MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-04-15 15:12:59+00:00
I'm surprised to see this kind of blue-anon discourse here. Why are we discussing the players of this administration "whacking" each other? There's plenty of horrible things happening in broad daylight, harms that the administration is inflicting on the American people. Why add a layer of speculation about a power struggle where they may or may not be trying to harm each other, when there's no reason to believe such a thing exists? What matters is that they're getting along well enough in the moment to push through their agenda. Hell, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of running for a third term, which would in and of itself be an illegal power grab; no need to speculate some scenario where Trump gets martyred and Vance takes over when the much simpler and more likely scenario is that Trump just ignores the law and does it himself.
by allemagne | 2025-04-15 15:13:37+00:00
Is it possible that Elon and Orange man have made mistakes? Even pretty bad mistakes?

Is it possible there could be "objective" facts about these mistakes that make Elon and Orange man look bad, even when reported fairly?

Is it possible the New York Times could be reporting on these facts?

Is that even possible? Are there any worlds you could conceive of where this is the case?
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-15 15:13:58+00:00
Again, not necessarily. Different things cause different cancers. You're unlikely to get melanoma from smoking; you're unlikely to get liver cancer from a sunburn.

CTs may not cause significant amounts of wrist/knee cancer - I can't speak either way on that - but that wouldn't mean they're 100% safe elsewhere. For starters, wrist/knee imaging needs less radiation - they're relatively thin parts of the body, and relatively small regions.
by 42772827 | 2025-04-15 15:13:59+00:00
The American Empire never existed, because it never could. The US made the explicit decision not to occupy the defeated forces after WWII, save for strategic forces in place to protect the interests of the host countries. The US opened its market (the only market of size left and still the largest consumer bases in the world, by far) with no tariffs.

What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer interested in subsidizing the global order.

The current discussion re: “bringing back manufacturing” is making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is involved: taking him at his word. The point isn’t to bring back all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some manufacturing will return — whatever is high value added and benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.

Also, those who are looking for an American decline as comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is, it’s still — still — the safest place to park capital, still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest of the world combined… and also holding the virtually all of the world's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a requirement for semiconductor production.
by oceanplexian | 2025-04-15 15:14:48+00:00
Radiation is poorly understood in healthcare due to the LNT Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model.

The science is based on assumptions and extrapolation, they drew a linear plot line between rates of cancers at different levels of radiation, and then extended it down and to the left. But there is no actual experimental data showing a relationship between low dose radiation and cancer (Ironically there IS evidence that rates of overall cancers are lower in high altitude cities like Denver with more background radiation).
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-15 15:14:54+00:00
What if a war erupts?

I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons.

But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality.

We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rather we should plan on the assumption that we want to confer maximum benefit on the US in likely non-apocalyptic future timelines.
by xnx | 2025-04-15 15:15:08+00:00
You are correct. They have control of executive, legislative, and (more or less) judicial. They could make any of this permanent through law, but they don't want to.

They don't want to work. They don't want the visibility. They don't want the accountability/blowback.

We've already embarrassed ourselves by electing these clowns twice. We'll really have failed if every responsible person and accomplice isn't voted out at the first possible opportunity.
by digikata | 2025-04-15 15:15:22+00:00
I think the mistake here is the model of low-skill/high-skill labor is not a useful distinction. Manufacturing is high skill period, however there are low-infrastructure and high-infrastructure products and factories. The labor wages themselves are a factor, but an increasingly minor factor in product costs. By bypassing investment in US manufacturing skills and infra, the US sat itself on the sidelines for the ability to build, staff, and supply modern low, medium and high infrastructure factories.

It's not impossible to build back, but it would require long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than just tariffs.
by simonw | 2025-04-15 15:15:55+00:00
Blocking aggressive crawlers - whether or not they have anything to do with AI - makes complete sense to me. There are growing numbers of badly implemented crawlers out there that can rack up thousands of dollars in bandwidth expenses for sites like SourceHut.

