MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vmh1928 | 2025-04-12 15:25:54+00:00
The catalog is a reminder of a time when the prime motive power for moving material was a human. Thus, the large number of different shovels(for different materials and situations,) with a human interface (i.e., the handle.) Ames was just one of many firms making shovels. Often these were local to a region since transportation costs added excessive costs (unless the target market had no competing shovel makers, say on the frontier.) The same situation exists for the ax. Look up "vintage ax brands." At one time there were many ax makers, mostly regional, because the ax was still a common tool for shaping wood, again, with the motive power being a human.

In modern times most of this type of work is done by a machine. Possibly human run but a machine so trench digger, auger, backhoe, etc.. (or with the ax, a sawsall, circular saw, chainsaw, etc..) With the result being there are a few shovels for sale in, say, Home Depot, most made in China, and, although most construction companies and landscapers have some shovels they're mostly for situations where a machine can't reach or can't do a fine enough job.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-12 15:25:57+00:00
I refer to what political scientists write about the subject.

Illiberal democracy (aka electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, or soft authoritarianism) is a system with democratic institutions that don't work properly. Opposition can still win but it's not a fair game.

>And if there is a significant difference, what stops one becoming the other?

People. For example, Ukraine was illiberal democracy and Orange Revolution 2004 changed that. Poland was slipping badly but 2023 Polish protests changed things.

Putin started with illiberal democracy and slipped into pure authoritarian eventually, because Russians can't get their shit together.
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-12 15:26:57+00:00
The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1.

My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new supplier/factor/product as a 1-2 year process.

Now imagine every producer with China exposure trying to do this at the same time dealing with the same limited ex-China options? Nothing was happening in the 90 day pause, let alone before the 2026 midterms or before the end of his reign in 2028.

Complete chaos for American companies who are left with no good options other than try to wait it out, and pass on excess cost to consumers in interim.
by surajrmal | 2025-04-12 15:27:02+00:00
Why is don't be evil relevant here? If Google never had that motto would you care less? It's not even factual that they dropped it from the code of conduct. It was just moved to the end rather than at the beginning. Moving it wasn't some magical event that signaled a change in Google's ethical values. Do the right thing was just seen as less ambiguous and placed more prominently.

As others have stated, being able to see that the appliance is phoning home or not is trivial. No one who is in the market for this won't ensure it meets some rigurous bar.
by burkaman | 2025-04-12 15:27:45+00:00
> make health insurance like buying car insurance ("free market")

This option doesn't work because healthcare can't be a free market. Car insurance companies have to compete not only with each other but with alternatives like not owning a car at all. There is no alternative to being alive, so health insurance companies can effortlessly collude to raise prices across the industry knowing that they have the most captive customer base possible.
by KittenInABox | 2025-04-12 15:28:02+00:00
One of the things I've noticed is that there is a huge discrepancy between people who can "bounce back" from someone behaving inappropriately to them when they are in a vulnerable position. People who are able to go "yeah fuck you too buddy, anyways onto the next thing" are way more able to handle things. People who end up dwelling on one person who did something bad years ago and are unable to let go of that pain end up closing themselves off for fear of exacerbating it.
by riku_iki | 2025-04-12 15:28:14+00:00
> The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees

other significant revenue surfaces:

- providing LLM APIs to enterprises

- ChatBot Ads market: once people will switch from google search, there will be Ads $200B market at stake for a winner
by sidibe | 2025-04-12 15:28:29+00:00
They "lost from a position of strength" in that they had they had the most public-cloud like data centers and started thinking about selling that later than they should have. Bard/Gemini started later than chatgpt , but there's not really a moat for this LLM stuff, and Google started moving a lot earlier relative to GCP vs Amazon.

They've got the cash, the people, and the infrastructure to do things faster than the others going forward, which is a much bigger deal IMO than having millions more users right now. Most people still aren't using LLMs that often, switching is easy, and Google has the most obvious entry points with billion+ users with google.com, YouTube, gmail, chrome, android, etc.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-12 15:29:26+00:00
A defeatist mindset. The point is to make money, then invest in making more.

For example my new starlite linux tablet is awesome and star is making money hand over fist. Because they finally built a good one and stopped making excuses. They develop firmware with coreboot and upstream patches to Linux.

That’s what a successful business is, you invest then reap the rewards.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-12 15:29:48+00:00
> One of the main reason LLMs are unintuitive and difficult to use is that you have to learn how to get useful results out of fundamentally unreliable technology.

Name literally any other technology that works this way.

> Guide dogs, sniffer dogs, falconry...

Guide dogs are an imperfect solution to an actual problem: the inability for people to see. And dogs respond to training far more reliably than LLMs respond to prompts.

Sniffer dogs are at least in part bullshit and have been shown in many studies to respond to the subtle cues of their handlers far more reliably than anything they actually smell. And the best of part of them is they also (completely outside their own control mind you) ruin lives when falsely detecting drugs on cars that look a way the officer handling them thinks means they have drugs inside.

