MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mppm | 2025-04-15 14:12:36+00:00
Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk

2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
by blululu | 2025-04-15 14:12:37+00:00
A true accounting of board level corporate motivations is not available. The standard line is typically something like “we are acquiring our smaller rival to more effectively compete with our larger rival”. I.e “we are acquiring a small desktop publishing start up to compete with the largest cloud computing provider”. Or in this case: “we are acquiring a small photo sharing company to compete against Google/Youtube”.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-15 14:12:44+00:00
Last reply, because you are very obviously trolling and commenting in bad faith.

>the US government had every right to deport him,

No.

These are all from that article. Special attention to "his removal was illegal".

>Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record in the United States or anywhere else

>the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States

>his removal was illegal because an immigration judge had granted him “withholding of removal”

>Jones’s 2019 ruling, barring Abrego Garcia’s removal

The Supreme Court has even stepped in, which I'm sure you're aware despite pretending not to be:

>On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam order, with no recorded dissents, requiring the government to “facilitate [Abrego Garcia’s] return”

And, despite any and all of that! There was no due process. Which, "illegal" or "legal", everyone is supposed to get a due process. If you remove due process for the people you don't like, someone else just needs to claim you're in that group and now you don't get due process! It's like Step 1 of authoritarianism.

Which, since you've not posted anything proving your innocence despite other commenters asking for it, perhaps we should remove your rights to due process.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-15 14:12:49+00:00
> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why?

This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.

Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.

> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)
by wongarsu | 2025-04-15 14:12:58+00:00
There are likely some languages that are genuinely easier or more difficult for LLMs.

For example consider Pascal or C89 requiring all variables to be declared at the start of the function body. That makes it much harder to generate code in a linear fashion. In Python you can just make up a variable the moment you decide you need it. In Pascal or C89 you would have to go back and change previous code, which LLMs can't easily do.

Similar things likely apply to strict typing. Typing makes it easier to reason about existing code, but it makes it harder to write new code if you don't have the ability to go back and change your mind on a type choice.

Both could be solved if we selected tokens in a beam search, searching for the path with the highest combined token probability instead of greedily selecting one token at a time. But that's much more expensive and I'm not sure anyone still does that with large-scale LLMs.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-15 14:13:00+00:00
I am bugged more by local environmental impacts.

Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
by SR2Z | 2025-04-15 14:13:06+00:00
AI cannot replace people for anything but shitting out large volumes of boilerplate code. It's really irritating that the grifters are so loud that actual smart people are believing them.

If you do, please take a cutting-edge model and ask it to write code for a slightly obscure use case. Unless your thing has been done to death, the model will fumble hard.

We have a word for programs that turn high level instructions into machine code: compilers. They don't lead to fewer software engineers, they lead to more, and a compiler that uses natural language and behaves unpredictably will not change that.
by kotaKat | 2025-04-15 14:13:16+00:00
Missing reason #15: commercial lenders with a brain realize that these tariffs and this self-imposed domestic crisis will dissipate in the next ~6 years. Nobody's going to lend in this market to try to spin up a new greenfield project in the US that will take years to get operational when they can sit and ride it out - ESPECIALLY at these interest rates.
by lesbolasinc | 2025-04-15 14:13:19+00:00
this is what i've been saying - critical manufacturing should of course be brought on shore but I don't understand the idea of bringing back "the assembly of hyper niche part that country Y can produce extremely cheaply but America can't even reasonably produce in quality" to American shores.

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-15 14:13:26+00:00
A few years ago, a teacher friend accompanied me to Phoenix Comicon where there was a panel discussion on “Using Pop Culture In The Classroom”. Driving home, I confided to her that I may have been the only Republican in the room.

Then a few weeks later, I mentioned the panel to another friend from the same church. He was in his mid-20s, and an educator in independent Catholic and charter [liberal arts] schools.

He told me that teachers there were expressly forbidden from introducing pop culture references. I mean, it seems nice for a student to share an in-joke with teacher, but is that an inclusive environment and a safe space?

It is never an error to adhere to the curriculum and thus ensure that your class materials engage all the students with cultural and moral sensitivity.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-15 14:13:47+00:00
/g/entoomen taught me a lot about Linux too. The desktop and home server threads also have a lot of gold, people put a lot of effort into their systems. There are even Lisp generals. I remember people attempting the advent of code together and posting progress. There was one person who used a lot of Unicode in the source code.

Just yesterday I saw a rather interesting discussion about WD HDD internals and possible ways to figure out whether they are SMR drives. Shame this hack cut it short.

/tg/ had some seriously good chess players.

There's a board for everything. People see 4chan and think everything is /pol/. If anything, it's /a/. People have been arguing over which waifu is best girl for 20 years. 20 years.
by jjulius | 2025-04-15 14:14:09+00:00
I know - I was a longtime IRC user way back when. You're still not quite groking my point. Lemme try and make it a bit more clear:

OP lamented that things like IRC meant that if you weren't always connected, you'd miss messages.

