MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2025-04-05 23:06:03+00:00
Those studies have been done, although not by me. People are really, really bad at working out how affluent other people are by inspection. That is one of the reasons I brought the topic up - the research I've seen suggests this sort of "I looked at it and it seemed ok" approach is very misleading. What people actually look at aren't things that indicate affluence.

If you look at the other comments you can see people are actually keying off how much of a sense of community and civic pride there is in an area, as well as commercial activity. Which is going to probably distinguish between upper and lower class - even that isn't certain - but that isn't actually relevant to the topic because there is always going to be an upper and lower class. It isn't going to get a great read on how affluent they are at any given moment.

> There's a reason your original post is a very light shade of gray.

In an academic sense, yes. But no-one knows what it is - some people might be in your shoes where they read "affluent", misinterpreted it and had a fear response. Or they might have other opinions as some of the other comments lay out. Or there could have been other reasons.

One of the philosophical underpinnings of HN is that downvotes don't contain a lot of information and are a poor tool for promoting discussion - it is a wonderfully mature approach to moderation.
by ashishb | 2025-04-05 23:06:10+00:00
Tests can be good. Tests can be bad.

- If you are writing a heavy algorithmic code, then write unit tests. - If you are writing glue code joining services, then write integration tests. - Integrating with third-party services means you prefer circuit-breakers and production monitoring over tests.

The tests should ideally be written along the axis of minimum change. Or the test code churn alone would slow down the product.
by stevenicr | 2025-04-05 23:06:50+00:00
Info I need to use the play store:

how many apps exist that does X thing.

Which of these apps either have zero ads and tracking, or have a pro version that removes ads and tracking.

Of those which have bad reviews in the past year, parse those reviews to see if they are device specific (doesn't work on 10 year old samsung, fine, disregard said negative) - if there are multiple bad ratings in the past 3 months put at bottom of list.

Finding the price of removing ads / tracking / unlocking features - I tend have to multi-tap to find a menu that says something unhelpful like 'in app purchases from 5.99 - $199'

give up on play store, go search fdroid

if fdroid does not have the thing, hope I can get someone to download the app, find what it costs, check if it actually removes tracking or just 'hides' the ads it downloads and reports data.

So solve the problem of searching just for free / non-ad supported apps (no way to do this in play store from what I have seen)

and transparent pricing and check for data sharing on pro versions,

I would use and promote others to use.
by tucnak | 2025-04-05 23:07:30+00:00
This has been the case for a while now. 3090 hoarders were always just doing it for street cred or whatever, no way these guys are computing anything of actual value.

Tenstorrent is on fire, though. For small businesses this is what matters. If 10M context is not a scam, I think we'll see SmartNIC adoption real soon. I would literally long AMD now because their Xilinx people are probably going to own the space real soon. Infiniband is cool and all, but it's also stupid and their scale-out strategy is non-existent. This is why https://github.com/deepseek-ai/3FS came out but of course nobody had figured it out because they still think LLM's is like, chatbots, or something. I think we're getting to a point where it's a scheduling problem, basically. So you get like like lots of GDDR6 (HBM doesnn't matter anymore) as L0, DDR5 as L1, and NVMe-oF is L2. Most of the time the agents will be running the code anyway...

This is also why Google never really subscribed to "function calling" apis
by comrade1234 | 2025-04-05 23:07:46+00:00
Eurocard? That’d be too obvious right? Visa, Mastercard, Eurocard?

