MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-04-05 13:25:40+00:00
> the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%.

That's kind of remarkable if true, because the openness of both individuals and institutions to taking reports of it seriously has increased. Before all our modern awareness of stuff like "consent" a lot of reports were dismissed, especially if the pedophile was someone trusted in the community and especially if they came from women. Boys often didn't report at all out of shame.

Usually when there's an increase in awareness you see a phantom increase due to reporting, as has happened with things like rates of homosexuality or with diagnostic categories like autism and ADD/ADHD.

Of course maybe there's less of it today because abusers are getting caught more often. That's possible too.

Edit: this wouldn't surprise me at all given that there appears to be zero relationship between public panics about something and its actual incidence. Street crime, for example, was orders of magnitude worse in the early 1990s vs. today but people were less panicked about it. Public panics are media driven.
by vel0city | 2025-04-05 13:25:42+00:00
For the routes I take on road trips, this is already the way. Lots of nice rest stops with lots of EV charging. Some restaurants, clean bathrooms, convenience stores to buy whatever snacks, etc.

I stop, go to the bathroom, grab a beverage, and by the time I'm back to the car I've got more than enough charge to hit the next stop. Coupled with Blue Cruise and road trips have never been so smooth and easy.

And I'm in Texas, a place you wouldn't expect to be some EV mecca.
by themullet | 2025-04-05 13:26:06+00:00
It's worth noting Neptune clouds are doing similar due to the suns 11 year solar cycle.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/neptunes-disappeari...

AI summary; "Yes, astronomers have observed that Neptune's prominent clouds have largely disappeared, and NASA scientists suggest this phenomenon is linked to the sun's 11-year solar cycle and its impact on Neptune's atmosphere"
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-05 13:26:58+00:00
We could already do it, then we automated huge portions of it, then as other economies matured we handed that work to them and developed into a high-margin, high-income knowledge economy.

We can rewind back to a middle income economy if we want, I guess, but I don't see the appeal.

I'm open to the argument that we want some domestic mass manufacturing capacity for reasons of self-sufficiency, supply chain resilience, etc, but just come out and say it: we need handouts to keep certain strategic industries alive despite their lack of economic viability in the marketplace.
by Majromax | 2025-04-05 13:27:56+00:00
> Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing.

You know, I need to put a tariff on my local grocery store. They keep taking advantage of me by selling me food, when I export nothing to them!
by im_down_w_otp | 2025-04-05 13:28:17+00:00
Now that the US has removed itself from the world stage, I think it's possible something useful about climate change can happen. Likely? Still no. But, possible? Yes, in a way that was never going to happen before.

China and the EU are taking over the leadership position that the US inexplicably resigned from. China and the EU take climate change and renewable/sustainable energy technology investment and adoption waaaaaaaay more seriously than the US did. The US has been (and continues to be) actively hostile to it, save for a few contrary blips.

The most powerful climate change denialist and impediment to progress, by far, to doing something to address climate denialist just self-immolated. There's a silver lining in there.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-05 13:28:56+00:00
> I think the people pushing these moral purity bills need a wake-up call about what women find hot. Because this worldview makes no sense once you know that these "violent and degrading acts" are extremely common fetishes among women who play the part of the "victim."

Agreed, every single woman I’ve slept with has expressed a desire to either be restrained, submissive, choked or spanked, and a few have expressed desires for nonconsensual sex fantasies. It’s exceedingly common.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-04-05 13:29:27+00:00
I'm responding to a post on Hacker News, not writing the complete history of morality and culture.

I agree that lying and fraud by businesses, employees, buyers, and sellers are all reprehensible. Nonetheless, I would contend there's no problem discussing the actual subject at hand without expanding it.

