seeing the end of an exceptional period of "housing affordability". (A similar analysis of Europe and Asia applies, piecemeal.)

As such, if we want to re-enter into a new period of housing affordability, we need to ask ourselves what we plan to give up and/or trade for that?

For WW2, it was millions of lives and worldwide devastation. It seems like we'd need a complete re-evaluation of the way wealth, family structures, and social safety nets work in order to vastly expand housing. (In the US.)
by tshaddox | 2025-04-15 14:24:28+00:00
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.

Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
by myth_drannon | 2025-04-15 14:24:35+00:00
A personal anecdote from someone close to me. A food plant in Canada (so not heavy/high tech manufacturing), was importing raw materials from US, processing it and exporting it to US. After Trump tariffs, they bought some small plant in the middle of nowhere USA. Moving most of the equipment to that US plant, increased the salaries of Americans that worked there before (very low salaries compared to Canada). So yes, it's unskilled labour but an example of production moving quickly back to US.
by anenefan | 2025-04-15 14:24:44+00:00
>The analysis honed in on geographic points where farm fields planted by corn growers are seen closely abutting waterways, and assumes that farmers sprayed their crops with atrazine, a common practice in the US Midwest.

Though it could not be determined if atrazine was used on the fields, the chemical is applied to the majority of corn acres in the state, and the satellite images show clear pathways for the flow of farm chemicals off the fields and into waters.

The biggest problem in any field of investigation and research is when people make assumptions In this case the whole issues begins by assuming the highly mobile (in soil -- iirc countless groundwater wells have recorded high levels present) herbicide was simply sprayed near the water way ... it's better to assume the dumb farmer isn't doing it right and ignored the requirement for a buffer ... and not heavens forbid, that the product is actually highly mobile, much more than mock up paddock trial experiments had demonstrated.

Still those corn farmers are left with a problem, they rely on that herbicide but it would be better if it were less mobile, especially in sandier soils.
by lwidvrizokdhai | 2025-04-15 14:24:44+00:00
It was bound to come tumbling down eventually. I've had good times in some of the discussion boards and especially with some of the more chill and creative boards like /qst/. the influence of /pol/ overshadows pretty much every board though, and it's rare to see a thread go by without some racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic bile being spilled unfortunately.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 14:25:04+00:00
Building up manufacturing has always been a period of pain for the population. There is so much to learn and so much hard work to do with, at least initially, so little gain.

Competition is extremely high initially, products will be ridiculed for being expensive and low quality. Companies will fail and go bankrupt, workers will suffer from that.

"Bringing manufacturing back" is a path of pain, not a way to fast economic success. There is no way to change that, tariffs will certainly not change it. Are Americans ready to leave their office job and work overtime in factories and engineering departments? No, automation will not do this for you, you are competing with a country which knows far more about automation than you do. To compete with them you need to be better and cheaper.

Lastly look how Germany struggles, right now. Their industry is in large parts starting to loose any competitive edge and will continue to do, unless very significant cuts are made somewhere. You can not keep the same living standards while someone is doing twice your work for half your costs.
by pauldix | 2025-04-15 14:25:08+00:00
We're very excited about this release, over 4 years in the making. Over that time we adopted, contributed to, and helped lead parts of what we're calling the FDAP stack: Apache Arrow Flight, DataFusion, Arrow, and Parquet.

We wrote and contributed the Rust object store crate used in this stack and by many others to the ASF.

This release is based on a "diskless" architecture that uses object storage for all durability. With DataFusion it has a columnar, vectorized, standards compliant SQL query engine. We also built support for InfluxQL on top of it.

The other big thing we brought in is an embedded Python VM using PyO3 and Python Build Standalone. This makes it possible to do data collection, ETL, monitoring, alerting, and all kinds of tasks inside the database at the point of collection.

Happy to answer any questions about the big project, what's next or anything time series related.
by mbrumlow | 2025-04-15 14:25:10+00:00
And that is not working out…

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.
by numbers_guy | 2025-04-15 14:25:11+00:00
Isn't manufacturing mostly a red herring? Sure some select people who are currently in Washington might care about it from a geopolitical angle, but the electorate is not lamenting the lack of manufacturing jobs, but rather their decreased share of the proceeds of the no.1 national economy in the world. Even if you bring all manufacturing back, I doubt those same people will be happy working in those factories.
by gambiting | 2025-04-15 14:25:12+00:00
>>Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar?

What democracy? Whose democracy?

Trump just blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine again. The entire administration keeps saying they will make Canada the 51st state and "destroy canada economically". They want to take Greenland by force. I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore, only dollars. China will take Taiwan and US will will keep buying chips like they always did.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-15 14:25:31+00:00
I don't think its so easy to pull apart what people are buying and what they want to buy.

Amazon has a pretty crippling hold on the online retail industry, and they collect massive amounts of data to decide what to put in front of people.

