MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mullingitover | 2025-04-21 21:56:06+00:00
This really looks like a case of the administration having a scheme to spook the markets and send them to the safety of bonds, which would then have plummeting yields, shaving tons off the federal budget that could then be funneled into tax breaks for the usual beneficiaries.

However, as they say, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand. They spooked the bond markets about whether the US is even going to be a going concern in the future.

Only question now is whether those in power will give it up willingly when the electorate inevitably shows them the door.
by ay | 2025-04-21 21:56:13+00:00
I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, which I shared.

“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.

Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.

As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-21 21:56:17+00:00
If it's helpful, the styling will be in the "jsx" file vs the css file! So when you use that "manual click-to-select-objects" feature in the chat bar, you can click on "Highlight Code" and then that will take you to the React component. In that component, you'll see a className field which will have Tailwind classes in it. That's technically what is applying the styling and boiling down to raw CSS.

Ah! Need to clean up what's happening there when using the Chrome extension to import an existing design - pushing up a fix. There's a great discussion on the extension here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42043552) btw if you're curious how it works.

When it comes to adding images, it works best if you give it an existing image URL or upload an image, which we then host for you. In this case, Sonnet 3.5 appears to have hallucinated an invalid image link. Also need to make this more robust!
by alephnerd | 2025-04-21 21:56:49+00:00
Texas subsidized wind energy for 30 years now - it was actually George W Bush and Rick Perry's legacy making project when they were Governors of Texas [0][1][2] and made up 20-30% of total energy produced.

Issue is, a significant proportion of Texas's budget comes out of NatGas and Oil revenue, so there's a perverse incentive when renewables end up pricing well below NatGas and Oil, and labor unions aligned to ONG like the UAW, ILU, and affiliates of the AFL-CIO like the United Steelworkers are VERY politically powerful.

This will be a major hurdle in energy exporting countries like the US, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, the Gulf, etc and it can't be handwaved away.

And no - rETraInInG doesn't work when much of the renewable industry is heavily automated, a major reason the ILU, UAW, and parts of the AFL-CIO ended up supporting the Trump admin's tariffs regime: either you drop the unions and cause tens of thousands to lose high paying jobs and radicalize a vast swath of Americans OR you do nothing and let the earth cook.

[0] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/08/29/70295/george-w-b...

[1] - https://www.texastribune.org/2013/09/16/book-excerpt-go-get-...

[2] - https://www.masterresource.org/texas/george-w-bush-wind-ener...
by john-h-k | 2025-04-21 21:58:00+00:00
Can you elaborate on this?

My understanding is you can specifically and formally define the natural numbers with addition and multiplication, although multiplication means the language is no longer decidable.

You can define natural numbers with just addition ( Presburger arithmetic ) and it’s decidable.

Im not sure how undecidable <=> “will define things that are similar to natural numbers but are not” but maybe I am missing something
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 21:58:09+00:00
You would need triple-quotes to span multiple lines, but yes, that is exactly how it's intended to work. `db.get` will receive a Template instance, which stores string parts something like `('\n SELECT * FROM users\n WHERE city=', ' AND age>', '\n')` and interpolated parts like `(Interpolation('London'), Interpolation(21))`. It's then responsible for assembling and executing the query from that.
by Jensson | 2025-04-21 21:58:52+00:00
I think you are off topic here. You agree these models can't replace those humans, hence you agree they aren't AGI, the rest of your post somehow got into whether companies would hire 11 year olds or not.

Point is if we had models as smart as a 10 year old, we could put that model through school and then it would be able to do white collar jobs like a 25 year old. But no model can do that, hence the models aren't as smart as 10 year olds, since the biggest part to being smart is being able to learn.

So until we have a model that can do those white collar jobs, we know they aren't as generally smart as 10 year olds since they can't replicate the same learning process. If they could replicate the learning process then we would and we would have that white collar worker.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-21 21:58:55+00:00
I'd wager such an encounter is way more likely to result in any of:

1) the Earth being flung out of the Sun's orbit

2) planetary orbits becoming disrupted such that an encounter with another planet over the coming years or millennia becomes likely,

2.1) which could eventually have the same "flinging away from the Sun" effect,

2.2) or (unlikely, but possible) result in a collision

2.3) or result in the Earth being shredded into asteroids

2.4) or other planets suffering that fate and then showering the Earth with dangerously-large asteroids over a period of decades or centuries until it's nearly, or actually (think: outright crust liquefaction from impacts) lifeless.

than the Earth actually getting swallowed up, by at least an order of magnitude.

IOW, the most-likely "we're all dead" outcomes for us, from a close encounter with a massive rogue anything really, including a black hole, might take years and years to play out.
by verdverm | 2025-04-21 21:59:50+00:00
Monthly fees for AI access is what holds me back from Cursor. I'm trying out VS Code free, but they are essentially the same pricing model last I checked.

