MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mhogers | 2025-04-04 10:06:58+00:00
The t-shirt metaphor is completely unjust - there is no value there for national security nor strategic autonomy.

Consider instead:

- Semiconductor low-end fabrication (Taiwan, Korea)

- Basic electronics: circuit boards, USB devices, .. (China)

- Auto parts (Mexico, China, Germany)

- Generic drugs (India, China)

The reality is that the US is not the ultimate global hegemon anymore and therefore offshoring industries cannot simply be viewed through an economic lens.
by mcny | 2025-04-04 10:07:38+00:00
> Honestly, who doesn't think that a person shouldn't be in jail who would prefer to film and giggle while a child was drowning? A person like that needs a timeout at least.

The difference is that jail in the US is not "timeout". Prisoners may be required to work against their will, which is the carve out in the fourteenth amendment which abolished slavery. People openly joke about sexual assault in prison with derogatory comments like "don't drop the soap". All in all, I think the bar should be higher to send someone to prison in the US. We already have too many people in prison and, in my opinion, many of them are wrongly in prison.
by InDubioProRubio | 2025-04-04 10:08:09+00:00
>high value goods at home and provided high value services that couldn't be provided elsewhere.

Eh, they were swiftly outcompeted in almost all fields, but protected that system of mercantilism, by disallowing their colonies to unload anything that was not flagged british. Monopolies work that way, they ruin things and are memorized in the empire center as "good times"..

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041615/how-did-merc...

PS: This is one of the reasons why the spinwheel is on indias flag- as a sign of clothing production autonomy.
by nosianu | 2025-04-04 10:09:25+00:00
I software and IT services (cloud) etc. "goods" or not here? As far as I know that very large sector is not included in that calculation. A follow up question is how US company subsidiaries located in Europe are counted - the gains all end up in the US eventually (or at the very least the money streams are under US control), but it does not count as a US export? I have sooo many questions.

Everything is Microsoft and Co. in Europe and elsewhere, both the OS and things like AWS or Office 365 subscriptions.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-04-04 10:09:55+00:00
It's made me reconsider visiting. ATM, if I do go, I'll most likely go via Ireland where most of the border checks are done before getting on the plane rather than when getting to the states.

However, the article you linked to states its not an offical travel warning, more like an advisory.

> But they also stressed that this change does not count as an official travel warning
by I_Nidhi | 2025-04-04 10:10:23+00:00
I think MIT's breakthrough is a huge step forward, but it also highlights just how tricky drug delivery still is. Scaling up nanoparticle production is essential if we ever want these treatments to be more than just a cool lab experiment. But even with this progress, we’re still stuck with the same old problem—getting drugs exactly where they need to go without wrecking the rest of the body.

That’s why I find DNA nanobots fascinating, even if they still feel a little like science fiction. Instead of just improving how we make nanoparticles, DNA nanobots could take targeting to another level—programming them to only release drugs when they hit specific cancer markers. The idea of a ‘smart drug courier’ that doesn’t dump toxins everywhere is really appealing. Will it actually work in humans at scale? Who knows. But five years ago, I wouldn’t have expected MIT to make mass nanoparticle production look feasible either.

If you’re curious about the DNA nanobot approach: https://dnananobots.com/antibody-drug-conjugates/
by vidarh | 2025-04-04 10:10:31+00:00
Your reasoning is invalid.

For your claim to be true, it would need to be provably impossible to explain human behavior with mathematics.

For that to be true, humans would need to be able to compute functions that are computable but outside the Turing computable, outside the set of lambda functions, and outside the set of generally recursive functions (the tree are computationally equivalent).

We know of no such function. We don't know how to construct such a function. We don't know how it would be possible to model such a function with known physics.

It's an extraordinary claim, with no evidence behind it.

The only evidence needed would be a single example of a function we can compute outside the Turing computable set, which would seem to make the lack of such evidence make it rather improbably.

It could still be true, just like there could truly be a teapot in orbit between Earth and Mars. I'm nt holding my breath.
by franga2000 | 2025-04-04 10:11:16+00:00
> The only way to balance that is to make things they can afford. Which means low value items.

How about the US pays them well for their work so they can afford all these "high value" items?

Oh no, we economically enslaved all these people to our clothing in sweatshops for pennies an hour, but now they're not buying our...1000$ tablets that don't even have a calculator app...or whatever else the US considers "high value"... Oh how terrible!
by hellotheretoday | 2025-04-04 10:11:45+00:00
You can’t win with these people. They don’t care if they aren’t personally impacted. The “sjw boogeyman” that could theoretically impact their cushy livelihood matters more than the very real right wing government that exists right now and is disappearing people.

