MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdtsc | 2025-04-07 04:11:57+00:00
> Waiting to pay: The 1.1% drop in returns so far may be tied to the fact that the number of returns with balances due – as opposed to a refund paid out – has been going up in recent years, said North Carolina-based CPA Jim Buttonow, who worked at the IRS for nearly two decades before going into the private sector.

I can see that. If more people owe money as opposed to getting a refund, there is more incentive to pay later. If US govt owes you money, you handed Uncle Sam a 0% loan, and then it makes sense to file as early as possible.

This one is interesting:

> Refusing to file in protest: Every year, a small number of filers politically object to filing and paying taxes for different reasons. This year is no different.

> Olson said someone recently sent her a letter in the mail containing a copy of an angry letter they had sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “It said they didn’t want to file their tax return and pay taxes because they were upset that the Trump administration was trying to breach taxpayer confidentiality,” Olson said.

That's happening with one of my acquaintances. They canvassed for Harris and were quite upset at the loss. As a form of protest they won't be filing their taxes. I don't know what happens then, I am not bold enough to try it myself. Even if a more friendly administration returns after 4 years, will they be willing to amnesty people who took this route. I wouldn't bet on it, and I don't see millions of people going for that option somehow, either.
by arcticbull | 2025-04-07 04:12:15+00:00
I cited the specific study on San Francisco that supports my argument as [2] — I edited it in for posterity so it may not have been there when you looked.

We can just end rent control for anyone who doesn’t have it but ending it is strictly good policy. There’s no rational basis in economics to support it.

Rent prices wouldn’t go up if supply and demand were allowed to meet making rent control unnecessary anyways. You get both security and lower prices if you just build. If you want to lock in the price negotiate such a lease directly or buy, but don’t leverage the state to force it.
by toast0 | 2025-04-07 04:13:43+00:00
I think all of the high profile detentions have happened at land borders. For this MMA coach, Renato Subotic, I can't quite tell, he says he was stopped at the border, which could be at an airport, but sounds more like at a land border.

It's a lot easier to put you on a return flight if you're at the airport.

It might be reasonable to consider visiting the US but being sure to arrive by air, and not by land. But it's understandable if you choose to visit somewhere that's more friendly.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-07 04:14:12+00:00
Here is why I think Gibson could in principle still be right (without necessarily summoning religious feelings)

[if we disregard that he said "concepts are key" -- though we can be yet more charitable and assume that he doesn't accept (median) human-level intelligence as the final boss]

Para-doxxing ">" Under-standing

(I haven't thought this through, just vibe-calculating, as it were, having pondered the necessity of concrete particulars for a split-second)

(More on that "sophistiKated" aspect of "projeKtion": turns out not to be as idiosynKratic as I'd presumed, but I traded bandwidth for immediacy here, so I'll let GP explain why that's interesting, if he indeed finds it is :)

Wolfram (selfstyled heir to Leibniz/Galois) seems to be serving himself a fronthanded compliment:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/combinators-a-ce...

>What I called a “projection” then is what we’d call a function now; a “filter” is what we’d now call an argument )
Show HN: GhostCast – Record screen, change your voice, and download in 1 click
by vinaysolapurkar | 2025-04-07 04:15:21+00:00
I built GhostCast, a lightweight web app that lets you:

Record your screen and microphone together

Change your voice in real-time using ElevenLabs

Download the final video with screen + modified voice in one file

Works on browser (no installs)
by Spivak | 2025-04-07 04:16:48+00:00
I think it makes more sense to think of them as agent software plugins than a protocol that makes sense in isolation. The reason for its existence is because you want your <thing> to work with someone's AI agent. You write some code, your user integrates it with their local software and you provide data to it in the format that it's expecting and do stuff when asked.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-07 04:17:38+00:00
Apparently this is an EU/US thing, because here overtime and on-call is always paid extra (as is essentially anything beyond your usual 40 hrs/week, or whatever you've got in your contract).

That said, I also see very few jobs that involve on-call. Maybe that's because companies know they have to pay extra for it and therefore don't hand it out willy-nilly, but typically there'll be an ops team who do have on-call, and whose job is to triage and fix anything they can, otherwise just minimise the damage, and then maybe the most business-relevant couple of teams will also have an on-call rotation in case the problem can't be solved by ops alone.