Framing that as "you cannot have our user's data" feels misleading to me, especially when they presumably still support anonymous "git clone" operations.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-15 15:16:08+00:00
Okay, it seems like you're talking about me. I don't particularly support Trump and didn't vote for the guy but his immigration policy is one place I agree. I believe that every single illegal should be deported and probably barred from re-entry or citizenship as a punitive deterrent. I do not believe anyone besides Trump will actually do this.

I do, however, disagree with Trump's targeting of pro-Palestinians. If Mahdawi originally immigrated illegally we should block a pathway to citizenship, as we should for every other current or former illegal. However, this appears to be done for the wrong reasons.

Tarring everyone who dislikes illegal immigration and believes the "soft" solutions have utterly failed as a bigot is inaccurate and unproductive.
by _flux | 2025-04-15 15:16:24+00:00
> I agree Rust is easy to learn. I've done it 4 or 5 times now.

https://www.lurklurk.org/effective-rust/ could be for you; while it starts from the very basics—for a person that knows how to program—it does seem to cover a lot and in a structured manner.

I expect one to learn something new at least something by page 70 :).
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-15 15:17:02+00:00
> Thanks to HN's naive and draconian policy prohibiting political discussion

No such policy exists. There was a brief experiment with such a policy, years ago, and it was terminated early when it proved unworkable.

It is true that most, especially high-controversy, political discussion is outside of what the community here views as simultaneously being intellectually stimulating and something that is likely to be discussed without descending into an emotion-driven flamewar with of hyperbole, lies,and people talking past each other that has no value. And, fairly frequently, the controversial political topics that don't die right away to community moderation reinforce this point.

The strengths HN has a forum on some issues over places loke Twitter or Reddit or even yelling at people on a street corner simply are not there for many political controversies.
by speak_plainly | 2025-04-15 15:17:39+00:00
One thing that helps is to be charitable.

Ideas in general are difficult to express and people struggle with conveying them separately from their private ideas, personal experiences, and personal reasons for believing what they believe.

If you want to be a good interlocutor, you have to deeply absorb what the other person is thinking and sometimes even help them develop their understanding with the hope that others can do the same for you. We are all toddlers at times.
by cs702 | 2025-04-15 15:17:39+00:00
Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:

> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.

> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.

> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”

> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.

The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:

> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-15 15:17:49+00:00
The solution is to pay everyone a living wage, regardless of job, and disconnect healthcare from employment. Lots of inertia against those ideas though. So, instead, "good manufacturing jobs" is the parroted point. Any job is a good job if you can live off of it.

(tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-15 15:17:57+00:00
That's not true. Painting the "other" as some sort of one-dimensional malevolent retard isn't doing you or anyone else any favors. I promise.

There are real people, even smart people, on the other team. They have thoughts, kids, impressive degrees, goals unrelated to politics. They enjoy sunshine and hiking. They think they're doing what they're doing for good reasons. They believe themselves to be good people. They might even believe you to be a good person.
by filoleg | 2025-04-15 15:18:10+00:00
> If you've made up your mind (even if, theoretically, it could be changed) why would you have an argument about it in the first place?

Because, in most of those cases, my mind is made up given the information I’d had access to and the points I’ve seen/heard made regarding the topic up to this point. If an argument brings up new (to me) points and information, it is all a fair game, and I am not holding onto my “already made up” position that dearly. If I consider a position “already made up,” it is usually due to me rarely encountering anything new on that topic. But I am not going to pre-emptively declare “my mind is made up, and nothing can change it,” all it could take is a single piece of new info or a new point that I was yet to encounter.

TLDR: the entire meaning of “my mind is made up on this topic already” to me personally is “over a course of a long time, I am yet to encounter any new materially relevant info on the topic that could change my mind, and all i keep hearing is the same stuff I heard before (but I am willing to change my perspective if there are any new and relevant points), so I expect the likelihood of my mind being changed on this to be low (given the low likelihood of any new relevant info being introduced)”.