But as long as they can still say the n word on twitter and call of duty everything will be okay. Who cares about those disappeared people anyway, they weren’t even citizens
by Realoneinvest | 2025-04-04 10:12:09+00:00
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by IanCal | 2025-04-04 10:12:10+00:00
Fundamentally I think this comes down to answering the question of "why are you creating this?".

There are many valid answers.

Maybe you want to create it to tell a story, and you have an overflowing list of stories you're desperate to tell. The animation may be a means to an end, and tools that help you get there sooner mean telling more stories.

Maybe you're pretty good at making things people like and you're in it for the money. That's fine, there are worse ways to provide for your family than making things people enjoy but aren't a deep thing for you.

Maybe you're in it because you love the act of creating it. Selling it is almost incidental, and the joy you get from it comes down to spending huge amounts of time obsessing over tiny details. If you had a source of income and nobody ever saw your creations, you'd still be there making them.

These are all valid in my mind, and suggest different reasons to use or not to use tools. Same as many walks of life.

I'd get the weeds gone in my front lawn quickly if I paid someone to do it, but I quite enjoy pottering around on a sunny day pulling them up and looking back at the end to see what I've achieved. I bake worse bread than I could buy, and could buy more and better bread I'm sure if I used the time to do contracting instead. But I enjoy it.

On the other hand, there are things I just want done and so use tools or get others to do it for me.

One positive view of AI tools is that it widens the group of people who are able to achieve a particular quality, so it opens up the door for people who want to tell the story or build the app or whatever.

A negative side is the economics where it may be beneficial to have a worse result just because it's so much cheaper.
by drob518 | 2025-04-04 10:12:33+00:00
Well, you actually want the body to clear things. That’s not a problem, it’s a feature. If the phage is able to target the bacteria before it is fully cleared, that’s all you need. Humans have been injected with phages and it has been shown to work. The Soviets actually did a lot of research on it, IIRC. The practical issue that is really challenging for broad phage therapy adoption is that phages are very specific to the bacteria they target. So, you can’t just get injected with any old phage and expect it to work. Instead, you need to catalog all the phages you find in a database and search for one that can target the specific bacteria the patient has been infected with. Phages are simply viruses that target bacteria. You’re awash in them all the time.
by neomantra | 2025-04-04 10:13:07+00:00
> Maybe Studio Ghibli making it through the seemingly deterministic GPT guardrails was an OpenAI slip up, a mistake,

The author is so generous... but Sam Altman literally has a Ghibli-fied Social profile and in response to all this said OpenAI chooses its demos very carefully. His primary concern is that Ghibli-fying prompts are over-consuming their GPU resources, degrading the service by preventing other ChatGPT tasks.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-04 10:13:15+00:00
Floating point math was a key feature on these early machines, since it opened up the "glorified desk calculator" use case. This was one use for them (along with gaming and use as a remote terminal) that did not require convenient data storage, which would've been a real challenge before disk drives became a standard. And the float implementation included in BASIC was the most common back in the day. (There are even some subtle differences between it and the modern IEEE variety that we'd be familiar with today.)
by tuyiown | 2025-04-04 10:13:38+00:00
I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But it does yield "no results", more often than before even if the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a source I could make sense of.

I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.
by SethMurphy | 2025-04-04 10:13:40+00:00
If the answer is the end of - I'll call it - "Consumerism", and the industries we choose to subsidize are those that are more essential to a community driven life (e.g. food, shelter, health, education, transportation, communication, etc ...), I think it is possible to lower the "Standard of Living" as reshaping what the term means, undoing years of advertisement based conditioning.

Americans may no longer have an unnecessarily large or luxurious automobile, or a screen in every room, but I would argue excess becoming the standard is the problem and a major cause of the imbalance.

The solution doesn't feel very democratic or free though, values that have been critical to the identity of the USA.
by lesostep | 2025-04-04 10:13:50+00:00
Lowering the cost of high-quality education makes it more accessible, which isn't the same thing as "accessible for all".

But lowering the cost of tuition also have positive effect on economy, because people who are starting their career will have more money roughly at the same age where they will want to spend more money. They are figuring their living situation, they are trying to figure out what independence means, a lot of people will want to start families at the first 10 years of their career.

If you paid your tuition fees for 15 years, then you most likely already figured where you live/had kids and the additional money will go into savings for retirement. It's will not be "buyer" money, that will go to pay for products and services, and so it wouldn't go towards someone's paycheck.
by botanical | 2025-04-04 10:14:50+00:00
It's such madness that all this resource usage is for LLMs that are barely useful (at least for me). So many billions in resources wasted for machine learning systems that mimic human speech, it's not intelligent in any sense.

