MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freeone3000 | 2025-04-09 13:36:16+00:00
For perishable goods, you cannot make up for loss of profit by increasing prices: storing goods has a cost, disposing of goods has a cost, and you have a window of a few months (a year at the outside for coffee) where these goods are viable. After that, your 100 tons of coffee is 100 tons of compost. You cannot produce “less coffee”: it’s already planted, and in some cases, harvested! You get what you get! So the rational act here is to have whatever customers you have left “dispose of” more of it for you: by lowering the price.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-09 13:37:03+00:00
I really wish that Apple would just pony up cash to developers to get their wares ported to the new Apple Silicon chips.

I can play Fallout 3 and New Vegas on my M2 Pro MBP. I know that makes me a stereotypical Millennial, that I'm playing that and not the Fortmonth or whatever the kids are playing, but to me, the ability to do that really does cement that machine as the do-it-all machine. I can set up my workstation portably by having my MBP and my second screen on my iPad 10", do Python backend development easily, then kick back with Fallout at the end of the day. All with great battery life and cool running temps.

I'd love to have that capability formalized.
Ask HN: Are you interested in a text only browser that runs JavaScript?
by keepamovin | 2025-04-09 13:37:29+00:00
There’s much prior art (good overview here: https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/#neighbors), but I’m doing something different that wants to exist.

Curious as to response. Probably a few weeks off release yet but here’s a brief screencap: https://youtu.be/_Bs7BoQBoBA (Or if you prefer an asciinema: https://asciinema.org/a/9w6CMnaI9VxiykI1PgVWm4lsi )

Thoughts?

The context is it’s meant for constrained environments (ultra thin client, engine runs remotely or on same machine if you like; security constraints? Bandwidth constraints? Resource constraints? Content constraints?).

Personally, this is a project close to my heart because my first interactions with computers, and even the Internet was textbased back in the days of dialup and BBS systems. But for another reason in the modern era, I often have the feeling I just wanna get away from all the bullshit all the colors and images begging for my attention. I just want a quiet web that works. But I don’t like an extension knowing everything, and content scripts are fragile. For me, the medium of the terminal is actually a different message and distinct experience that I find valuable. And I think the Internet wants to see itself that way too.

So I’m building this whatever the response here. I also think maybe I can make a trendy thing as OCR is still a major problem and if AI’s can have a text based way to drive web content, maybe they’d like that. Not my main bag though, but I need to consider cash.

I have some other fun ideas for this too, that’s a real nod to the past; a more civilized age.
by croon | 2025-04-09 13:37:38+00:00
[citation needed]

Every successful tariff that I've read about through history has been:

1) Targeted on a segment.

2) Accompanied by subsidies.

3) A plan for developing competence in the segment through education and training.

Sounds a lot more like the half measure than whatever this is.

You're right in that this is a big hammer though, but that's more often used for tearing things down rather than building.
by Clubber | 2025-04-09 13:38:51+00:00
>The second thing we see is that Asian manufacturing in Asia produces US jobs. You go to Footlocker to buy a pair of $100 shoes because you can afford them. This creates jobs for the Footlocker employees, Nike designers, marketing teams, and other US people throughout this chain.

In all fairness, most of those jobs would still exist if manufacturing was brought onshore. The fact that they were manufactured in Asia makes no difference here, except for perhaps the longshoremen that was included in "other US people."
by wpietri | 2025-04-09 13:39:04+00:00
Yes, but I'm not sure he fully took in the lesson. Did they really build a bunch of separate domain-specific ontologies? Or, given that it's one system, did they build a universal ontology that's just a big mess?

The lesson I take from the fact that universal ontologies are untenable is that human cognition isn't driven by ontology, so the quest to make a thinking thing out of pile of symbolic logic is one that has no guarantee of succeeding. I think Cyc's whole project is roughly similar to the Frankensteinian notion that if you just put together the right parts and provide a vital spark, you'll get a living being. It might work and it might not, but either way it's not science; it's sympathetic magic with the trapping of science.
by mooreds | 2025-04-09 13:39:06+00:00
> And it's nice to see software maintainers respecting their own time.

