MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _carbyau_ | 2025-04-10 01:32:21+00:00
>>>For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc

Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography. <<<

For me it is the second order benefits, notably the idea of "attention to detail" and "a feel for the principles". The principles of each activity being different: writing -> fine motor control, spelling -> word choice/connotation, map -> sense of direction, (my own insert here) money handling -> cost of things

All of them involve "attention to detail" because that's what any activity is - paying attention to it.

But having built up the experience in paying attention to [xyz], you can now be capable when things go wrong.

IE catch disputable transaction on the credit card, or note being told by the shop clerk "No Returns" when their policy says otherwise, un-losting yourself when the phone runs out of battery in the city.

Notably, you don't have to be trained for the details in traditional ways like writing the same sentence 100 times on a piece of paper. Learning can be fun and interesting.

Children can write letters to their friends well before they get their own phone. Geocaching/treasure hunts(hand drawn mud maps!)/orienteering for map use.

As for LLM ... well currently "attention to detail" is vital to spot the (handwave number) 10% of when it goes wrong. In the future LLMs may be better.

But if you want to be better than your peers at any given thing - you will need an edge somewhere outside of using an LLM. Yet still, spelling/word choice/connotations are especially linked to using an LLM currently.

Knowing how to "pay attention to detail" when it counts - counts.
by alganet | 2025-04-10 01:33:10+00:00
It is very likely that some kind of AI similar to the current batch of LLMs was already deployed and working before any of the commercial players published their public versions. We just didn't knew about it. You probably talked to one without realizing. I must have done it several times myself.

So, what changed? Really? (rethorical).

You're proposing an HTTPS padlock sign. "This conversation is human" is the new "This connection is secure". Can't do that, it doesn't work. You should know these marks and verified labels are useless by now.

We need to get better than AI can possibly be. It's a mathematical machine turk, we should be able to overcome it (at least in energy efficiency). Smarter, kinder humans are what we need.
by acdha | 2025-04-10 01:34:49+00:00
There isn’t a serious plan to bring manufacturing back. You can debate whether there is a plan for high-pressure negotiations, insider trading or kickbacks (e.g. Nvidia’s successful deployment of a million dollar dinner at Mar-a-Lago), etc. but you can tell that it’s not a good-faith attempt to invest in American industry because that would start with the two things you mentioned: you’d see the investment in those industries now and a commitment to raising taxes on foreign competition in 2030 or so when people have had time to actually be able to meet demand.

What we’re seeing now makes as much sense as a middle-aged laptop jockey deciding that they want to be in better shape – and then quitting their job to run in the Badwater Ultramarathon the next week.
by giuseppe_petri | 2025-04-10 01:35:27+00:00
€1200 per month is around £1000, there are 43.1m working age people in the UK, that's £517.2 BILLION per year.

The NHS costs £181.7b per year and climbing & we struggle to afford that.

HMRC collected £828.9 billion in taxes in 2023 to 2024

UBI would cost 2.8 NHSs per year and 62% of all the tax revenue.

"Tax the rich!" You're probably thinking... "The combined wealth of the 350 wealthiest individuals and families in the [Sunday Times Rich] list totals £965 billion," even if you took every penny real and imagined from the rich, you'd only manage it once and get not even two years of UBI from it.

UBI isn't going to happen.
by newtonsmethod | 2025-04-10 01:35:31+00:00
The issue is that putting fluoride in the water isn't really "treating" the water. It's in essence acting a medication (see my paragraph below for a justification of this), to the benefit of people's teeth. As far as I know, every other chemical added / removed from the water is done for the purpose of the taste of the water, protecting the pipes which serve the water, or disinfecting the water. In this way, it's different from all the other chemicals, and there is also some limited opposition to other chemicals (e.g. debate on the use of UV / chlorine / ozone).

As for a loose argument for why fluoride in water is medicinal: the FDA classifies toothpaste as a cosmetic and also potentially a drug (depending on whether it contains fluoride and the claims the product makes):

> Ingredients that cause a product to be considered a drug because they have a well-known (to the public and industry) therapeutic use. An example is fluoride in toothpaste.

> Some products meet the definitions of both cosmetics and drugs. [...] Among other cosmetic/drug combinations are toothpastes with claims to freshen breath and cleanse the teeth that contain fluoride. [Both quotes are from https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetics-laws-regulations/it-...]
by const_cast | 2025-04-10 01:36:18+00:00
Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is right. And every other console company has been charging for it, too. For longer, at a higher price.

There's this recurring theme I'm seeing where when Nintendo does something price-wise people act like it's the end of the world. And, almost every time, the other big dogs have already done it, and typically worse.

