MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bobjordan | 2025-04-03 17:01:27+00:00
I'm an American that owns/operates a design and manufacturing company -- we build customer products in China and export to USA buyers. Let's say we build the customer product and sell it to them for $20 ex-works China. That means USA customer must pick it up at our dock and pay the shipping fee. Lets ignore the shipping fee to keep it simple. Assume USA customer currently sells the product for $80 in USA. If USA customer now needs to pay 35% import tariffs on $20/unit, then their cost goes up $7 USD. If USA customer passes 100% of that cost to their own final end customer, then they need to start selling it for $87 USD. So 35% tariff ultimately turns into a price increase of 8.75% for consumers.

But actually, tariffs have been 10-25% anyway for a number of years. So for existing products, some tariff cost was already included in that $7 total tariff cost. So, for existing products, the cost may go up ~$3.50 and our customer would sell it for ~$83.50 and the actual increase consumers would see is ~ 4.5% increase.

Now, this is a typical pricing scenario for our USA customers, they are selling individual products that cost $20 in China at volume, in USA at retail for ~3x-5x the per unit purchase cost from China, this is quite common. Now, the USA customer must buy ~5000pcs to get that $20 USD unit cost, while consumers get to buy only 1pcs and pay $87 USD, whether or not that is fair pricing given the risks and R&D costs, that's just the reality. Anyway, I'm not sure of the ex-works cost of shoes, but I'm highly confident big brands like Nike sell them for at least 5X the ex-works cost. So the math would be similar.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-03 17:01:38+00:00
>I liked Sowell's book, "Wealth, Poverty and Politics". Can you recommend one of Piketty's books?

I'd say start with Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. Its a great read, if a bit thick (its a very large tome indeed and very information dense)

>Is that necessarily true? The US has abundant natural resources. Tesla could be mining lithium a few hundred miles away from their factory instead of importing it...

Its about access, cost, amount, etc. One company getting lithium is a rounding error. The entire market for lithium is bigger than Tesla and even electric cars. Then there is the entire question of how fast you can get the lithium online. Its not like most (if any) of the businesses reliant on lithium - which again, more than just auto makers certainly - take in raw lithium and produce something with it. It is typically pre-processed depending on its use. So that needs to come online too. Also, is there enough of the US workforce that can get this material online quickly? We're talking years before something comes online in sufficient quantity to be meaningful, let alone replace other sources.

Then you have to ask how much of the given resource do we even have? Whats the quality? Not all lithium deposits are the same, after all.

And many more questions I am not likely thinking about, and this is only in regard to lithium. Think about the raw materials for everything in our lives - gold, silver, uranium, iron etc. and you'll find in more cases than not its simply unfeasible to start mining & processing it in the US, you will have to import it.

Your idea of what this takes is, frankly, a bit too simplistic to be realistic or useful until it answers all of these kinds of questions.
by joshdickson | 2025-04-03 17:01:44+00:00
Thank you very much for your feedback. Building a great product that did not have variable usage costs that allowed for a generous free tier was my primary motivation for undertaking this project. While there is a need to monetize, I also believe there is a niche for an app with a more expansive free tier than exists in the space currently.

Only using the OFF database would be untenable to me as an end user. I think most people do not want to know or care about where the data is coming from, they just want it to be accurate and easy to use. I've listed the usability reasons here for why I can't offer that how I want with only OFF (and that's no dig to OFF, it is a fantastic project, and a primary motivator for this project and its license structure).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43570775
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-03 17:02:13+00:00
I'm not proposing that this all happen on an L1, of course you need some time for various parties to decide whether settlement should proceed. Nor am I saying that all ledgers everywhere would benefit from this change.

I'm just saying that many businesses would benefit (or become feasible in the first place) if the time between service-rendered and payment-pending were sub-second and built into the product and instead of relying on month-long-billing cycles. It would also be beneficial if the infrastructure for handling that process were common to both parties rather than having each of them track it separately hoping they agree on what is owed after the fact.
by teolemon | 2025-04-03 17:02:16+00:00
Hi Josh: Pierre, Open Food Facts NGO co-founder. 1. Generic, non-branded foods & 2. Simple prepared foods that ease food entry: Those two could be solved in a deterministic way, and we'd be happy for a separate Open Food Facts hosted API endpoint (basically a small backend serving a combination of all national generic databases), or improvement to the core software 3. Restaurant foods - Open Prices (our effort to collect geo-located prices on products) could be an entry point to collect menus, and potentially estimate nutrition for food in restaurants, since we have support for products without barcode. 4. Micronutrients beyond those reported by the brand. - We have an issue to propose approximation of micro-nutrients from reputable database: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/issues...