Make a credit card, get a European bank to back you, slap a picture of some generic bridge or Romanesque building on it. No faces! Can’t offend any country in the eu by posting a face from some other country…

Sorry, just cynical. This is a great idea but would require a sort of teamwork and patriotism the eu doesn’t have in order for it to be successful.
by AngryData | 2025-04-05 23:08:03+00:00
Im sure there are a few places in India and China that still do it where alfalfa is expensive while antibiotics cost pennies. But it certainly isn't happening in the US where growing grass is as close to free as anything gets but antibiotics cost a decent amount of money. A 800 pound cow is only worth around $250 pounds to a farmer, so even a 30% increase, which is far beyond optimistic, is at best going to net you $75 extra, which is not going to cover the many months worth of antibiotics it took to dose an animal that large.
by whycombinater | 2025-04-05 23:08:19+00:00
It's possible that hospitals were claiming something like a car crash victim with COVID as a COVID death for extra funding, making actual total deaths less due to COVID than reported, meaning what he said was true, even while the hospital is full of people with COVID, possibly including that very car crash victim.

Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-05 23:08:51+00:00
It's funny you mention Wikipedia, I wonder if (at least since the early days when Wikipedia was the big scary thing on the block) anyone has run the same sorts of searches for plagiarized material and "hallucinations" against Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia explicitly forbids "original" research, which means all of the output of Wikipedia is by definition a regurgitation of someone else's work. Yes you're supposed to cite everything, but between the number of things that are [Citation Needed] and the number of cites that don't seem to actually go to anything, there's almost certainly a good amount of "hallucinations" in there too (see also the effectively the entire Scots Wikipedia https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/). And that doesn't get into whether the factual things that are cited gave permission to the editors to use their material in the first place. Of course, I would argue Wikipedia is sufficiently transformative (and facts aren't subject to copyright anyway) and is overall a net good despite its problems. But I also argue the same of the various LLMs and their outputs too.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-05 23:10:48+00:00
I have found the Gemini 2.5 Pro summary genuinely interesting: it adequately describes what I've read.

Have you thought about automatizing hn-summaries for say what the 5 top posts are at 8 AM EST?

That would be a simple product to test the market. If successful, it could be easily extended to a weekly newsletter summary.
by ricardobeat | 2025-04-05 23:11:29+00:00
That's simply rationalizing the use of tariffs as leverage for trade deals, and only makes it desirable to the US. But that was not the question. A poorer country that exports raw goods does not necessarily have the spending power (or need) to import the same amount of goods - having a trade surplus is desirable for them, and not necessarily bad for the US.
by moekiorg | 2025-04-05 23:12:08+00:00
Sorry for the misunderstanding, Active MCP requires two processes.

1. mount the Engine and then `$ rails s` 2. `server.rb` to start the MCP server. `$ ruby path/to/server.rb`

`server = ActiveMcp::Server.new(name: "ActiveMcp DEMO", uri: 'https://your-app.example.com/mcp' );server.start`

Then, with an MCP client such as Claude Desktop, configure the following.

`{"mcpServers": {"active-mcp-demo": {"command": "/path/to/ruby", "args": ["/path/to/server.rb"]}}}`
by dangus | 2025-04-05 23:12:20+00:00
Let's talk about the modern world then. You want to get away from the grind of working for someone else and sustain yourself on your own.

Perhaps you could turn into a subsistence farmer making every home product you own on your own or in a small commune, or perhaps you and a group of employees could buy your existing employer.

But the other more realistic method is that you would start your own business so you no longer have to work for someone else.

19% of all American adults are starting or run a business. It's a very common way to make a living.

IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further. People would only know brands like Coca-Cola, Tide, and Apple, the brands they knew about the day the ads shut off. There would be no chance for other companies to enter markets because they would have no realistic way of spreading the word about their alternatives, not even for small local businesses.

The proposal is not just radical, it's downright moronic if you've ever been in the shoes of owning your own company.
by tucnak | 2025-04-05 23:14:07+00:00
Let's see how that 10M context holds up, 128k pretrain is good indicator is not a scam but we're yet to see any numbers on this "iRoPE" architecture, at 17b active parameters and with 800G fabrics hitting the market, I think it could work, like I'm sure next year it'll be considered idiotic to keep K/V in actual memory.
by Hackbraten | 2025-04-05 23:14:08+00:00
> oh i see. you were being sarcastic. forgive my earnestness.

haha, not sarcastic! I do think your work is interesting, I just thought I’d write "that sounds awesome" under your post that has made an absolutely valid point about unhelpful comments that say "that sounds awesome."