The reality is 80 dollars is about expected for a flagship game. 450 dollars is the cheapest console around. And, NSO is the cheapest subscription. I think people percieve Nintendo as making kiddy games so they expect kiddy prices. The problem is, that doesn't mean the games are cheap to produce.
by Retric | 2025-04-10 01:36:20+00:00
You’re not going to see it used in such terms because of how economics defines trade. However you will see examples that make it clear currency is a commodity subject to supply and demand when you look into exchange rates. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041515/how-does-bal...

Trade networks allow for stable equilibriums with no individual country having equal trade with any other county. To simplify, A on net sends money to B, and B buys stuff from C with A’s currency, C then buys stuff from A in A’s currency returning that money to A. However, people want to operate in their native currency and there are a lot more than 3 countries in the real world so you end with intermediary currency exchanges changes going on. In theory supply and demand steps in to balance things, in practice cash flows rarely actually sum to 0.
by egonschiele | 2025-04-10 01:36:30+00:00
Hey! I love parser combinators and wish they were more mainstream. That's why I wrote Tarsec, which is Parsec for TypeScript: https://github.com/egonSchiele/tarsec

I have a short and a long intro, both illustrated: https://github.com/egonSchiele/tarsec/blob/main/tutorials/5-... and https://github.com/egonSchiele/tarsec/blob/main/tutorials/th...

It also has a neat debug mode, and a way to benchmark performance. I've loved using it, hopefully someone reading will use it too! Use this as a chance to learn something cool (parser combinators)!
by cool_finds2007 | 2025-04-10 01:37:01+00:00
Did some more experimentation with local LLMs. This time looking at how to integrate MCP servers.

As a fun experiment I tried to use tool calling to implement a simple POC of a basic GraphQL-esque response from a series of tool calls inferred from the prompt.

My takeaway is that tool calling works reasonably well, even in small LLMs (7-8B).

Article: https://www.teachmecoolstuff.com/viewarticle/using-mcp-serve...
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-04-10 01:38:05+00:00
HSV-targeting antivirals like acyclovir lower the chances of transmission when taken regularly by an infected individual. They do nothing if taken by those not carrying the virus. Keeping them on hand accomplishes nothing.

From the page you link:

> If you have genital herpes, you will probably be somewhat less likely to infect your partner if you use antiviral medication for prevention. The medications used for this purpose include acyclovir, famciclovir and valaciclovir. They must be taken every day over a long period of time, though. Using them as a creme or ointment is not suitable.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-04-10 01:38:20+00:00
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc

However, I am going to hazard a guess that you still care about your child's ability to do arithmetic, even though calculators make that trivial.

And if I'm right, I think it's for a good reason—learning to perform more basic math operations helps build the foundation for more advanced math, the type which computers can't do trivially.

I think this applies to AI. The AI can do the basic writing for you, but you will eventually hit a wall, and if all you've ever learned is how to type a prompt into ChatGPT, you won't ever get past that wall.

----

Put another way:

> So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me"

"Because eventually, you will be able to do X better than any LLM, but it will take practice, and you have to practice now."
by osigurdson | 2025-04-10 01:38:37+00:00
>> Uh I work for an enterprise of tens of thousands of users and $18 a month is not nothing for us. In fact considering the discounts we get at our size that would be so high we'd never consider it.

This doesn't make sense to me. It shouldn't matter if you are a small company or a large one, a few bucks per person per month is noise. I get trying to leverage scale to get a better price, but if something saves time / money, a company shouldn't refuse it just because they are large. Whoever is gatekeeping these decisions is ultimately eroding the company's value.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-04-10 01:40:53+00:00
> As it turns out, a UI toolkit is, at least conceptually, not very complicated.

Hee hee

Interesting read but as a seasoned Blub programmer I probably won't be binding my non-LISP code to Barium any time soon. This does give me ideas for *my* eventual GUI framework ofc
by setheron | 2025-04-10 01:42:03+00:00
What a fun read. Thanks for the nice call out on my blog.

If you're also interested I (Farid) also had a follow up where I follow up on how the hashes are calculated. (Using the error to get the hashes also bugged me)

I use it to also create vanity hashes :)

https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/28/what-s-in-a-nix-store-path

https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/27/nix-vanity-store-paths
by ajross | 2025-04-10 01:42:11+00:00
This is all correct, but it's a first principles explanation that doesn't explain why US bonds, and in particular the 10-year note, spiked today. Yes, eventually excessive tariffs would have that result. They literally hadn't even taken effect yet. So this doesn't explain the bond motion today.

Someone was dumping, we don't know who or why. But the answer to that question is a lot (a lot) more important than people realize, and certainly more so than the immediate market motion or tariff policy.

Honestly if the answer was "The PRC was unloading bonds to send a message" that's sort of the best option, as they have limited wiggle room to continue to do so without wrecking their own financial situation.

If it's "The market as a whole lost confidence in US debt", then we're fucked no matter what Trump does next.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-10 01:42:36+00:00
The problem always was that the improvements worsened other cases.

