MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by QuesnayJr | 2025-04-09 07:43:35+00:00
I never even understood what the theory was supposed to be for why it would lower interest rates.

You can only run a trade deficit if the country you are trading with is a net investor. Part of that investment is going to be in the form of bonds. If you force a cut in the trade deficit, you cut the demand for bonds, which lowers their price and raises their interest rate.
by LoganDark | 2025-04-09 07:43:50+00:00
> Unfortunately it does still require you to have a swell touch machine and swell touch paper, neither of which are particularly cheap.

I had a look online and they don't look too expensive: 'only' 3-4x the cost of a regular printer. Accessibility typically always has a high price (for stupid reasons, but still) but this isn't the highest I've seen...

"Heartwarming! This 2-year-old's family couldn't afford his $20,000 electric wheelchair, and their insurance didn't cover it. So, a high school robotics team burned down the insurer's headquarters"
by dathinab | 2025-04-09 07:44:53+00:00
> hell calls a tool "buildah"?

people who seem to have done a pretty good job

I mean branding logo for a this kind of tool really doesn't matter and if so why should you hire a graphic designer to do that for you if you already have something which is passable.

You can read it as build-ah, ah is in some languages the word for the sound people make when they have a insight/light bulb moment. It might also just be a coincidence, idk.

But most importantly it's nicely searchable word, it's memorable too, it's pronounceable and it's somewhat related to what it does (a "build" tool).

So in all the metrics which matter it's a good name.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-09 07:46:31+00:00
An nVIDIA H200 uses around 2.3x more power (700W) when compared to a Xeon 6748P (300W). You generally put 8 of these cards into a single server, which adds up to 5.6KW, just for GPUs. With losses and other support equipment, that server uses ~6.1KW at full load. Which is around 8.5x more when compared to a CPU only server (assuming 700W or so at full load).

Considering HPC is half CPU and half GPU (more like 66% CPU and 33% GPU but I'm being charitable here), I expect an average power draw of 3.6KW in a cluster. Moreover, most of these clusters run targeted jobs. Prototyping/trial runs use much limited resources.

On the other hand, AI farms use all these GPUs at full power almost 24/7, both for training new models and inference. Before you asking, if you have a GPU farm which you do training, having inference focused cards doesn't make sense, because you can divide nVIDIA cards with MIG, so you can put aside some training cards, divide these cards to 6-7 and run inference on them, resulting ~45 virtual cards for inference per server, again at ~6.1KW load.

So, yes, AI's power load profile is different.
by michaelt | 2025-04-09 07:46:36+00:00
Practically speaking, I agree.

But theoretically speaking, the time when a strong manufacturing industry is needed is if you get into a lengthy WW2 style conflict, where both sides burn through their stockpiles of tanks/shells/missiles/whatever.

Then whoever can deliver tanks to the battlefield fastest has the numerical advantage. In 1942 the allies had retooled their car/locomotive/tractor manufacturing plants to make tanks and they were literally producing 9x as many tanks as the axis powers. Which is obviously a very good thing, militarily.

So there is historical precedent for the idea that a strong domestic car/locomotive/tractor industry being very helpful in wartime.

Of course, the question you've got to ask is: Will we ever see another WW2 style conflict? Because in a nuclear conflict there's no time to retool and manufacturing plants, and in lower-intensity conflicts like Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan there was no desire to.
by alwillis | 2025-04-09 07:46:53+00:00
The whole point of CSS is/was to standardize presentation across browsers.

CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over.

text-wrap: pretty is a great example of progressive enhancement [1]: it's a great way to add some polish to a website but if the user's device doesn't support it, they can still access all of the content on the site and be none the wiser.

If you read the CSS specifications, browser makers, in some cases, are allowed to use platform-specific heuristics to determine whether or not to execute certain features. Downloading web fonts works like this—browsers fallback to system fonts if a webfont doesn't download within 3 seconds.

It makes sense that text-wrap: pretty should be one of those. If your smartphone is low on power and the signal isn't that great, you can forgo expertly wrapped text and elegant hyphenation in order to view the webpage as quickly as possible.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
by transpute | 2025-04-09 07:47:08+00:00
Have you looked at Barrelfish (2011) from Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/barrelfish-exp...

> “In the next five to 10 years,” Barham predicts, “there are going to be many varieties of multicore machines. There are going to be a small number of each type of machine, and you won’t be able to afford to spend two years rewriting an operating system to work on each new machine that comes out. Trying to write the OS so it can be installed on a completely new computer it’s never seen before, measure things, and think about the best way to optimize itself on this computer—that’s quite a different approach to making an operating system for a single, specific multiprocessor.” The problem, the researchers say, stems from the use of a shared-memory kernel with data structures protected by locks. The Barrelfish project opts instead for a distributed system in which each unit communicates explicitly.

