MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepsun | 2025-04-10 02:59:16+00:00
It is genuinely the worst IMHO:

1. Too large and heavy to carry around.

2. Requires grounding (third pin), even when devices don't need it. Other standards let devices decide.

3. Doesn't allow the cord to go straight out of the plug, it always go sideways which makes it even clunkier, harder to plug (e.g. behind a nightstand at a hotel), and more prone to cord damage from bending.

CEE 7/3 and CEE 7/5 (known as "French" and "German") are way better IMHO. I doubt they have problems with "wiggling and sparking" -- that wouldn't pass certification. And it's easy to make a plug to fit both of them, with or without grounding. CEE 7/5 can even be plugged upside down.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-10 02:59:33+00:00
If it happens, the US will have nobody to blame other than itself. Industry is what generates wealth. The USA deindustrialized itself when it moved all of its manufacturing overseas for the sake of greater profits. It gave away its intellectual property on a silver platter so that things could be made cheaply. Other countries are only too happy to take advantage of american greed.
by pxc | 2025-04-10 02:59:38+00:00
Flipped classroom sounds horrible to me. I never liked being given time to work on essays or big projects in class. I prefer working at home, where the environment is much more comfortable and I can use equipment the school doesn't have, where I can wait until I'm in the right mood to focus, where nobody is pestering me about the intermediary stages of my work, etc.

It also seems like a waste of having an expert around to be doing something you could do at home without them.

Exams should increasingly be written with the idea in mind that students can and will use AI. Open book exams are great. They're just harder to write.
by slt2021 | 2025-04-10 03:01:00+00:00
by all statistics, it is Americans that make the life in the USA insufferable: corrupt politicians, oligarchs, lobbyists, party leaders, and criminals (the ones that sell drugs and shoot people).

go to any county/state jail and try to find a single H-1B visa holder there... its all home grown foundational Americans, raised on McDonalds and Coke
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-10 03:01:12+00:00
Struggling to find a definition, but seemingly zonal just means there's a massive instance per cluster.

Did find some interesting recent (March 28th, 2025) reads though!

Colossus under the hood: How we deliver SSD performance at HDD prices https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

I kind of thought you meant ZNS / https://zonedstorage.io/ at first, or it's more recent better awesomer counterpart Host Directed Placement (HDP). I wish someone would please please advertize support for HDP, sounds like such a free win, tackling so many write amplification issues for so little extra complexity: just say which stream you want to write to, and writes to that stream will go onto the same superblock. Duh, simple, great.
by tail_exchange | 2025-04-10 03:01:55+00:00
> In the meantime, tariffs are raised on every country to gauge which side they are on

Why on earth would you be on the side of a country like this? Why we should be an ally of the US right now, if Trump can't even uphold agreements he signed himself 5 years ago? What guarantees do we have that, as soon as we decouple from China, the US won't treat us as a vassal because we gave up our only alternative? The only rational choice is to either be neutral or ally with China.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-10 03:02:22+00:00
> I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

and they know this, and that's the point... there's a reason people talk about the chilling effects of shitty, but not technically illegal behavior

> For the record, my employer is Google.

Yeah, I knew that from your hn profile. Which caused me to ask a friend, also SRE at google, how onerous it was, he said basically the exact same thing you did, just intrusive enough his github is also completely empty.

I wonder what cool stuff doesn't exist today because of it
by alexpadula | 2025-04-10 03:04:27+00:00
Another few pieces here listening to your video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzDnA_EVhTU

You mention it runs in process? How does this occur? You mention running cached in memory tables. So you're caching on at the application level, not the storage level?

There's a few things with the video I find misleading. You mention 400ms at best to parse, plan and execute a query; That's not true, what about the type of query, etc.

Overall I can see it's still early, which is ok. I will review the code and see what else I can find.
by troad | 2025-04-10 03:05:15+00:00
I do remember reading somewhere that for all the vaunted safety features of the plugs, etc, more people do in fact die in Europe and the UK than in the US from contact with the mains, precisely because of the 240V potential. (Definitely anecdata, would be curious about the hard numbers too!)

Of course, the trade off is much faster kettles. How many lives is faster tea worth? For the British, clearly the answer is 'yes'. :P
by slt2021 | 2025-04-10 03:05:26+00:00
more expensive shoes will lead to longer lead times to sell inventory, due to downward slope of the Demand curve (less demand for more expensive shoes).

If you sell $75 shoes, you can sell 1000 units/mo, but if your shoes are $100 you can only sell 700/mo and it will take 1.5 months to sell 1000 units.

This effectively increases fixed overheads per pair of shoes and decreases net margin per pair, given constant demand
by milesrout | 2025-04-10 03:06:38+00:00
If you have a distribution of work where most is easy and cheap, some is moderate and moderate, and a little is difficult and expensive, and you take out all the cheap and easy work, the moderate and difficult work could drop in price but the average of the remaining work will still be higher than before.

e.g.

