MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dataviz1000 | 2025-04-09 13:25:07+00:00
The article is focused on global commodity price trends rather than being exclusively about U.S. prices.

Coffee will get more expensive in the United States which is great for Puerto Rico -- although the kids in San Juan would prefer a protectionist strategy of growing crops that they consume themselves than exporting to the mainland.

Because the price of imported goods will increase in the United States driving down demand within the United States, exporters will have more supply which will drive down price to the other 100+ countries they trade with.

Once countries like Thailand and Peru start to trade more amongst themselves there probably isn't a return to same trading with the United States who will be like the kid on the playground nobody wants to play with.
by omnimus | 2025-04-09 13:25:19+00:00
Nowdays basically any professionally produced book is made in Indesign. And text wrapping is semi-automated. It's automated but checked for issues and fixed manually. Indesign has two text wrapping algorithms paragraph composer that tries to balance whole paragraphs and line composer that only checks line by line.

Surprisingly in the high-end the less automated line composer is used a lot more. It requires more work but human decisions lead to best results if done properly.
by rconti | 2025-04-09 13:26:06+00:00
We have a Tesla car, but I never considered their solar because it's a commodity, and their options are overpriced. They also pushed leases pretty heavily, which I was not interested in. We bought our panels in 2018, the same year we bought the EV.

Just talk to your neighbors about reputable local installers. They'll have panel and storage options.

That said, because these things are largely commoditized, there's some turmoil in the market. Our (excellent!) local installer was saved by the PPP during the pandemic, which was a bit of a sobering thought -- they're the ones backingthe 25 year installation guarantee!

Then Sunpower (our panel vendor, and one of the higher end ones, at that) went out of business. Our monitoring system continues to work thanks to the work of the bankruptcy courts, though it's been transferred to a company who is trying to support those assets be having a freemium model.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-09 13:26:26+00:00
Tesla is a meme stock. Caveat emptor. For a considerable period, the price has never made sense considering the fundamentals. It's currently valued at ~$450k per car delivered in 2024 with a P/E ratio of 108 and that's after a 50% decline from its peak.

Just compare it to any other car company, be it the Big Three, European car makers or BYD.f

The whole purchase of SolarCity was one of Elon's companies (Tesla) buying another company of Elon's that was failing (SolarCity) because it owed a lot of money to a third company of Elon's (SpaceX).

Tesla's most recent quarterly shipments are down 13# Y/Y with likely worse to come. The brand is being publicly torched by the actions of its CEO. A protracted trade war with China could end very badly for Tesla. A trade war with Europe may see the EU replace its demand for EVs with the likes of BYD.

Solar is (now) a commodity business. The panels get ever-cheaper. The only real cost is installation. And a labor-intensive cost like that doesn't scale.

I predict that Tesla will be forced to try and save itself by ousting its CEO in the coming years.
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-09 13:26:30+00:00
I didn't, honestly. In the end, it was just a gradual step for me. I got more things to do, I became slightly more social, talked to more and more people, and it just happened. I still deal with it, just on a lesser scale where it's managable unless I have a bad day - in which case again I'll turn to screens for comfort. But it's rare.
by enaaem | 2025-04-09 13:27:03+00:00
If you don't trust your government then you don't own anything, since it's the government that enforces and arbiters property rights. The fact that you own a home is only written on some piece of paper and you trust the government to enforce it.

Crypto is only worth something because you can convert it to fiat and with that fiat can sign fiat denominated contracts that are enforced by the government.
by juliusgeo | 2025-04-09 13:27:09+00:00
As Percy Shelley said about Ozymandias, "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" We're all sand on a long enough time scale, and getting a TC 800k+ will not save you from that fate, in the same way that conquering an empire will not save you either. Other people have pointed out that you likely make a decent wage, but understandably that does not address your concern. If you feel that your only value is your accomplishments, then no matter how much you achieve it will never be enough. You get to decide your own goals, and whether you're reaching them. Don't let these proxies for ability and class decide what you want or how fast you should get it.
by cbhl | 2025-04-09 13:27:17+00:00
You should look closely at solar rate plans and interconnection fees in your area. If you're hoping to save money with solar, it's possible that you never recoup the initial investment because of the way the newer rate plans are structured (esp. for PG&E).

In the bay area, it might be cheaper to opt into 100% renewable rate plans from CleanPowerSF or Peninsula Clean Energy. (Silicon Valley Power is 100% renewable by default, IIRC.)
by socksy | 2025-04-09 13:28:25+00:00
Assuming they wouldn't want to take on server maintenance workload, wouldn't something like NetBird be a better fit? The free version has ACL already, the $5/user/month has OIDC integration, and the business version (MDM integration and auditing) is $12. Then the server is still open source so if they wanted to transition to doing it themselves they still would have that option down the road.
by everdrive | 2025-04-09 13:28:30+00:00
We've had more than a few in my company. We work in Cybersecurity for the company, so we've definitely seen them and seen the details. I don't actually think they're that hard to avoid .. but to say they're not a problem at all is not fair. I agree with you that if taken the wrong way that this is just ammunition for "return to office" efforts.