I'm not being hypocritical, I'm simply being topical.
by RedNifre | 2025-04-05 13:29:30+00:00
Oh, that's interesting! It sounds like it's not literally being fed UTF-8 bytes, but instead more like this: For rarely seen characters, it's two tokens, namely first a codeblock token ("Tag" token in this case), followed by a token like "1st character in this codeblock" or "2nd character in this code block" and so on and since many rare codeblocks are latin-like (tags, circled letters, mathematical Fraktur variables etc.), the LLM picks up that "some block token"+"1st character in the codeblock" kinda is like "A"? Is that how it works?
by Balgair | 2025-04-05 13:29:49+00:00
Issue is that Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba visited Donny in February already to avoid tariffs and talk security. Ishiba gave him a one of a kind golden samurai helmet even. It was kind of a big deal.

Donny reneged on that.

Other countries know that Donny is not trustworthy when it comes to deals. He will go back on them at any time.

You can't negotiate with a pigeon.

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2025/02/b4067f888d9e-japa...
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-05 13:30:08+00:00
That's a real shame as there's some top game companies in the U.S. (Steve Jackson Games springs to mind). Stonemaier Games makes some lovely games - Wingspan and it's variants are beautiful products, but it doesn't seem like they'll be able to survive in the U.S. (Here's a blog post from them: https://stonemaiergames.com/the-darkest-timeline/ ).

Ultimately, the manufacturers are going to have to leave the USA or risk going bust as they'll likely only have U.S. customers and even then their products will be expensive.
by bendigedig | 2025-04-05 13:30:55+00:00
+1 for the citation, thanks.

The numbers do paint a picture of a fairly anemic 5-10% increase between 02/03 and 23/24 in 'inflation-adjusted' median household income.

However, I note that that the data is 'equivalised' which to me somewhat muddies the waters; the numbers are inherently tied into the population's demographics, and I'm not confident that I understand what effect things like demographic shifts (which are obviously ongoing) would have on these numbers.
by vel0city | 2025-04-05 13:31:20+00:00
I have the cables that came with the car and I have a different EVSE on my wall, but otherwise I've never had to buy cables.

Some places in the world expect you to bring your own cable to use the charger, but in the US public chargers have cables.

That said, I do keep the included charging cable in it's special spot under the trunk area. I've used it once out on the go, but wasn't really needed.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-04-05 13:32:13+00:00
R̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶x̶t̶…̶

- A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶

̶ A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶1̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶q̶u̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶

- A̶ ̶T̶e̶r̶a̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶.̶

[edit: The earth receives 14.9 ZettaWatts of solar power per day, and 173 Petawatts per second, I was reading it as 173 PW over a day, in which case the above works fine. Mea culpa]

See: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
by DennisP | 2025-04-05 13:32:35+00:00
But that means any AI that just talks to you can't be AI by definition. No matter how decisively the AI passes the Turing test, it doesn't matter. It could converse with the top expert in any field as an equal, solve any problem you ask it to solve in math or physics, write stunningly original philosophy papers, or gather evidence from a variety of sources, evaluate them, and reach defensible conclusions. It's all just generating tokens.

Historically, a computer with these sorts of capabilities has always been considered true AI, going back to Alan Turing. Also of course including all sorts of science fiction, from recent movies like Her to older examples like Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-04-05 13:33:07+00:00
> Does the US have a strategic in that

It makes sense if you consider how Chinese companies moved factories to Mexico after the first round of tariffs. You have to treat every country consistently, all at once, or else loopholes emerge. That said, there's probably a smarter way to accomplish this, such as something like setting lower tariffs based on the first $x amount of trade deficit and increasing them by volume.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-05 13:33:34+00:00
Of course, but most people overestimate how much of super speed chargers we need, just provide 20kw chargers inside every parking garage and need for super speed charging will be lowered significantly. also just having 10 kw in my favorite restaurant is enough for 1.5 hour i spend there. everyone gravitates to most expensive gadgets, but simple small is many time better value. of course im not saying do not build super chargers, but we kinda say we need them, even when we dont.