Now we see models showing the user it's "thinking" as some sort of intelligent agent, when really, ploys like that is to prop up the AI sector's stock price.

Surely LLMs in this form can't be the future of AGI?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-04 10:15:00+00:00
> Why is Denmark so high up for example, generally considered the country in the world with the highest tax pressure, and without any substantial natural resources.

It isn't the country with the highest tax pressure, e.g. Denmark government revenue is 36% of GDP, approximately equal to the UK, vs. 44% for France or 48% for Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

But the major source of variance in the numbers is that it not only matters what the tax rate is, it also matters how effectively you spend the money.

Suppose a government with the level of competence of Denmark would have an optimal tax rate of 20%, i.e. that's the point at which the low-hanging fruit is gone and additional spending starts to become net negative. That doesn't mean it's enormously net negative, when the government is more competent and efficient than average the loss could be small, so that Denmark at 36% might still only be slightly worse than breakeven compared to the lower tax rate.

Meanwhile a different government has the 20% tax rate, but three quarters of the money is lost to corruption or incompetence instead of funding the beneficial programs it should have been, so they could be worse off because high levels of corruption and waste can be as bad as high taxes.

The worst case is, of course, when you do both and have a high tax rate which goes to a government with a high level of corruption, which is what you see in e.g. Greece. But this is also what tends to happen in any place with a less efficient government that tries to solve it by raising taxes. The inefficiency that was the cause of the problem to begin with then gets more money to set on fire and that makes it even worse.
by IanCal | 2025-04-04 10:17:20+00:00
> If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y

That's not overfitting. That's either just correct or underfitting (if we say it's never returning anything but 2)!

Overfitting is where the model matches the training data too closely and has inferred a complex relationship using too many variables where there is really just noise.
by kdjs7 | 2025-04-04 10:17:56+00:00
Thats just half the story.

What the US has traditionally done is make these countries then take Dollar loans from the IMF and World Bank to buy American defense and high tech products. When they naturally then default (right now there are more than 50 countries that cant pay back these dollar loans cause where the fuck are they going to get dollars from) their only option is to sell off their natural resources to Wall St/build a US mil base/hand over port etc.

This game has been going on so long (google super imperialism) the US with 5% of the worlds population has accumulated more than 50% of the worlds market cap value.

So the US starts overdosing on leisure/luxury and pace of innovation starts slowing cause they dont even need to be innovative. Try to build a ship in the US and its not possible anymore cause the experience is all gone. There is no great magic solution. When you talk about British history look at the 60s and 70s. There was major turmoil economically and socially post the Ww2 rebuild cause the entire system dependent on colonies had to restructure itself.
by kymki | 2025-04-04 10:18:02+00:00
As a European this whole debate i sickening.

Trade deficit is a blunt and ineffective way to model international trade on this level, but it is easy to point at and say "look at this large bad number!" which is exactly what is going on. People are primed to interact with that through social media, etc.

The American trend currently is that any trade deficit is bad. It simply isnt. It is idiotic to state so.

The whole point of unequal import and export is that every single country should not strive for importing as much as it exports across all sectors. It is extremely inefficient for every country to specialize in everything equally. What then is the point of international trade? I produce steel, you produce tractors, your neighbor produces wheat. We have mutual dependence across our specializations in the market.

What is missing from the debate is that import/export equilibrium should be achieved on a global level, not on a national level. This is taking something that is a healthy driver for international trade and framing it as if trade partners are forcing others to sell out cheaply.

They aren't. They have found their niche. Find yours or step back.
by refurb | 2025-04-04 10:18:10+00:00
That’s not true.

Apple has internal transfer pricing which is dictated by accounting regulations and tax law.

Companies try and set transfer prices to minimize local taxes, but need to follow regulations.

A phone made in China is “purchased” by say Apple Canada for some fraction the price it sells for - regulation usually require the Value to reflect the cost of inputs.

So Apple Canada might purchase a phone from Apple China for $600 CAD then turn around and sell it for $1200 CAD in Canada.

It’s the $600 that counts as a Chinese export to Canada.
by renegade-otter | 2025-04-04 10:18:29+00:00
We ARE hired to write code, but it's our job to know how to write less of it.

Sometimes I go into the weeds and create a monstrocity bowl of spaghetti around a feature. Then I pull back, simplify it, and get amazed at how I missed that.

