MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-09 18:02:51+00:00
Boasting that Iran has similar birth-related mortality rates to Mississippi is ... I don't know what you're trying to prove, actually.

Mississippi is one of the worst states in the US for maternity health; the US is one of the worst countries in the developed world for the same.

The comment you're responding to implied that Mississippi was comparable to Iran, and you rebutted that... the data supports that claim.
by gruez | 2025-04-09 18:02:56+00:00
>Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.

You're totally ignoring the option of wiping your phone prior to crossing, and avoiding both fates.

>Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.

This already has been litigated, and the courts have affirmed CBP can deny entry or seize your phone. By all means, try to affect change by writing to your senator or whatever, but displays of civil disobedience is mostly pointless. ACLU won't even take on your case because it's been settled, and the chance of it being overturned is slim.
by sumonoahid | 2025-04-09 18:03:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched LaunchJet, a full-stack TypeScript boilerplate I built to scratch a personal itch — speeding up the repetitive work I do every time I start a new SaaS product.

Over the years, I found myself spending 80% of my time setting up things like authentication, payment processing, and dashboards… and only 20% on the actual product. So I decided to build a boilerplate that handles all the boring parts for me — once and for all.

What LaunchJet includes: JWT auth with social login

Stripe integration

Email confirmation flows

Admin dashboards

Notification system

Fully typed with TypeScript

Production-ready backend with Node.js & MongoDB

React frontend with beautiful UI and dark mode

Extensive documentation

What used to take me 6–8 weeks now takes just a few days.

If you’re building SaaS apps, you might find this useful. I’d love your thoughts, feedback, or suggestions for what to add next.

https://www.launchjet.dev/

Happy to answer any questions!
by quantumHazer | 2025-04-09 18:03:23+00:00
As a student, I use LLMs as little as possible and try to rely on books whenever possible. I sometimes ask LLMs questions about things that don't click, and I fact-check their responses. For coding, I'm doing the same. I'm just raw dogging the code like a caveman because I have no corporate deadlines, and I can code whatever I want. Sometimes I get stuck on something and ask an LLM for help, always using the web interface rather than IDEs like Cursor or Windsurf. Occasionally, I let the LLMs write some boilerplate for boring things, but it's really rare and I tend not to use them too much. This isn't due to Luddism but because I want to learn, and I don't want slop in my way.
by jhanschoo | 2025-04-09 18:03:28+00:00
Indeed, Paul Krugman has been doing the rounds on podcasts recently and he seems to think that Trump is doing tariffs and trying to eliminate trade imbalances because he has always had that idea of doing tariffs and thought that trade deficits were being taken advantage of, and the talk about a greater strategy are post-hoc rationalizations. Sometimes a simple person has a simple reason divorced from complicated reality.
by r14c | 2025-04-09 18:03:35+00:00
I'm in a similar boat. I dropped out of uni for reasons (a bit of a story, I can tell it if you buy me a beer) and ended up making a career out of software engineering.

The main thing to do IMO is spend time building a network. A recommendation in the right place at the right time can open doors that would otherwise be closed to you.

School is an option, but the opportunity cost has been too high so far for me. Though doing a freelance PhD thesis probably wouldn't hurt.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 18:03:38+00:00
You know, I cut my teeth on AT&T SVR3. I loved reading up on the basic tools and learning their options and then putting them into everyday practice.

In those systems there were far fewer tools, far fewer options, and much simpler workflows, so honestly I didn’t need to endlessly flip through manpages to sift out hundreds of options with arcane, incompatible, unintuitive syntaxes. The few options we needed to memorize were always paired with consistent syntax and impeccable mnemonics to remember (who can forget ‘ls -l‘ or ‘rm -f‘?)

Ironically, ‘vi‘ was already quite evolved, complex, and arcane by this point, but that was completely different: it was required for us to acquire proficiency in order to code, and it was easy to build skills from basic to expert/power, and all ‘vi‘-editing commands still featured those standardized mnemonics and consistency that can only come from a proprietary single-entity codebase. Plus all possible legacy compat with ‘ed‘ which nobody used directly anymore!

So while we may today consider this a lacuna in the reader tool, it wasn’t by design, and I blame the explosion of “GNU long options” and lack of standardization, more than anything. But also ‘tar‘ and ‘ps‘ and BSD vs. the world. Eff those guys.

https://m.xkcd.com/1168/
by Clubber | 2025-04-09 18:03:40+00:00
>In that case they could do things like block some or all exports to the US until we, say, stopped escorting cargo ships in and out of Taiwan. But the notion they would "instantly cut off all exports to the US" is nonsense. There's no reason that's somehow a no-brainer post invasion.

You think they would supply their enemy? Biden said he would protect Taiwan pretty emphatically. I assume Trump would be advised of the same.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-04-09 18:03:46+00:00
> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back?