Maybe solution can be new app, connect bluetooth dongle to cars OBD port and provide more accurate range estimation than car infotainment does, after a while start providing said service to car manufacturers...?
by throw0101d | 2025-04-05 13:34:04+00:00
> Well guess we’re not going to Canada again.

Or Australia:

> Electronic devices held for forensic examination under section 186 of the Customs Act will be retained for no longer than 14 days, provided there is no content on any device retained which renders the device subject to seizure under Customs-related laws. If any device is subject to seizure, the examination of any associated retained devices may take longer than 14 days.

* https://www.abf.gov.au/entering-and-leaving-australia/crossi...

Or every other country.

You may be asked by a border agent from any country to unlock your electronic device.

Feel free to not unlock or give your password of course: every country has a law about confiscation and/or not allowing you in.
by martinky24 | 2025-04-05 13:34:47+00:00
I would be so pissed off if I were using a phone today from 10-20 years ago…

For some small minority of people (who are overrepresented in this forum, but not in the general population), sure, they’d pull it off and be happy. But there is not mass market appeal here.

Haven’t startups and such tried to create modular, upgradable phones? And have any single one of them taken off with even 0.1% of market share?
by herval | 2025-04-05 13:34:47+00:00
I read somewhere that part of the rationale is preventing countries from using other countries as a way to bypass import taxes, which does make sense if your goal is to force everyone to negotiate. Although why putting some of the largest rates on countries that almost don’t export while keeping some huge players at 10%, that I have no clue. It’d just make madagascans negotiate with some countries with lower rate, if they intended to keep the product flowing into the US..

The other theory is some of those smaller countries would accept becoming “vassal states” and house US military in exchange for more favorable terms. Madagascar and Falkland are strategically positioned, so maybe that’s the play?
by swat535 | 2025-04-05 13:34:56+00:00
So at our company, we stopped asking algorithm questions in interviews.

Instead, our process starts with a one-hour technical conversation. We talk through the candidate's experience, how they think about systems and products, and dig into technical topics relevant to our stack (Ruby on Rails). This includes things like API design, ActiveRecord, SQL, caching, and security.

If that goes well, the next step is a collaborative pull request review. We have a test project with a few PRs, and we walk through one with the candidate. We give them context on the project, then ask for their feedback. We're looking for how they communicate, whether they spot design issues (like overly long parameter lists or complex functions), and how they reason about potential bugs.

This has worked really well for us. We've built a strong, pragmatic engineering team. Unfortunately though, none of us now remember how to invert a binary tree without Googling it..
by jordanmorgan10 | 2025-04-05 13:35:39+00:00
The interesting thing with my side projects is that they are ever so close to being a full-on business, but they are slightly under the threshold where I could go all in (stay at home wife, three kids, American healthcare costs). So, it’s hard to think of them as “side” projects when in reality they’ve become a “side” business. It’s like I have no choice but to take them a bit seriously, though I do hope to find the time for a “love of the game” side project. Great post.
by avidphantasm | 2025-04-05 13:35:53+00:00
My lay understanding is that the US can’t have USD be the global reserve currency without running trade deficits. Countries need dollars because it’s what oil and other commodities are exchanged for. At some point, the only way to get dollars is by selling things to the US. If they turn around and buy an equal amount of things from the US, they wouldn’t have the dollars they need to buy things like oil.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-05 13:36:19+00:00
> Although why putting some of the largest rates on countries that almost don’t export while keeping some huge players at 10%, that I have no clue.

Israel got 17% but Iran got 10%.

> Madagascar and Falkland are strategically positioned, so maybe that’s the play?

1. LOL: there is no "play" here. Trade deficit = bad, so must be stopped.

2. Falkland is under the UK—like Diego Garcia—and so there is no new alliance to be formed.

BTW, Diego Garcia also got hit with tariffs, even though the only inhabitants are UK and US military personnel. There's a bunch of B-2s there right now:

* https://www.twz.com/air/b-2-spirits-amassed-on-diego-garcia-...