Mixture of experts tends to lock models up. Chain of thought tends to turn the models loopy. As in circling the drain even when asked not to. Tree of thought has a tendency to make the models unstable by flipping between the branches, and otherwise unpredictable complicating training ...
Ask HN: Has anyone quit a job after the first week? Feeling like a total failure
by drowningbad | 2025-04-10 01:42:40+00:00
I recently joined a later stage company amidst a major shakeup as the only IC PM. I have had no ramp up time. Now 1 week in I’m being blamed for not adequately taking ownership of my new role, not being assertive enough with key stakeholders and lacking the political savvy to drive product. It feels like I was hired to be scapegoated.

I have never felt like such a failure. I hardly sleep. I have no time to think before I’m bombarded with another litany of demands and questions over why something hasn’t been finished.

I have over 5 years of experience and it has never been this stressful and demeaning.
by Avshalom | 2025-04-10 01:42:47+00:00
>Prosecutors shall prioritize cases that hold accountable individuals who (a) cause financial harm to digital asset investors and consumers

Technically FTX/Alameda was able to repay investors and consumers so did SBF cause financial harm?

He definitely did fraud (a crime), but did he cause financial harm?

Similarly does Money Laundering (a crime) cause financial harm?
by malux85 | 2025-04-10 01:45:27+00:00
> Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me

The same way you answer - "Why should I memorise this if I can always just look it up"

Because your perceptual experience is built upon your knowledge and experiences. The entire way you see the universe is altered based on these things, including what you see through your eyes, what you decide is important and what you decide to do.

The goal of life is not always "simply to do as little as possible", or "offload as much work as possible" but lots of the time includes struggling through the fundimentals so that you become a greater version of yourself, it is not the complete task that we desire, it is who you became while you did the work that we desire.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-10 01:45:38+00:00
I genuinely think it's rational.

Not clever, or justified, or well though out, or based on any solid evidence. But there's probably a rationale behind it.

Now, ideally, we shouldn't have to care what the rationale was if there was any way of just getting back to "normal", but the same way Mao wasn't a flash in the pan, I assume we're looking at a few decades of it for the US as well.
by autoexec | 2025-04-10 01:46:09+00:00
When the economy slows down companies start getting rid of workers regardless of any technology. It's one of the first levers they pull.

Some companies looking to get rid of even more workers might search for new technologies that they hadn't considered before but which could enable them fire more people, or they might accelerate existing plans to replace workers with technology to get rid of them even sooner.

AI is different though because companies are fully aware of it and they are already moving as fast as they can. They have been salivating at the thought of using AI to fire their workers for years now and they're already making every effort to replace workers anywhere it seems feasible to do so. They are in such a hurry that it sometimes results in embarrassing failures like this one: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/airline-ai-chatbots-refund/

Like you say, the world is messy, which means there is no rule saying that companies must leave massive piles of cash sitting on the table until the economy gets bad enough for them to reach out and take it. Shareholders won't accept that. Any company that sleeps on firing their workers when AI can do the job will get absolutely crushed by their competitors who don't sit on their hands.
by salawat | 2025-04-10 01:46:14+00:00
Going on the record that I agree everything AI originated should be marked as such and carry strict liability for the generator to disincent careless, untested implementations.

AI is crack cocaine for capitalists. It has all the trappings of salaryless, ownable labor, and we should stop acting like it's entire purpose isn't to become just that.

The hallmark of a competent practitioner of an art is to recognize when one is potentially doing harm. Technologists over the last 10 years have eschewed this responsibility to society over the last decade or so, and we really need to rein in the excesses we're equipping the market with to the detriment of society.
by brich4419 | 2025-04-10 01:47:25+00:00
looking for some people to beta-test so I can kill this idea...

idea is it auto-populates all ur contacts from all sources (iMessage, Gmail, Outlook, etc). Right now, we are only dealing with gmail and outlook. But it's sorta fun; it finds everyone you know and generates a profile for them.

Let me know if it sucks (cuz again.. trying to kill it).

Thanks!
by Suppafly | 2025-04-10 01:47:27+00:00
We have two second hand bookstores in my area. One of them has changed hands a couple of times over the years, so I don't think they make a ton of money, although they are in a large, albeit older, retail space so they must do ok. The other keeps expanding in adjacent spaces, but seems to make a lot of their money selling book adjacent stuff (socks, bookmarks, pins, candles) instead of actual books. In fact the owner regularly stocks several of those free libraries around town and always has free books outside of her store.
by stubish | 2025-04-10 01:48:15+00:00
You can only sell medication after trials. The first trials were on young women, and later trials on other groups. Nobody wanted to pay for trials on all demographics before there was evidence it worked from cheaper, more focused trial. There are also barriers to doing trials on high risk groups like the elderly without first testing on lower risk demographics.