I simply posited, from a philosophical perspective rather than the technical perspective you are focused on, that it's OK for us to not be connected all the time. That not everything we miss is as important as we feel it might be when we think about missing out. That the truly important details will make their way to us one way or another.
by gowings97 | 2025-04-15 14:14:12+00:00
Because you cannot hide the imbalance of disconnecting yourself from the material reality that's involved with making your lifestyle possible by outsourcing to other human beings, over multiple decades, without it coming back to bite you in one form or another.

See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the Soviet Union.

A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside the country, it will come back to bite you.

"Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-15 14:14:20+00:00
> I don't think you'd normally choose Go to train your ML/AI model. It has really only gunned for Python in the server realm

I don't think anyone ever claimed Golang will displace Python in the ML area. But in a world where Golang and Elixir exist (two languages with stacks that make starting a new web / API projects extremely easy, almost trivial), not to mention old-timers like Ruby, the amount of people reaching for Python for web / API projects is depressingly high. "Sunk cost fallacy", "one-trick pony", "Stockholm syndrome" and a few others come to mind when thinking about the programmers doing it.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-04-15 14:14:26+00:00
it's not grammatically correct but reflects a pausing speaking style to avoid confusion generated from repeating the same word twice in a row, and also to emphasize the repetition (a thing becoming more of a thing after already being that thing). (others are telling you whether it's correct per textbook rules or that it's purely stylistic but not why it's used in practice and what it conveys)
by csense | 2025-04-15 14:14:29+00:00
There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work.

But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.

How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people really want. Tariffs are simply a means to that end.

I wish people would stop writing articles about 100% criticizing tariffs and instead write articles 50% about criticizing tariffs and 50% brainstorming alternative solutions to achieve the same objective.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-15 14:14:32+00:00
My GitLab CI/CD pipelines are 100% code that I personally wrote or that I've personally reviewed and forked into our internal source control. Our entire business depends on this code, so the best possible course of action to me seemed to be 100% control.

The idea of just plugging in some black box script written by anyone who can update it at any time seems insane. What kind of idiot would trust something as sensitive as CI/CD with random unverified scripts you have zero control or oversight of? Apparently quite a lot of idiots.
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-15 14:14:49+00:00
Well, the assumption was based on the fact that they chose base 26, and that the "26" came from the use of a 26 character alphabet. The 10 Arabic numerals are then a convenient character set to expand to 36, which is a much nicer number base than 26.

Japanese could be combined with the Hindi character set to yield base 96, which is fairly convenient. Cyrillic would be harder -- perhaps the best options there would be to drop a character to yield base 32, or perhaps 3 characters to yield base 30.

I'd argue that base 60 is probably the optimal number base for nearly any use (with base 16 or 64 as close second and third for working with binary data). Hindi's 50 characters combined with our 10 Arabic numerals could indeed be a great way to get there.
by skydhash | 2025-04-15 14:14:55+00:00
My approach since I was in High School and started programming has always stayed the same.

It's actually very rare to have to innovate, starting from scratch. So whatever problems I need to solve, my first step is always looking for information. And more often than not, the solution is right there.

I don't spend much time at the keyboard. Most of my time is spent perusing books, articles, blog posts, and source code. Or talking to a domain expert. That's what will gave me the system design/architecture for what I want to build. Once that's done, it's pretty much a straight line, or better a spiral iteratively building and testing, going deep only when things matters.

This approach clashes with AI (at least from my POV), because they can't give you a coherent overview of a domain. It's always piecewise elements that are probably wrong in the problem's context, or just plain wrong.

I much prefer to go from general/introductory materials to very specific/advanced ones that matters with sources I trust.

As for the code, it's starting small, get it to work well, and then start on the next iteration. And thanks to the kindness of people, there's so many opensource code from which to learn from.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-04-15 14:15:07+00:00
I was diagnosed with ODD as a kid and was prescribed Ritalin. I hated being on Ritalin because it made me feel unenthusiastic about anything and killed my appetite. My older brother stole my 60 day supply when I was 10 and sold it for heroin money. Insurance wouldn't pay for a refill so that's when my family decided I was magically cured!

I meet adults today who self diagnose with ADHD so they can get Ritalin or something I suppose. They want to take stimulants to be more efficient at work or have more energy at home, but I can't imagine wanting to feel that way all the time. I HATED being on Ritalin, made me feel like a zombie.
by jruohonen | 2025-04-15 14:15:14+00:00
Tanenbaum:

"It is hard to pin down what an operating system is other than saying it is the software that runs in kernel mode--and even that is not always true. Part of the problem is that operating systems perform two essentially unrelated functions: providing application programmers (and application programs, naturally) a clean abstract set of resources instead of the messy hardware ones and managing these hardware resources."