Public development stopped in March 2020, https://github.com/BarrelfishOS/barrelfish & https://barrelfish.org
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-09 07:47:12+00:00
> From a practical standpoint Cycorp seems to have pivoted at least 10 years ago into providing knowledge and inference systems for clients. If customers are willing to pay them then perhaps we can conclude there is value in the technology.

This is exactly the kind of thing that suggests they were nowhere close to AGI. Unless you think Palantir has somehow developed AGI too and kept it secret from everyone else.
by dsign | 2025-04-09 07:47:29+00:00
"Impartial news"? Here is a fringe position of mine which I'll be happy for you to turn to shreds, or at least illuminate: rational consensus is being stabbed to death.

If we are to live in democracy, we need consensus to be able to do important things. Without those important things, "bad things" happen. Say, you don't get medical care. Or a pandemic of a preventable disease kills a lot of people who don't have access to a vaccine or who don't want to be vaccinated. Here, you may say, "hey, my definition of bad thing is different than yours. Who are you to decide?". And now you are starting to see the problem.

So, we need consensus. And a good way to reach consensus is for people to have access to facts and to be able to make sense of those facts. But in an increasingly complicated world, both things are very difficult. Making sense of facts requires advanced mental tools: previous knowledge, reading skills, mathematics and logic. Those skills are under siege by forces that compete to engage people with dopamine-inducing content: social media, cable-news, video-games, politicians in campaign trails, etc. You as an individual may perhaps have enough reason, but at a group level, the critical mass for rational consensus is not there.

The endgame of that train is lack of social trust and anarchy. But "fortunately", before getting there, people turn to strong figures and/or to violent ideologies that suppress the "other".

The worst part is that I don't think there is a democracy-preserving solution to this problem, at least not for societies which are already incapable of reaching rational consensus. USA should prepare for its age of stabby emperors[^1].

[^1]: Please don't take this last statement seriously, I'm just goading you with dopamine-inducing content.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-09 07:47:44+00:00
Oh wow, I just tested this and found the source of my confusion.

I'm know it's not cool, but I have used GitHub Desktop all the time, for years. In the GitHub Desktop app, my new personal repos are private by default.

However, on the github.com, they are public by default.

That seems a bit weird, and a dangerous place for inconsistency. I certainly prefer the private by default behavior. I would love to know the PM lore about this difference.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-09 07:47:54+00:00
No, I disagree. If anything, all of the (mostly rich) STEM people that I know spend a large portion of their disposable income on things and experiences that creative people make: Music, film, restaurants, art, books/magazines, etc. Image and video generation via LLMs will become one more tool for creative people to make new & cool stuff.
by ENGNR | 2025-04-09 07:48:04+00:00
Possibly true.

China has had net positive tariffs against the USA for decades though. Obama tried to use the WTO to label them as a currency manipulator. Trump tried some tariffs the first time around but they just raised theirs higher to keep the imbalance.

Not saying the current strategy is a good one. But America has lost the entire supply chain, racked up huge debts, and a dollar that encourages more and more consumption. Doesn't something have to happen eventually, before the problem gets worse?
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-04-09 07:48:23+00:00
Trademarks only help after you've built something and are recognized as a brand. They don’t help indie developers, small startups, or creators at the starting point who just want to launch a project with a reasonable, memorable domain name. On top of that, pursuing a trademark or legal dispute over a domain isn’t approachable for most people—it’s time-consuming, expensive, and often out of reach for solo devs or small teams.

The current system encourages mass domain hoarding purely for profit, which ends up killing innovation and creativity. Trademarks don’t solve that, and they’re not meant to.
by pmg101 | 2025-04-09 07:49:58+00:00
I quite agree. It's simply a slider isn't it, with "no time, no knowledge, pure guesswork" at one end and "infinite time, thorough analysis, perfect understanding" at the other end.

Clearly the left end is dangerous but the right end can also be, due to opportunity costs. Making a judgment on where the slider should be for each decision/change is a key skill of the craft.
by p2detar | 2025-04-09 07:50:53+00:00
The saddest thing here and the way I understand it is that even waiving the tariffs won't fix the long term damage these actions have caused. Foreign partners will now be much more weary of the US as a trading partner. At least this is my understanding.

I'm a European and I hold a good amount of US stocks exactly as retirement plan. I'm scared right now, not gonna lie.
by arkh | 2025-04-09 07:51:56+00:00
> The best devs talk to principal engineers and junior devs alike. There is no hierarchy. They try to learn from everyone, young and old. The newcomers often aren’t entrenched in office politics yet and still have a fresh mind. They don’t know why things are hard and so they propose creative solutions. Maybe the obstacles from the past are no more, which makes these people a great source of inspiration.

