MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FridayoLeary | 2025-04-10 03:27:03+00:00
Agreed. If anything it's an icon of overengineering. The main advantage imo is that you dont need to worry about a kid sticking a fork into the wall socket. I grew up with it so i never really thought it strange that the plugs are 2 or 3 times bigger then necessary. It's an event every time you connect to the National Grid as the plug slots into the wall with a satisfying clunk, so there's that i guess.
by mptest | 2025-04-10 03:27:28+00:00
the answers to that question are hugely variable and depend on the objective and defining waste. if one values learning intrinsically, like most of us here probably do, it is pretty hard to come up with a waste of time, even taking the rare break from learning.

But it seems self-evident where constraints like markets or material conditions might demarcate usefulness and waste.

Even the learners who are as happy to hear about linguistics as they are material science I presume do some opportunity cost analysis as they learn. Personally speaking, I rarely, if ever, feel like I'm wasting time per se but I always recognize and am conscious of the other things I could be doing to better maximize alternative objectives. That omnipresent consciousness may just be anxiety though I guess...
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-10 03:27:58+00:00
God these things are horrible. They're huge, they can't fold away, and they require fuses. And the receptacles all must have switches, and must be exactly the same.

Leave it to the British to shoot themselves in the foot for no reason. Why not Schuko / Europlug? Because we have to have our own standard that's worse, that's why.
by wuming2 | 2025-04-10 03:29:34+00:00
My understanding is EBA’s RT1 is enabled by SEPA Instant CT. Itself an industry lead initiative under ECB oversight. ECB is tiding things up with TIPS by evolving the specifications and also providing the service directly in central bank money. At a much lower price.

TIPS represented more than 50% of all TARGET number of payments at the end of 2024: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/payment_statistics/large_val...

Beyond TARGET, ECB noted repeatedly the reliance on international card schemes for electronic payments and card transactions in the EU. The latest report restating that accounted for approximately 61% of euro area card transactions in 2022: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502...
by gus_massa | 2025-04-10 03:30:01+00:00
You mae a clone, you didn't open source it. My suggestion is to post this again in a few days with a title like:

Show HN: Open souce alternative to SpurTest

or just drop the comparison, because SpurTest is not so famous

Show HN: Neutrino Test is an AI-powered QA platform that automates end-to-end testing

Also, the repo has no license, so it's not "open source". Choose a licence carefully.
by varelaseb | 2025-04-10 03:30:13+00:00
It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon. My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.
by varelaseb | 2025-04-10 03:30:28+00:00
It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.
by varelaseb | 2025-04-10 03:31:11+00:00
It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.
by hattmall | 2025-04-10 03:31:52+00:00
Because $25 per "pair" of shoes is absurd. That's Nike "juking" the stats to make it look like they pay far more than they do per pair of shoes. For one thing, as a consumer you can buy individually shoes that are at least as good of quality as any Nike Shoe for anywhere from $8-$12 delivered. So the idea that Nike, in bulk, is running factories that are known to be questionable and paying $25 per shoe is "pure fantasy". Just based on known labor rates and material costs it's safe to say $4 on the high end if you factor in a bunch of operational and brand based overhead.
by ta8645 | 2025-04-10 03:32:08+00:00
It sounds like you're advocating for a centrally planned market that allocates resources according to a grand, rational vision. A free market will by definition be messy, sometimes inefficient, adhoc, and defy any notion of a grand vision. You have to trust the free market to produce the best results in the long run, and to be the most responsive to change (opportunity).
by dangus | 2025-04-10 03:32:24+00:00
The funny thing about this is how it's one of the most boomer conservative hot issues about what is wrong with the world today.

Trump is truly the ultimate populist in all the low-education kinds of ways. It's exactly why he's trying to dismantle higher education, because morons worried about their shower pressure will let you dismantle Medicare and crash their 401k as long as you can bring back plastic straws and disposable shopping bags.

Of course if you tell a conservative that disposable products didn't use to exist and that great marketing efforts had to be undertaken to convince people to throw away perfectly good items in order to ensure that plastic industry profits didn't dry up, that would just be "woke." I guess eggs cost too much but the water/sewer bill is fair game.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-10 03:32:25+00:00
Why would they take a percentage of your salary? You're the recruit. They're providing the business a service (good recruits who can fill a position), so they charge the business. You're providing the recruiter a service (being that good recruit), so they pay you in the form of a signing bonus. Additionally, since the employer pays the recruiter a percentage of one year's salary, the recruiter is incentivized to make that salary as high as possible, so they'll negotiate on your behalf in that regard.
by tedsanders | 2025-04-10 03:32:41+00:00
From a primary source:

"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."

https://x.com/__nmca__/status/1882563755806281986
by varelaseb | 2025-04-10 03:32:54+00:00
It's not so much about what you _can do_ but about the messaging and posturing, which is what drives the adoption of standards as a social phenomenon.