The trick is to STOP and think. Not everything is a "needful".
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-04 10:18:51+00:00
>no good GUI editors really emerged.

In those good old times both Oxygen and XML Spy were good enough, so I even purchased a license of Oxygen for myself and never felt the money were wasted.

>And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.

This happened at such scale where we can say that it was UX problem of XML itself.
by orwin | 2025-04-04 10:19:18+00:00
When you see the damages 13 first-gen Caesars and a couple of month of training did to Russian artillery, you wonder what 90 of updated ones can do with people who operated them for 5 years. The Russian can't fight the EU in the air, and even if S400 and S800 were as good as advertised and managed an air interdiction area, Excalibur missiles are a thing.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 10:19:22+00:00
(Funny story, I seem to have a bout of visual migraine at the moment and misread your comment until just now and had to remove what I wrote).

I didn't mean to give the impression that I'm putting down Zig. It's more that I've noticed that people tend to frame problems differently with Zig than with Odin.

To explain what I mean by framing, consider OO vs procedural and the way OO will frame the problem as objects with behaviour that interact, and procedural will frame the problem as functions being invoked mutating data.

The difference isn't at all that stark between Odin and Zig, but it's present nonetheless. And clearly Zig is doing something which a lot of people like enjoy. It's just that the person using Zig seems to enjoy different aspects of programming (and it seems to me be in the spirit of "the challenge of finding an optimal solution") than the person using Odin.
by vidarh | 2025-04-04 10:19:27+00:00
A lot of people don't have internal monologues. But chain of thought is about expanding capacity by externalising what you're understood so far so you can work on ideas that exceeds what you're capable of getting in one go.

That people seem to think it reflects internal state is a problem, because we have no reason to think that even with internal monologue that the internal monologue accurately reflects our internal thought processes fuly.

There are some famous experiments with patients whose brainstem have been severed. Because the brain halves control different parts of the body, you can use this to "trick" on half of the brain into thinking that "the brain" has made a decision about something, such as choosing an object - while the researchers change the object. The "tricked" half of the brain will happily explain why "it" chose the object in question, expanding on thought processes that never happened.

In other words, our own verbalisation of our thought processes is woefully unreliable. It represents an idea of our thought processes that may or may not have any relation to the real ones at all, but that we have no basis for assuming is correct.
by mjburgess | 2025-04-04 10:19:40+00:00
Novelty in one medium arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external environment.

We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from synths.

We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel developments in the broader environment. If synths were invented after its training, it could never produce synth music (and so on).

The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.

Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment can, trivially so.
Show HN: I'm Building a Micro SaaS – My First Time Sharing a Product Publicly
by trm_razvan | 2025-04-04 10:22:53+00:00
After years of building (and failing) quiet side projects, I’ve finally decided to try something different: talk about what I’m building before it’s finished.

I just launched a landing page for a micro SaaS product I’m developing. The app is still in progress, but I want to build with user feedback in mind — not just ship something in silence and hope for the best (been there, done that, failed at it).

This is my first time trying to collect early feedback without running ads or doing any kind of paid promotion. In the past, my approach was always: build → run ads → tweak ads → hope for results. That method burned time, money, and energy — with little learning in return.

Now I’m focused on: • Validating the idea by getting people genuinely interested early on • Improving the landing page to make sure the message is clear • Gathering initial users for product feedback once the app launches

Here’s the landing page: https://www.tasksiftai.com/

If you’ve got a minute: • I’d really appreciate feedback on the product idea itself • Suggestions on how to improve the landing page (especially around clarity and conversion) • And if the idea resonates with you, I’d love it if you signed up to get early access when it’s ready

Thanks for reading. Open to all thoughts — positive or brutally honest.
by _Wintermute | 2025-04-04 10:23:14+00:00
Happens with R as well where everything gets dumped into a global namespace. It's a huge mess.

If you're lucky all functions will have a common prefix str_* or fct_*. If you're unlucky then you have to figure out which package has clobbered a standard library function, or the exact ordering of your package import statements you need for your code to run.
by eimrine | 2025-04-04 10:23:24+00:00
What are you able to build with your blocks?

Castles and palaces, temples and docks.

Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,

But I can be happy and building at home.

Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,

There I'll establish a city for me:

A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,

And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride...
by vidarh | 2025-04-04 10:23:36+00:00
The irony of all this is that unlike humans - which we have no evidence to suggest can directly introspect lower level reasoning processes - LLMs could be given direct access to introspect their own internal state, via tooling. So if we want to, we can make them able to understand and reason about their own thought processes at a level no human can.

But current LLM's chain of thought is not it.