> I thought HN is overrun with men LOL

Oh, it absolutely is! I’m sticking around anyway.

Cool to have you here!
by anticorporate | 2025-04-05 23:14:24+00:00
This was me. I loved my co-op job, but I had no family money and no prospect of ever being able to buy a home on that income.

I worked in tech long enough to pay off debts, put a down payment on a house, and no longer have to live in fear of a minor crisis bankrupting me. I didn't got rich, I stayed long enough that after leaving tech I could continue to work a normal job until normal retirement age - the thing that used to be in reach for the working class, but no longer is. The continue pursuit of money beyond a basic safety net wasn't worth the harm.

I still love technology. I have no love for the tech industry.
by tim333 | 2025-04-05 23:16:13+00:00
Almost but the formula actually says trade with B is X, deficit is X, their effective tariff on the US is X/X =1 or 100%, the US tariff on them would be half or that or 50%.

There's a list of real tariffs for various countries here https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1908609257756336239

The circular situation seems not so common but countries like Camboidia don't import much from the US because the people there don't have much money, so the Trump formula makes their 'effective rate' 97% whereas their actual tariffs are 7.9%. The net effect is to hammer the poorest countries.

Ironically the Cambodians don't have much money to buy US stuff because of terrible governments that got in partly as a result of the US destabilizing things by bombing the country. They don't seem to have much luck with the US.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-05 23:16:22+00:00
Having it disappear. I've been employed full time for 41 years. According to the last statement I got, I, and my employers, have paid in over $400,000 during that time. If I don't get monetary support after I retire, I've gotten robbed of almost half a million dollars. Musk and Trump better give me a big check if they're going to wreck the system so I can actually retire. Otherwise, they need to leave it strictly alone.
by marcusverus | 2025-04-05 23:17:52+00:00
He is preserving power by delaying elections, and his party (who control the parliament) is preserving their majority by delaying elections. Many a dictatorship has been kicked off and maintained by strictly legal means with the help of a complicit legislature.

Ukraine should hold elections. Delaying them is bad. This is the pro-democracy position. Calling it "Russian propaganda" is nuts. Pretending that Trump's support of this position is evidence that he is controlled by the Russians is literally insane.

Fair enough--the one poll funded by the American government (through the International Republican Institute) found that Crimea wanted to stay in Ukraine, after 5+ UN polls found 60+% supporting annexation for several years in a row.

Is citing the UN data evidence of Russian mind control? No. Arguing otherwise is insane!
by af78 | 2025-04-05 23:18:23+00:00
Yeah.

Today I learned about how, early in his first term, Trump told his son-in-law Jared Kushner to select a trade advisor, giving him a few vague ideas. Kushner searched Amazon for these terms and one of the first results was Death by China, by Peter Navarro. This is reportedly how this guy was hired. Navarro often cites an supposed expert, "Ron Vara" to back up his claims. It turns our "Ron Vara" does not exist and is just the anagram of "Navarro". The trouble is Navarro believes every import decreases the GDP of the US, an idea every economist except him seems to know is incorrect since at least the 19th century if not earlier.

Wild story.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/doesn-t-exist-maddow...

One would think a "genius" like Elon Musk would be better at choosing who he supports when so much is at stake... One would be wrong.
by atombender | 2025-04-05 23:19:14+00:00
You may enjoy Peter Watts, especially Blindsight and its sequel, Echopraxia.

Watts is himself a biologist, with a refreshingly unromantic perspective on humanity's place in the universe.

