MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-09 16:53:10+00:00
The situation at the U.S. border re phone privacy is exceptionally good. In most countries this isn't a live issue because you have no such rights and everyone would laugh at you for asserting them. There are exceptions, perhaps Germany? In Britain they'll throw you in prison for refusing to give them your phone password, and if you do they'll throw you in prison for the wrongthink tweets they find on your phone.

Should Americans be subject to search-for-no-reason at their own border? No, and I hope that as these border issues work their way through the legal system this will get sorted out. Please note that the CBP can say whatever they want about you having to give them a phone password, but you don't have to. They might keep your phone for a while and fuck around with it.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-09 16:53:13+00:00
NAFTA wasn't inevitable. Globalization has largely been about (some) people making money as we all race to the bottom, and that has meant a steady supply of desperate people willing to sell their labor for less than the current crop of workers.

Arguably one motivation for Trump's tariffs is to onshore jobs. It's an incredibly brutish and stupid way to go about it, though. A much better way would have been to oppose NAFTA and similar global a marketplace policies, as Bernie Sanders has done for decades now (and has largely been in a pretty lonely position).
by jdalt | 2025-04-09 16:53:14+00:00
I graduated in 2009 in the middle of the Great Recession. I lived in a basement after graduation and did odd jobs for 9 months while learning how to build web apps. Then I took a job teaching English in South Korea.

After I got back from Korea 2 years later I faced a similar situation. Be flexible, take odd jobs, don't be afraid to work in the trades and use your free time to build durable economic skills for a job that you really want. Conditions will change (and they do so unevenly throughout the economy).

Get by and get ready. They can't repossess your brain. If you're from a financially unstable background - live cheap and be creative until you've built the stability you want.
by q_andrew | 2025-04-09 16:53:27+00:00
You're right - what I should have said is that a local store owner is getting the direct profits of their labor. I admit that one of the short-term benefits of a big box store coming to town is that their lowest paid employees get more protections. This comes at the cost of being held at arms length from the actual power structure of the company and makes the dollar general's business practices more unsustainable.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-09 16:53:39+00:00
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc

What I don't like are all the hidden variables in these systems. Even GPS, for example, is making some assumptions about what kind of roads you want to take and how to weigh different paths. LLMs are worse in this regard because the creators encode a set of moral and stylistic assumptions/dictates into the model and everybody who uses it is nudged into that paradigm. This is destructive to any kind of original thought, especially in an environment where there are only a handful of large companies providing the models everyone uses.
by OnionBlender | 2025-04-09 16:53:51+00:00
Has anyone else found that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages?

My boss keeps pestering me to get people to use these tools. I find they demo nicely for other languages, but aren't very good at non-trivial C++. Besides, our department's problems aren't from writing C++ too slowly. Our problems are a flaky build system, tightly coupled code, and teams that depend on one another spread across US, Europe, and South Asia.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-09 16:53:53+00:00
> Why should training be any different?

If you really can't think of a reason, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to offer you one you are willing to accept. This isn't a difficult or complex idea, so if you don't see it, why would anybody bother trying to convince you?

> (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)

This is lazy and obnoxious.
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-09 16:53:56+00:00
> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn.

I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back?

The history of civilization is the history of specialization. No one can re-build all the tools they rely on from scratch. We either let other people specialize, or we let machines specialize. LLMs are one more step in the latter.

The Luddites were right: the machinery in cotton mills was a direct threat to their livelihood, just as LLMs are now to us. But society marches on, textile work has been largely outsourced to machines, and the descendants of the Luddites are doctors and lawyers (and coders). 50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."
by parpfish | 2025-04-09 16:54:02+00:00
in this particular case you're probably right, especially for the people opposed to DG on 'local character' grounds.

but it's not like YIMBYs literally say "yes" to every development. there's also DG opposition on the basis of creating sprawl on the outskirts of town, and that's the type of opposition you'd probably hear from the strongtowns-loving YIMBY types. they are strongly opposed to the types of developments that increase sprawl because of long-term infrastructure costs, reduced walkability, etc.
by outer_web | 2025-04-09 16:54:19+00:00
> At the end of January, foreign countries owned $1.32 trillion worth of U.S. MBS, or 15% of the total outstanding, according to Ginnie Mae. The top owners: Japan, China, Taiwan and Canada.