* https://newrepublic.com/post/193523/donald-trump-tariffs-us-...
by gpm | 2025-04-05 13:37:14+00:00
Simple ones probably do. Because a small country has both less buyers and less sellers.

Consider the people of the world to be a graph. Each person is a vertex, between each pair of people is a directed edge indicating how much they bought/sold from the other person. Assume every edge is selected independently at random.

Consider a country to be a set of people. The average weight of the edges crossing in/out of the set (treating incoming edges as positive and outgoing edges as negative) will be zero no matter the size of the set.

---

The bizarre part here is that they went from "models often assume this" to "it's something we should attempt to force to be true via taxes". Trying to force the world to fit your known to be incorrect model assumptions... doesn't make any sense as a policy.
by Apreche | 2025-04-05 13:37:31+00:00
A single family home is presumably owned by a single family that is actually living in that home. A large building with many apartments is owned by a wealthy landlord who is less likely to be living there. Of course the wealthy landlord should be taxed much more than the single family, that’s just common sense.

The problem is that the single family that can afford a whole house in a city, while less wealthy than the big landlord, is likely more wealthy than the tenants in the apartment building. Because the landlord is able to pass down the burden of the property tax to the tenants, the property tax becomes regressive.

There is no way to solve this problem by simply changing the rates around. If you lower the property tax on large buildings, it is not guaranteed to ease the burden on tenants. You will likely just end up increasing the profits for the landlords. A true solution requires a systemic change that taxes the landlord, but prevents that tax burden from being passed down to the tenants.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-04-05 13:37:40+00:00
I just got a RAV4 Prime (a “plugin hybrid” or PHEV).

In EV mode, it has 40 or so miles of range. That’s high enough that I never need to use gas during the week, unless I go to the next city over. It’s also low enough that it can always fully charge overnight without a special circuit.

If I need to go further, it just becomes a RAV4 Hybrid (with better performance - aka HV mode). No long waits or searching for chargers needed.

Generally I put in maybe a half tank of gas ($15) once a month. Especially in the US, I really think PHEVs make much more sense than EVs. BYD seems to make some really nice ones, but we’re sadly hostile to them.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-05 13:38:40+00:00
>I would be so pissed off if I were using a phone today from 10-20 years ago…

Phones today evolve at a glacial pace compared to the pace from 20 years ago. So it's a poor argument IMHO.

A flagships from 5 years ago (with a fresh battery) is just as usable today as it was when it came out. This wasn't the case 20 years ago.
by namdnay | 2025-04-05 13:39:02+00:00
As the great Matt Levine said:

Well, yes. I just like that they made up the numbers to get an exact negative 1. Again, I am a financial columnist, and I have a patriotic appreciation for the US’s export industry of finance, and two of that industry’s most popular products are:

1) Sprinkling some Greek letters on your work to add visual interest, and

2) Making up parameters to solve for the result you want.

Even in this tariff announcement, you see the US leaning into its comparative advantage.
by api | 2025-04-05 13:39:20+00:00
I'm not saying you're implying this, but I need to be the boring hall monitor to point out that while consensual submissive fantasies are extremely common there is none -- zero -- overlap with actual non-consensual sexual assault which I'd venture to say nobody (to within a rounding error of zero) finds appealing.

It's kind of like the difference between watching a scary movie or visiting a haunted house attraction vs. actually being chased by a brutal crazed murderer.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-04-05 13:40:13+00:00
When I first started using Unix in school in the early 1980s, at least a third of the time was using nroff/troff, tbl and eqn. Maybe another 20% playing rogue. The rest was used to become a vi/ex advanced user, writing csh and awk scripts, and learning C.

The article mentions the "t" in troff, but doesn't mention that "roff" was short for "run off". I forget what the "n" was for.
by xg15 | 2025-04-05 13:40:27+00:00
Had to read it again as well but yeah, that's how I'd understand it too. So the "offset in block" tokens are still not the same tokens as for the "real" ASCII letters, but they are the same tokens for all "weird ascii-like Unicode blocks". So the model can aggregate the training data from all those blocks and automatically "generalize" to similar characters in other blocks (by learning to ignore the "block identifier" tokens) even ones that have very little or no training examples themselves.