All the things you mention have a certain objective quality that can be reduced to an approachable minimum. A house could be a simple cabin, a tent, a cave; a piece of cloth could just be a cape; metal can be screwed, glued or cast; a transistor could be a relay or a wooden mechanism etc. ...history tells us all that.

I think when there's a Homo ludens that wants to play, or when there's a Homo economicus that wants us to optimize, there might be one that separates the process of learning from adaptation (Homo investigans?)[0]. The process of learning something new could be such a subjective property that keeps a yet unknown natural threshold which can't be lowered (or "reduced") any further. If I were to be overly pessimistic, a hardcore luddite, I'd say that this species is under attack, and there will be a generation that lacks this aspect, but also won't miss it, because this character could have never been experienced in the first place.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_the_human_species#Li...
by skeledrew | 2025-04-09 18:03:58+00:00
The entire point can be summed in the first 5/6s of that. You don't need to know any of it, because it's irrelevant (at that abstraction). Just as it's irrelevant to know how registers work, to allocate and free memory, avoid/handle segfaults, etc if using a high level language like Python, vs Assembly or C.
by porphyra | 2025-04-09 18:04:02+00:00
Chatgpt 4o's advanced image generation seems to have a low-resolution autoregressive part that generates tokens directly, and an image upscaling decoding step that turns the (perhaps 100 px wide) token-image into the actual 1024 px wide final result. The former step is able to almost nail things perfectly, but the latter step will always change things slightly. That's why it is so good at, say, generating large text but still struggles with fine text, and will always introduce subtle variations when you ask it to edit an existing image.
by aseipp | 2025-04-09 18:04:18+00:00
The reality is that for large scale AI deployment there's only one criterion that matters: what is the total cost of ownership? If TPUs are 1/30th the total perf but 1/50th the total price, then they will be bought by customers. Basically that simple.

Most places using AI hardware don't actually want to expend massive amounts of capital to procure it and then shove it into racks somewhere and then manage it over its total lifetime. Hyperscalers like Google are also far, far ahead in things like DC energy efficiency, and at really large scale those energy costs are huge and have to be factored into the TCO. The long dominant cost of this stuff is all operational expenditures. Anyone running a physical AI cluster is going to have to consider this.

The walled garden stuff doesn't matter, because places demanding large-scale AI deployments (and actually willing to spend money on it) do not really have the same priorities as HN homelabbers who want to install inefficient 5090s so they can run Ollama.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-09 18:04:26+00:00
> we would like to give your child something that we think will lower their intelligence

“The association between drinking carbonated drinks, eating chips and intelligence level was significant (P= 0.043, 0.001) and prevalence odds ratio of 1.5 and 2.4 respectively” [1].

Anyone arguing this is about childhood IQ and wouldn’t similarly ban (not stop mandating, ban) soft drinks, chips and fast food for kids, they’re signalling this is about something other than kids’ health.

(Note: this isn’t my mole hill. I think communities should have the right to make this call on their own. And the cited study quality is just as good as the fluoride causes autism ones.)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3507933/
by gnabgib | 2025-04-09 18:04:43+00:00
(2015) Discussions in:

~2022 (42 points, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30389591

2020 (459 points, 282 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23444594

2015 (577 points, 212 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215
by scott01 | 2025-04-09 18:04:44+00:00
There's a problem with f32 due to devices using two ADCs to implement it. Essentially, there's certain volume threshold when device switches DACs, and it's audible. If you record sources with varying loudness, you may see noise floor raising around loud bursts, and typical noise suppression tools won't work on files like this (there was a video or a blog post, I can't recall where I saw this). At least this is how Zoom implemented f32, don't know about Sound Devices.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-09 18:04:47+00:00
I've had a couple of leather shoes (goodyear welted oxfords) repaired, and the last pair cost me around $100 to get re-soled. It was a local cobbler that has a very, very small shop.

I mean if you pay $300 and up for a pair of shoes, it could make sense. If you pay $100 for a pair, you might as well just purchase a new pair. In my case I re-sole the shoes because my shoes fit me well, and they're more on the high-end and thus I've paid a bit for them at the time of purchase. Makes sense for me to re-sole a pair of $1k shoes, rather than purchase a new pair.