I'm not sure a fraction of 15% is all that concerning. It especially wouldn't be if there was sufficient liquidity for others to buy up the discounted MBS.

But do mortgage rates follow the price of MBSes? That seems backward. The article says mortgage rates loosely follow the 10y and presumably more closely follow the Fed benchmark.
by Retric | 2025-04-09 16:54:23+00:00
The scope of what’s useful to know changes with tools, but having a bullshit detector requires actually knowing some things and being able to reason about the basics.

It’s not that LLM’s are particularly different it’s that people are less able to determine when they are messing up. A search engine fails and you notice, an LLM fails and your boss, customer, ect notices.
by Supermancho | 2025-04-09 16:54:36+00:00
Sounds like a miserable company. I wholly believe that the culture (or at least some small administrative group) is run by those making up arbitrary gatekeeping at best and looking to exploit inexperience at worst. Future prediction is certainly not their strong point. I didnt know much at 5yrs, given I had been at 2 companies with specific roles. This idea of some unicorn jr is a coke fueled fever dream, which is being touted as a virtue.
by mrandish | 2025-04-09 16:55:02+00:00
I was curious as it seems like a nice thing to have and I use Firefox, so I looked it up. It's been suggested and you can upvote it here: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/text-wrap-pretty-for-de.... Per the last post there (Aug 24).

> Mozilla standard position on this feature is positive > https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/993
by bko | 2025-04-09 16:55:13+00:00
I don't know, most of the things I'm reliant on, from my phone, ISP, automobile, etc are built on fragile interdependent supply chains provided by for-profit companies. If you're really worried about this, you should learn survival skills not the academic topics I'm talking about.

So if you're not bothering to learn how to farm, dress some wild game, etc, chances are this argument won't be convincing for "why should I learn calculus"
Show HN: Policy driven vulnerabilities scanning on free Gitlab account (CE) [video]
by kunalsin9h | 2025-04-09 16:55:36+00:00
Description: GitLab CI Component that lets you seamlessly protect your pipelines from vulnerable and malicious open source dependencies. The component integrates directly into your CI/CD workflow through the GitLab CI Catalog and allows you to establish policy-driven guardrails using Common Expression Language (CEL).

Key features:

- Set your own opinionated security policies as code using CEL - Detect and block risky OSS components before they enter your codebase - Seamless integration as a native GitLab CI Component - Available directly in the GitLab CI Catalog

Try and lets us know our thoughts!
by tim333 | 2025-04-09 16:56:01+00:00
A lot of voting, Brexit and other stuff, comes mostly to whether people are pissed off with the current situation or not. If pissed off they vote for a change as in Brexit, otherwise not. I'm not sure a lot of the reasoning gets much deeper than that.

I remember asking Brexit voters who said they didn't want EU regulations to name one actual regulation that inconvenienced them and I don't think I got one answer.
by tetha | 2025-04-09 16:56:06+00:00
> You think the sliders ought to be a wider range?

With this presentation, I'd think so.

Like, your presentation says this is an "order of magnitude estimation". However, the slider of "85 - 125 people on a plane" locks me into ~100 people on a plane, ~100k flights, and the hours is a bit weird. However, if I just put that in, I get 200k - 1M people no matter what hours I choose, and about 500k if I choose 1 hour. As an order of magnitude, that's correct and not bad.

Maybe something bigger & coarser could be interesting - high 100s, low 1000s, high 1000s and so on. We use that kind of magnitude estimation at work quite a bit.

It'd also be interesting to see a highlight where you estimated very incorrectly. I'm not certain if I had guessed 100k+ flights / day.
by hx8 | 2025-04-09 16:56:16+00:00
I agree fully. Having comfortable shoes with reasonable lifespans isn't a luxury.