That's how you can work against the normalization of deviance. Never dismiss new people commenting on what you may doing wrong for no reason. Yes, you've been doing X in an unusual way and no accident happened still; but there's a reason you should not do it this way and it may cost a lot to relearn it by experiencing it.

And same thing with old rules for which no one has an idea of why they exist but are still followed. Any rule should have an explanation for its existence and their relevance checked periodically.
by s_trumpet | 2025-04-09 07:52:53+00:00
> The old growth engines (microtransactions, live service games, season passes, user-generated content, loot boxes, eSports hero shooters, etc.) also no longer work, as neither general players nor whales find them appealing.

I just don't think that's true in a world where Marvel Rivals was the biggest launch of 2024. Live service games like Path of Exile, Counter-Strike, Genshin Impact, etc. make boatloads of money and have ever rising player counts.

The problem is that it's a very sink-or-swim market - if you manage to survive 2-3 years you will probably make it, but otherwise you are a very expensive flop. Not unlike VC-funded startups - just because some big names failed doesn't make investing into a unicorn any less attractive.
by boxed | 2025-04-09 07:53:03+00:00
> If rule of law and due process are arbitrarily ignored then the only real difference is time.

Due process isn't a part of any religion afaik. And "rule of law" in Christianity and Islam is "suffer not a witch to live" and stuff like that. Not good.

> Given enough time all can degenerate.

"Degenerate" is a strange word in this context. Islam started as an imperialist death cult. Any movement towards liberalism and sanity is not something I'd call "degenerate". Christianity is hard to pin down where it started because it started small and without power. As soon as it got real power it turned evil real fast.
by farhanhubble | 2025-04-09 07:54:03+00:00
The intention is that it should be used for all kinds of research, including the efficacy of LLM OCRs. It shouldn't be too difficult to look at the original PDF to substantiate any "fact" anyone wants to quote from the dataset.

I'm more interested in seeing if people can find new insights, questions, or inconsistencies by reviewing the documents at scale, automatically.
by helloplanets | 2025-04-09 07:54:22+00:00
Following the parent comment's idea, it'd end up in a table being the best choice 100% of the time.

Because the underlying assumption is that accessibility and the ability to grasp the data that is being conveyed isn't completely dependent on the audience. If I happen to prefer a static chart, an animated chart might still convey the intended thing in a stickier way, to a wider audience.
by intended | 2025-04-09 07:55:27+00:00
There are several things at play.

1) Trump is playing a storyline. The Market place of ideas in America has one side which is under a monopoly. It sets its own prices, decides what information enters and exits, decides what the market SHOULD look like. It manages half the voting population.

This is why “Trump does what he says” resonated. Previous lawmakers played the role on TV, but in back room deals, acted as if reality mattered.

Trump does not. He will continue to not do so, and the ideas sold in the market place that supports him, will continue to sell ideas to support it. Even if they don’t make logical sense.

It’s like science fiction, reality doesn’t matter.

Without addressing the information asymmetry, no democracy can function. No decisions can be made.

This is the nicest way I can put it to people, without being blunt. This has been the work of decades, reaching all the way back to watergate.

2) Jobs are being lost to automation faster than they are lost to outsourcing. China is the last country that will raise its standard of living through manufacturing. India has to pivot to services, to have a hope of doing anything. All of this is human capital intensive.

3) Wealth inequality is the problem - and frankly, if you have money to spare you are simply going to buy assets. This will be bought from people who are increasingly affected by cost of living issues, and have to sell their assets. This means taxes

4) If Americans want a snowballs chance in hell, there need to be special elections around the country in 2025, to take control of congress. Republican senators and congressfolk are threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump, which they wont anyway. The checks and balances are broken, see point 1.

You cannot win in a broken market place. You cannot fix a marketplace of ideas with government power, because that breaks the principle of Free speech. If you are a government who IS in power because of market place monopolies, these rules do not apply to you.

Trump is serious about devaluing the dollar. The only reason he may not, is because the viewers/storyline suggest he shouldn’t.

I will regret making this post, because of the comments it will generate. It is general enough for a million holes to be poked in it. Sure. This is an outline, that covers most of the pieces that are on the board.
by TimK65 | 2025-04-09 07:55:32+00:00
I use a search engine if I can more or less precisely describe what I want in a few words.

If I find that I really need to be more extensively descriptive, or to actually ask a question, I'll use an LLM, but that's pretty rare.

Here's an example of the latter that I did yesterday (this is Google Gemini):

"Hello! There is a poetic device where one line of a poem can be read both as the continuation of the previous line and as the first part of the following line. What is that called?"

"Hello! That poetic device is called an anastrophe or sometimes a hyperbaton, but these terms are more generally used for the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses in a sentence.

"While anastrophe or hyperbaton can create the effect you're describing, there isn't one single, widely recognized term specifically for a line that functions as both the end of one thought and the beginning of another in the way you've described.