A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are. And so, a bullshit artist can get hired. Technology now allows these bullshit artists to propagate more, and do more damage than would have previously be possible. AI in the workplace is a similar problem. Can you tell the different between someone who really just leans on ChatGPT all day but is actually incompetent? Probably so, but someone who was that incompetent just wouldn't have previously been able to hang on for quite as long, or deceive so many people.

[edit]

It's clear that my comment was not clearly written -- when I said "A LOT of people are far worse at interviewing than they think they are," I was referring to the people holding the interviews, and not referring to candidates. I'm shocked at just how bad a lot of folks are at holding interviews, and just how misplaced their confidence in their ability seems to be.
by tasn | 2025-04-09 13:29:35+00:00
Hard disagree. Markdown is the way to go.

I've been using Linux for a couple of decades at this point, and I've use man pages quite a bit over the years. Though even though man pages are not foreign to me, I think they are no longer the right solution to the problem.

First of all, we are all used to reading documents on the web (or in a code editor) nowadays, so having a completely different interface is not great. At some point 10 years ago or so I mostly stopped using the `man` command and just googled for man pages so that I can have the interface I'm used to.

Additionally, developers are very much used to markdown, and most other docs are written in markdown (maybe some RST, but probably mostly markdown) so this is not great for the person writing the docs either.

So man pages are inferior for both the producers and the consumers of documentation.
by milesrout | 2025-04-09 13:29:42+00:00
The situation with food is that everyone today has access to good quality food if they choose to actually put their money towards it, but large numbers of people enjoy McDonalds and KFC and such slop, so they choose to spend far more on it than they'd spend cooking for themselves.

It is still much better than when large numbers of people starved if it rained a bit in the wrong week.

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees Of the singing birds and the humming bees; Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.

The weather and its effect on the food supply was the preoccupation of 90% of the population 90% of the time for all of agricultural man's history (and pre-history) and hunting and gathering was even worse for quality of life.
by ericmay | 2025-04-09 13:29:58+00:00
You're not accounting for countries in which China has set up manufacturing facilities to avoid US tariffs (Vietnam, Mexico, etc.), so the overall figure is higher, albeit indirectly.

The other problem is that you're not considering the full scope of impact at the nation state level.

It might be "3% of China's GDP", but when you look at dollar figures the US is buying almost $500 billion of Chinese goods, while China is buying around $150 billion. If the US stops importing Chinese goods (as an example), that's $500 billion worth of trade that's good for China that is destroyed, whereas if China cuts off the United States, the US is only losing $150 billion.

If you want to minimize the situation by suggesting it's no big deal for China to stop exporting to the United States because it's only 3% of China's GDP, you'd have to make the same argument that it's even less of a big deal for the United States to lose its $150 billion in exports to China.

Of course the situation isn't that simple, and you know that.
by stephenitis | 2025-04-09 13:29:58+00:00
There are a lot of bacteria that live in a dirt and our natural biome that also reduce to antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria thus making antibiotics a more effective.

This general weakness of the bacterial wall is something to be wary of given they didn’t study its effect on a wider range of important bacteria.

Throwing a lot of anything in your gut that can cause an imbalance, ir serious dybosis is a good reason to treat your stomach like a little fermenting aquarium whose bacteria and skin cells cycle every 3-5 days.
by NickM | 2025-04-09 13:30:43+00:00
I will never buy another Tesla again for political reasons, but regarding reliability: their new models have always had reliability problems, but then reliability has always gotten much better within a year or so.

I don't know if the Cybertruck will follow the same pattern, or if the whole company has jumped the shark, but if we're looking for non-political opinions I would not necessarily write them off on quality issues alone.
by specialp | 2025-04-09 13:31:31+00:00
Another remote employment fraud that is much more prevalent is "Overemployment". You will get an applicant that is very skilled and hits the interview out of the park. But then when hired they are working many jobs and just trying to steal as many paychecks as they can until you fire them. They keep their first jobs resume clean and they all check out.

There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There's lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can't be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can't make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/top/
by NotGMan | 2025-04-09 13:31:32+00:00
The problem is food. Stop eating many carbs and no more tooth problems.

Trying to solve tooth rot with flouride is stupid because it misses the point: flouride doesn't help much: people still get tooth rot.

So basicaly if you flouridate water you get tooth rot + you ingest a neurotoxins.