If you spend more money and get a proportional increase in quality, that's not luxury. A luxury good occurs when the marginal increase in quality cannot be justified by the increase in price. For example, you could buy a quartz Casio for $25 that's more accurate than a $10,000 mechanical Rolex. Both tell you the same time.
by Empact | 2025-04-09 16:56:38+00:00
You’re begging the question. If fluoridation decreases IQ through developmental neurotoxicity, is the lost cognitive capacity in the general population justified by the protection of children with irresponsible parents (who do not enforce eg the brushing of teeth) from the consequences of caries? This is a real moral problem we ought to contend with.

I believe society suffers from lower IQs, and that targeted interventions against childhood caries can be applied effectively without dosing the whole population. Why don’t schools teach toothbrushing? Why not have the school nurse check children’s teeth, or have a dentist come to school periodically?
by ryandrake | 2025-04-09 16:56:45+00:00
This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-09 16:56:52+00:00
> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.

The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-04-09 16:57:00+00:00
I think you're looking at it from a weird angle...

"Every single one" in your team agreeing on a single specific technological choice is one of the rarest things I can image! Developers argue about libraries, frameworks, programming languages, services, etc., and I think it speaks for itself if Postgres is the thing that comes closest in bridging the gap at least on one layer in the tech stack. Postgres is a "conservative" choice with a very active community and extensible ecosystem.

Also, nobody is ever making use of their technological choice to its full extent, you'd rarely know what you'll need beforehand, and it's just nice not having to add other storage engines when that one feature request steps into your life.
by nkingsy | 2025-04-09 16:57:11+00:00
The example of the cat and detective hat shows that even with the latest update, it isn't "editing" the image. The generated cat is younger, with bigger, brighter eyes, more "perfect" ears.

I found that when editing images of myself, the result looked weird, like a funky version of me. For the cat, it looks "more attractive" I guess, but for humans (and I'd imagine for a cat looking at the edited cat with a keen eye for cat faces), the features often don't work together when changed slightly.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-04-09 16:57:32+00:00
Reminds me of one of my favorite stories on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2xjrdy/whe...

tl;dr - Company CTO hires off-shore dev consultant to write an app, the code is horrendously bad, doesn't even fulfill requirements, and has to be thrown out because it's such a bug-ridden mess. Company scrambles to produce the app internally and succeeds. Later, they need to launch a new product, CTO decides to rehire the same off-shore consultant.
by tenwz1 | 2025-04-09 16:57:32+00:00
My friend, I like you, and I like this place too. Most people on HN are very friendly. I understand your sadness. But please don't feel sad for me. I once read a book called On Liberty when I was a freshman in high school. I also read 1984 and The Road to Serfdom (stereotyped, some people may think that such books are banned from sale in China). At that time, I began to realize that our country restricted the freedom of citizens in some aspects. Later, I asked our university teacher, and she said that freedom is always relative, but I still don't quite understand this sentence. But there is one thing I can understand, that there is always a gap between real freedom and ideal freedom. For example, are your people really free? The words can be said very beautifully, but practice is often another matter. If you look at the development process of capitalist countries, have they also sacrificed the freedom of some people? I remember that your people flocked to RedNote a while ago, saying that the lower-class Americans worked several jobs to maintain the high rent. I was actually a little surprised, because in the past, such things would only be associated with our country. Are they free? Maybe I am making a choice between economy and freedom, but freedom is indeed not an independent concept. It is complex and related to many factors. So I simply don’t think about it. It is enough for me to work hard, improve myself, improve my life and create value.
by torginus | 2025-04-09 16:57:34+00:00
I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated.

In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster.

Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc.

And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue).

Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business.

American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use.

Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.
by cyberax | 2025-04-09 16:57:36+00:00
> It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.

Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated.

> Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?

Yes.

> If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.

And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-04-09 16:57:46+00:00
Ignoring the US political situation for a moment I want to point out how ridiculous modern phones and apps storage access given to their users is. You used to be able to mount a phone as a full hard drive and have access to all your files, do a real full backup without some encrypted databases that only facebook, google or apple hold the key for. The first tragedy is that we accepted that the US gives no rights to non citizens the second tragedy that no one talks about is that we accepted giving away our own data sovereignty and using devices that make us more vulnerable and effectively digital slaves.
by Peritract | 2025-04-09 16:57:49+00:00
You can offload the simpler things, but struggling with the simpler things is how you build the skills to handle the more complex ones that you can't hand off.