What I want is to pay-per-use, with some nominal / maximal upcharge to support their development.

What Cursor / Copilot get right is the deep integration into the IDE that an extension will never be capable of. I'm only interested in VS Code based setups (OG or a fork like Cursor).
by skissane | 2025-04-21 22:00:01+00:00
In Catholic theology, God is believed to be Goodness itself – in a sense, identical to Plato's Form of the Good (but going far beyond Plato's idea at the same time).

Hence, anyone who loves Good loves God... so a person who truly loves Good, but who due to some intellectual obstacle, isn't able to call that Good "God" – from a Catholic viewpoint, it can be said that they love God without knowing that it is God whom they love – and by that love they can be saved
by JadeNB | 2025-04-21 22:00:11+00:00
> Many (most?) results are easier to write if you allow the empty set. For example:

> "The intersection of two sets is a set."

Many results in set theory, yes! (Or at least in elementary set theory. I'm not a set theorist by profession, so I can't speak to how often it arises in research-level set theory.) But, once one leaves set theory, the empty set can cause problems. For the first example that springs to mind, it is a cute result that, if a set S has a binary operation * such that, for every pair of elements a, b in S, there is a unique solution x to a*x = b, and a unique solution y to y*a = b, then * makes S a group ... unless S is empty!

In fact, on second thought, even in set theory, there are things like: the definition of a partial order being a well ordering would become simpler to state if the empty set were disallowed; and the axiom of choice would become just the statement that the product of sets is a set! I'm sure that I could come up with more examples where allowing empty sets complicates things, just as you could come up with more examples where it simplifies them. That there is no unambiguous answer one direction or the other is why I believe this alternate universe could exist, but we're not in it!
by scarecrowbob | 2025-04-21 22:00:53+00:00
I'd be quite interested if you could point me to some sources who are making what you believe is a credible case that the Trump admin is executing some coherent strategy in a competent manner.

I read quite lot, everyone from anarchists an d communists to people I believe would happily describe themselves as fascists. I read self-described US liberals and conservatives. And I am having a very hard time finding folks who describe a reasoned, coherent strategy being implemented.

I have read a lot of (typically US "right wing") commentators who claim that "we just can't know", but having come of age when the same disingenuous claim was made about the US invasion of Iraq it is hard for me to take those kinds of claims seriously.

I'm not looking for an account that I can agree with, but even a simple "this is their strategy, and here is an account of why that is a coherent idea" would be a big upgrade from what I am usually hearing; my current understanding is that only God and Trump understood the big picture and that Trump is senile enough that even he has lost the plot.
by tkcranny | 2025-04-21 22:01:02+00:00
I wouldn’t hold your breath for TypeScript introducing any new supra-JS features. In the old days they did a little bit, but now those features (namely enums) are considered harmful.

More specifically, with the (also ironically gummed up in tc39) type syntax [1], and importantly node introducing the --strip-types option [2], TS is only ever going to look more and more like standards compliant JS.

[1] https://tc39.es/proposal-type-annotations/

[2] https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v22.6.0
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 22:01:13+00:00
I see the announcements of China importing more Canadian oil to be largely performative.

Canada lacks the facilities to export oil so they'd have to build them when there are existing piplines that export it to the US. That's a hard to justify expense, particularly because Canada-US relations could change any moment. LNG is even worse because those facilities are expensive.

China is going to get its oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela, like it already does. Russian oil can be imported overland. Sanctions are laughably avoided by simply laundering oil exports through Malaysia and elsewhere [1].

This also suits China's strategic interests of not having a unipolar world.

But long-term China seeks to end its dependence on imported oil, just like the US did, except China is doing it with hydro and solar and by decreasing demand by electrifying transportation.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chinas-march-ira...
by samf | 2025-04-21 22:03:27+00:00
Some examples are in these comments, e.g. the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an amusing outcome, where 1 is the only prime if you take it literally.

But also mentioned elsewhere in the thread: if we declared 1 to be a prime, then many (I daresay "most") of our theorems would have to change "prime number" to "prime number greater than one".
by bilekas | 2025-04-21 22:03:47+00:00
> When customers try to cancel, Uber makes it extremely difficult. Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel

Funny enough I had to take an uber today but it was taking too long so I wanted to cancel the request and call a taxi, I was asked 4 times if I wanted to really cancel, small things like that really do just inflict a little bit of pressure it’s a horrible practice. The fact that a company comes up with these dark patterns to squeeze every cent from you says everything you need to know about them.
by ArneBab | 2025-04-21 22:03:52+00:00
It’s beautiful how in the end he writes how this actually helps him.

My experience is that whenever I skip organizing my tasks with org-mode, I lose focus and time.