Stop eating trash food and you won't get rotten teeth + no neurotoxin will be ingested!

People who will comment in the likes of "yeah but people won't change their diets": I agree, they won't. But I don't want to get neurotoxin put into my water because other people are fine with poisoning their children with trash food.
by xyst | 2025-04-09 13:31:38+00:00
This reminds me of SQL indentation “best practices” discussion [1]

I personally don’t find this particularly helpful but can see it helping some folks. You write enough dockerfiles, the formatting becomes irrelevant.

What pisses me off though is _inconsistency_. One code base uses "formatting practices 1b", then another code base uses "formatting practices 2x". Then the worst offender: a service owners that can’t make up their mind and each developer makes up their own "best practices".

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272210/sql-statement-ind...
by boringg | 2025-04-09 13:31:39+00:00
Can I add that outside of the political commentary because thats mainly the only reason this is on hackernews.

There are mounting challenges in climate tech - specifically in residential solar: 1. Residential solar has been under punishing economic headwinds. Tariffs (before this) against imported PV. The market has not been performing. 2. Many of the Public Utilities are making it very difficult for solar to work out financially for home owners - see CPUC in California changing the terms of NEM to the advantage of the Utilities as an example. 3. Energy storage in residential markets has ALWAYS been an insurance product/backup power and not a financially beneficial product. It is tough competition against generators etc 4. Utilities are wisening up and increasing their fees and reducing the benefits of on site power generation. 5. Residential solar has likely already found all the best home owners (ie lowest CAC) so are now pursuing harder to reach.
by sjmulder | 2025-04-09 13:31:45+00:00
It's a shame so many web versions of man pages are typeset with monospace fonts and barely any formatting. The mandoc-powered OpenBSD online man pages are great though: https://man.openbsd.org/acme-client

Still I also really like being able to read man pages in the terminal. Getting a bit familiar with less helps to make it convenient. I mostly use the search features (/ and ?) and half page scrolling (d an u).
by joakleaf | 2025-04-09 13:31:51+00:00
I would think that you could be right, but it could also be the opposite.

Low demand in the US, means less sales to US, so they may try to make up for the loss of profit on the US market by increasing prices on other markets... So global price increase.

E.g. Apple likely to increase prices on iPhones world wide to make up for the loss in US.

This feels completely unpredictable.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-09 13:32:38+00:00
Speaking as someone who lives in his minivan because he is homeless, I’m hoping this will turn out to be a net zero for me. Since oil is going down, gas prices are going to be much lower, but I’m afraid food prices, which is my only commonly purchased thing, are going to be much higher.

I have purchased several things that I might need in the future including a new 200 watt solar panel and a bunch of extra parts for my van. (My old solar panel is dying.).The one thing I have left to buy is an alternator, and possibly a larger solar battery.

This is how everyone living in poverty should be investing right now.
by busyant | 2025-04-09 13:32:44+00:00
> Nice work blaming the victims and trying to push them into passive acceptance of what is done by perpetrators

I don't think the person you were responding to was necessarily blaming the victims.

S/he's just pointing out that China imposing tariffs are self-inflicted pain just like the US imposing tariffs--tariffs cause some amount of self-harm.

Even The Economist said the most 'rational' response from Europe was not to impose counter-tariffs, but simply continue on as best they could without them and let the majority of the pain fall on the US.

But The Economist (and the person you responded to) also acknowledge that there are other factors at play beyond economics (e.g., national pride).

National pride is part of what got Trump elected and it's something that China has to incorporate into its decision making.
by milesrout | 2025-04-09 13:32:48+00:00
It doesn't make sense to suggest that AI has made human effort more valuable. Before, to do X, Y, or Z you needed human effort. Now, you can do X with AI. You just need human effort to do Y or Z. There is less demand for human effort. Why would that result in an increase in the price of human effort?

>Most people's purchasing power being reduced is a separate matter, more related to the eroding middle class and greedflation.

Greedflation, is that where companies suddenly remember to be greedy again after years of forgetting they're allowed to be greedy, which happens by random chance to coincide exactly with periods of expansionary monetary and fiscal policy?
by didericis | 2025-04-09 13:34:22+00:00
You are correct that there is a lot of distaste for Europe within the MAGA base. Although it’s important to note most of the distaste is about subsidizing their defense so they can have welfare states at the expense of US taxpayers, and a distaste for EU leadership. A lot of MAGA are friendly with other populist movements in Europe.

Again, I don’t think it’s an either or, and I don’t believe this is a ploy. The desire to reduce commitments in Europe and to have long term changes in trade is genuine.

The core motivation of the base is simple: middle America wants their industrial jobs back.

The motivation of advisors like the people at Hoover, military strategists and other intelligent higher ups is to deal with the weaknesses (present and future) that both Covid and Ukraine made obvious.