If the simpler thing in question is a task you've already mastered, then you're not losing much by asking an LLM to help you with it. If it's not trivial to you though, then you're missing an opportunity to learn.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-09 16:58:04+00:00
Surprised there isn't mention that a big part of the tariff strategy is to throw the equity markets into chaos in an effort to drive down the price of the 10-year bond. There was a panic last night because the 10 year bond price started going up as stocks were trading down, which is not supposed to happen. It would be truly disruptive if the whole game gets blown up by a lack of buyers for US debt.
by bpt3 | 2025-04-09 16:58:07+00:00
Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

Scarcity is very real, I'm not sure why you would feel otherwise. Fortunately, we have largely eliminated scarcity of the necessities of life due to economic policies that are as far from your suggestions as possible, but that doesn't mean that they are produced at no cost or that scarcity in general does not exist.

And you don't need to go back 100 years for precedent. We basically paid people to sit at home during covid, and I didn't see some sort of renaissance as a result. Why would this be any different?
by shishy | 2025-04-09 16:58:30+00:00
> If there's a structural ratchet mechanism, where outsourcing a particular kind of manufacturing work means the US can never do it effectively again, doesn't every tick of the ratchet pose significant risks?

Yes, and in an earlier post Ben made that argument and said that the broader conversation on tariffs has been straw manning and wasn't trying to understand where they were coming from. He did more or less agree that the post-ww2 and post-nixon economic setup created this and articulated why it's problematic.

His thesis is just that this approach is wrong, and that it's hard to unpack the reasons because you don't know what to trust: is what the admin says a PR problem, a bad argument, directional or literal, etc.

Here's the older post (the one I shared in this thread was a continuation): https://stratechery.com/2025/trade-tariffs-and-tech/
by krakotuoa | 2025-04-09 16:58:42+00:00
it does happen and companies don't like to talk about it and most have existing actors still collecting paychecks. however, we have caught the whole gambit. A lot of applicants are good the problem is there is a subset that will go to extreme lengths to trick you. Competitors will do it, and even other governments will be depending on your industry.

We talked to some recruiters recently and they essentially said atleast 1 step of the hiring process must be in person unless a valid reason can be made. i.e. single mother taking care of child going through a divorce backed up by a court record.

One fun thing to do is stress test their GPU / CPU out during part of a coding exam. (Only do this for 99% confirmed cases) This can slow the deepfake software down so much that it starts looking messed up and obvious. Securing employee onboarding with KYE IAM is also critical. Most of these people don't put much effort on the 360 review of an applicant and verifications beyond video calls spot them early on. There are countless solutions to the problem so you need to be creative. These applicants think they are next level fakes, but a lot can be spotted a mile away.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-09 16:59:05+00:00
It's not though. The US has been getting compensated for its military investment all around the world.

The explicit architecture of the petrodollar system is that the US will protect international shipping, and in return all petroleum contracts will be priced and executed in dollars. This makes the USD the international reserve currency, and every country participating in international trade needs to hold USD.

How can they put those USD to work? By buying up safe US government debt and other financial instruments.

The US has been rewarded with near unlimited borrowing ability assuming it remained the most stable, powerful, and trusted partner. We could use that to fund practically any investment we want.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-09 16:59:05+00:00
> We should also acknowledge that most modern developers aren’t as skilled or knowledgeable as they believe.

I think this is probably true. I suspect that most people think they are above average, but of course it is impossible for most people to be above average

AI tools will definitely allow below average programmers to get themselves into situations where their reach has exceeded their grasp, and the everyone else will pay for that
by rvz | 2025-04-09 16:59:09+00:00
No it isn't. MCP is a security nightmare, just as bad as crypto "smart contracts".

The protocol already has been riddled with embarrassing vulnerabilities which is already a badly designed standard and would already be a disaster if it was applied all over the web.

Security consultants are having a feast on breaking these LLM apps just like they did with the crappy "smart contracts" in crypto. Adding MCP to the mix would just make it all worse.

Neither of them is "Web 3.0".