My team's been working on implementing MCP-agents and agents-as-tools and we consistently saw confusion from everyone we were selling this into (who were already bought in to hosting an MCP server for their API or SDK) for their agents because "that's not what it's for".

Kinda weird, but kinda simple.
by gbraad | 2025-04-10 03:33:28+00:00
If only the Europlug or Type F had a fuse they would obsolete this terrible plug; worse to step on than a Lego brick ;-) (sarcasm; I prefer the euro style over these bulky ones. Fuses should not have to be necessary. The us/china blade plugs are terrible; easy to fall out of a socket)
by gradientsrneat | 2025-04-10 03:34:10+00:00
I despise Facebook for many reasons, privacy being a major factor. On the other hand, both Trump and Musk own competing social media companies, and the CEOs of other social media companies have attempted to curry their favor. So, there is a potential for conflict of interest here, which could lead to a misproportion of due process. Or, regardless of truthfulness, some form of leverage. Or the trial is just for show. Maybe the accusations are true, but there's a reason this person is coming forward now.
by Sanzig | 2025-04-10 03:35:13+00:00
As a North American, I'm very jealous of the BS1363. I know some people don't like the mandatory ground pin, but it actually serves a really handy purpose. Because the shutter is engaged by the slightly longer ground pin, the shutter just works with minimal resistance.

In the US and Canada, the electrical codes now require tamper resistant receptacles in most residential settings, to stop children from poking metal objects into them. Because the ground pin is optional on plugs that connect to the standard NEMA 5-15R receptacle, you can't use the ground pin as a keying feature like you can with the BS1363. Instead, there is a mechanism that is supposed to only allow a plug to be inserted when both hot and neutral pins are present. It is probably the worst thing ever designed. Sometimes it works fine, a bit of extra pressure and the plug goes right in. But most of the time, it stubbornly binds up and you're left trying to fiddle with the plug to find the perfect combination of pressure and angle that allows the shutter to open. It can be horrendously frustrating.
by sien | 2025-04-10 03:36:05+00:00
Fusion would be something totally new.

The other thing to look at is the number of high impact papers in Materials Science, Chemistry, Engineering, Comp Sci and Physics and look at where they are being written. Check the image from The Economist in the article below :

https://asiatimes.com/2025/03/behold-chinas-innovative-golde...

It's great for the world that China now has hundreds of millions of people who are able to have much better lives and tens of millions who are making great contributions to the world.

China has done what the US did in copying Europe 150 years ago. The US copied Europe and then went further. China is now doing that.

If fusion is successfully done in China rather than the US it will still be great for people in the US. The US can copy it.

The only thing is that the US's dominance is ending.
by tasn | 2025-04-10 03:37:10+00:00
TR: I know why they did it, but I'm not a fan of the tradeoff. I don't think making all the sockets worse is the solution, people with kids can just baby proof their place (I have a toddler, and we baby proofed our house).

Fuse: I'm not familiar with ring circuits and everything you mentioned, though I was aware it's for fires. Other places (and the UK as well in most apartments I had) have centralized fuse boxes. Is this still needed?

Either way, these are reasons for why things were done the way they were done, but reasons aside, the usability is inferior.
by umanwizard | 2025-04-10 03:37:25+00:00
Is there a serious steelman argument for why it makes sense to reflexively call protests against Israel anti-Semitic? The Jews are a globally distributed (and somewhat loosely defined) cultural group, whereas Israel is a specific concrete geopolitical entity. They are just completely categorically different things. Even if you have insane pro-terrorist views and want to wipe Israel off the map (which, to be clear, I don’t support), it’s not necessarily the case that your reason for holding those beliefs is antipathy to the Jewish culture, religion or ethnicity. Indeed that might be why you hold those beliefs, but as far as I can tell it’s not logically required.
by jwilber | 2025-04-10 03:38:44+00:00
"Observable is obnoxious if you want to add a D3 pie chart to your Vue application and have to untangle calls to D3’s API from reactive cell values, which look like ordinary JavaScript, but are not, and will cause compilation and runtime errors when copied."

Yep - as I wrote: "If you want to just blindly copy and paste d3 code, you may have issues with the docs being hosted on observable."

If instead you learn the core api (selections, bindings, and update patterns), any chart is really just a matter of using the correct layout/generator.

Here's d3 pie: https://d3js.org/d3-shape/pie

No need for going into Observable at all, as the pie generator is completely documented.