Personally, I've never had on-call.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-07 04:17:54+00:00
Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)

The immediate "savings" reduced workforce (even assuming the same level of work gets done) can easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay more to attract equally-qualified applicants away from the private sector.

Some quick napkin-math just to illustrate:

* Assume the stupid and illegal firings continue, shrinking the workforce to 90%. * Assume payroll expenses move the same, to 90%. * Now workers require 5% more to be hired at a flaky employer with dodgy benefits. * After just two years, the "savings" are erased. Every year the broken trust continues makes it worse.
by whoisthemachine | 2025-04-07 04:19:00+00:00
In regards to Federal agencies, a lot of it comes down to many people just not knowing much about these agencies, and much of what they do know are the scary bits and pieces capitalists have broadcast through their media (I hesitate to just call them conservatives, as their agenda is completely separate from moving law and government in a slow, conservative manner).

I for one didn't even know we had an agency like USAID, which sounds like it has done wonderful work around the world. Most people (again, myself included), probably don't know just what the DOE's main function is. Turns out it's a pretty hands-off agency, and shutting it down will mostly just harm kids with disabilities. Why we shut these agencies down is beyond me, but I guess it makes them look like they're doing something without going after the actual big fish, like our national "defense" apparatus. Oh no, there we're going to build a "golden dome". A very "efficient" one I'm sure.
by archagon | 2025-04-07 04:20:21+00:00
> Rent prices wouldn’t go up if supply and demand were allowed to meet making rent control unnecessary anyways. You get both security and lower prices if you just build. If you want to lock in the price negotiate such a lease directly or buy.

You can do other things to increase supply (rezone, force vacant properties to be rented, offer subsidies to developers, etc.) while still maintaining rent control. The end result will be the same once the market stabilizes, except rent control has the benefit of protecting renters again unforeseen future market distortions, such as your neighborhood suddenly becoming popular with the nouveau riche.

I see the elimination of rent control as a blatantly anti-renter, pro-landlord policy that's dressed up as pro-renter market correction.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-07 04:20:41+00:00
This isn't really my area, so I'm probably wrong... I'd always assumed that RAW files were, well, raw data straight off the sensor (or as close as possible)? In which case, you could standardize the container format, but I wouldn't think it was possible to have a standard format for the actual image data. Would appreciate if anyone could correct me (a quick skim of wikipedia didn't clear it up)
by timr | 2025-04-07 04:21:30+00:00
More important is why they do it: it's a chance for the market to pause and rationally assess automated trades. The reason we're seeing it more often is because it's a reaction to stuff like "flash crashes", which weren't a thing (as much of a thing, anyway) before bots took over the market.

Of course, journalism remains trapped in a death cycle of click-chasing stupidity. This means that the triggering of the mechanism itself has now become a source of hype to propagate the panic ("OMGOMGOMG the market fell so fast that it tripped the circuit breakers!! Panic! Flee! Run away!"), so it's less clear that the mechanism is a net good.
by energy123 | 2025-04-07 04:21:37+00:00
The market is still pricing in the optimistic scenario of tariffs being repealed, either by supreme court (e.g. on the non-delegation doctrine), by congress veto (13 more Republican defectors), by impeachment, or by Trump changing his mind.

If none of these four scenarios come to pass, the market will keep dropping as these possibilities get priced out and the remaining scenarios (escalation or maintenance of the tariffs) become more likely.
by Aachen | 2025-04-07 04:22:42+00:00
> people thought 'views' were folders, and that if an email existed in two places that meant two copies, and that they could delete one of them

Thunderbird user here. I wish you hadn't said that. I'll be forever missing this now :(

Having just one Big Ol' Container of Email and making views on that, based on whatever properties/tags like which project it's for, which customer, whether it's marked as spam by the system or by you, a keyword match, or sorting it higher if I'm in To instead of CC... yes please! Am I picturing right how this worked?
by wredcoll | 2025-04-07 04:22:49+00:00
I mean, I feel like you might be aware of this, but what you're describing is literally PR and propaganda.

Many millions of people get social security/etc payments every month from the federal government, but of course that doesn't count. "Keep the gov out of my medicare!" anyone?

People have a real short memory and nobody appreciates the lack of mercury and arsenic in their sausages today, it's all about "what are you going to do tomorrow?"

I'm probably not cruel enough to do it but I wish every person who spoke like you just did would have to live a month or whatever without all of the benefits of the government.
by droopyEyelids | 2025-04-07 04:23:33+00:00
I think you might be caught up in a bit of the rationalist delusion.