(His other great story sequence, The Freeze-Frame Revolution, is some of the darkest sci-fi I've read since Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".)
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-05 23:19:44+00:00
>> We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

That isn't all advertising. That is the modern algorithm-dependent systems that curate ads for individual viewers. In the good old days of print ads, ads targeted at say the readership of a particular magazine, we did not suffer from the downward spiral. There is no reason websites cannot have static ads. Many do. The issue is not advertising per se.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-05 23:20:27+00:00
Lots of good gems

> And yet, when people talk about the labor market, they think “oh, a company wants to give me a job! What a relief!” As though having a job were in itself some special privilege for which a company is the gatekeeper. > > Dispel yourself of this mindset. > > A job is just a deal. It is a deal between you and a company to exchange labor for money (and other things you value). > > Negotiating is a natural and expected part of the process of trying to make a deal. It’s also a signal of competence and seriousness. Companies generally respect candidates who negotiate, and most highly attractive candidates negotiate (if for no other reason, because they often have too many options to choose from).

I'm far from a great negotiator, but there are definitely lots of good lessons from here that I've learned the hard way over time and through experience.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-05 23:20:31+00:00
> switch-based bytecode VMs

I am finding a switched byte interpreter to be very expedient on my computer. It seems that if the # of cases is kept small enough, your chances of getting a good branch prediction can go up substantially. Something like a brainfuck interpreter runs extremely fast. In the worst case of randomly guessing, you are still going to time travel with a 12.5% success rate.
by dzikimarian | 2025-04-05 23:21:16+00:00
IMO advertising itself is ok, if not targeted by profiling user. I'm reading about bikes and I'm offered a bike or helmet? Fine by me.

Problem starts, when I'm scrolling $socialWebsite and I see ton of biking ads, because some Orwellian ad network is tracking me through time & space.

Then content starts to serve as means to push ads into my eyes whenever I dare to open them. If content is crap - doesn't matter - if I switch to other source ad will follow.

What's worse - many people were brainwashed into believing that's normal. I remember guy from Chrome team, who published draft for web attestation. He was convinced he's doing good thing because brands have "right" to be sure they're getting real eyeballs and he was just making this process "better" for the users.
by sandworm101 | 2025-04-05 23:22:09+00:00
Anecdote: If you are driving through Canada and start seeing billboards beside the highway, you are very likely crossing a native reservation. Billboards are generally banned but native communities have more direct control over their own land use and so regularly operate billboards.

(Billboards also also reasonably good as sound reflectors, reducing the highway noise in the community if positioned properly.)
by scubbo | 2025-04-05 23:22:47+00:00
Presumably, they are excluded from consideration because manual tests[0] are, by definition, un-automated, and so are a bottleneck. Every manual test added to the "test suite" adds seconds (or, more likely, minutes) to execute, whereas the majority[1] of automated tests should run in milliseconds. The "confidence generated per time spent execution" of a manual test is far lower.

[0] which are discussed later - "Now, to be fair, most engineers are not skipping testing altogether. They’re probably doing some manual checks with Postman, watching logs, or visually confirming debug output. The resistance isn’t to testing itself, it’s to codifying and automating those tests."

[1] Yes, there are exceptions. That's why I said "the majority".
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-05 23:22:54+00:00
> Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc.

Why not? What's so special about having all content on the same website? You can generally only consume videos in your own language or others you can understand. There's generally only a handful of countries that speak a certain language, and aggregators would likely appear.

If each country had their own localised platform, local culture would have a much greater chance to flourish.

I know plenty of teenagers who know more about US politics than their own country's, who barely know local artists, who know certain expressions in English but have no resources to convey a similar message in their native languages.

I wouldn't mind going back to a world a little more diverse, a little less homogeneous.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-05 23:22:58+00:00
While you seem to imply NASA is wasting money how many legacy projects did that Voyager era budget have to support? Oh yeah, close to zero. When a company implements an ERP system, a HR system, etc. the IT budget tends to increase to more than before.

How many weather satellites did NASA operate during the Voyager program verses now?

How many Landsats like Landsat 8 and 9 now https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/projects/hls

Anything like GRACE and GRACE-FO?

Perseverance rover? https://phys.org/news/2025-04-perseverance-rover-witnesses-m...

Were Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) missions ongoing?