You have tasks advertised in the distribution $1, $1, $1, $1, $1, $1, $2, $2, $3, $3, $5, $5, $10. Median price is $2, and average is $2.76.

All the $1 and $2 tasks are replaced with AI. Old tasks get $1 cheaper each as there are more people that can do them. Now the distribution is $2, $2, $4, $4, $9. Median is $4, average is $4.2.

So you have made labour less valuable but the prices advertised go up because only the more expensive work now gets advertised.
by vitorgrs | 2025-04-10 03:07:55+00:00
I also had the same thinking, when somehow my mother started watching Chinese TV shows. She first started with kdramas on Netflix, tried to watch a few Japense and didn't liked... then moved to Chinese dramas. And it seems, it's getting really popular here in Brazil. All anecdotical, but I know a few people that watch besides her.

Tencent has a streaming focused on international market called WeTV, there's also IQIYI. There's Viki too, that is from Rakuten - that is Japanese, but there's a ton of Chinese content there (which she also watches).

My nephew even learned a few words of mandarin (and Korean too) because she keep watching that all day.

Kdramas are really popular here, and don't think it's as popular as the US, my guess it's just the soap opera consumption Latin America was always huge, so it makes Asian dramas more palatable, as they are more soap opera style.

Now for music yeah, don't think Chinese music is that popular or will ever be compared to kpop.
by cranky908canuck | 2025-04-10 03:08:50+00:00
Agree with comments below, am observing that the British (commonwealth etc) plug standard is a good common denominator (and a perfect calthrop. grin!).

Living in North America where the 110 V is standard...

the GBR plug/socket is a lovely standard, my brother-in-law gifted us a UK power bar for travel a few years ago, worked great. [[1]]. Since then, it's become common that wallwarts handle 100-240, so recently I just use physical adapters, and if need be wallwarts with multiple charging ports and/or feed-through mains sockets.

[[1]] use whatever physical adapter to power it -- we know that it's ok for 240 V. Then use whatever adapters to charge. I did have a bagful of physical adapters.
Show HN: Multi-region support for ACS Object Storage
by acstorage | 2025-04-10 03:09:26+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve expanded our Object Storage service to support up to 12 AWS regions! You can now create a bucket in one region and performantly access it in another to collocate your storage with compute.

The service is currently live in us-east-1 and us-west-1, but we’re ready to deploy to any other AWS region within an hour—just drop us an email at sales@acceleratedcloudstorage.com.

Let us know what you think or if there are features you’d love to see next!

Thanks!
by rootsudo | 2025-04-10 03:09:59+00:00
And to ride on Jimbocho/international reference, they have the same in Manila, Philippines in Recto, which is a university area, tons of english university text books, around 100-200 pesos, "international editions."

Jimbocho has limited English text.

Now Hong Kong, Quarry Bay Street has a few but they're all on south island I see and accessible via the metro.
by drooby | 2025-04-10 03:10:00+00:00
This is going to be a naive and stupid question perhaps... but here it goes.

What optimization are we chasing here that's worth all this effort and brain power that will be so amazing in 10 years?

I've been using real-time collaborative editing tools for the past decade and it's "good enough". We.. collaborate... and then we go about our day.. almost zero friction 99.9% of the time.

This just doesn't really feel like a real problem to me. A theoretically interesting problem, sure..
by gadtfly | 2025-04-10 03:10:33+00:00
Completely unrelated to anything I'm just taking this as an opportunity to yell this into the void while nix is on topic:

I have a theory that a problem for Nix understanding and adoption out of all apparent proportion is its use of ; in a way that is just subtly, right in the uncanny valley, different from what ; means in any other language.

In the default autogenerated file everyone is given to start with, it immediately hits you with:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ foo ];

How is that supposed to read as a single expression in a pure functional language?
by UltraSane | 2025-04-10 03:10:35+00:00
I'm sure the absolute performance of the Telus II CPU is very good since it runs at 5.5Ghz and has 36MB of L2 cache per core. But I'm talking about price per dollar and this is where IBM mainframes fail miserably because IBM charges through the nose for them.

I would not be surprised if a IBM mainframe costs 10x of what a x86 or ARM server of equal performance does.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-10 03:11:36+00:00
> The deficit should count, but since Federal taxes haven't been increased to service it it doesn't, so there is that

Inflation is the result of the deficit, and it is the equivalent of a tax. This is why politicians work so hard to deny that inflation comes from the deficit.