But if, as you mentioned, you prefer to copy the code from Observable, the linked pie example is extremely simple to do so: https://observablehq.com/@d3/donut-chart/2

Zero reactive cells, you can literally just copy the code inside the cell statement (e.g. the curly braces).
by marenkay | 2025-04-10 03:39:08+00:00
Not really. The opposite. The current market is centralized a lot more than people want to see or admit. I had trust in the free market for a long time but it has not really materialized the best results. As can be seen by the current state of affairs. Everyone fighting over who gets to have money and production is not freedom, it's a war without guns.

Just to make this clear, a truly free market would be desirable but I don't see it materialize on this world.
by comrade1234 | 2025-04-10 03:39:29+00:00
I had a client fall behind on my consulting work by about $75K for a software product I was writing for them. I negotiated a revenue sharing agreement of 10% and we would call things even while I finished the application. I finished and was paid about $2M over ten years, with almost no work done for those years.

Then before Covid they needed more work done (customers and revenue were dropping because no updates to the application) so I negotiated part ownership of the company and have been working full-time on it since to try to increase revenue.

So yes, no pay, no work. But pay doesn’t have to be a paycheck. That said, I could be getting paid more right now if I was working in a more traditional role in a more traditional and larger company.
by dangus | 2025-04-10 03:40:01+00:00
This article unnecessarily frames this phenomenon negatively.

Democrats desperately need to shuffle out leadership and replace them with fresh strong leaders who can combat MAGA and offer solutions that aren't status quo.

"The middle" is just shorthand for "status quo," and it has been quite clear since at least 2016 that nobody on either side of the aisle is happy with the status quo.

It's so odd that the article seems to imply or indirectly frame retiring at a normal age as something that is unfortunate or a little sad.

We desperately need more 30-40-somethings in Congress who understand how the modern world works. The 60+ year olds with few exceptions understand the world they find themselves governing in, with social media, AI, and other features of modern life making our lives look unrecognizable compared to just 10 or 20 years ago.
by holden_nelson | 2025-04-10 03:41:23+00:00
When in human history has a reasonably educated person been able to do that calculation rapidly without a calculator (or tool to aid them)? I think it's reasonable to draw a distinction between "basic arithmetic" and "calculations of arbitrary difficulty". I can do the first and not the second, and I think that's still been useful for me.

I do agree that it's a fair point to ponder. It does seem like people draw fairly arbitrary lines in the sand around what skills are "essential" or not. Though I can't even entertain the notion that I shouldn't be concerned about my child's ability to spell.

Seems to me that these gains in technology have always come at a cost, and so far the cost has been worth it for the most part. I don't think it's obviously true that LLMs will be (or won't be) "worth it" in the same way. And anyways the tech is not nearly mature enough yet for me to be comfortable relying on it long term.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-10 03:41:55+00:00
The UK ain't alone in that either. California's agricultural sector is one of the largest in the world (let alone in the US) in terms of revenue and output, in many cases providing most/all of national and even global supplies of various fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Virtually all American almonds and broccoli, 90% or more of American dates and avocados, top producer of peaches and dairy products, the list goes on.

And yet, California's entire agricultural sector only totals to $50 billion in annual revenue. There are multiple tech and entertainment companies in California that individually surpass that, in some cases (like Apple and Amazon) by an order of magnitude.
by jcalx | 2025-04-10 03:42:42+00:00
It's not explicitly mentioned in the article, but the arrival rate and queue sizes are related via Little's Law [0] — the average number of people in a system is equal to the arrival rate multiplied by the mean wait time, regardless of the arrival distribution, service distribution, or service order (e.g. FIFO, LIFO, random).

I was fortunate enough to take some great queueing theory classes in college, and fondly remember flailing about in Simio [1] trying to get a bank teller simulation to work. Really useful stuff to learn, although it did make me incredibly susceptible to Factorio and similar games.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCzAhKtucck
by jmcintire1 | 2025-04-10 03:43:06+00:00
fair point. offline+local would be ideal, but as it stands we can't run asr and an llm locally at the speed that is required to provide the level of service we want to.

given that we need the cloud, we offer zero data retention -- you can see this in the app. your concern is as much about ux and communications as it is privacy
by hattmall | 2025-04-10 03:43:28+00:00
It's more of a work backwards thing. The price is set by demand, what the market will bear, etc. Then for well established supply chain / commodity goods overhead tends to rise to meet COGS. The reason is that there exists profit taking at every level of "overhead" but when the cost of revenue exceeds the cost of goods it becomes a marker of inefficiency. In the same way when manufacturers recognize that their cost are less than the retailers overhead to generate sales they see room to raise costs so markets trend to 50/50.