We're happy to cover more use-cases, so feel free to join the project and contribute your time/coding skills to help us solve those issues. https://slack.openfoodfacts.org or https://forum.openfoodfacts.org or directly https://github.com/openfoodfacts
by marcuskane2 | 2025-04-03 17:02:31+00:00
It is! Or at least, it can be.

The exact lines are a bit blurry and subjective, but this is a decent overview: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/copyrightinfo/fairuse.html

If you're charging people to watch in a movie theater, you can't pretend that's educational. But if you want to show a video in a classroom that's relevant to the coursework, it's absolutely covered under fair use.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-03 17:02:46+00:00
That is one exception, and it's only because Huel reports that info since it's a fortified meal replacement product. The same way a multivitamin would have that info on its label.

But consider that OpenFoodFacts can't give you that info on just about anything else, especially not basic foods like "apples" or "tofu" or "chicken breast".

I'm not dumping on the project. It's really useful to have a database of packaged food labels. It's just not trying to solve this problem.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-04-03 17:02:50+00:00
This addresses questions I had about certificate generation across nodes/regions.

Slightly off topic, but something nice about Caddy is that it automatically falls back on ZeroSSL (if you have an email address defined) when you hit letsencrypt rate limits. I have a case where more certificates for a root domain are needed than LE is capable of providing, and this fallback solves for the rate limit problem seamlessly.
by keithxm23 | 2025-04-03 17:03:13+00:00
> but many on this very site would need to give up a little bit of their privilege to reduce the pain felt by many of their fellow citizens.

Agreed. However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most. The pain is felt most by the low-skill workers you mentioned earlier.

If the solution was instead along the lines of changing tax-brackets to tax the 'privileged' more, that might have better addressed the problem you mention in the beginning.
by groovybits | 2025-04-03 17:03:19+00:00
Steam Deck owner since launch here -- I wouldn't say the Verified status is a lie, but there have been instances where games have received Verified badge status at launch, but performed poorly on Deck.

Some popular examples of this;

1. Baldur's Gate 3: It has Verified status, but the community unanimously agrees that the performance is very poor around Act 3, and makes the game nearly impossible to finish on Deck.

2. Spider-Man 2: It had Verified status at launch, but performed poorly in terms of graphics and visuals. It was recently downgraded to Playable status, meaning you have to change the graphics settings to comfortably play the game.

Personally, I think Valve's definition of Verified [1] is too vague. The 4 criteria don't actually mention anything about graphics or performance - it only says it should have "good default settings". What does that actually look like when you play it? Additionally, how much of the game is tested when evaluating those settings?

Valve doesn't actually advertise the process of how the badge is assigned, that I'm aware. Is the game 100% completed in evaluation? What percentage of input is there between Valve and the developer? Are certain publishers or developers given any bias or leeway? That part is still opaque to the end-user.

I think the Verification process is a good first cut at standardizing PC specs, where before there weren't any. But it can definitely be improved.

1: https://www.steamdeck.com/verified
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-03 17:03:23+00:00
> The u.S. didn't negotiate protectionist policies against their own exports. Can you cite a single example of this?

Oh yes the hell we did. I was running an ecommerce store when this happened, it's been a disaster for US entrepreneurs who have any model other than dropship from China - https://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_037....

> A more charitable explanation is that the U.S. has been all in on globalization and free trade since the 1970s and the rest of the world took a protectionist stance in response. I'm sure the rest of the world had their reasons. But the U.S. does now, too. Globalization and free trade that only substantially flows in one direction simply is not sustainable.