Yes, it is hard to pin it down. Nor am I sure whether time should be wasted on attempting to pin it down.
by bhouston | 2025-04-15 14:15:22+00:00
> If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state. You should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.

As a Canadian I am already scared of visiting the US. I've re-posted UNRWA, Unicef, MSF and WFP criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza on social media. I could very well be viewed as being a someone who is undermining US foreign policy goals and either detained, deported or at best denied entry to the US.

https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-to-begin-sc...
by hylaride | 2025-04-15 14:15:32+00:00
To maybe oversimplify it, cancer risk from radiation is all a stats game. The situations where you get a CT scan is either very rare (once or twice in a lifetime and often highly localized) or for a very acute issue (eg a heart attack or car accident) that is almost certainly worth the risks.

Also, ionizing radiation has a varying risks to different tissues. "Soft" tissues that have cells that divide a lot (lungs, colon, etc) are of greater risk than others. I wouldn't bat much of an eye for a CT scan on my knee, but would be more worried about a chest procedure. Again, more worried doesn't mean I wouldn't do it, as the alternative is either a much more expensive MRI, much more fuzzy echo-cardiogram, or wondering if my health is more seriously at risk.
by danaris | 2025-04-15 14:15:35+00:00
There's a big difference between "upbeat music" and "positive culture".

"Positive" in this sense isn't being used to mean "optimistic" or "happy". It's being used to mean "healthy for the world at large".

Regardless of whether any of us agree that 4chan was a net-negative, it should be very clear that "music that doesn't have an upbeat sound or themes" is not inherently unhealthy, but "subcultures that are unhealthy for the world at large" definitionally are.
by lesbolasinc | 2025-04-15 14:16:18+00:00
going to have to give you kudos and steal that last part of "unskilled factory labour being a way to just tread water"

i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on and its asinine to pretend it is.

I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has picked up the steam it has
by stronglikedan | 2025-04-15 14:16:19+00:00
I don't think anyone underestimates that, as much as some people with the author's viewpoints would like it to be true.

To paraphrase Kennedy: "We choose to [bring back manufacturing]. We choose to [bring back manufacturing] in this [or the next] decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-15 14:16:27+00:00
Fair point. :/

My friend is watching his business get ready to die. His wife is still the CEO, and she's losing her shit. They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something doesn't give.

I guess the mega-rich oligarchs think this is great, but they don't employ the majority of Americans.
by singron | 2025-04-15 14:16:29+00:00
It's a principle of capitalism, but taken to the extreme, it's just a strawman. At this point, I think we are pretty sure that some interventions make capitalism better.

This post is specifically about Industrial Policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy

But other effective interventions are anti-trust and demand-inducing regulation (e.g. people want to fly because they know it's safe).
by rkozik1989 | 2025-04-15 14:16:37+00:00
Americans have a very 1980s idea of manufacturing (and China in general) in that there aren't actually that many humans being used in Chinese factories let alone the American ones some of them want to build here. There's even a concept of, "Dark Factories" in China which are 100% automated factories that operate in the dark. The only jobs that will come from bringing manufacturing back to the states will be in automation, robotics, AI, and roles to support those things.
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-15 14:16:41+00:00
A. Newer CT scan machines use lower radiation doses.

B. If you're getting only one scan a year you're fine and within yearly limits of radiation dosage considered acceptable.

Remember that you'll get comparable levels of radiation even if you commute through the grand central station every day.

This paper is for lack of a better word, crap. It's becoming sensational for the conclusion it makes and I'm afraid it's now going to create more harm because of that.
by pc86 | 2025-04-15 14:16:46+00:00
I don't think an off-topic comment about Roger Stone and a 15-year old ad hominem meets the bar of constructive HN discourse but we can agree to disagree. I've seen plenty of constructive, right-leaning comments downvoted and flagged while unconstructive partisan pablum from the other side sits there without even being greyed out.

I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
by philipallstar | 2025-04-15 14:16:52+00:00
Progressive movements have giant amounts of funding. Every big business in the US and mostly in the UK as well are donating to various Progressive causes. Loads of Progressive people are fairly rich tech workers. Most of Hollywood are Progressive. Kamala Harris took over the previous presidential candidacy from Joe Biden and raised $1.4bn in a very short amount of time, twice what Trump got.

That's why the joke is Progressive YouTubers are sponsored by Amazon and Google, and Conservative ones are sponsored by Freedom Water and other budget right wing brands.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-15 14:17:52+00:00
Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)

Social network culture is a multipart problem:

1. You need quality posters 2. You need to provide value to those posters 3. You need to remove low-quality posts attracted by site growth

Any system that creates the above will be successful.

The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails.

Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.