Anything like the Juno project around Jupiter?

Complex projects like OSIRIS-REx?

Telescopes matching the ongoing requirements of James Webb Space Telescope?

Were there Psyche style missions ongoing? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/psyche/
by baumy | 2025-04-05 23:24:24+00:00
Would you be interested in making a comment that adds to the conversation, instead of whatever this was? The person you're replying to identified constraints that prevent him from imagining it - any system for restricting advertisements will either be permissive enough that it's ineffective, or strict enough that it will be abused for political reasons. This sounds like a reasonable concern.

Can you imagine a realistic way around this issue?
by nilslindemann | 2025-04-05 23:24:29+00:00
I'm against advertising that presents a simplistic, beautiful world — in other words, manipulative advertising. Which is basically all advertising currently. Nevertheless, there must be ways for producers to communicate the existence of their product and its advantages to the consumers. Comparable to how programmers put links to their projects here. How do you inform potential car buyers that you have built a car that consumes one liter less gasoline and travels 25 km/h faster, if you are not allowed to advertise?
by chr1 | 2025-04-05 23:25:31+00:00
When plane is crashing, one wouldn't suggest the pilot to jump off to make the plane lighter.

Same here, if life has any chance at all to survive long term, that chance is through humans.

Sadly we are not all powerful and some species will go extinct before being restored, but if humans are "removed" these species living a few more years on a doomed planet is not any better.

Moreover, saying that ultimate goal of nature conservation is removal of humans is simply counterproductive, it makes people ignore the nature conservation efforts as suicidal mental illness, while we are mindlessly wasting priceless library of useful genes and proteins that took billion years to develop.
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-05 23:26:37+00:00
The strongest steelman I can make of not testing is that if your system architecture is a mess, then tests accomplish very little except wasting devs' time. If your data flow and module hierarchy is sufficiently bad, then you end up having no choice but writing tests with "mocks that mock mocks that mock mocks", and those are almost never actually useful - at that point you're testing the mocks, not the system.

The rebuttal, of course, is that even in this case the tests are still providing value - they're telling you that you badly need a major ground-up refactoring. As a rule of thumb, I've found that mocks are OK, but if I ever see or write a mock which returns another mock, that's a sign all the modules involved need a rewrite. It's not true literally 100% of the time but it has served me well.
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-05 23:26:39+00:00
Good vibes, I mean yeah, we need more breakthroughs and AI isn't here to take our jobs if WE can own the AI too and not just a super-corperation.

I think what we are all really excited about having finally AI at home and being unchained and freed from a central SaaS controlling all the AI is ever going to tell you.

So, 6-7y ago google had these AI Chats internally and never intended to release it, a friendly googler told me.

Then ChatGPT came along and locked you into their SaaS. That was fantastic in the beginning, but the more you used the AI, the more you felt helpless, swound by anyone who may have access to an AI at OpenAI that is unfiltered and uses the full power of the model. Then came the jailbreak and accounts being banned for using it.

Then came the freedom by LLAMA and DeepSeek and waves of otheres. It rolled into your laptop real quick and this freedom is priceless! Something we should be really thankful for that it happened and support more OSS.

Google and Facebook would never share their trove of data with us ever and very few people have enough storage and compute to even attempt to replicate them. But their Data Dominance doesn't protect them anymore. Once the models became intelligent enough to slurp up large chunks of the web, they became a better search, a better teacher and a better experience than sponsored ads, with ads with internal google/bing products listed up, then SEO websites and somewhere hidden what we really were looking for. Or often.. just being deleted for copyright and other reasons.
by metalman | 2025-04-05 23:27:15+00:00
vastly simpler to build the road up on pylons for a few miles. 1, build new road on pylons beside the old road for a few miles. 2 ,switch traffic to new road on pylons. 3 , rip up old road 4 , build some fences ,plant some grass and shrubs 5 ' repeat in each eco zone and local water shed and other areas where there are lots of critters....too chicken to cross the road