In a different context, I was talking to someone who volunteers with an org that I also volunteer with. I shared that I really respected her ability to set boundaries because a pattern I've seen over and over again is this:

if someone capable comes to a non-profit that is relatively immature, they are asked to do more and more and more until they either burn out and bail or set hard boundaries. The non-profits need so much and there are so few who contribute.

It's great to help out, but setting and respecting boundaries is critical for your long term health and enjoyment of the activities you are helping with.
by hylaride | 2025-04-09 13:39:16+00:00
When you're starting something new and the amounts of data is still small, it's often better early on to focus on the product than optimizing for theoretical performance optimization that may never pan out (either because the project will fail or that the bottlenecks may ultimately not be what you thought or expected).

At my current gig, we used to shove everything (including binary data) into postgres because it was easy and all our code plugged into it anyways. When it started to become uneconomical (mostly due to RDS storage costs), we then started shunting data to S3, DynamoDB, etc.

Also, not everybody can be on a cloud with easy access to all the fancy products for queuing, caching, etc. Sometimes it's better overall to have to deal with one complex beast (that you'd have to maintain anyways) than spending time deploying Kafka, MongoDB, etc (even though it can sometimes be easier than ever with pre-built manifests for K8s) as well as securing and keeping them all up to date.

I do strongly encourage people to treat code that deals with these things with as much abstraction as possible to make migrations easier later on, though.
by intended | 2025-04-09 13:39:41+00:00
People are rightfully angry. LORD has it taken a long time for people to start talking about how everyone can’t become a coder. However, this seems like common knowledge today, but it was unpopular to think about this back when people were still struggling to deal with the issues that were cropping up.

Trump the character plays the storyline, which is hopefully useful to help people predict what’s happening.

What bugs me is that, the deeper shifts aren’t part of the counter narrative. Automation is eating jobs faster than trade ever did. Lights-out factories exist.

Also - it sucks to get taxed, sure. However it sucks more to not have a working global market. Your wealth is better if you have more people able to buy and make things.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-09 13:39:53+00:00
Unless you know something I don't, VirtualBox isn't qemu's CPU emulation - it's only virtualization for the current CPU. So, great if you want an alternative to Virtualization.framework but it's not going to run Windows 7 on Apple Silicon

And, even if it did run effectively under Rosetta, its management interface won't even let you select a non-arm64 guest: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/Introduction.html#h...
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-09 13:39:56+00:00
The risk reward ratio is way off at most people’s electricity prices. At best, you save yourself a few dollars in electricity costs (unless you’re in super high priced and sunny California).

At worst, you need to deal with a roofing problem.

For backup purposes, a generator and some fuel seems to be a lot more bang for the buck.
Show HN: Busy – A Generative Pen Plotter Artwork
by cosiiine | 2025-04-09 13:40:06+00:00
Hi all,

I've spent the last year creating an artistic body of work centered around generative art and pen plotters. I decided to be extremely transparent about the process and put together an article documenting the end-to-end process. My interest in pen plotters started in 2019 on Hacker News, and I'm thrilled to submit my own writings about them.
by matt_s | 2025-04-09 13:40:15+00:00
My experience was similar but with on/offshore companies in India. We just started requiring camera on (it was pre-pandemic) and it was obvious if candidates knew their stuff or were just prepped and/or reading responses. Most of those contracts were setup where the company was providing a "service" with fake cost recovery wordings if the service was not provided. Money only went one way, the contracts had wording about penalty payback but the reality after talking with people in finance was the financial process/systems weren't setup for that, lol.

