MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by travisgriggs | 2025-04-05 01:17:21+00:00
The boundaries of what is politics and what isn't is difficult to suss (for me) these days. I personally do not believe this is good. But I have a theory on why those that do think so.

I'm 54. It follows that I see a number of people my age. I'm churchgoing, as well as involved in a number of clubs (pilots, rowing, legos, etc). So I get to rub shoulders with a decent amount of people. And especially a bunch of older people. Our parents are aging.

I'm just beginning to see how hard these years from here on out have a number of difficult challenges. I've begun writing myself notes that I hope will help me navigate the years ahead. One of the key issues is feeling relevant still. As well as losing your competitive edge. Your formative wisdom is being invalidated and eroded constantly.

Couple that with a period of euphoria that was experienced as post WWII prosperity followed by the cessation of the "cold war" and a surge in population, and you have a group of people that are more in their own generational bubble than historically. There's enough peers to make you feel like you're in the majority. I think many of these people feel like this is good, because it feeds the need for relevancy. It's not uncommon for older people to lash out, somewhat foolishly, as they transit these years. And as cognition decreases, it becomes easier to game people in this age bracket (unless someone has a better explanation for why older people are the best target of scams).

As I visit with many of the older genrations (not all of course), their justifications, when pared back often come down to "this makes me feel relevant again". And attempts to restore "the narrative I have in my head about how life was in the good years".

Just some rambling thoughts, about why some people think this is good. It's less about the money to them, and more about a hope of something gained. Not unlike a terminally ill person blowing a wad of cash on something that they would never otherwise have justified.

It is sad, that it comes at the expense of the younger generations. It breaks my heart actually.
by taberiand | 2025-04-05 01:17:56+00:00
There's a certain satisfaction in anticipating these stop and go waves while driving, and timing it so that you catch the tail just as it starts moving again - the goal being to use the brake as little as possible and ideally only need to adjust acceleration. I don't really get why people feel the need to repeatedly accelerate up and then slam on the brakes, when leaving reasonable gaps makes everything go smoother.
by bawolff | 2025-04-05 01:18:01+00:00
I don't think that makes sense. Wars happen when one of the sides think they can win (and want something). USA leaving nato and reducing trade makes european states more vulnerable. I would expect this to increase the liklihood of war.

Especially in the near term - eventually europe will adapt to the new world order, but in the mean time their is a limited window of opportunity where everything is in flux, which would be a great time to strike.
by pedalpete | 2025-04-05 01:18:03+00:00
We started with SquareSpace just for a quick website and the ability to make quick updates, try different things, etc etc.

It was fairly inexpensive, squarespace doesn't "own" your domain.

We ended up going to webflow which, though a bit complicated to set-up, is much more flexible and you "design" your own site.

I'm a former webdev, both of these platforms are probably better than handrolling these days.
by jdlshore | 2025-04-05 01:18:07+00:00
Bonds and stocks tend to have an inverse correlation. And, yep, bonds are up while stocks and real estate are down.

That’s why financial advisors tell you to keep a mix of stocks and bonds, trending towards a greater percentage of bonds depending on your risk tolerance and as you get older. (Because bonds have lower returns than stocks, historically, but are also less volatile.)
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-05 01:18:23+00:00
Trump's been talking about tariffs for far longer than the current t-note cycle. He was talking about it a decade ago during his first time in office. IIRC he ran for POTUS as a Reform Party candidate in the 90s or 00s, and that party was started by Ross Perot, who was against NAFTA on the grounds that it'd cause a giant sucking sound of American jobs to Mexico.

He doesn't care about the debt; you can see this in how he pays taxes.

What he needs is something that lets the rich have their cake and eat it too. He needs to appear to be doing something for working-class American manufacturing jobs, while making the people that would fill those jobs bear the brunt of the impact. Tariffs are an expedient way to do that. They don't have to be approved by Congress and are effectively an autocratic way of raising taxes. They apply to prices first, not revenues, and they're simple to implement. The surplus value that used to head to shareholders as a result of cheap foreign goods will go down, but that can be offset by layoffs and the like.

The refinancing, if it's even a viable plan, is a nice side-effect.
by nwatson | 2025-04-05 01:18:46+00:00
When the bully gets too ambitious the large number of bullied gang together for revenge, or at least effective countermeasures. The world will route around USA, find they can manage ok without it. The USA will be iced out, lose its reserve currency status, nobody will buy its military technology, making the USA unable to recoup large outlays for ambitious military projects, and the USA will lose its military dominance.

Also, the future of warfare and terrorism is autonomous networks of drones. Mexico and Canada won't be disposed to care what passes through their borders with the USA, and like Zelensky said ... we had the oceans and friendly neighbors, but that won't help us anymore.