To get the prices down, you'd need a lot more cobblers though. And there just aren't many going to trade school for that. It is very much a "artisanal" craft today, akin to tailoring.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-09 18:05:00+00:00
I would definitely come across as suspicious to any border inspection. I have no Google apps, I have no social media apps. I have very few apps at all. I definitely qualify as someone that would be the type to wipe their phone. Also, my photos would definitely look like something someone staged to show activity, as the vast majority of my photos are of my fur babies. I don't do selfies, so that would be sus too. My browser history would also appear to them to be wiped, because I simply do not browse the web on the phone. I doubt it would be a quick conversation of me convincing them I'm really just that boring.
by danabramov | 2025-04-09 18:05:42+00:00
I'll add I think you're mistaking the cause and the effect. I'm not trying to sell you on something; I don't give a damn what you use. Like literally, I don't. I'm not personally invested in that. I'm not being paid to work on this or promote it or whatever. But I've been thinking about this stuff for a while and I wanted to write it down on the page. And my thoughts tend to be longwinded because I prefer that style. I think someone will salvage something valuable from my writing if they find it there.
by notahacker | 2025-04-09 18:06:25+00:00
You hit the nail on the head with the targeting. Trump has a long held obsession with tariffs based on an inability to understand that trade isn't a competition where if you buy more stuff you lose.

It's arguments about tariffs as a revenue source replacing other taxes which are ancillary ones thrown out to appeal to other vaguely Republican instincts. Obviously if the US actually wanted to use them as a revenue source they wouldn't set them at punitively high rates likely to simply eliminate trade, frame it as a battle to reduce import dependency or dangle the carrot of trade deals to anyone willing to bend the knee. Not to mention his rapid reverse ferret reframing it as focusing on China
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-09 18:06:57+00:00
That's what I mean, if one day they actually study this correctly and have a raging epiphany then it would be too late for kids already subjected to fluoride whereas a healthy diet, good brushing with fluoride free toothpaste and using a water pick could mitigate cavities just fine among other things. Perhaps even mitigate the need for SSRI's, ADHD drugs, etc... but that's a much bigger topic.
by tombert | 2025-04-09 18:07:04+00:00
It might be good for Bitcoin, it's bad for pretty much everything else.

We depend on our institutions to investigate cases of fraud. If all a fraudster has to do in order to legally commit fraud is to launder it through a cryptocurrency then of course every fraudster is going to do that.

It's getting fucking exhausting seeing how blatant this orange president is being without even trying to pretend he's not corrupt. He launched two cryptocurrencies on the day he took office, and he's in charge of a publicly traded company.

Frankly I am kind of just sick of this cryptocurrency shit in general. I am embarrassed that I ever fell for it, and frankly if anyone still believes in it as a concept at this point then I really don't understand why.
by specialp | 2025-04-09 18:07:39+00:00
I think you are conflating "working multiple jobs" with working multiple jobs during the same time period and lying to the other jobs about what you are doing when you cannot be reached. There is a big difference. If I work 9-5 on one job, and 5-1am on the other job that is not taking time from one to spend on the other. If I work 2+ jobs during that 9-5 period and not tell anyone and make excuses for not getting things done long enough until one of them fires me that is being dishonest.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-09 18:07:55+00:00
> Those aren't mutually exclusive

Logically, no. Politically, I think so. (Counterargument: fluoride is a bulwark against the idiots. As long as they’re fighting fluoridation, they aren’t as focussed on vaccines. I don’t buy it, but it’s worth raising.)

> a quirk of America's history of treating various groups of people as chattel that we have kept that framework for children

It’s a quirk of the Constitution having been written in the 18th century. Children didn’t have rights in most of the world at that time.
by matt-p | 2025-04-09 18:08:19+00:00
Sorry, but I don't think this is the reason. There were vastly more people in financial services calling for us NOT to have brexit than fishermen asking for it, even in number of people. I honestly don't think this was a numbers of people affected vs "% of GDP" affected issue. Not at all.

What good did it do for us? At the time everyone was running around rubbishing and laughing at the "outrageous" claims of 10% GDP loss, and where are we now?
by eyko | 2025-04-09 18:09:50+00:00
It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate.

And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
by raincom | 2025-04-09 18:10:32+00:00
I worked in the retail; it is the shittiest job I ever had. I was given an abnormal schedule: two days closing, one day opening, one mid shift (and I should work either Saturday or Sunday). The churn is really high: people leave even if they find a better yet shitty job. Which jobs do you want to create in US? Retail jobs or manufacturing jobs?
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-09 18:10:41+00:00
>We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis,

This is a nice way to put it.

Anticipate a world within your life time where China is the dominant economic, technological, military and cultural super power.

Anticipate jealousy, anticipate fear, but know that as Americans who have been top dog for decades there is nothing wrong with not being the best.

Additionally anticipate a changing world view less focused on the view that freedom and democracy as the only possible way to lead and anticipate that despite the fact that China is a communist country and centrally controlled they don't want conflict and they don't want total war.