Ways to combat bait and switch is to alter interview questions, add new questions to every interview, ask deeper level questions, and observe the candidate in how they respond. It should be a more conversational tone the entire time, random discussion paths pursued, especially if the candidate's interests perk up about something. Every candidate has a different background so getting them to talk about that and problems they solved and diving into those in detail should be a good gauge of ability.
by _pdp_ | 2025-04-09 13:40:18+00:00
Link to repo: https://github.com/google/A2A Docs: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/documentation

I think they are trying to ride the MCP hype as well with their own implementation that is also meh. MCP itself is also an over-engineered implementation of AI plugins by OpenAI. Obviously the end game is control over a standard which can act as a strategic tool for boosting valuations or even better product positioning.

The better approach is to simply use open standards that already exists but I guess this is just not sexy.
by qsort | 2025-04-09 13:40:34+00:00
The rabbit hole runs much deeper, this is a specification of the rotation system for current (modern) Tetris games:

https://harddrop.com/wiki/SRS

The "modern" rules ("guideline", as the community calls them), with Hold, 7-bag, multiple previews and a rotation system that allows easy T-spins make for more interesting multiplayer games that go beyond "who can spam Tetrises the fastest".
by 9rx | 2025-04-09 13:41:07+00:00
The trouble is that there is a strong correlation between being able to design good interfaces and being able to prepare good documentation. Meaning, where guessing fails, the reference is bound to also fail due to inaccuracies or failing to communicate what you need to know. Which stands to reason as both require concern for how the user perceives the product. That is a skill in its own right.

In practice, so many times I've spun my wheels thinking I just didn't understand the reference only to find out that there was a bug or change that invalidated the reference. Nowadays, if I must interface with a product built buy someone who doesn't understand the user, I'll go straight to the source code if guessing fails or resort to probing the system if code isn't available. Not only is it faster, but you'll gain a better understanding of what is going on than some stumbling attempt to describe it in natural language will ever be able to communicate.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-09 13:41:16+00:00
yeah - I don't get it. I'm all for abstraction but the entire point of using agents at the UX-level is you didn't need a single agreed-upon protocol to make it work. Feels like they're using the old Microsoft fire and motion strategy to keep people busy on their tech, or artificially introduce structure & coupling that - suprise - benefits the maker of shovels, not the diggers.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-09 13:41:20+00:00
Sadly, all those points but 5 are also political. The US isn't serious about it, for whatever (political/economic) reasons.

The UK, on the other hand: https://www.fmb.org.uk/homepicks/news/surge-in-solar-panel-i... ; helped by an efficiency mandate on new houses.
by gloxkiqcza | 2025-04-09 13:41:46+00:00
With coffee maybe. With tech I doubt it. If US companies raise prices worldwide, companies from the rest of the world will be in a great position to gain market share, if they don’t (as far as economy of scale permits). If iPhones are suddenly 30% more expensive in the EU and Chinese phones keep their pricing, it’s going to drive Chinese phones market share up. Even more so for products that aren’t premium/compete on cost, like Google Pixels.
by lossolo | 2025-04-09 13:42:00+00:00
> But, for a long time, they didn't notice.

Oh come on, everybody knew what was going on since the 90s but greed was just too strong. The next quarter's results were just too good to walk away from all of it. Everyone who needed to know, knew exactly what was happening, but they were getting rich in the process, so they didn’t care.
by pc86 | 2025-04-09 13:42:05+00:00
The title alone reeks of pro-RTO-at-all-costs "there's nothing wrong with driving an hour each way to your office because work should be the most important thing in your life here's $70k for the year thanks so much" bullshit.

I'm 100% sure there are some people there using AI to try to get through interviews, but what's the end game? The article mentions faking identification documents and work history. Well the first is a crime, and the second takes about 5 minutes to verify. "RTO to prevent crime" is so dumb even the RTO CEOs aren't pushing that one yet.
by milesrout | 2025-04-09 13:42:13+00:00
You're used to reading documents on the web. I am used to reading them on paper, in the terminal using man (strictly, troff and less), in the web browser and in a split or tab in vim (also using troff). I wish people would stop this "we" business where they purport to speak for everyone.