"However, the effect you're describing is closely related to the idea of enjambment (also known as "run-on lines"). Enjambment is when a line of poetry ends without punctuation or a natural pause, and the thought continues onto the next line.

"..."

I proceeded to provide an example, saying "Points if you know what song this is ;-)", and Gemini confidently misidentified the song. (The correct song is "Black Cow" by Steely Dan; Gemini told me that the lyrics I'd quoted were from Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," which doesn't contain any lyrics that even resemble what I'd quoted.)
by ungreased0675 | 2025-04-09 07:55:38+00:00
I’d love to see how this works out, because my rule of thumb is to not hire for potential. In my experience, including “potential” in the decision matrix is just a way of laundering bias and makes the process less objective. My managers must be able to answer why they’re hiring one person over another. If it’s too subjective, we might as well save time, skip the charades, and pick randomly.
Show HN: Webtor – open-source torrent streaming engine
by vintikzzzz | 2025-04-09 07:57:46+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Webtor — an open-source engine that lets you stream .torrent and magnet links directly in the browser.

- No swarm exposure — all torrent traffic runs server-side

- In-browser playback via HLS

- Progressive download with resume support

- Lightweight JS SDK and public API

- Fully self-hostable via Docker

Demo: https://webtor.io

GitHub: https://github.com/webtor-io

SDK: https://github.com/webtor-io/embed-sdk-js

Self-hosted: https://github.com/webtor-io/self-hosted

API: https://rapidapi.com/paveltatarsky-Dx4aX7s_XBt/api/webtor

Would love feedback!
by norman784 | 2025-04-09 07:58:19+00:00
I think comparing Steam and to some extend Apple with payment methods, they are stores and it cost money to store apps and games and for this one I'm not 100% sure, but I read a while ago that they also pay taxes for you in the country you sell, while pure payment processing services are just a proxy to move money from one account to another. You could argue that 30% is high for that, but we aren't discussing it here.
by exodust | 2025-04-09 07:58:26+00:00
Still use Google for quick generic lookups, spell-checks/definitions, shopping stuff, products, or things I know will return a good result.

Grok is great for finding details and background info about recent news, and of course it's great for deep-diving on general knowledge topics.

I also use Grok for quick coding help. I prefer to use AI for help with isolated coding aspects such as functions and methods, as a conversational reference manual. I'm not ready to sit there pretending to be the "pilot" while AI takes over my code!

For the record, I do not like Google's AI generated results it spams at me when I search for things. I want AI when I choose to use AI, not when I don't choose it. Google needs a way to switch that off on the web (without being logged in).
by svantana | 2025-04-09 07:58:30+00:00
I see a strong similarity with the (over)use of CGI in movies 25 years ago - the producers were of course thrilled to save money on special fx and at first glance, it looked real. But after seeing a lot of it, a feeling starts to creep in: it's all fake, it's all computer. It breaks the illusion and moves the focus from the story to what the hell they were thinking. Of course today it looks laughable, like a bad video game.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-09 07:58:59+00:00
>There are a lot of really shitty software engineers out there.

That doesn't mean you'll get hired as one. Especially in the current market. There's a lot of shitty politicians out there, that doesn't mean anyone can just become a politician.

>Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.

Every job has some critical thinking aspects to it, even landscaping and construction workers, crane operators, truck drivers, etc that doesn't mean everyone wants to code, or can be a productive programmer.

I have plenty of friends form technical university, mostly mechanical engineers, who did everything they could to avoid getting into SW development because they just don't like it and they weren't good at it.
by palata | 2025-04-09 07:59:45+00:00
Wow, that sounds like a toxic mentality.

First, interviewing is notoriously hard and random. I feel like in sport, when they scout, they can look at young players doing pretty much exactly what they will be doing for the rest of their career. Baseball won't dramatically change during the course of their career. Software engineering feels more like your next baseball game may require swimming, or sailing, or the ball may be replaced with cards. And it's not like you observe your "rookies" doing exactly what you think you need now: you observe them in an environment where they excel at passing exams.

Second, I wouldn't be proud to strive to mimic a system that is very, very far from perfect. In sport, if you're not in the very few players who get very rich or in the pretty limited amount of players who can make a living out of it, you pretty much have to find another job and practice your sport in your free time. Even if you are excellent. A company recruiting "the best of the best" must fundamentally lack humility: do they think that they themselves are the very best in the world? As in, not only they must be excellent, but they must be at the very top of the excellent people in the world. If not, why would this exceptional rookie go work for them?

I don't want to work with superstars, I want to work with nice humans that are competent for their job, have a healthy work/life balance and care about doing something that matters, and doing it right. If you so openly look for someone who either wants to feel special or earn a lot of money, you risk ending up recruiting someone like "Big Balls". And I surely don't want to work with them, or for you.