EDIT: minor corrections
by Majromax | 2025-04-05 01:19:12+00:00
I know that a quotation is not necessarily an endorsement, but this is a fantastically short-sighted idea.

> it becomes increasingly burdensome for the United States to finance the provision of reserve assets

How dare countries want pictures of dead Presidents so badly that... they're willing to send real goods to the United States for its consumption, with no expectation of reciprocation.

> and the defense umbrella

... and agree to a de-facto policy of minimal militarization, such that they could not pose a threat to America's global security interests, no matter what it decides those are.

A few hundred years ago, this would look like a tribute system. It's unfathomable that a nation in such a privileged position would decide it's tired of such a systematic set of advantages.

> as the manufacturing and tradeable sectors bear the brunt of the costs...

What's the saying, they've tried nothing and are all out of ideas? Industrial policy is a known and understood thing. The US has this in its defense sector even it doesn't want to admit it, and the CHIPS act was another attempt for the semiconductor industry.

This sort of policy is far more targeted and far less disruptive than blowing up international supply chains in hope of repatriating sweat-shop sneaker sewers and factories for five cent injection molded widgets.
by darksaints | 2025-04-05 01:19:30+00:00
This. There is no reason why any country should trust us anymore if entire trade relations can be destroyed by a presidential whim.

Even if Trump fell out of a window today and we got a pro-trade president tomorrow, we’re not fixing this damage for a very long time.

We probably would have to amend the constitution to insulate foreign policy from the whims of a single person if we want any chance of fixing this in our lifetime.
by nimos | 2025-04-05 01:20:19+00:00
Almost all the trade deficit numbers being thrown around by the US administration don't include trade in services which the US generally has a large surplus. A lot of that is very high margin tech SASS/advertising.

If this continues it seems like this could be a "digg->reddit" type moment for US tech. In some ways it is easier for a lot of people to leave facebook than it is for a single person. If you look at gross margins there is a lot of room for competition, though network effects make that competition very difficult. Maybe this is the catalyst for competitors to break in.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-05 01:20:49+00:00
There is away out of this mess: A U.S. Senate bill that would require congressional approval for new tariffs gained more Republican support on Friday [1].

Trump is not going to back down since that will make him look like a loser. Neither is China. But GOP can help Trump out by creating a new law that automatically expires all new tariffs after 60 days unless approved by congress. This will let Trump extricate his head from this mess without losing face.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-us-senate-republicans-...
by shoo | 2025-04-05 01:21:14+00:00
Another kind of optimisation is to see if you are solving an unnecessarily general problem, which could be replaced by a narrower problem specific to your actual situation & workload, that might be easier to solve.

see also: Mike Acton's 2014 CppCon talk "Data-Oriented Design and C++": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
by kcplate | 2025-04-05 01:21:22+00:00
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.

DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.

I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-04-05 01:21:26+00:00
>> this immensely flexible and versatile language

> I would be interested to know if anyone ever built anything non-trivial that didn't turn into a complete mess due to TCL's general type-flimsyness and "everything is a string" philosophy.

Both MacPorts CLI client[0] and ports tree[0] have used it successfully for many years.

Regarding:

"everything is a string" philosophy

That can be said for the vast majority of Unix-like OS user-space programs.

0 - https://github.com/macports/macports-base

1 - https://github.com/macports/macports-ports
by astrange | 2025-04-05 01:21:32+00:00
The civil rights movement was effective of course, but they were very, very careful about how they did things, and iirc the public protests were part of an intentional media strategy because TV would show them doing nothing and getting attacked by police.

> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states

Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.

Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-05 01:22:26+00:00
> Why must a country run a trade deficit to retain its global reserve currency status? Because when your currency is the global reserve currency, the entire world constantly hungers for it in order to use it in all the various countries’ international trade between each other. The only way to keep those countries constantly supplied with dollars is for Americans to buy tons of foreign imports, which effectively sends dollars to those countries, since these purchases are made with dollars

So... the problem with the US being the reserve currency is that it makes other countries cater to our tastes because they want our money...?
by brailsafe | 2025-04-05 01:22:55+00:00
My thought today was that aside from the stocks crashing, and aside from any realistic possibility of magically minting new manufacturing facilities, you'd force the price of imported products up in the short term, and prices don't really go back down, so after they go away you'll hypothetically be selling the same products at higher prices that people are now used to, and nothing else needs to happen functionally to increase efficiency or build them domestically. 1) Increase cost of selling imports 2) Crash stock market 3) Buy stocks 4) Remove tariffs 5) Profit

But I don't know wtf I'm talking about.
by snackernews | 2025-04-05 01:23:05+00:00
> Other companies pour money into their own giant datacenters, hoping to keep pace.

> estimates that the globally available AI-relevant compute will grow by a factor of 10x by December 2027 (2.25x per year) relative to March 2025 to 100M H100e.