China and the US are not perfect. The US needs to accept this fact and it needs to accept that another is about to take it's place as the top dog.
by alpha_squared | 2025-04-09 18:10:55+00:00
I get where you're coming from, I really do, but I also think that perspective effectively means that you should never migrate -- ever. To anywhere, at all. I take the stance that gentrification is inevitable, unfortunately, but it can be guided and managed (and I say this as someone who's been gentrified out of an area I'd really love to live in for the rest of my life). Just like you can't control the weather, you also can't control migration patterns but you can manage them.
by Fairburn | 2025-04-09 18:11:11+00:00
It's because the folks in the back-end of things like what he represents in terms of wealth consolidation and fewer lookie-loos to peek inside to see what's truly going on. "Trump" is a symptom of much broader things that can only be fixed by fire. And even then, just like the cockroach, he'll scurry away under the baseboards to hide until his next meal.
by jasongill | 2025-04-09 18:11:13+00:00
This brings back memories - I owned a large web hosting company and we had thousands of machines. When hardware issues came up, or machines wouldn't boot, using this method was our first line of defense - we'd boot the machine from a burned copy of "Recovery Is Possible" which was an all-in-one Linux distro for recovery, then mount the partitions and chroot in to figure out what is going on - or use rsync to migrate data off as needed.

Just looked and it looks like "Recovery Is Possible" hasn't been updated in a dozen years which dates my story, but I fondly remember overnight phone calls from panicked new sysadmins and telling them to be calm and "RIP it and get chrooted in" and then waking up to help them troubleshoot.
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-09 18:11:43+00:00
Couldn't have said it better myself.

The biology of the human brain will not change as a result of these LLMs. We are imperfect and will tend to take the easiest route in most cases. Having an "all powerful" tool that can offload the important work of figuring out tough problems seems like it will lead to a society less capable in solving complex problems.
by justinator | 2025-04-09 18:12:16+00:00
Just like text results from AI, when images like this get better, the more and more subtle yet absolute wrongness is going to be a nightmare to deal with.

Imagine a ask AI to show me a sewer cap that's less than a foot wide (or whatever, I dunno, watch TMNT right now). And it does, just by showing a sewer cap that looks photorealistic and a ruler, that has markings from one end to the other that only go up to 8 inches. That doesn't mean sewer caps come in that size, it just means you can produce a rendered image to fit what you asked for.
by paulgb | 2025-04-09 18:12:49+00:00
I’m not a fan of Trump but my steelman argument for this is: policing public markets is a public good because efficient capital markets are the bedrock of a capitalist society.

It’s hard to make the same case for crypto, which (despite the insistences of its participants) more or less exists in isolation from the rest of the market. The industry feels it is over-regulated. Makes sense that a more lassiez-faire leader would take a more hands-off approach to it.
by logifail | 2025-04-09 18:13:26+00:00
> Completely barking mad

Well, we'll see that and raise you the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

The EU could get rid of this idiocy overnight, except - well - France.

(I have nothing against the French, I've visited France dozens of times and have many friends there.)

"Once a month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg at a cost of £150m a year as lorries transport paperwork."[0]

"Top EU official brands Strasbourg shuttle 'insane'"[1]

"EU parliament’s €114m-a-year move to Strasbourg ‘a waste of money’, but will it ever be scrapped?"[2]

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/meps-on-the-move-madness-of-stras...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/05/eu.politics

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/20/eu-parliament-s-114m-a-y...
by declan_roberts | 2025-04-09 18:13:27+00:00
Indeed you can skip most of the unnecessary additional mount requirements with systemd-nspawn. If /dev/sde1 (your root partition) is mounted to /tmp/rescue just run:

systemd-nspawn --directory /tmp/rescue --boot -- --unit rescue.target

It should automatically find the boot partition and mount it as well.
by bentley | 2025-04-09 18:13:49+00:00
mdoc(7), which is the primary macro set used on BSD systems, is a 90s language (as opposed to a 70s language) with useful semantics that support both hyperlinking and featureful search, both on the web and in the terminal.

For example, here’s a search for “C functions beginning with ‘str’ and with return type size_t”: https://man.openbsd.org/?query=Ft%3Dsize_t+-a+Fn~^str&apropo...

On OpenBSD you can do the same from a terminal:

$ apropos -s 3 Ft=size_t -a Nm~^str

But the biggest value of manpages to me is somewhat independent of the underlying format: its quality as documentation. BSD systems have a strong tradition of cohesive usability, including good manpages. A lot of the manpage alternatives I see advertised in Linux circles (such as tldr pages or bro pages) are of little use to me, because OpenBSD manuals are thoughtfully written, clear, concise, complete, and have useful examples. The difference is very noticeable when I try reading manpages for programs I’ve installed from packages, which are often incredibly sparse or incredibly verbose, and lack examples in both cases.

The nifty features that come from the modern language and tooling used by BSD manpages are really just symptomatic of the overall care that BSD communities put into their documentation generally. I wish it were more widespread in the free software world.