> Argument is there to explore that to which you have not yet made a mind. Your mind won't change because there is no basis on which to change from.

Agreed wholeheartedly, except i would completely remove the “that to which you have not yet made a mind” part.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-15 15:18:15+00:00
> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.

This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.

Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
by _bin_ | 2025-04-15 15:18:15+00:00
Question, since I can't seem to find the answer anywhere: is he actually discussing deportation or is he effectively talking about using Salvadoran prisons on a contract basis? That's probably not especially humane; then again, neither are existing private prisons. We do have crazy crowding and overflow problems so I can understand the motivation though I doubt El Salvador is providing much in the way of better conditions.
by batdata | 2025-04-15 15:18:48+00:00
For April Fools’, I built a fun demo called QuackToSQL — you quack into your mic, and it transcribes your “quack” into a SQL query, entirely in the browser.

It uses transformers.js (Hugging Face) with WebGPU for real-time transcription using Whisper, all running locally with no server-side code. I wrote up a deep dive into how it works, what WebGPU enables, and the future of local browser-based AI.

Also touches on challenges like model size, browser compatibility, and why this shift might matter beyond just fun demos.
by taylodl | 2025-04-15 15:18:49+00:00
Thing is, manufacturing in America is up. The 2008 crises dealt a blow, but manufacturing has been building-back. I don't think people realize how many high-value items are made in the United States. Let the East Asians make our mass-consumer junk while we focus on the high-value stuff.

Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective policy.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bou...
by ukoki | 2025-04-15 15:19:00+00:00
It doesn't matter if it rots, burns etc -- all that matters is that it rots slower than the time it took to grow the wood it was made of

Eg:

You have a forest of trees that take 20 years to mature

You cut the trees and regrow the forest every 20 years

You use the timber to build houses (or furniture or whatever) that are _on average_ replaced after 60 years.

This will pull 3x the carbon from the atmosphere than just the forest by itself
by noinsight | 2025-04-15 15:19:08+00:00
> allow better network management

Yeah, this would definitely block that.

DNS-based (hostname) allowlisting is just starting to hit the market (see: Microsoft's "Zero Trust DNS" [1]) and this would kill that. Even traditional proxy-based access control is neutered by this and the nice thing about that is that it can be done without TLS interception.

If you're left with only path-based rules you're back to TLS interception if you want to control network access.

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/networkingblog/anno...
by mjburgess | 2025-04-15 15:19:27+00:00
One has to imagine it's vanishingly rare to hear anyone call for "the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims" -- esp. by students at western universities.

Expressing support for groups who have taken such actions is not calling for terrorism -- almost every state in the world has engaged in terrorism. Plausibly the CIA's (recent) use of torture prisons and kiddnapping was in large part about terror for political ends. Yet one can express support for the US, and indeed, the CIA in other actions (eg., non-terror actions against military targets).

In very many cases today it seems "terrorism" is a political accusation that is used to suppress political expression and as a way around free speech and freedom of assembly laws. It is, I suppose, especially effective when acts of terrorism have recently been committed.

The state, in having the prerogative to decide who counts as a terrorist and therefore what kinds of speech count as "support for terrorism" thereby basically grants itself universal licence to suppress any kind of speech it dislikes.

In the case of israel/hamas, since gaza has been flattened by military bombardment and has no effective capability to resit or mount any opposition to israel -- speech in support of israel's enemies is particularly powerless. There's bascially nothing anyone can do, let alone as a student. So even to care, at all, what students in universities are saying shows this cannot plausibly be about the actual actions of hamas.