And falconry is a hobby.
by mubou | 2025-04-12 15:30:00+00:00
I wish it were more common for open source licenses to have an attribution clause, like Apache does with its (optional) NOTICE files. When you put years of effort into a work, you deserve credit for it.

Edit: Actually, using a library via a package manager would likely be considered "linking" and not a Derivative Work, so I don't think even Apache's clause would apply in many cases.
by rvz | 2025-04-12 15:31:16+00:00
I think you made the mistake in assuming I was being partisan in the first place or whether if I cared about 'downvotes'.

Insider trading laws applies to ALL. Cheering on politicians from Trump to Pelosi that you pay your taxes to, only for them to violate insider trading laws is insane.

That means, we investigate and go after everyone; from president to congressperson.

No exceptions.
by brookst | 2025-04-12 15:31:23+00:00
Are you confusing the budget deficit with the trade deficit? Is that what all this is about?

I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.

But that has nothing to do with whether my household budget is balanced.

Do people really think that making goods more expensive for consumers will somehow produce the funds to support even greater tax cuts for billionaires?
by ferociouskite56 | 2025-04-12 15:32:07+00:00
From hateful experiences, this is bullshit. In 2019 I was accused in court that "Blacks...Muslims are a delusion." I've dated both as a Muslim convert and won the case.

I said my family are jealous. January 2014 mother tried to invite 2 guys on my first African American date. Both parents banned minorities from the house. Most psychiatrists make things worse. Mother claims I'm not part of the computer industry because I am poor. Despite reading about Linux hours a day since at least the year 2000.
by bjourne | 2025-04-12 15:33:17+00:00
The proof is supplied by the article: "Multiple independent sources inside Meta confirmed the authenticity of the information provided by the whistleblowers. The data also show that Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs submitted by the Israeli government in an average of 30 seconds." 90k take-down requests in 18 months is quite a lot.
by jader201 | 2025-04-12 15:33:26+00:00
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government

Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:

> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
by AS04 | 2025-04-12 15:33:30+00:00
Because of the niceties of Rust, combined with the widespread compatibility and architecture support of gcc / C compilers in general?

Rust is a modern language, with package management, streamlined integrated build/testing tools, much less cruft, and lots of high-level features and syntax that people actually like. C is neat but complex codebases benefit from modern languages that help in building robust abstractions while still maintaining the speed of C. Not to mention, of course, the borrow checker and memory safety.
by feross | 2025-04-12 15:33:51+00:00
Hi — I’m the security firm CEO mentioned, though I wear a few other hats too: I’ve been maintaining open source projects for over a decade (some with 100s of millions of npm downloads), and I taught Stanford’s web security course (https://cs253.stanford.edu).

Totally understand the skepticism. It’s easy to assume commercial motives are always front and center. But in this case, the company actually came after the problem. I’ve been deep in this space for a long time, and eventually it felt like the best way to make progress was to build something focused on it full-time.
by singron | 2025-04-12 15:33:58+00:00
I don't think it's a bad idea, but currently packages aren't written with adversarial packages in mind. E.g. requests in Python should have network access, but probably not if it's called from a sandboxed package, but you might be able to trick certain packages into calling functions for you without having your package in the call stack (e.g. asyncio event loop or Thread). I think any serious attempt would get pushback from library authors.

Also it's hard to argue against hard process isolation. Specter et al are much easier to defend against at process boundaries. It's probably higher value to make it easier to put sub modules into their own sandboxed processes.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-12 15:34:06+00:00
> And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?

You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-12 15:34:14+00:00
There are valid reasons for tariffs:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good

Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization

* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...

But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-12 15:34:23+00:00
>This does not excuse the fact that the Pelosis' benefitted from insider (political) information and traded on that, like this blatant example.

You, nor others, have not actually proven that.

>Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on.

Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.). (Though admittedly I don’t know exactly what that looks like) They should be serving the people, not themselves.

But if I tell you sandwiches should be banned because they are bad for you and I bring you a bowl of pasta as an example of their harmful ways, I’m going to look silly, aren’t I?
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-12 15:34:51+00:00
Yes. Health insurers are partially hired villains to take blame and ire. My employer has a multi-vendor plan that is mostly UHC. They even have specialist cancer care that will pay in full for just about everything, including travel and food. We have almost none of the issues that you hear about insurance nightmares.

That's because they negotiated and paid for such a plan.

My sister works for a similar large employer. They hired Cigna as the insurer/benefits administrator, and every interaction is a problem. Your two kids have an ear infection? Cool, we've determined that the second one is due to an auto accident. It's so bad that the company hired another company to argue with Cigna for you.