We negotiated those free trade agreements. Stop acting like we were being taken advantage of. Now, if you want to argue that American labor has been hosed, then I agree with that too, but China didn't do that - Nike did. None of these idiotic tariffs are going to help the American worker either - what remains of accessible opportunity for the masses has already become more like sharecropping with huge corporations owning the plantation, and it's only going to get worse under these policies.
by atq2119 | 2025-04-03 17:03:23+00:00
A couple of things. In practice, most goods are actually priced as cost-plus, with very thin margins, and any response in prices is highly asymmetric.

If the purchase costs for a good suddenly increase, retailers will increase prices very quickly because they would otherwise start losing money very quickly.

If demand for goods decreases, that doesn't affect the retailer's cost of goods at all, and if they were to reduce their prices, they'd eliminate their thin margins. From their perspective, it's better to sit on inventory for a while.

So any downward pressure on prices would happen much more slowly.

BTW, this kind of asymmetry is why a bit of inflation is good, actually. Inflation acts as a universal and permanent downward pressure on (real) prices, in the sense that if retailers and others are unable to justify an increase in nominal prices to their customers, their real prices will drop.
by andy_ppp | 2025-04-03 17:03:41+00:00
I think this is great and I was thinking about doing the same thing, you could use a few different LLMs to do a kind of adversarial check of calories for a thing and use a load of other techniques to improve the dataset over time. It's hardly as if the dataset in something like MyFitnessPal is completely perfect. You could probably figure out boundaries too so if we know 100g of a food does the protein/fat/carbs/sugar/fibre/water etc. content wildly exceed the boundaries/totals you could get it to review it's findings, ignore that LLM, fill in from a different food db etc. etc.

Incidentally o3-mini-high got the fried breakfast I added to a tracking app this morning within 50 calories!
by vinceguidry | 2025-04-03 17:03:53+00:00
> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way.

Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
by darawk | 2025-04-03 17:04:18+00:00
The loss of trust issue is the one I worry about most. However, it's also true that the key players who we've implemented tariffs against have had them against us for years, and we've simply absorbed that.

I don't like the mechanism he chose to implement them, or the sharpness with which they were imposed, but I do think implementing actual proper reciprocal tariffs phased in over a reasonable period of time was a good idea. And I agree with you re: the service/goods issue. Them excluding services in their trade deficit calculation is by far the dumbest part of this plan.
by genewitch | 2025-04-03 17:05:20+00:00
the odd thing, i suppose, is i probably won't use the site as i don't watch broadcast TV at all; but just for research, testing / using / tuning speech to text (translate and transcribe,) and comparing coverage of news stories it is invaluable. It would be awful if it had to shut down because it was linked on a VC forum where people often defend IP.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-03 17:05:58+00:00
I don't know who these people are that you're talking about, who only propose taxes on billionaires and not the rest of the upper class, or who have compared those two numbers and seen they are different. I would imagine you're talking about two different groups with different figures.

Regardless, "taxing the rich" is not one mediocre policy, but several interdependent policies. It's not just picking the 5 richest people in the world and taking their money. The transformation doesn't come from redistributing $20 billion (wherever that figure is from) but encouraging executives to reinvest into their company instead of trying to suck as much cash out as possible.

Bobby Kotick making $155 million a year while Activison lays off hundreds of employees is insane. What on God's earth could you possibly need more than $20 million a year for? That is not right no matter you slice it. That money needs to be aggressively taxed so it is instead used to keep people employed at a much lower tax rate, not in the hopes that the government can use it for spending.
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-04-03 17:05:59+00:00
Interesting. From what I've seen, the lack of empathy is the root of most of the political problems in the US.

If people put the welfare of others first, for example, taxpayer funded universal healthcare wouldn't even be something that was debated, it would be implemented with as much fuss as we have over painting lane markers on streets. But Americans care less for their fellow American than most other countries out there it seems.

