MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-05 04:01:07+00:00
"Sure get rid of coins but cash is not going away.

…but people do not want to be locked out of their money."

I'd like to think cash is not going away but I'm not at all sure that it won't disappear, I reckon its life is in the balance.

I make a point of using cash whenever possible to the extent that I'll withdraw cash from an auto-teller before I go, say, to a supermarket where I'll pay cash. It's my small way of bucking the trend to e-cash.

I find it alarming that so many people are just prepared to pay with their smartphones and do so without a second thought. It's clear to me these people have little concern about being 'locked out of their money'.

Even when e-transactions fail through the network being down these people aren't deterred, they expect merchants to give them credit. Recently, the e-terminal at my local coffee shop was down [I pay cash] and the proprietor told me that he had to credit all his e-customers because they didn't have any cash and it turned out that many never repaid him. Not only that but he actually lost some customers—rather than repay the debt they went elsewhere (there are about a half dozen similar shops near by).

BTW, that e-outage was a big one and was well publicized but even then it seems few bothered to take cash as a precaution.

Unfortunately, I don't see the decline in cash contining unless there's widespread disruption to the banking system and banks start failing as they did in the 1930s. Nevertheless, I hope I'm wrong.
by veidr | 2025-04-05 04:01:50+00:00
It's clearly not good for the US economy, but I think that is a red herring. This has been so far, and continues to be, a highly successful endeavor from the perspective that matters: that of the US president himself, who wants to benefit personally.

I think it's helpful to ask "What if this president actually doesn't care one way or the other what happens to the US economy, the world economy, or even geopolitical stability (beyond the US not getting nuked, causing him to die), and everything is just a grifter's instinct for how to benefit personally?"

In that light, literally everything this administration does makes perfect sense.

This is a man whose main accomplishment before the presidency was "being famous" — starring in a reality TV show and professional wrestling (the fake/scripted kind), and he clearly wants to be the center of attention in the media.

Although his tariffs are widely mocked by knowledgeable people as "insane", "stupid", or as the Financial Times put it, "one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history", imposing them gives the man himself the opportunity for corruption on a scale unprecedented in modern US history.

He can easily (very easily) benefit financially and otherwise because heads of state, captains of industry, and the ultra-wealthy have to come to him to beg, flatter, or do something — buy his memecoin, rent out his hotels, buy his otherwise-failed social network for billions, the list is near-infinite — to get out from under his tariffs.

So I don't think there is any upside of the kind you are talking about. But there is substantial upside for the man himself, and it is enough to explain all of his actions.

They only seem nonsensical if you believe he is trying to act in the best interests of the nation.
by amy_petrik | 2025-04-05 04:02:16+00:00
Just to play devil's advocate on de-industrialization here -- The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-05 04:02:52+00:00
>Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language

No offense but I don't think this makes any sense (or only if you take the first part of that sentence literally). It's like jumping into Calculus 3 to introduce a kid to maths. From a teaching standpoint, if you're a beginner, you can't even understand what problem Rust solves. Someone who doesn't know what manual memory management, a heap and a stack is should not be handed a borrow checker.

You can either start from the top, the old school way, teach a lisp or python as a more modern alternative and teach people symbolic computing, or you can start with C and teach people from the bottom up how computers work, but frankly throwing you into a language that basically exists to solve problems professional C++ developers have in large projects is kind of wild
by satvikpendem | 2025-04-05 04:05:14+00:00
> Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.

> Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.

Change the temperature of a model, and you will have your randomness.

There is no explanation of how a biological brain can have randomness but a silicon process cannot.
by Jedd | 2025-04-05 04:06:32+00:00
I remember reading in a PJ O'Rourke book about Comparative Advantage - I've found the section, as the 'non-trivial and non-obvious' sleight stuck with me, even decades later:

> Todd G. Buchholz, in his book New Ideas from Dead Economists, says, “An insolent natural scientist once asked a famous economist to name one economic rule that isn’t either obvious or unimportant.” The reply was “Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.” > > The English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823) postulated this: If you can do X better than you can do Z, and there’s a second person who can do Z better than he can do X, but can also do both X and Z better than you can, then an economy should not encourage that second person to do both things. You and he (and society as a whole) will profit more if you each do what you do best.

There follows some droll examples around the implications of this law, comparing John Grisham and Courtney Love's contributions to society, which doubtless helped consolidate the lesson.

Point being - this foundational law would seem to trump any interest in mistakenly attempting to optimise for inputs vs outputs to your nation.

EDIT: From his book 'Eat The Rich: A Treatise on Economics' (1998)
by walterbell | 2025-04-05 04:07:11+00:00
> The entire new tariff scheme is napkin math.

See the 2024 paper (40 pages) by Stephen Miran, current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which has influenced tariff policy, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43589350

https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump...

> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”
by geor9e | 2025-04-05 04:07:28+00:00
I made a little viewer to see the dataset. Spoilers, it shows you the answers. It's mainly to see the mistakes they've fixed on GitHub since it was released, and also to make proposing fixes easier.

https://9eorge.com/arc

Supposedly, they validated it upon release by showing each task to at most nine people and only keeping the ones that at least two people got correct in two tries. But still, they have had to subsequently fix more than a dozen of them.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-05 04:07:50+00:00
i do not know, but they sometimes publish altered photos with digitally added red tint in them.

( websites have to be good from accessibility standpoint to provide good experience for this. i got fed up with every webpage, font looking different. I like internet/www/hyperlink like it was meant to be consumed in early days. website is just api which provides me data and my emacs / webbrowser does styling and everything. like email or rss - decentralized, local first. because there has to be global mechanism to provide styling so there are no transitions from bright white, to dark and vice versa. and this global styling can be achieved only, if in current state of things, webpages are made in a way that screen readers and other similar kind of things have good experience too. even tho i do not have any health issue, need for accessibility features, just need for global consistent styling. )
by password4321 | 2025-04-05 04:08:16+00:00
https://github.com/errantmind/faf is the fastest Rust static "web server" per the most recent TechEmpower Round 23 (Plaintext); it is purposely barebones (provide content via Rust callback!) The top 3 Composite scores are all Rust web frameworks, also not necessarily intended as general-purpose web servers.

https://github.com/static-web-server/static-web-server wins the SEO (and GitHub star) battle, though apparently it is old enough to have a couple unmaintained dependencies.

I use https://github.com/sigoden/dufs as my personal file transfer Swiss Army knife since it natively supports file uploads; I will check out Ferron as a lighter reverse proxy with automatic SSL certs vs. Caddy.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-04-05 04:08:34+00:00
I remember playing Space Quest IV and we got to a part where we were completely blocked. We got parents permission to call Sierra's 1-900 hint line (who knows how much that cost) to find out that the game won't process until you stand on a certain pixel in the back of the arcade. There was no reason to go there, so while we had walked around the arcade many times apparently we never stepped on that precise pixel.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-05 04:11:26+00:00
I've seen that postulate in the very first chapter of wealth of nations. But perhaps Ricardo expressed it in mathematical terms?

And I'd argue that there are properties of nations that make them distinct from individual humans or even companies.

The relative autarky possible for a country is much higher.

I've read a similar position by a libertarian Hayek I think in "I pencil", but I never did buy the argument, the idea that a pencil is the product of global trade, I don't buy, you can make national pencils without a sweat.
by nine_k | 2025-04-05 04:12:10+00:00
> what should be a simple scroll

Because the scroll, as you see, is not simple. The complexity of the real-world scenarios outlined in the post force the complexity of the solution. It may feel that "it's simple common sense" kind of thing, but if you ever tried to implement a simple common-sense thing, you know that it only appear simple.

By the same token, some UX person might read about the mechanics of database transactions with two-phase commits, or about MVCC, and ask why so much complexity exists around what should just be a simple write to disk.

"Reality has a surprising amount of detail."
by walterbell | 2025-04-05 04:12:39+00:00
Nov 2024 analysis, https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/north-america-prepar...

> Some Members of Parliament have also advocated for increasing trade barriers on Chinese imports alongside the United States, which the Canadian government has recently begun doing unilaterally. Suggesting Canada could be interested in coordinating those China-related trade policy measures across all three USMCA members, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland recently said she sympathizes with US concerns that “Mexico is not acting the way that Canada and the US are when it comes to its economic relationship with China.”
by YZF | 2025-04-05 04:13:12+00:00
Every large scale cloud/SaaS software has been using parallelism for decades [well, almost two decades give or take]. Requests run in parallel on millions of servers and one server processes many requests in parallel.

In that sort of setup the old school optimize one program by doing things in parallel is somewhat less relevant because everything by its nature is massively parallel and complex operations are often broken down into bits that all run in parallel. In that sort of environment over-parallelizing can actually be a pessimization because there is often some cost around breaking the work up to run in parallel and your little bit of this massively parallel system may have some fraction of resources anyways.

Not to say there's no value in knowing "old school" parallelizing (including using SIMD or GPUs or whatnot) but for many types of applications that's not where I'd focus.
by almosthere | 2025-04-05 04:13:31+00:00
Knowing nothing about .NET for the past 20 years, I don't know what to make of "IdentityService" that they're talking about.

In the Java ecosystem they had always been about Java interfaces make up a JSR. Then, you can choose the official "Sun" version (or Oracle now of course), but the JSR was also implemented by unlimited OSS ones - from Apache to CodeHaus affiliated forges.

Now also having been out of the Java world for the last 10 years (mostly supplanted by Typescript/Python personally), maybe that's changed.

But all this to say... maybe .NET needs to copy the JSR system of standardizing interfaces and make things more swappable?
by satvikpendem | 2025-04-05 04:13:47+00:00
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.

There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.

> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.

Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-04-05 04:14:43+00:00
Zen is found, Not in a project. But in desire, To quell a need. A need born, From purity of thought. Thought without, Encumbrance. Thought without, Politics. Thought without, Concern of outcome. But in desire, To quell a need. To find Zen, Not from a project. But within oneself.
by safety1st | 2025-04-05 04:15:17+00:00
When people say that China will replace the US as the world's largest buyer of exports, I always wonder what planet they're living on.

China does not WANT to do this. They have tons of protectionism. They give tons of preference to their own firms and protect their domestic market from foreign companies. This enables their firms to grow strong. This is a strategy which has been practiced by many many developing nations. They can't live without it and don't want to.

Why does gmerc think that China is going to rewrite its entire economic policy in order to take "market share?" We usually use that term to mean, you are selling stuff and want to sell to more customers because you make more money. In this context however we are talking about BUYING more stuff - why would it be sane for China to dominate the act of buying everything it can on the planet? (At the inevitable erosion of its manufacturing base - just like what happened to the USA when it opened up its markets.)

I mean you can think whatever you want about Trump and his actions, but it just makes zero sense to think that China will step in and fill the old role of the US here, when doing so is a polar opposite from their current trade strategy and would probably collapse their economy. And that gets to the real elephant in the room, which is that no one wants to do America's "old job" anymore. No one else wants to be the ubiquitous buyer of everything with big trade deficits all over the place, the vast majority of countries on earth defend their domestic markets and preference their local firms more than pre-Trump America did - exactly what are these new alliances that are going to arise, when everyone wants to sell to other countries, and no one wants to buy?

I happen to live in a country whose #1 export market was the USA and is being slapped with some of the largest tariffs. Time will tell of course but at the moment they pretty much just seem to be fucked and all they are saying is they are ready to come to the table and negotiate with the US as soon as possible. There just doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for their exports elsewhere - it's not like every country on earth isn't out there pimping its exports to anyone who will listen, pretty much all the time. If China or the EU had a burning need for a couple hundred billion dollars more of shellfish or textiles or what have you, they'd already be buying it.
by satvikpendem | 2025-04-05 04:15:49+00:00
> No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.

This does not answer the question, this sidesteps the requirements. I can either have no avatar, or I can make one for the marginal cost of zero via an AI. This then belies that the true complaint of people against AI is one of an economic variety, not a technological one, in which case, fix the economics, and support open source AI so that all may have such tech, not just big tech.
by chadbennett | 2025-04-05 04:16:53+00:00
Server specifications:

- Server model: ASUS ESC8000A-E12P - GPUs: 8x NVIDIA RTX 4090 - CPU: 2x AMD EPYC 9254 Processor (24-core, 2.90GHz, 128MB Cache) - RAM: 24x 16GB PC5-38400 4800MHz DDR5 ECC RDIMM (384GB total) - Storage: 1.92TB Micron 7450 PRO Series M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD (110mm) - Operating system: Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS Server Edition (64-bit) - Networking: 2 x 10GbE LAN ports (RJ45, X710-AT2), one utilized at 10Gb - Additional PCIe 5.0 card: ASUS 90SC0M60-M0XBN0
by somenameforme | 2025-04-05 04:17:09+00:00
Why would you or any customer want to receive SMS instead of email when most/all phones, even brick phones now a days, have internet? SMS, to me, feels like a way less secure, less functional, less portable, and more expensive email. It made sense back before basically every plan had a high/no limit internet plan, but now..?

The only real positive, so far as I can see, is the 'instantaneous' send/receive, but again thanks to big plans now a days your email checking every 5 seconds or whatever is basically free, making that benefit more of a technicality than reality.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-05 04:17:23+00:00
This always felt quite subjective to me.

There's also the tautological paradox where price is defined by trade, so the trade balance will always be equal by any measure, if country A exports 1T bushels of wheat and country B exports 1 computer chips, we subjectively know who is winning in the exchange, but it will tally up to equal values in the balance sheet.
by nikodunk | 2025-04-05 04:17:46+00:00
Same here! Been self hosting on hetzner for about a year now, and support the OSS project for $10/month. Love how it can auto-deploy new git commits, deploy Postgres or any database to the same or separate servers, and you can cram as many apps or docker containers onto a single VPS or move them to a separate server when you need to.

Finally, little utilities like snapdrop or mosquitto are a button click away. Strongly recommended - it’s liberating! I don’t need to re-learn every PaaS vendor’s system - my PaaS comes with me. And a junior can be onboarded to this UI way easier than dokku or kamal IMO.
by rbetts | 2025-04-05 04:17:54+00:00
So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-05 04:18:11+00:00
That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.

There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."

They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.

What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.

Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-05 04:19:37+00:00
> Why would I want small businesses to be able to spam me as well the large ones? I’d prefer no one does, but less is better than more.

For the sake of discussion, let's accept that Dumbutt Inc, of Pikesnot MN is sending out actual sms spam.

Instead of ending the wanted SMS comms between millions of customers and the business they depend on,

how about the recipient of a Dumbutt Inc spam just give them a call tell them to knock it off?

I'll do it myself if it means un-crippling wanted SMS comms.