Man pages are superior because they don't give you the opportunity to add all the other stupid markup, animations, css etc people put in HTML documentation. The key thing is that they're consistent. Always in the same format.

Man pages don't have to be in troff. And as you illustrated, nothing stops you from generating web pages from them.
by amichail | 2025-04-09 13:42:52+00:00
As you may know, I have been working on DropZap World, a falling block game with lasers for many years.

It lies somewhere between Tetris and Candy Crush.

Getting the game mechanics right has been hard and I've tried numerous variations on the game rules.

I think I have something that works now.

Check out the beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/CdEXgjst

Any feedback would be appreciated!
by flakiness | 2025-04-09 13:42:57+00:00
> A2A is an open protocol that complements Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides helpful tools and context to agents.

A "server" sample: https://github.com/google/A2A/tree/main/samples/js/src/serve...

So it looks like the point is that it keeps the connection/context open for multiple interactions vs. MCP, which is more like pure request-response?
by Take8435 | 2025-04-09 13:43:28+00:00
This is just adding metadata. The whole blog can be reduced to...

'Tag resources for any cloud you work in'

Azure recommends this. AWS recommends this. etc.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/tagging-best-... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manag...
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-09 13:43:44+00:00
So many questions, but first off the bat: how are you getting onto HN, and what are you getting from this community to help you as a homeless guy in a minivan?

What does your rig look like? If you've got solar panels and battery and able to live somewhat comfortably, where would you draw the line between homeless and "van living"?

Hope your fortunes improve and that you ride this one out OK, godspeed!
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-04-09 13:43:55+00:00
I do not disagree with disentangling the hyper globalised world. We have evidence of how quickly things can go south (bronze age collapse, recent supply chain madness etc).

The entire theory is also based on inequality. We build nothing and we ship all the low paid / environmentally disastrous industries abroad.

What I disagree with is the methodology, which is simply idiotic.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-04-09 13:44:05+00:00
As a European I have a rough understanding about the legal grounds of how tariff rules are being set in the EU.

But on the US side - can a US citizen maybe explain the legal basis of the current tectonic shift in trade policy enacted through the tariffs? So far I assumed that the federal executive branch could only use tariffs to address security concerns or unfair practices. The actual policy change (especially the 10% base rate) is definitely more than that.
by jchw | 2025-04-09 13:44:23+00:00
I have a somewhat contrarian opinion. I think if you're making a clone of Tetris you should actually take design cues from the somewhat more obscure Tetris the Grand Master series instead of the "guideline" or NES Tetris rules. TGM's rotation and kick rules are a lot more elegant and avoid a lot of unneeded complexity. Guideline Tetris kicks let you do absurd and weird things (look up the series of kicks that make up a T-Spin Triple and see if that makes sense to you) and rewards doing canned setups really fast, whereas TGM's game design is all about doing good stacking very fast.

The TGM randomization algorithm is also pretty elegant. 7 bag is a bit extreme, it gives you such a perfect set of pieces at all times that it's genuinely less challenging and fun. TGM's random piece algorithm is a lot simpler: the randomizer has a 4-piece history window and it tries multiple times (IIRC, 6) to find a unique piece that hasn't appeared in that window. It is initialized to SSZZ to lower the odds of starting with an S or Z early on. (~~They also use the Mersenne Twister as their PRNG, which was a pretty good PRNG in an era where many games still used LCGs.~~ edit: Apparently, they do not. Don't ask me where I got this, I have no idea.)