But consider Footlocker sells a lot of other shoes for much less than Nikes. Those shoes don't cost any less to manufacturer and depending on the brand are just as well established so the 50/50 ratio still applies. It's just that at each level the overhead adjusts to meet the ratio over time.

For fringe brands the retailers markup can be huge 10x or more.
by ronnieboy493 | 2025-04-10 03:44:35+00:00
The same company Applause recently bought out Strongbox [0], which has been discussed a few times on HN a few times[1]. They have a pretty reliable history of destroy applications / extracting maximum value.

[0] https://strongboxsafe.com

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=strongbox+site%3Anews.ycombinator....
by perihelions | 2025-04-10 03:47:40+00:00
I can't believe it's coincidence and accident that this Administration is assaulting medical research simultaneously on multiple fronts: here, with these attacks on universities, that seem to primarily target NIH research at America's most prestigious schools; the DOGE attacks, which are preferentially deleting medical workers, multiple entire offices at the FDA and the CDC; and that decision to elevate an HIV/AIDS denier to the office of HHS secretary.

I don't know what the intention is behind this systematic assault on medicine. It's incomprehensible.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-10 03:47:42+00:00
I don't mind the China tariffs. They have been abusing US interests for years and scoffed at promises they made when they entered into WTO and any IP is fair game for their corporate spies, and US companies would be laughed at to try and litigate any of it inside their borders. Something does need to happen with China, but the vast majority of Trump's tariffs were indeed as if he is stupid as a sack of rocks.
by motorest | 2025-04-10 03:48:37+00:00
> That doesn't pass muster. If they had much interest in balancing the books, they wouldn't be ripping huge holes in revenue collection.

It's not about balancing the books. It's about not making a problem far worse.

You remember the global financial crisis of 2008? The reason most of the bailed out countries requested bailouts was their bonds spiraling out of control when they had to refinance their debt. That was the primary reason they reached out to the likes of IMF and had to undergo austerity programs.

The Trump administration put the US on that path with their global tarrifs and provoking their main trading partners, specially China.
by protocolture | 2025-04-10 03:48:53+00:00
I did door to door sales for a while and came to a similar place.

It wasn't that I was expecting to make a wage on a commission job, its that during the training portion I was expected to comp my sales back to the company and then on top of that, my trainer put his name down on my sales anyway.

Ultimately I learned that they handed new people territory that had been walked twice already in the previous 2 months.

The whole hierarchy of the business was designed to suck value out of new starters, and the winning move was to just drop it and leave.
by intrasight | 2025-04-10 03:48:59+00:00
The antiviral valacyclovir was discussed in an article in The Economist recently. Is used to treat herpes simplex or herpes zoster (shingles). What the Economist article discussed is that the drug seems to reduce the severity and onset of dementia. The drug's patent expired long ago.

I'll be seeing my doc soon and will be requesting to begin treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valaciclovir

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7045215/
by dang | 2025-04-10 03:50:49+00:00
> Seems like an odd choice to move some but not all comments between posts like this

The idea is to move good, substantive comments that have something to contribute to the new thread, and to leave the ones that don't fit that description and are bound by the context of the previous article.

I'm not saying I made all the calls perfectly about which ones to move and which ones to leave, but that's the idea at least! If there are cases I missed, I'd be happy to take a look.

> Especially when the only ones moved seem to be conservative talking points.

You can't jump to conclusions like that from such a paltry handful of datapoints. I say "you can't", but of course you can, because everyone does! But it's not reliable to do so:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> This one even discusses a title that doesn’t exist on this article?

Yes, that's why I replied—to make the context switch explicit because otherwise the comment wouldn't make sense.
by ropable | 2025-04-10 03:51:19+00:00
As an outside observer, the difference between the current US administration and the CCP is becoming smaller every day. What's the point of having actual domain expertise when the primary selection criteria is partisan support of the current party in power? It's policital appointees throughout the apparatus of government, top to bottom. The USA is surrendering any pretense of higher moral superiority at a frightening rate.
by ajross | 2025-04-10 03:51:25+00:00
They view it as an assault on Universities, not "science". The thinking goes (you see this kind of rhetoric right here on HN) that The Radical Left has infested education in the United States and polluted the thinking of a generation of future leaders. "Woke Mind Virus", etc...

So to stamp that out, you need to get the kids to stop with the bad thinking. But you can't actually do that as the government because of the whole "shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech" thing.

So instead you hit their school instead. Make it so Columbia (in this case) knows that their funding depends on the grace of the government, and that if they want it back they need to start expelling or otherwise controlling the spreaders of the woke virus.