How would removing what little empathy that there is improve matters?
by shw1n | 2025-04-03 17:06:17+00:00
this is actually in the footnotes and addressed by the "thinking in bets" section

"[9] Fully understanding I can be the one in the wrong -- however, when this is the case, the person explaining is usually able to:

understand my argument convey their disagreement in good faith without circular reasoning or rhetorical tricks"

"There's a 40% chance this succeeds because of A, 25% chance of B, 10% of X, and 5% something we haven't thought of"
by sheer_health | 2025-04-03 17:06:17+00:00
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by WorldMaker | 2025-04-03 17:06:41+00:00
Farm and construction equipment the colors are dominated by brand. Team Green Equipment versus Team Red Equipment versus Team Yellow Equipment versus Team Orange Equipment, pick your side. Each side is effectively monochromatic within whatever their brand tolerance is for their brand's color. John Deere's green is a very specific single Pantone shade and has stuck to it consistently as long as color standards have allowed them to be that consistent.

From a buyer's perspective there's still a choice of color if you have no allegiance to brand, but the monochromatic tribalism of each brand (and their loyalists) is strangely fascinating.
by suchintan | 2025-04-03 17:06:43+00:00
Hey HN, we were playing around with MCPs over the weekend and thought it would be cool to build an MCP that lets Claude / Cursor / Windsurf control your browser: https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/tree/main/integrations...

Just for context, we’re building Skyvern, an open source AI Agent that can control and interact with browsers using prompts, similar to OpenAI’s Operator.

The MCP Server can:

- This allows Claude to navigate to docs websites / stack overflow and look up information like the top posts on hackernews - https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/tree/main/integrations...

- This allows Cursor to apply for jobs / fill out contact forms / login + download files / etc - https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/tree/main/integrations...

- Connect Windsruf to take over your chrome while running Skyvern in “local” mode - https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/tree/main/integrations...

We built this mostly for fun, but can see this being integrated into AI agents to give them custom access to browsers and execute complex tasks like booking appointments, downloading your electricity statements, looking up freight shipment information, etc
by nottorp | 2025-04-03 17:07:22+00:00
Only if Apple provides a stream of clean microfibre cloths and someone to lay it out for me and close the laptop with care.

Otherwise they'd better lay off the drugs that generated that thinness fetish and make sturdy devices again.

(Note that i don't see any button traces on my m3 mbpro yet. it's close to a year old. And I'm not the kind that keeps the tv remote in the plastic bag that it was delivered in, probably the opposite.)
by apitman | 2025-04-03 17:07:40+00:00
I thought about almost this exact thing recently. I hope we're able to keep the best games running forever.

For games that are fun I think you can leave in balance issues and even features-not-bugs. It's trickier for things like netcode bugs that are purely a negative.

Really grateful Id release their source eventually. Really hoping the same will happen for AoE2 someday.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-03 17:08:32+00:00
Seeing as much of the discussion here is about LLMs, not just the shortcomings of natural language as a programming language, another LLM-specific aspect is how the LLM is interpreting the natural language instructions it is being given...

One might naively think that the "AI" (LLM) is going to apply it's intelligence to give you the "best" code in response to your request, and in a way it is, but this is "LLM best" not "human best" - the LLM is trying "guess what's expected" (i.e. minimize prediction error), not give you the best quality code/design per your request. This is similar to having an LLM play chess - it is not trying to play what it thinks is the strongest move, but rather trying to predict a continuation of the game, given the context, which will be a poor move if it thinks the context indicates a poor player.

With an RL-trained reasoning model, the LLM's behavior is slightly longer horizon - not just minimizing next token prediction errors, but also steering the output in a direction intended to match the type of reasoning seen during RL training. Again, this isn't the same as a human, applying their experience to achieve (predict!) a goal, but arguably more like cargo-cult reasoning - following observed patterns of reasoning in the training set, without the depth of understanding and intelligence to know if this is really applicable in the current context, nor with the ability to learn from it's mistakes when it is not.

So, while natural language itself is of course too vague to program in, which is part of the reason that we use programming languages instead, it's totally adequate as a way to communicate requirements/etc to an expert human developer/analyst, but when communicating to an LLM instead of a person, one should expect the LLM to behave as an LLM, not as a human. It's a paperclip maximizer, not a human-level intelligence.
by wishfish | 2025-04-03 17:08:55+00:00
There's an interesting comparison to ChromeOS here. Thinking about managed Linux desktops for consumers. SteamOS would possibly be a good, more private alternative in the near future if Steam ever released the OS for wide use outside of handhelds. Could imagine people buying SteamOS laptops for grandparents or kids as an alternative to ChromeOS or even iPads.