Want more examples of burdensome regulation? Try Lina Kahn of the FTC with her frivolous (but very expensive) lawsuits. Regulation is why the California high speed rail failed to be built, and why Biden's big spending program to install car charging stations resulted in zero chargers being built. Nearly every aspect of a car is subject to regulation, which is why they pretty much all look the same (unlike the variety in earlier years). EV regulation have been resulted in massive costs for the auto industry.

As for oil and gas, Biden blocked the pipelines that would have saved a ton of money.

The only unregulated market in the US is the software industry. And look how spectacularly successful it has been!! Prices have been driven down to literally zero! I'm in the software business, and I do not need approvals, permits, licenses, or any regulations pertaining to the software I write and sell.

(Other than laws against fraud, theft, etc.)
by defrost | 2025-04-10 03:12:18+00:00
US Republicans "stopped time" wrt responding to the POTUS emergency Tariff powers a full twenty nine days ago.

Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.

~ https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio...

"Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"

I commented on this shortly after it happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43358343 and once or twice since.

It's remarkable how little attention this has gotten.

See also: Letters from an American https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Cox_Richardson
by quadragenarian | 2025-04-10 03:13:19+00:00
If foreign investors like China dump our debt, prices will go down and yields will go up. As long as we increase our debt ceiling and don’t do anything intentionally crazy like try to renegotiate existing debt (which would be a technical default), we could always issue more treasuries at the higher rates with the caveat that more money will need to be spent servicing the debt, which requires even more debt be issued. A vicious cycle for sure.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-10 03:13:28+00:00
Tooling: started developing in Replit including hosting, added Cursor later when it got a bit more complicated.

FE: React SPA with Tailwind; I don't think he was knowledgeable enough to pick a UI component library.

BE: Database is Supabase, auth is Firebase. He had a hard time getting the AI to work with Supabase auth so I suggested Firebase instead (Firebase auth is dead simple and lots of docs). This created another challenge which was using the claims from Firebase in Supabase for the row level security. Rest of the backend is running in Replit autoscale deployments. Stripe integration for payments and other integrations for common third party systems in this particular industry. All done via AI and handing it relevant documentation and code samples.

Replit's tooling is interesting because it can run the app and see the errors in the console. It can also take its own screenshots to see if it's getting it right. I watched some of his sessions and the LLM often makes mistakes. He'll try a few passes to get the LLM to fix the mistake, but if it doesn't work, he moves and will come back to it if it is non-breaking.

I talked to him a bit more and he said he thinks his "super power" is managing an offshore team in India for a few years so he's very used to managing features and code quality via written instructions. Where an engineer (like me) might just give up and take it into our own hands when things go wrong, he can just keep chatting with the AI and pointing it to docs and such.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-10 03:13:57+00:00
1. There is little size difference between your choices and BS1363 plugs/sockets. They are large, I concede, but that is in pursuit of the many safety features of the plug.

2. Better have it than not. Plus, it makes for a single uniform plug design and specification that is straightforwardly adhered to.

3. IMO this is a good thing as it allows furniture to be set up considerably closer to the walls.

Funny you mention hotels, because I was in one in France not two weeks ago and it had the worst sockets I've ever seen. My phones took forever to charge, half the sockets didn't even seem to have power, and they all had this unintuitive setup where there was a spring loaded panel in the socket that needed to be twisted to get the plug in.

Now, I've seen some odd BS1363 setups, but never one this strange.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-10 03:15:52+00:00
> the state has $40b of wealth under its control to invest.

Defense spending is not an investment in the economy, neither are entitlements.

The returns on government investments that are legitimate investments, however, are quite a bit less than the returns on the investments of rich people. The reason is simple - people who get rich off of investments are very, very good at it. Government bureaucrats are not.

Government investments are socialism, which have an inglorious history of poor returns.

> The belief in the business genius really is overblown

4 out of 5 business ventures fail. The survivors tend to be pretty good at it. You'd be very hard pressed to find a dummy who grew a business to a billion dollars. The ones who have done it more than once are very, very rare. (Like Steve Jobs, who did it 3 times.) If you want to argue that Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc., just fell into it, go right ahead!
by mananaysiempre | 2025-04-10 03:16:06+00:00
This is not quite like the stereotypical case of that, as the legislature first said it wants something to happen one way, and then—later and with a different set of lawmakers, but still—the same institution effectively said that, on second thought, no, just in this case it wants it to work another way. Which seems like a simple case of the legislature changing its mind, something it should definitely be able to do as a matter of course?..

And I mean, both of the houses participated in the first part but only the lower house in the second (AFAICT), so maybe there’s something iffy about that for example. Then of course there are all the suggestions about how the statute these tariffs were ostensibly instituted under (the IEEPA) may not actually authorize tariffs; or that if it does authorize that, then it effectively amounts to the legislature delegating all of its power over tariffs to the executive, which does not entirely sound in tune with the Constitution.