An example: While duplicating the gist of JIRA issues in my local org-file may seem wasteful, whenever I tried to leave it out, my completion time for tickets ballooned. I tried multiple times.

There’s just no other tool that worked for me, even though I’ve tried to use many over the years.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-21 22:04:02+00:00
I'm sure this is all true. I'm also sure that every time I interact with a chatbot it will be a miserable experience that ends up with me getting forwarded to a real human. Just have humans doing the chats, one at a time. We can all tell when your boilerroom is full of folks with 4-7 chats going at all time. There are huge lags, bizarre answers clearly meant for another conversation.

If you can't face customers, get out of business.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-21 22:04:30+00:00
Both of the parties in America are deeply coopted by moneyed interests; we explicitly allow rich people to bribe politicians. That being said, the republicans, and the right wing in general, are typically gonna be the guys getting money from rich people because they push for policies that benefit them. I don’t necessarily blame a moderate conservative for voting for a politician that pushes to remove child labor laws because they were given a bunch of money. I do wish, however, that they’d look at the broader tendencies by their party towards such things and take them into consideration when they decide to vote for them, not just brush it under the rug.
by alganet | 2025-04-21 22:04:44+00:00
I see 1 as mostly an anchor. However, my thing is not about working out axioms and formal mathematics. I do some visualizations that can help demonstrate aspects of prime distribution.

I am fascinated by geometric proofs though. The clock thing is just a riff on Ulam's work. I believe there is more to it if one sees it as a geometric object and not just a visualization drawing. I could be wrong though.
Ask HN: How do you ensure you don't get locked from your email?
by stankot | 2025-04-21 22:05:26+00:00
Big parts of our digital lives depend on our email address (personal, professional, financial…). I’m wondering how you've secured yourselves to prevent getting locked out of your email?

Of course, using my own domain is a no brainer, but I’ve heard horror stories of people getting kicked from their domains.

It feels like we are always at some company’s mercy, a mail provider, a domain service or something else.

I’m definitely overthinking, but it was triggered by a large financial institution that doesn’t support adding a recovery email.

I’m curious how you folks handle this, thanks!
by oytis | 2025-04-21 22:06:17+00:00
Might be because you are an expert in what you ask it to do, and actually care about the result. E.g. I'm not sure what a marketing or otherwise business professional would say about the work it did on the cheese business. What has caught my eye is that projected cost of doing business (salaries) is unrealistically low, especially as the volumes are expected to grow
by feoren | 2025-04-21 22:06:20+00:00
The biggest problem is that you lose unique prime factorization. With prime factorization, I get a unique representation of every positive integer. Let's consider a way to write positive integers in "base prime", similar to base 10 or base 2. I'll start counting from 1 and write numbers as a tuple of prime factors. Similar to base 10, "base prime" has an infinite set of 0s that we're leaving out for brevity (e.g. 19 = 0000019), although it's on the right side instead of the left.

1 = () = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ...) 2 = (1) = (1, 0, 0, 0, 0, ...) 3 = (0, 1) 4 = (2) 5 = (0, 0, 1) 6 = (1, 1) 7 = (0, 0, 0, 1) 8 = (3) 9 = (0, 2) 10 = (1, 0, 1)

The i th position in every tuple is the power of the i th prime in the factorization of that number. So 10 = (1, 0, 1) = 2^1 * 3^0 * 5^1. 84 would be (2, 1, 0, 1) = 2^2 * 3^1 * 5^0 * 7^1. If we have unique factorization, there is exactly one way to write every positive integer like this, and there are many insights we can gain from this factorization. If 1 is prime, then we can write 6 = 1^257 * 2^1 * 3^1, or any other power of 1 we like. We just gain nothing from it.

There are often many equivalent ways to define any mathematical object, and I'm sure there are plenty of ways to define a prime number other than "its only factors are itself and 1". These other definitions are likely to obviously exclude 1. One obvious one is the set of basis coordinates in this "unique factorization" space that I just laid out here. And we're never really excluding or making a special case for 1, because 1's factorization is simply the absence of any powers -- empty set, all 0s, whatever you want to call it.

Keep in mind that "unique factorization" turns out to be very interesting in all sorts of other mathematical objects: rings, polynomials, symmetries, vector spaces, etc. They often have their own notion of "prime" or "primitive" objects and the correspondence with integer-primes is much cleaner if we don't consider 1 prime.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-21 22:06:43+00:00
Westridge Marine Terminal back in Burnaby (right outside Vancouver) can handle APAC oil exports.

That said, Canada is ambivalent about negotiations with China as much of Canada's automotive industry would be destroyed in a liberalized trade deal with China, just like what happened to Australia after their FTAs with ASEAN, China, India, SK, and Japan.