Targeted marketing and the partnership between marketing and psychology is nothing new, it has gotten stronger though. I have a hard time looking at a market run like that as a roughly free market where the successful products indicate what buyers actually want rather than what they were best coerced (or "nudged") into buying.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-15 14:25:35+00:00
> But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?

It's hard to quantify. E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable is insurance? How much useful work (and skill) do you ship overseas in exchange for promissory notes[0]?

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-invest...
by pierrec | 2025-04-15 14:25:52+00:00
Sounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.
by asdajksah2123 | 2025-04-15 14:25:52+00:00
America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr.

The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.

And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.

But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.
by smcl | 2025-04-15 14:26:05+00:00
The thing is the US already experienced Trump 1.0, so it was presumably easy for many to assume that Trump 2.0 would follow broadly the same pattern and that there'd be an "adult in the room" somewhere to say "this will crash the world economy and do three consecutive 9/11s worth of damage to the stock market". So even though there are some very silly people in very high places saying some very wild things, the assumption for many is that there's someone there to manage the chaos and minimise the stupidity.

This has been a pretty sobering reminder to anyone that, in fact, there is no such thing.
by fullshark | 2025-04-15 14:26:12+00:00
Some did understand it I think (maybe not Trump), but were tired of hearing it couldn't be done and decided to try. A large % of Americans are happy at least someone is trying, and at the very least perhaps some lessons will be learned, and the parties will recalibrate their policy platforms to actually accomplish reshoring.

That's the optimistic POV at least imo.
by cogs | 2025-04-15 14:26:15+00:00
But how many citizens know calculus, literature and physics? Certainly not enough know history - or US democracy wouldn't be facing the threat it does now.

The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.

Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-15 14:26:17+00:00
> It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

Sounds more like China has an exploited educated class/lack of oppurtunity than America has bad education.

Plenty of American workers can multiply in their heads and diligently perform there work. These people work in white collar jobs though, not in factories snapping together phone cases for 12 hours a day.

The author isn't totally wrong here, Americas bottom tier labor pool sucks, but they miss the bigger picture when comparing Chinese and American workers. China has skilled workers doing unskilled work. That's why they are so good. That's also why bringing manufacturing to the US will be so hard. Ain't nobody wanna get a degree so they can work a hot factory floor all day.
by dashundchen | 2025-04-15 14:26:17+00:00
I saw a chart passing around from this Cato Institute survey (Cato is a right wing think tank) [0]. It made me laugh.

> America would be better off if more Americans works in manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20%

> I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73%

[0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...
by mapt | 2025-04-15 14:26:46+00:00
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ?

I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clear on how the rest of this works.
by jghn | 2025-04-15 14:27:02+00:00
The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan.

In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-946f-70263adba...
by lizknope | 2025-04-15 14:27:02+00:00
It was registered in Delaware but it was an LLC.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if an LLC would have to comply in the same way.

I do know that there was an operating agreement and we had a very strange meeting at one point where the CEO and the financial guy told us that we had the right to see the operating agreement. Someone who left shortly after must have hired a lawyer and demanded that.

I did see it the operating agreement but not the cap table. When I left the company I did not even know what a cap table was so didn't even know that it was a thing that existed. I only found that reddit post a year later. I'm post that link so that people don't make the same mistakes I did. There were a lot of other questions I should have asked before joining both startups.
by gowings97 | 2025-04-15 14:27:06+00:00
Because in the absence of that physical connection you begin to accumulate a social and economic debt that will eventually come due, because sooner or later that 80% working in the service economy will come for the remaining 15-20%. Domestic manufacturing made possible by some degree of anti-dumping/tariffs would at least create a more balanced distribution of this wealth.

Globalist trade promoters are just short-term wishful / magical thinkers. It's magical thinking that you can create this social and economic imbalance via outsourcing it to the other side of the globe, without consequences over the long run. It's wishful thinking that there are enough upper middle class jobs / lifestyle for everyone that took Calculus.
by fromMars | 2025-04-15 14:27:12+00:00
The world is an interdependent eco- system these days. The idea that a country can isolate itself an reproduce expertise that has flourished elsewhere is a bit silly and tilting at windmills.

Globalization is a fact of the world today and the best path to better lives for everyone is through mutual cooperation and policies that lift all boats.

Trump's goals and attempts to change this are foolhardy.
by rasmus1610 | 2025-04-15 14:27:37+00:00
There is no compelling evidence that MRI contrast agent causes cancer. Gadolinium (the stuff that’s in the contrast agent) can deposit in the body, e.g. in the brain, but if this even has any consequences is still unclear. Nonetheless there is some nice research going on how to drastically reduce the amount of contrast agent needs to be administered through image postprocessing.
Show HN: Skylight – Run computer-use agents on Windows VMs
by mflvn | 2025-04-15 14:27:39+00:00
Hey all! We're Skylight, a team founded by Maria (DeepMind Scholar in AI) and Adam (PhD researcher focused on LLMs).