Edit: So this means if you want to sanitize text before passing it to an LLM, you don't only have to consider standard Unicode BMP characters but also everything that mirrors those characters in a different block. And because models can do Cesar ciphers with small offsets, possibly even blocks where the characters don't line up completely but are shifted by a small number.

Maybe it would be better to run the sanitizer on the tokens or even the embedding vectors instead of the "raw" text.
by ta20240528 | 2025-04-05 13:40:43+00:00
'The primary benefit of an EV is that you ~never need to stop and “refuel”'

I beg to differ: The primary benefit of an EV is that I am not handing over my hard-earned post-tax income for oil to countries that loath my way of life and my values.

Some decisions in life should transcend economics.
by 486sx33 | 2025-04-05 13:41:25+00:00
You’re missing a state of change. California uses coal, natural gas, and nuclear primarily. Nuclear efficiency is low at 33%. Best case you‘re charging your car from a new natural gas plant that is a combined cycle design which can potentially have up to 60% efficacy.

So 60% efficiency, minus 9.2% transmission loss, Minus charging losses and then electric motor efficiency loses… verses directly consuming fuel and putting the power to the wheels.

Electric cars are much less efficient if you consider the entire stream. If you want to use the argument that the gasoline needs to be refined and transported. Well so does natural gas. Or coal, or nuclear fuel rods, or bio mass, etc etc.

I’m not saying electric cars aren’t good. But we should really force people to charge them with solar if we want peak efficiency to save the planet.

Generating plant efficiency source - https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...

Electrical distribution loss in California 9.2% source - https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how...
Would this kind of security tool make sense for MCP servers?
by skilldeliver | 2025-04-05 13:41:25+00:00
I’ve been reading about some serious security issues in MCP implementations — things like command injection, SSRF, prompt injection via tool descriptions, and even cross-server “shadowing” attacks.

Got me thinking: should there be a dedicated tool to scan and audit MCP servers?

Rough idea: something that checks for misconfigurations, scans for common vulns (RCE, path traversal, etc.), flags suspicious tool definitions, and maybe even maps out agent context chains. More like a Burp Suite or Wireshark, but for MCP.

I grabbed scanmcp.com as a placeholder — not sure if I’ll build it yet. Just wondering if there’s actual demand or if anyone else is working on something similar.

Curious what others think — especially if you’re building with agents or looking at AI security stuff.
by RobinL | 2025-04-05 13:41:31+00:00
Interested in experiences switching back to VS Code from Cursor. I've recently (past couple weeks) been trying out copilot again on Vs code insiders, which has had agent mode for a while.

My perception is that it's caught up a lot. It still seems a bit slower to run agent, and slower to apply diffs. As the auto complete is a little worse. But it's no longer a no brainer to spend the extra on the cursor subscription.

For harder problems, I've also found myself reaching for long-context Gemini 2.5 pro using files-to-prompt, meaning I've been relying on copilot/cursor for less complex tasks
by pinewurst | 2025-04-05 13:41:34+00:00
IBM's Early Computers A Technical History by Charles J. Bashe, Emerson W. Pugh, John H. Palmer and Lyle R. Johnson

IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems by Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson and John H. Palmer

Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design by C. Gordon Bell (Author), J. Craig Mudge John E. McNamara
by treyd | 2025-04-05 13:41:48+00:00
Yeah the units cancel, that's the issue. The phrasing implies that after half a day it's received 85k terawatts which doesn't make any sense.

Power (kg m^2 / s^3) * Time (s) = Energy (kg m^2 / s^2)

Now from context it's obvious that what was meant is that Earth continually receives 170 terawatts from the sun. The phrasing is technically inaccurate, but it's a turn of phrase that works fine.