The most charitable interpretation of why this is happening is that pro-israeli students and civil society groups (perhaps often leftwing) are engaged in a moral panic about their peers who have turned against israel. And higher-ups in power are responding to this moral panic. The backfire effects from this on US society will be enormous --- lots of people will be asking, "why is the US state engaged in violent actions against students for the sake of another country who is in an extremely powerful position?". Knowing US citizens, I think this will rub a lot of people the wrong way, in the end.
by helle253 | 2025-04-15 15:19:53+00:00
My wife is a naturalized citizen (and a brown one with a muslim name, at that)), and to be perfectly honest I'm no longer confident this admin won't start looking into denaturalizating people like her, for no reason except their ethnicity.

It's clear they're taking a 'the Court has written their law. Now let them enforce it.' approach, and it's not clear anybody is going to stop them.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-15 15:19:55+00:00
With streaming, the service provider is generally also controlling the clients, so they should be much better off when it comes to client behavior.

In case of bring-your-own-client, the incentives are exactly the same: Clients would likely default to good behavior as network health equals user experience, and exactly like BitTorrent there will be neither punishment nor need for it if some clients disobey.
by dfee | 2025-04-15 15:20:06+00:00
On mocking your database transaction: I was there, and on behalf of an LLM I reasoned with, I refactored that bit out to be an actor that carries the transaction, and passing messages (alongside a oneshot channel for return value). The benefit isn’t just that you’re not managing a transaction, but also that you don’t need to coordinate the transaction between multiple async paths where lifetimes and ownership really blow up!

I didn’t use an actor framework, for better or worse, but rolled my own.

Great write up!
by windward | 2025-04-15 15:20:07+00:00
>Rather than mentally implementing something in C/C++, and then thinking, “how do I translate this to Rust in a way that satisfies the borrow-checker?”, it’s better to think, “how can I accomplish the goal within the semantics of Rust, thinking in terms of linearity and lifetimes?”.

I still do think about it all in C++ terms. Borrowing and ownership are just specific terminology for things that you must know to create a correct C++ program of any useful complexity and performance. Two common anti-Rust arguments are:

- It's hard to learn

- You should just git gud at C++

But the Euler diagram of people who struggle with the borrow checker and people who are gud enough at C++ has no overlap. Likewise String and &str.

I also think it means the performance user story is, somehow, underappreciated, especially for naive users. Immutable borrows and moves are just part of the development experience, and copying is the unobvious path. And if you still struggle you can often just toss in `rayon` in ways that you never could with `std::execution::par`
by sho_hn | 2025-04-15 15:20:10+00:00
Another very cool project in this space is TRX, which is based on a decompilation of the original Tomb Raider 1 & 2 source code:

https://github.com/LostArtefacts/TRX

Of the various Tomb Raider fan engine projects, this is basically the "vanilla, but modernized and well-maintained" historical archival option.

I contributed the MacOS port to this one, and last year I dabbled a little in porting an older random git snapshot to the web:

https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/ (using a fan level, as to not post the original game content online)

It's a very rough hack, so it's not upstream at the moment.

The TRX team is a wonderful and passionate bunch of people to hang around.
by BlackFly | 2025-04-15 15:20:11+00:00
I feel in rust you want to be a lot more judicious in where you introduce and deal with traits than in other languages with interfaces. Author blames lifetimes for this but I think the truth is that it is because there is no garbage collector so not everything is a fat pointer and fat pointers cannot have generic methods anyways because generic methods are monomorphized so they feel a bit lame even if you would reach for them.

Thus you almost certainly need parametric polymorphism whereas other languages described would use implementation/interface/inheritance/duck polymorphism. Parametric polymorphism explodes rapidly if you aren't judicious and it doesn't feel very agile.

Once you are dealing in traits, does that trait have a copy bound or am I going to need to take a borrow and also grab a lifetime next to my trait parameter? Or should I just hide it all by slapping my mock with an `impl Trait for Arc<RefCell<Mock>>` or equivalent?
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-15 15:20:17+00:00
> Original article definitely said "per person".

Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare absolute production.

> China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption

Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US residential is more than 2x of China's residential power use, but that's relative to the much larger production use. In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not that different actually:

CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)

US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)

Now, on a per-capita basis the difference is staggering, as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...