Now of course I'm not sure if it matters at all for this particular game since it isn't really a Tetris clone at all, but while TGM is a well-known cult classic for people deep into Tetris it's relatively obscure outside of that circle (and presumably outside of Japan.) The Tetris Company is very strange about licensing and has apparently, as the legend has it, blocked and forced changes on TGM releases for a very long time due to the fact that it doesn't fit with the Tetris guideline rules they enforce in an oddly totalitarian fashion, probably suppressing the game even further in an era where speed games and competitive gaming is a lot more popular.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-09 13:44:29+00:00
Marginally technical executives are really dangerous here. My CTO is "all in" on MCP but fails to see it's an over-engineered attempt by one player to own the thin veneer on top of the bog-standard plumbing that's actually doing all the work. It's like OpenAI made an ODBC database connector and is saying "we created relational databases!"
by mbesto | 2025-04-09 13:44:34+00:00
I went through this process myself as well. A few conclusions I made:

1. The installer you choose is more important than anything else. The panels are pretty commoditized at this point. The battery cells are pretty much commoditized as well (they are 2-3 companies all of the major battery companies use). Your biggest worry is not if, but when, things break. Most well known manufacturers (REC, Enphase, Canadian Solar, Hyundai, etc.) have good warranty policies, but you need someone to coordinate that - so make sure your solar installer does that on your behalf.

2. A Powerwall battery is 13.5 kWh and has a 11 kW inverter. The base is $8k and $6k for each battery expansion. A similar, well known, brand EG4 sells the same battery for $3.7k and a similarly spec'd inverter is around $2.5k. Generally speaking Tesla installers quote much higher on labor than others too.

3. From the installers I spoke to they dont really like working with Tesla.

4. If you live in a place like Texas, Florida, etc., I wouldn't even bother with batteries unless you have a relatively small house. Most houses suck down so much energy that a natural gas generator is way more cost effective.
by tenwz1 | 2025-04-09 13:44:45+00:00
Americans seem to be very sensitive about Taiwan, but if you understand the history of our country, you will find that Taiwan has always been a part of China. Even Taiwanese people today will not deny this. In fact, the Taiwan issue was originally caused by the obstruction of the Americans, which led to our country's failure to unify. Our people have always been resentful about this matter.
by LorenDB | 2025-04-09 13:44:48+00:00
Probably not unless Apple provides a way to run 32-bit binaries or some really dedicated hacker figures out a way to make it work. Even Valve's own titles have 32-bit macOS versions (e.g. Portal 2) that won't work on modern macOS, so Proton on macOS today would only work with more modern 64-bit games. Not a problem for some people, but Valve really likes to support everything.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-09 13:44:55+00:00
Great, another Agent 2 Agent protocol. One more of those and we'll have a complete set!

OK, I'm being a little bit facetious. But there has been an awful lot of work in this space (or closely related space). Going back to FIPA[1], KQML[2], DAML+OIL[3], etc., up through the more recent AGNTCY[4] and Agent Communication Protocol[5] stuff, there's a lot "out there".

[1]: http://www.fipa.org/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Query_and_Manipulati...

[3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/daml+oil-reference/

[4]: https://github.com/agntcy

[5]: https://github.com/orgs/i-am-bee/discussions/284
by coldtea | 2025-04-09 13:44:59+00:00
>That's called a search engine. We've had them for 30 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The LLM could "intelligently" pick from the top several pages of results, discard search engine crap results and spam, summarize each link for you, and so on.

We don't have that now (or for 30 years - I should know, I was there, using Yahoo!, and Altavista, and Lycos and such back in the day).
by Maxious | 2025-04-09 13:45:18+00:00
The google angle here isn't even so much on the LLM side but on Google Cloud

See all those shiny badges for consulting firms? If you are a truely thought leadershiping executive, you should get one of them in ASAP to build you an A2A Registry [1] for your "Enterprise Agents" [2] to communicate via an A2A NotificationService [3] (brought to you by GCP!)

Indicative that the blog post example isn't help book a holiday but help hire a software engineer

1: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/topics/agent_discovery

2: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/topics/enterprise_ready

3: https://google.github.io/A2A/#/topics/push_notifications

edit:

> Updates to Agentspace make it easier for customers to discover, create and adopt AI agents. We're also growing the AI Agent Marketplace https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/browse?filter=c... , a dedicated section within Google Cloud Marketplace where customers can easily browse and purchase AI agents from partners.

https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/next-2025/