China was also caught trying to influence Canadian elections by the CSIS [0], so trust is limited.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canada-spies-found-ch...
by yesfitz | 2025-04-21 22:06:53+00:00
I posted the King County Library System's budget in the comment you're responding to. In 2024, they spent roughly $84,897,000 on personnel expenses, including benefits. As another poster pointed out, libraries have to do more than just pay salaries and benefits, but you can find out where the rest of the money goes by looking at the budget.

You should contact the library to see if they would promote books that you don't hate.

I'd recommend trying to understand what the libraries do as fully as possible before deciding how it should be changed. You could even start your research with the help of a librarian: https://kcls.org/ask/
by berdario | 2025-04-21 22:06:56+00:00
A Tesla Powerwall3 (which apparently uses LFP) has a capacity of 13.5kWh

A household uses up at least around 2MWh per year, most of which during the winter, if you don't use air conditioning in the summer and don't have an electric car to charge.

That means you'd need around 150 (!) Powerwall 3 units. At a price of around 10k GBP each, you'd have to shell out more than 1 million pounds just for the batteries. Not to mention the space that they'd have to take, and the increased risk in having something failing.

In the USA, homes are even less efficient (and depending on locale, people run AC all year round, and drive tens of thousands of kilometers on cars which also need to be powered). 2 years ago MKBHD published a video about his experience with the Tesla roof:

https://youtu.be/UJeSWbR6W04

In it, he revealed that his yearly power consumption is 55MWh. His battery was able to tide him over the next cloudy day, and during the winter the solar panel wouldn't ever fully recharge again.

Expecting every household to be energy independent year-round via solar is patently absurd. Renewable energy tided over with massive batteries upstream? Maybe that could work, I haven't run the numbers... But you cannot hope to push that responsibility downstream to every household. Reliable baseline is still going to be necessary for the foreseeable future.
by d4mi3n | 2025-04-21 22:07:00+00:00
> Maybe ignoring the AT protocol so I (and others?) can get a better sense of how such systems might be employed to ensure that an arbitrary organization can build defenses against themselves becoming adversaries (seems like a fairly useful mindset in general).

There are ways to do this, but being trustless in the context of a social network is a thorny problem I'm not sure I can provide an answer to. The whole purpose of such networks is to enable communication with people you may not necessarily know (or trust). Furthermore, you implicitly trust the medium in which you use to communicate (BlueSky, Twitter, SMS, Zoom, etc.).

There are ways to make things difficult for a service provider; you see many of them in high security contexts. For example, when storing data on AWS GovCloud or similar, you have the option have AWS use user or company provided encryption that they do not have control over. Should AWS be compromised in some way, they would still need to have your cryptographic keys in order to access unencrypted data (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Server...).

Another approach is message signing. An example of that is PGP signing of emails or files. You can use these cryptographic signatures to verify a message (email) or binary blob (file) has not been tampered with.

Another common approach, which you have alluded to, is some kind of multi-party scheme. Many cryptographic blockchains are good examples of this: You need a majority of parties in such schemes to agree on something for it to be considered valid or true.

A combination of these things can be used to make it more difficult for a service provider to be compromised or act against their user's interests. Sadly, this does not make it _impossible_ for them to do so. A user or customer who doesn't want to tolerate the worst case scenarios here still needs to make their own back ups, decide what entities to trust, and ensure they have robust procedures for doing things like trusting new entities or managing cryptographic material.

I'll also note that there are in fact live examples of such systems if you look for them. See IPFS for one such example: https://ipfs.tech/
by toofy | 2025-04-21 22:07:12+00:00
the 80% does not include withdrawal. the numbers are here [0].

80+% rely on things like pill, condom, tied tubes, etc...:

23.9: tube ligation/implants

16.4: pill

13.2: condom

12.0: iud

8.50: vasectomy

2.6: implant

2.1: injectable

1.2: vaginal ring

.4: patch

80.3% rely on the contraceptions listed above.

The remaining rely on: withdrawal, emergency contraception, family planning, etc...:

5.8%: withdrawal

2.6%: family planning

0.2%: emergency contraception

0.2%: other

11%: no method

the 80% does not include withdrawal.

[0] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-method-u...
by riyanapatel | 2025-04-21 22:07:25+00:00
You make a good point: Saying you "Googled" something does not give it as much credit since we know it's not Google, but all the other websites, publications, and sources that provided the info. You'd probably credit the website itself. I agree with the claim that the credit essentially should go to the one doing the "heavy lifting" aka training the LLM to even create the output.
by samf | 2025-04-21 22:08:06+00:00
This is the best answer.

We could declare 4 to be a prime number, and keep the rest of the definition the same. Instead of just saying "no", you could ask, "okay, what would that do for us?" If there isn't a good answer, then what's the point? And usually, you're not in the 1% of 1% of 1%.