Meanwhile, back in the real March 2025, Microsoft and Google slash datacenter investment.

https://theconversation.com/microsoft-cuts-data-centre-plans...
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-05 01:23:05+00:00
> The reason is simply that if every time you increase taxes and notice revenue goes down, you will naturally reverse it.

That isn't necessarily how it works.

Suppose you increase taxes and revenue goes up by 5%, but growth goes down. Now in ten years your economy has grown by 2.5%/year instead of 3.5%/year or more, so your tax base is >10% lower than it would have been in the alternative but at no point is is less than it was the year before.
by bdelmas | 2025-04-05 01:23:20+00:00
Well before what's happening now the US still was doing very strong on the economy (plus their advantage to be that big, their military advantage, them owning half of their continent, etc...). But with what is unfolding now...

If you want to know more about the current situation in the UK I would recommend this video [1]. His channel is amazing for geopolitical content.

[1] https://youtu.be/OTWDzMjgsEY?si=hxoB8ef_y2Qy4u0I
by surfaceofthesun | 2025-04-05 01:23:58+00:00
I’m pretty sure the conventional wisdom suggests inflation happens when countries don’t pay down their debt.

Increased money supply isn’t the only cause of inflation (e.g., stagflation). Uncertainty about how to price goods—especially for goods in the middle of supply chains—could cause supply disruptions. It’s a self-inflicted version of the Covid supply disruptions.
by ein0p | 2025-04-05 01:24:09+00:00
It's 1D chess, really, and it isn't really Trump who came up with the idea. We're between a rock and a hard place. If we refinanced at 4.8%, the interest payment would go to $1.2T per year. If we refinance at a lower rate, it's lower. Note that we're not just refinancing either, we'll have to borrow about $1.8T, too, unless DOGE miraculously achieves its $1T/yr savings (doesn't look like it will, if the current trends are anything to go by). Tariff revenues would help to plug that hole somewhat. Then there's the issue of many countries having higher tariffs for our stuff than we have for theirs. That's not "free" trade. Then, finally, there's the issue of the near-irreversible erosion of the industrial base.

Warren Buffett warned about this back in 2003, and proposed an elegant solution, which, unfortunately, would require Congress to implement it through legislation: https://faculty.washington.edu/ss1110/IF/Buffett%20Fortune%2... But we do not have a functioning congress, so Buffett's solution is impossible.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-05 01:24:40+00:00
> In this case there are very few truly "OSS companies" except for Red Hat and few other Linux distribution maintainers.

Okay then. Fine by me.

> Gitlab

Perfect example. They have OSS offerings. They are not an OSS _company_.

This also serves to exclude the hundreds of VC-backed "totally open source 100% not going to enshittify this when our investors come asking for returns". Which, again, I'm fine with.

The business model of the purist OSS company is not one that's been found to be terribly successful. Nevertheless, it _is_ one which has a sort of moral high ground at least. I would prefer to leave definitions as is so as to keep that distinction (of having the moral high ground) crystal clear.

Does that make sense?
by Terr_ | 2025-04-05 01:24:41+00:00
It doesn't require a constitutional amendment, we can just repeal the law [0] being used, which would ironically involve the same number of votes as keeping the law but slapping down Trump's particular usage of it. (That's now how it originally worked, but the easy-slapdown route got ruled unconstitutional.)

Military alliance stuff might be harder. Some stuff like NATO is supported by actual legislation, but other stuff was set up as a kind of gentleman's agreement with the US President-du-jour on the assumption that successors wouldn't be crazy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
by tayo42 | 2025-04-05 01:25:00+00:00
I started wondering if there's a way for citizens to push the issue that these tarrifs are unconstitutional. Like a lawsuit that got escalated to the Supreme Court or some thing if congress isn't going to.

Some of the senators are breaking away though.

If the country survives this though the next thing through executive order could be just as bad or worse. There doesn't seem to be any realistic way out of this insanity.
by bgentry | 2025-04-05 01:25:17+00:00
Ah, so that issue is specifically related to a statistics/count query used by the UI and not by River itself. I think it's something we'll build a more efficient solution for in the future because counting large quantities of records in Postgres tends to be slow no matter what, but hopefully it won't get in the way of regular usage.

> Perceived only at this stage, though the kind of volume we’re looking at is 10s to 100s of millions of jobs per day.

Yeah that's a little over 100 jobs/sec sustained :) Shouldn't be much of an issue on appropriate hardware and with a little tuning, in particular to keep your jobs table from growing to more than a few million rows and to vacuum frequently. Definitely hit us up if you try it and start having any trouble!
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-05 01:25:43+00:00
Trump has kooky beliefs about tariffs, and his economic guys are yes men.