This is one reason why so much medication not to be used by pregnant women. The trials have not been done, and trials involving pregnant women are particularly expensive and risky.
by thayne | 2025-04-10 01:48:18+00:00
> It's called Content Security Policy, not Content Performance Policy

As is often the case with security, the downsides of locking something down may not be worth the increased security .

Another reason not to prohibit inline scripts and stylesheets is if you need to dynamically generate them (although I think strict-dynamic would allow that).

> External resources can be cached across multiple pageloads.

That only matters if the resource is actually shared across multiple pages
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-10 01:48:29+00:00
When everyone feels this way instead of fighting for the future they want to make reality... There are journalists, protestors, entrepreneurs, unionists, billionaires, etc, all fighting for what those history books will say. Ukrainians are fighting for what they will say right now.

I think a better question is what do you want them to say. Do you want them to say tyranny triumphed un-resisted?
by rayiner | 2025-04-10 01:48:45+00:00
A lot of our “value chain” is bullshit. If and when China becomes twice as big an economy as the US, much of our “edge” in marketing, finance, and services isn’t going to mean squat. E.g. how much “GDP” will evaporate overnight when American universities no longer have the cachet that comes along with being the best universities in America?
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-10 01:51:39+00:00
The problem is convincing the public to do this. That's going to be an uphill struggle considering the inconveniences of wiping and restoring a phone. The chilling effects these kinds of policies have on people is another major factor.

The alarming thing is, we all do have something to hide now, unless you're full MAGA. When anything vaguely critical of the current administration can be used as grounds for detention without due process, every bit of information on our phones becomes "sensitive."
by kazinator | 2025-04-10 01:51:43+00:00
> It uses the pcre-heavy Haskell library which in turn calls out to the system-wide pcre C library for actually compiling and running the regex.

That's not true regular expressions, but a backtracker with eclectic features.

The regex used in the regex solution is just:

mul\((\d+),(\d+)\)

not requiring PCRE.

If Haskell happens to provide bindings to the POSIX regcomp/regexec stuff, that would be something to try instead. \d has to be replaced with [0-9], needless to say.
by echelon | 2025-04-10 01:52:24+00:00
They're trying to get in on the AI IDE / AI coding land rush so they don't have to acquire one of the leaders later. Or get blocked from acquiring one for antitrust reasons. Winning a chunk of this space feels like a major chess move that enables a lot of market optionality.

Google and Microsoft both have web IDEs, so it's a natural product evolution for these (though Microsoft's Github is much better positioned with its deep distribution and integrations).

It still feels like these are so far behind Cursor and Zed and the like in terms of getting real work done, but maybe the customer is new or non-engineers.

I haven't looked at startups like Replit. Are they even in this game?

And then there are the end-to-end products like Vercel's V0, Lovable, Bolt, etc. If they can get past the 80% problem, they might be a huge deal.

This is going to be quite the battle.
by qiqitori | 2025-04-10 01:53:02+00:00
There was nothing to do back then. And if there was, it was crazy and/or reserved for the feudal lords. The primary income of the state was through alcohol taxes. Countries thought it was okay to invade other countries just to make themselves bigger/stronger countries. Nationalism, racism, sexism were the norm. Most people can't read/write. Information is scant and passed on by word of mouth.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-10 01:53:43+00:00
Granting the Trump administration “extraordinary relief” to continue deporting people is absolutely a decision. You can say “we didn’t rule on that issue” a hundred times in a row if it makes you feel better, but if you go out of your way to make sure the government can continue to exercise power under an absurd legal justification, you’re making a very explicit choice.

It’s this kind of legal storytelling, by which you pretend you didn’t authorize something, while actually taking actions that ensure it’s authorized in practice, that is the worst enemy of the rule of law.
by alxlu | 2025-04-10 01:54:36+00:00
I’ve been using this for a while now and I really enjoy it. I ran into a semi-obscure bug and emailed them and they basically fixed it the same day.

I do wish there was a mobile app though (or maybe an iOS keyboard). It would also be nice to be able to have a separate hotkey you can set up to send the output to a specific app (instead of just the active one).
by m-ee | 2025-04-10 01:56:37+00:00
She wrote a whole book about it, and yes that’s more or less her claim. Her telling is that she tried to avoid touching China policy as long as possible until she was forced into it, largely as retaliation for reporting sexual harassment from Joel Kaplan. Kaplan and Zuckerberg were directing most of the China policy personally so she had little to no ability to overrule them.

The audiobook is free if you have Spotify premium.
by simondotau | 2025-04-10 01:56:43+00:00
Seriously yes. I don’t want to own rapidly depreciating hardware if I don’t have to.

I don’t want to own open source software and I’d prefer if culture was derived from and contributed to the public domain.

I’m still fully on board with capitalism, but there are many instances where I’d prefer to replace physical acquisition with renting, or replacing corporate-made culture with public culture.