People -only!- draw conclusions based on personal experience. At best you have personal experience with truly objective evidence gathered in a statistically valid manner.

But that only happens in a few vanishingly rare circumstances here on earth. And wherever it happens, people are driven to subvert the evidence gathering process.

Often “working against your instincts” to be more rational only means more time spent choosing which unreliable evidence to concoct a belief from.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-07 04:24:49+00:00
Not many people realize that the Fed can’t really increase rates any more, because of that debt service. That’s a problem because if inflation comes back with a vengeance, the Fed can’t pull its anti-inflation lever.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Fed does but I’m inclined to think they’ll be dropping rates to near-zero sometime this year like they did in 2020. That would at least somewhat offset increased prices from the tariffs, while applying “expansionary” force on the economy through cheap money. There’s a nonzero chance this tariff game ends up reviving the economy (let’s be real, Biden Admin avoided a “recession” but the economy was/is on life support) by encouraging companies to spend more on expansion while simultaneously suppressing consumer spending. I’m no economist but it’s actually low-key genius… if it works. It probably won’t work.
by shsachdev | 2025-04-07 04:24:49+00:00
Good question. I asked myself the same thing. Since airlines are mandated to produce a safety video regardless, the ROI they really have to assess is against that incremental spend on making the video cinematic/entertaining. And if you factor in that potential to go viral and get good PR from it, as well as the fact that they can produce a video once and reuse possibly for X years, the incremental investment doesn’t sound that unappealing. Also: traditional methods of advertising (say renting a billboard) are just as expensive, if not more.
by rgovostes | 2025-04-07 04:24:58+00:00
Boston sells off every square inch of public bus stop, trash can, etc. to a small number of companies that pay a pittance for the right to resell the space for advertisements. Lexington and Concord are the only places where such things are disallowed.

During the pandemic I found a trash can in a suburb that had been postered with a Johnnie Walker ad for over a year, and sent in a phony request for a quote to advertise a community poetry slam event. The quote was for over $2000. Multiply that by every trash can in the city.
by TheDong | 2025-04-07 04:25:05+00:00
I pay for kagi, and that works okay.

I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.

It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.

Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
by buildbot | 2025-04-07 04:26:10+00:00
I think that might be why a lot of camera makers don't care to use DNG - it's easier to make their own format and easy enough for others to reverse engineer it.

One thing that open source libraries do tend to miss is that very important extra metadata - for example, Phase One IIQ files have an embedded sensor profile or full on black frame that is not yet encoded into the raw data like it typically is for a NEF or DNG from many cameras. It does seem rawspeed handles this from a quick scan of the code.

It can get more tricky - Sinar digital backs have an extra dark frame file (and flat frame!) that is not part of the RAW files, and that is not handled by any open source library to my knowledge - though I did write a basic converter myself to handle it: https://github.com/mgolub2/iatodng_rs

I'm not sure how DNG would be able to handle having both a dark and flat frame without resorting to applying them to the raw data and saving only the processed (still unbayered) data.
by timr | 2025-04-07 04:28:02+00:00
> Indeed. That's especially true on the NATO side. This is a historical event on the scale of the breakup of the USSR.

Exaggeration isn't helpful. Whatever "this" is, you can't possibly make an assessment of that kind until years after the fact.

In March 2020, people were convincing themselves that the global economy was flying straight into the ground, but people who didn't lose their minds made a lot of money, quickly.

IMO, there was a better case for that panic, given the context (they were partly right! the lockdown stuff was incredibly costly!), than there is that this particular spasm is meaningful. Only time will tell.
by mindslight | 2025-04-07 04:28:28+00:00
Being tired has made me incurious.

But I'm not even that incurious. Rather I think the problem is that their claimed plans rhyme with reality, while being utterly preposterous upon deeper analysis. We need to avoid implying there might be any merit to them lest other people read our comments and, not having been as diligent to separate fantasy from reality, get sucked into the fictional universe where Trump is some master negotiator who is going to bring other countries to heel with pure drunk-uncle-on-the-recliner force of will. And if we do analyze their delusions to figure out what destructive thing they might do next, we should be using the same disclaimers as doctors at a mental hospital.
by epidemian | 2025-04-07 04:29:21+00:00
And, just to expand a bit on this, what i find puzzling about the stance of "how will you find out about stuff without ads" is that it goes totally contrary to my contemporary experience.

Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
by mmooss | 2025-04-07 04:29:45+00:00
> I see this get thrown around once in a while and I really don't get it. Isn't this true of basically every leader? Gates, Jobs, Buffet, Obama, they all wouldn't existing without their teams. Isn't that just obvious? Isn't one of the important markers of a good leader to be able to build a good team?

The others don't claim the extremes of power and genius, based to a large extent on what their teams do. They also build good teams - look at DOGE, for example.
by aegypti | 2025-04-07 04:29:49+00:00
The literal next paragraph:

Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.

Halfway through:

As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.

Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.

IE they are intentionally conflating wealth with security to illustrate the concept of a “comfort class”. It’s The Atlantic, not The Economist. There Will Be Style.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-07 04:32:01+00:00
Transfer Learning during LLM training tends to be 'broader' than that.

Like how

- Training LLMs on code makes them solve reasoning problems better - Training Language Y alongside X makes them much better at Y than if they were trained on language Y alone and so on.

Probably because well gradient descent is a dumb optimizer and training is more like evolution than a human reading a book.

Also, there is something genuinely weird going on with LLM chess. And it's possible base models are better. https://dynomight.net/more-chess/
by computably | 2025-04-07 04:32:13+00:00
Practically speaking, 99% of advertising is covered by a dozen or two primary channels which are obnoxious and ubiquitous. The goal should be to regulate platform-ads, e.g. print, billboards, TV, radio, web, streaming, social media. Ads are all already clearly regulated within the limits of freedom of speech, such as criminalizing false advertising, as another comment has pointed out. These platforms are also generally regulated for obscenity, harassment, etc., which if anything are much more subjective than commercial activity.

> What if I hire a large staff to go out and sing the praises of my company? Walking downtown shouting to the rooftops. That is not advertising, right?

That is (or should be) prevented by laws against disturbing the peace or similar. Which is more along the lines of reasonable solutions in general. Banning advertising wholesale seems impossible, yes, but regulating the actual most common mechanisms of selling ad spots is much easier.

> Ok, now suppose some strapping young individual creates a service that pays websites to carve out a little div on their site that will display these employees songs of love? This strapping young individual now sells this service to companies wishing to more easily get the word out to more people. Is this advertising? But I am not paying someone to make the ad, my employees are doing that.

You're paying somebody for the distribution of the ad embedded within/alongside content (websites) you don't own.

> How is this different than my company posting on facebook? Where is the line?

Posting on Facebook is clearly distinct from paying Facebook to promote your ads.
by freen | 2025-04-07 04:32:18+00:00
The key thing here, which again, is something that governments must consider but individuals and nonprofits do not is the breadth vs depth.

Your gift of $10 provides 50 meals to 50 families. Well done!

It did absolutely nothing for tens of millions of other families.

The implications of the loss of tax revenue as a result of charitable giving is an exercise I will leave up to the reader.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-07 04:32:57+00:00
My favorite airline safety video of all time is ANA's "Kabuki", which (IMHO) strikes the right elements of being clear, informative, gorgeous, absurd and showcasing Japan all at the same time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2IZP5NhaKM

They used to have a really good "behind the scenes" video for it as well, but I can only find this shortened version on online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCJRyHuXo4
by fmxsh | 2025-04-07 04:33:18+00:00
Reception of propaganda is contrary to the essence of democracy, relying on a rational citizen able to critically weight different viewpoints and cut trough the worst of bias where propaganda thrives.

In a democracy, propaganda works, because of weak democratic implementation. If democracy is an ideal able to be realized, it would protect against that.

The burden is on the shoulders of the citizens, culture and state. Without education in the sense of critical thinking, intelligence isn't developed enough to establish democratic structures.
by saintfire | 2025-04-07 04:34:03+00:00
I'd argue two dime-a-dozen pump and dumps is dwarfed by the magnitude of issues that letting politicians exploit trading using policy-making.

The profits they earn is hardly the issue. The issue is they are motivated to set policy or spend as much govt money in a way that benefits their portfolio.

A politician spending an extra billion of public funding to make (say) a half a million themselves is a real issue.
by sanswork | 2025-04-07 04:34:16+00:00
Most people can't afford to pay for Kagi.

A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.

You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.

You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.

Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.