We’re building Windows virtual machines that can be operated by computer-use agents (CUAs). You can spin up persistent Windows instances in seconds and operate them with CUAs. We’ve created a built-in agent, or you can plug in your own with the API + SDK.

Skylight works best to automate apps and legacy software that don’t have APIs, such as Microsoft Office and ERP systems.

We built this because deploying CUAs in production is way harder than it should be, and we packed in all the things we needed ourselves:

- Persistence – pause and resume VMs without losing progress - Interactive Live Streaming – watch agents work in real time and take control if needed - Multiple Instances – run multiple VMs at once and coordinate across them - File Downloads – pull files from VMs to your local machine - Knowledge Base – agents retain context of past actions - Human-in-the-Loop – guardrails for important and irreversible actions

If you need to run agents that use desktop software (not just browsers), come check us out (for free).
by etrautmann | 2025-04-15 14:27:52+00:00
That's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
by palmotea | 2025-04-15 14:28:02+00:00
> Native English speakers don't know how to use commas, so they throw them anywhere they want to have a pause.

Like with any language, there are wildly varying levels of literacy. Many native English speakers know how to use commas, and many others don't. I think that shades from using them grammatically (most literate), to using them ungrammatically as a generic pause, to not using punctuation at all.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-15 14:28:04+00:00
Just to refresh for anyone reading along:

> The contract between the two countries is only for 1 year

Ty's red herrings about court filings and so on are just that: red herrings. All sources lead back to exactly one piece of information, which is an AP article about a memo from El Salvador about an agreement. That AP article claims the memo says the following:

"El Salvador confirms it will house these individuals for one (1) year, pending the United States’ decision on their long term disposition"

That's it. It does not say "only" for one year. There is no information about the renewal terms. There is no information about what happens after one year. No one has produced the full set of terms of this agreement, and no one has produced evidence (as is required under US law) that an actual signed contract even exists (as is required under US law).

Readers can assess that how they wish.
by simonw | 2025-04-15 14:28:05+00:00
Doesn't look very expensive to me. An LLM capable of this level of summarization can run in ~12GB of GPU-connected RAM, and only needs that while it's running a prompt.

The cheapest small LLMs (GPT-4.1 Nano, Google Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B) cost less than 1/100th of a cent per prompt because they are cheap to run.
by Blikkentrekker | 2025-04-15 14:28:10+00:00
I'm saying I searched and I couldn't find it but what I did find was many news websites that reported it but said they couldn't confirm these rumors themselves and said they were just that, rumors. I found threads about it on other anonymous textboards where people would have no compunction to post the links and yet they didn't. The news sites don't just say “We obviously won't post the links.” but “We couldn't confirm these rumors.”.

Edit: I finally found one news website willing to actually confirm it though. The Daily Dot claims to have accessed the leaked information and verified it for itself.
by sct202 | 2025-04-15 14:28:17+00:00
I've seen this brought up with board games that are now primarily made in China, because injection molding is cheaper there especially for small quantities. The US could make the board game minis, but everyone who is capable of it in the US is producing high value high quality aerospace, industrial, medical parts. It's a waste of their time to produce small runs of toy parts.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-15 14:29:07+00:00
I think it's worse than that as the DOGE staffers are presumably picked according to Musk's preferences and he's not going to be looking for generous, well adjusted do-gooders, but selfish, arrogant, greedy racists. Presumably, they're also going to be targetted by other countries intelligence services with a mind to getting hold of the same data.
by snarf21 | 2025-04-15 14:29:09+00:00
We don't. We need only take a look at Detroit, holdout of American manufacturing. They have been automating and robotizing everything they can. ["... However, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis notes that motor vehicle manufacturing employment declined 17% from 1994 to 2018, while motor vehicle productivity increased by about 13% over the same period..."] If manufacturing does come back to the US, it won't create very many jobs. Mostly just the people to maintain and fix the machinery.

Given the improvements in cameras and computer vision and AI and robotics, there is no reason to think this won't accelerate. A long long time ago, labor was cheap and resources were expensive. Today, the opposite is true. Keynes predicted in the 50s that we would be working 15 hour work weeks. The reason he was "wrong" was that he underestimated our insatiable human greed. We all want more. Average house size in the 50s was < 1200 sq ft. Today it is 2400+. Each kid must have their own room that is 12x12!! (I grew up with 4 boys in a 10x10, lol). Each kid must get a new $200 bat each year for little league, etc. We want a higher standard of living for ourselves and our kids. This is understandable but we forget our role in the never ending chase.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-15 14:29:35+00:00
One of the most astonishing things about working in Application Security was seeing how many SQL injection vulns there were in new code. Often doing things the right way was easier than doing it the wrong way, and yet some would fight against their data framework to create the injection vulnerability. Doubt they were trying to intentionally cause security vulnerabilities but rather were either using old tutorials and copy/paste code or were long term coders who had been doing it this way for decades.