End of the day, the employer controls the purse, and the insurer is doing what the employer paid for. It's cheaper to hire another company to argue for the folks who have noticed problems than to pay for a level of service.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-12 15:35:21+00:00
I am 50/50 on this particular argument for why OSes are in a rut. I think there is actual competition in the form of the various distros out there and they have passionate advocates with real skill trying new things but they don't really take in a more mainstream way and they rarely feel revolutionary. I think this is more of a track gauge problem. It is hard to provide a truly novel OS without building all the infra around it so that people can actually use it. That takes resources at a scale that few can muster. What if I wanted to build something that kills off the idea of a file system? All the apps out there are written at their very core with this concept in them so even if it is a better idea, it is incredibly hard to bring it out to market and only huge companies can do it. At the same time though the huge companies are pushing their versions of things which makes it hard to compete and have even small innovation in the space. I don't have a solution here. I had hoped things like web assembly would have led to OS breakaway by now but it hasn't really happened. Maybe it still will.
by rglullis | 2025-04-12 15:35:47+00:00
>it's better when everyone has a (place?) they feel welcome

Yes, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of people using sites like Reddit or Discord are not choosing it. They are there because it has become their only alternative.

And it has become their only alternative because all these hobbyist forums can only exist when they are serving some tiny, exclusive priviledge few. If they grow too much, they either will crumble or will find themselves becoming a "professional" service with people on payroll and revenue targets.
by netsharc | 2025-04-12 15:36:22+00:00
Huh, let's just forget that women had to e.g. fight for the right to vote, or the whole civil rights movement... OK, fine, it's 2025, and let's see, is the discrimination that's in people's heads about "what's normal" totally gone? I can admit that if you ask me to imagine a CEO, I'd imagine a middle-aged white man, am I the only one? And what does this image of normality do to the idea of who will be picked for a particular job, by a group of people?

Yeah if I'm looking for a caretaker for my child, a male candidate would also make me go "Huh, interesting". Women have the advantage for this job, and men have it for the CEO job, I wonder which job is more powerful in the world (if we don't pull out a philosophical idea of "powerful"...).
by starkparker | 2025-04-12 15:36:22+00:00
I get to be one of the lucky few to learn today that ffmpeg was ported (well, transpiled) to WASM. This is more specifically built on that port: https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

That project has an interactive playground that essentially describes and demonstrates how it works: https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/playground

This also means that despite being a locally hosted ffmpeg frontend, it's still slower than native ffmpeg and bound to WASM limits like file size (still a generous 2GB for images and audio, but not as viable for big video conversions).

Still weird that this project doesn't seem to acknowledge that anywhere.
by voisin | 2025-04-12 15:36:35+00:00
The strategy is to sow fear and uncertainty to drive capital from stocks to government bonds and drive down the bond yield. Bessant is pretty clear about this. Once they get the bond yields down and refinance a lot of the short term debt into longer term debt they free up operating budget. Combine with Elon’s DOGE cutting costs and Lutnick raising some capital from tariffs, and it is a pretty good strategy. I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
by dzaima | 2025-04-12 15:37:39+00:00
What's all that undefined behavior? Closest I can think of is executing unsupported instructions, but you have to mess up pretty hard for that to happen, and you're not gonna get predictable behavior here anyway (and sane hardware will trap of course; and executing random memory as instructions is effectively UB on any architecture).

(there's a good bit of unpredictable behavior (RVV tail-agnostic elements, specific vsetvl result), but unpredictable behavior includes any multithreading in any architecture and even Rust (among other languages))
by bumby | 2025-04-12 15:38:04+00:00
>Low pay selects for rich and corrupt politicians.

Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.

Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.

This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.

If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.

*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.
by unoti | 2025-04-12 15:38:16+00:00
When using AI, you are still the one responsible for the code. If the AI writes code and you don't read every line, why did it make its way into a commit? If you don't understand every line it wrote, what are you doing? If you don't actually love every line it wrote, why didn't you make it rewrite it with some guidance or rewrite it yourself?

The situation described in the article is similar to having junior developers we don't trust committing code and us releasing it to production and blaming the failure on them.

If a junior on the team does something dumb and causes a big failure, I wonder where the senior engineers and managers were during that situation. We closely supervise and direct the work of those people until they've built the skills and ways of thinking needed to be ready for that kind of autonomy. There are reasons we have multiple developers of varying levels of seniority: trust.

We build relationships with people, and that is why we extend them the trust. We don't extend trust to people until they have demonstrated they are worthy of that trust over a period of time. At the heart of relationships is that we talk to each other and listen to each other, grow and learn about each other, are coachable, get onto the same page with each other. Although there are ways to coach llm's and fine tune them, LLM's don't do nearly as good of a job at this kind of growth and trust building as humans do. LLM's are super useful and absolutely should be worked into the engineering workflow, but they don't deserve the kind of trust that some people erroneously give to them.

You still have to care deeply about your software. If this story talked about inexperienced junior engineers messing up codebases, I'd be wondering where the senior engineers and leadership were in allowing that to mess things up. A huge part of engineering is all about building reliable systems out of unreliable components and always has been. To me this story points to process improvement gaps and ways of thinking people need to change more than it points to the weak points of AI.