But you see how this starts to look like something you’d want to consult an actual expert on constitutional law about, not dismiss out of hand or listen to random opinions on the Internet on. It’s not immediately clear what even a perfect court would decide here.
by pmags | 2025-04-10 03:16:08+00:00
Some key text from the article:

At the behest of its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH will not only block new funding for the university, but also stop paying investigators working on all existing NIH projects. Although these researchers will not be ordered to stop work, they will need prior approval from NIH to draw from existing disbursements, according to an NIH source.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-10 03:19:07+00:00
We basically agree then: as China takes up higher value activities, they won't need those activities from the US anymore. Also, France is the cutting edge designer of nuclear power plants these days.

> Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?

Hardware people becoming software people was extremely common back then, and still is today (EEs can make more coding than using their degree directly). Now we have the opposite problem (we don't have enough hardware people because software sucked all the oxygen out of the room) and China has less of it (although increasingly...they are repeating history as well). If anything, this just backs up my point in how higher value activities de-emphasize manufacturing (even super high end manufacturing as in semiconductors).

You can replace perceived value with actual value if you don't agree with the value judgement calls that were made, which is entirely reasonable.
by marenkay | 2025-04-10 03:21:07+00:00
Hasn't that point already been reached given the US could not sustain itself in any reasonable way without Chinese labor and knowledge?

There seem to be a lot of companies in the S&P500 that would dry out without access to Chinese workers and goods. Just take cloud providers. Where is their gear sourced from? Is there any realistic chance to provide that from within the US? Given the current state that would become necessary but seems highly unlikely to be achievable.
by eitally | 2025-04-10 03:23:44+00:00
I don't fault them for this at all. AI isn't possible without the full infra stack, which clearly includes storage (and compute, and networking, and data pipelining, and and and...). There's an entire ecosystem of ISVs that only do one of these things, very well (Pure Storage, for example, or Lamba or Coreweave, or Confluent (Kafka + Flink with LLM integration). While it might be more precisely accurate to state "AI enabling" tech, I'll give them a pass.
by atomicnature | 2025-04-10 03:24:43+00:00
It's amazing.

I've wanted a small prompt-manager chrome extension for a while.

Was procrastinating.

Was able to build one for myself with Firebase studio in 30 mins.

Here's my PromptPal - built in just 30m (disable ad-blocker to avoid issues - there's some interference for some reason):

https://9000-idx-studio-1744253706406.cluster-fkltigo73ncaix...

No frustration whatsoever

Their prototyper is awesome

And code mode also great

I was able to push to github as well with no problems. And the tool generates nice commits for every single change one makes.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-04-10 03:24:46+00:00
Vietnam does not pay $68/month. Where did you get your made up numbers?

Source: brother works in a Nike factory in Vietnam; am acquaintances with the manager of an Adidas factory in Vietnam; and know that the legal minimum wage in Vietnam -- which is definitely enforced on foreign factories -- is far above $68/month.

My brother at the Nike factory makes almost 10x that assembling women's shoes.

Someone working part time at a convience store makes 3-4x your claimed number.
by dangus | 2025-04-10 03:25:25+00:00
Here's an example, and this is a very critically acclaimed safety video. And, yes, I like it as a video, I just don't like it as a way to demonstrate safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al51WZcN2_U

It takes over 30 seconds before any visual instruction starts.

The business class shoulder harness isn't shown at all and is instead a tiny icon with a moving background shot taking up most of the screen.

The overhead bin animation is not taking place inside a real plane, is barely an outline of a part of a plane, and has most of the image being of a historic building in the background.

The instructions are then interrupted by dancing on the beach for about 10 seconds.

The next instructions has a set of dancers and a very colorful Kathakali dancer taking up most of the screen while the electronic devices are a tiny icon.

No smoking is again a small icon on the side of the screen with the foreground being a much more interesting and compelling visual.

Another 10 seconds of dancing...the video is interrupted constantly and made unnecessarily long.

Emergency exit doors shown as an outline again in a colorful historic building with a dancer moving around as the focal point.

Then the exit aisles are shown not in a plane but as part of an old building.

Oxygen masks aren't shown connected to the plane so it's hard to say where they're coming from.

More dance interruptions with no instructions.

The life vest is probably the first thing that's just as clear as seeing the in-person demonstration.

Then the last 30 seconds is all timewasters.

Again, great video, but it's a brand and tourism advertisement and not a safety video.
by marenkay | 2025-04-10 03:26:26+00:00
This makes a good argument against centralized production and knowledge. It would economically be much more reasonable if any good could be produced anywhere at any time. Smaller production facilities for localized sourcing. Would IMHO also be much more in line with a free market. Everyone would be free to source goods in any country or location of their choice. Coupled with open knowledge this could be a truly free market.

But will never happen because currently free market means one business is free to dominate and control a market.