These are in alignment.

And yes, the MAGA base desire for a return of manufacturing came before the understanding of strategic weakness. That doesn’t mean the strategic motivations are a cope: I don’t think it’s a coincidence the bureaucracy were only willing to go along with this after both Covid and Ukraine discredited a lot of previously held beliefs about the state of the global order and the need for a course correction.

It’s also important to note politics and “cope” are basically the same thing. Everything is compromise.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-09 13:34:31+00:00
.. for how many panels? In the UK, ten years ago, I got 3.68kW for the equivalent of $7k. A $50k installation sounds wildly unprofitable.

(permitting requirements kick in above 3.68kW, see nice chart at https://www.energynetworks.org/assets/images/Resource%20libr... which gives the rules for ANY size of power station)
by afpx | 2025-04-09 13:34:55+00:00
Here’s my hot take on a messy topic.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began implementing Neo-conservative / Neo-liberal policies in the 80s. This shifted the UK and US economies to high margin things like pharma, finance, technology, and services. Those things stayed in the US. Everything was outsourced to developing countries.

It sounded great. Through free-trade, developing countries would improve their standard of living. Also, democratic countries didn't go to war with each other. So, this led to the conclusion that improved trade between wealthy nations and developing nations would lead to global harmony. Everyone's standards of living would increase, and we'd all be one happy globe.

The US kept trying to push democracy, often through force and by destabilizing governments. But, for some reason countries weren't adopting it. The reason was that academics and political leaders didn't account for the impact of culture. That is, a lot of countries didn't want democracy and free-trade.

A lot of areas of the US eventually got wiped out economically. But, for a long time, they didn't notice. Things stayed relatively stable for a few decades because prices kept falling from all of the incoming cheap goods. Meanwhile, they faced 'brain drain' - the next generation started getting college degrees and moving to the wealthy cities. Some areas became wealthy - the rest became poor.

The US became a powerhouse of tech, services, and finance. But, they didn't have enough skilled labor in the cities. So, the US opened the door to immigration. As GDP increased, salaries went up. People started flocking to the US both for high-end jobs and also low-end jobs to support all of the urban areas. The poor areas of the US became enraged - new immigrants had more money than them, and they had less.

Trump (and I assume the think tanks behind him) believes these tariffs are a last ditch attempt to fix the system. Otherwise, the US dissolves.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-09 13:35:11+00:00
This could be solved by companies charging $1 to apply for a given position. Same as charging people a small amount to send emails. Turn the economics in your favor.

Undoubtedly there would be many who would say "I would never spend even one cent to apply for a job position". However, given that such positions tend to pay tens of dollars per hour, and given that a proper application takes at least a few minutes to fill out, I think this is economically unviable. And, of course, if I'm wrong and you now have thousands of applicants anyway, you then have a small fund to draw from for other recruiting activities like in-person interviews.
by lossolo | 2025-04-09 13:35:41+00:00
> When China was content to make stuff and not invade places things were fine

And "content to make stuff"? You mean back when they were underpaid workers doing low-complexity manufacturing and not actually competing with the U.S.?

> but now it's building up it's military and saying it will take back Taiwan things are more awkward.

Maybe it's building up its military because it keeps hearing things like "pivot to Asia" and "we need to prepare for war with China"—for about 8 years now. If I were China, and knowing how the U.S. has violated international law by invading other countries (like Iraq), I’d be ramping up my military even more.

> not invade places

Which country did they invade?
by xyst | 2025-04-09 13:35:53+00:00
It’s wild that this has to be a third party offering.

I wish projects would adopt/create their own formatters like go and rust.

The amount of time I have wasted discussing "best practices" with "senior" engineers is way too damn high.

In code bases such as go or rust, the discussion ends with the "the built in formatter and preferences is preferred"
by jeromegv | 2025-04-09 13:35:57+00:00
> Low demand in the US, means less sales to US, so they may try to make up for the loss of profit on the US market by increasing prices on other markets... So global price increase.

This is not how supply and demand works in a competitive market. If demand drops, supplier compete on price and it leads to a reduction in price. They don't up the price to try to "make up", they can't, because someone next door will accept the lower price to get rid of their supply.
by forgetfreeman | 2025-04-09 13:36:08+00:00
The goal isn't to block all trade in favor of a purely domestic market. That would be stupid as now your manufacturing base is limited to the quantities of raw materials that can be produced locally and you're burning through non-renewable strategic assets just to float domestic day to day activities while simultaneously artificially limiting your available market for finished goods.

This is manufacturing economy 101 and how the US built and defended it's manufacturing base before the pivot to a "service" economy. China's trade strategy mirrors this, as is evidenced by the last 30-ish years of constant bitching by trade wonks and pundits.