Economics and science mean nothing to the President. He probably heard some blowhard in a bar 50 years ago yabber about tariffs. He’s an instinctual person, and when he senses danger to himself, he’ll pivot.

I’d guess there will be air strikes on Iran or threats of an incursion into the Mexican side of the border by June.
by kragen | 2025-04-05 01:26:22+00:00
Interesting, I hadn't thought about this. Is the issue that the JIT output is likely to be a different number of bytes away? tbb/tbh seems like a more common version of that problem, TBH.

As I understand it, this kind of thing was a big problem for ARM in the mid-90s when they finally wrote the ARM ARM and outlawed things like ldmia r2!, {r0-r4}.
by sebmellen | 2025-04-05 01:26:36+00:00
Yes, it is a liability, because in exchange for your reserve currency status you are indebting your country. Gradually, as you outsource more and produce less, your country derives more and more of its returns from soft economic assets (financial markets, legal structures, software, pharma, IP, etc.), than hard economic assets (commodities, energy, manufacturing, transportation, logistics, etc.).

In the long run, this hollows out your industrial base, drives income inequality (because labor is devalued when products/soft assets have zero marginal cost of replication), and defangs your country.

Said differently — vertical integration is the key to “innovation” in the abstract. You can see this with BYD.

With the above in mind, let’s say your goal as a country is to develop your industries so you can achieve vertical integration. Soft economic assets are easier to bootstrap once you have hard economic assets. If you lose your hard economic assets and only have soft ones, you are at a strategic disadvantage because your opponent (in this case China), can bootstrap their soft assets relatively quickly. By comparison, it will take you much longer to get your hard assets back (through the mythical process of “reshoring/reindustrialization”).

All that being said, this is not a commentary on the effectiveness of the tariff policy of the Trump administration.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-05 01:26:42+00:00
I’ve lost my voice for a few days because I spent a solid eight hours in a row talking developers out of solving already-solved problems.

“No, you don’t need Redis for caching output, we have a CDN already.”

“No, you don’t need to invent authentication tokens yourself, JWT is a downloadable package away.”

“No…”

“No…”

…
by benatkin | 2025-04-05 01:26:44+00:00
Sweet. I know. I even have the $5/mo plan just to keep https://anigram.herokuapp.com/ online :)

Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks. https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/
by Majromax | 2025-04-05 01:26:46+00:00
> Trump is crashing the T-note yield to refinance $9T (which is how much US debt is going to mature in 2025) at a lower rate

Even if this were intended (unlikely), destroying $6T of notional stock market value so far to save $270b/yr of interest (if 10-year yields drop by 3%, which hasn't happened yet) is a bad trade.
by hintymad | 2025-04-05 01:27:06+00:00
I think deindustrialization is detrimental to the US. We couldn't even make masks fast enough during the covid. The YouTube video that compares the factory of GM and that of BYD's is just embarrassing. It really shows how far we've fallen. The cost of building anything, including canon shells, is through the roof because we simply don't have the supply chains. And do we really believe that we can keep innovating if we don't actually make things? It's really a pipe dream that our engineers can keep drawing boxes in their cushy offices and believe that Chinese companies won't catch up. On the other hand, it's so sad that successful people like Balaj believe that the US can never reverse the course of deindustrialization. Their reasons are the usual: the US workers are too incompetent compared to the Chinese workers. Our automation is too behind compared to China's. We have lost the know-how of building our supply chain. We may get back manufacturing, but we will lose our seigniorage of a global currency - the US dollar.

What I don't understand is that China was dirt poor 30 years ago and was not a manufacturing powerhouse even 15 years ago. It was the Taiwanese, the Japanese, and the westerners who invested heavily in China and brought them technologies and expertise and bootstrapped the massive manufacturing industries in China. The quality and professionalism of US workers used to be the envy of Chinese people. Since when rebuilding the manufacturing business has become mission impossible? Can we really keep printing money when we make so little stuff? I get that we have great service jobs, but who wants our services if we don't make anything worth servicing? Back in 1917, Allyn Young believed that London would always be the finance center of the world, but we all know what happened later.

I'm not sure if Tarrif will work in the end, but at least it can attract additional investment given that the US is the largest consumer market in the world. Combined that with deregulation (assuming it will be be successful) , at least the US has a shot to bring back the key manufacturing business. And don't we believe actions lead to information? What have we done in the past 15 years to stop our deindustrialization? At least this time our government is trying. For that, I'd like to give them benefit of doubt.
by fulladder | 2025-04-05 01:27:25+00:00
Actually, that's not what I've found. When I have compared betting sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to the implied probability of Fed rate cuts in the interest rate futures market, I have found them to match up and move in lock step with each other. (I don't work for any of these companies and I don't use the betting sites myself; just stating my observation.)