MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ytpete | 2025-04-09 16:59:27+00:00
Even the gold & silver thing is a different argument: that's essentially saying a country should have a net trade surplus with the rest of the world in aggregate. You can have that while still running deficits with some/many individual nations.

The personal-finance analogy would be that it's fine for me to have a "trade deficit" with my grocery store, just as long as I'm not spending more dollars than I have coming in, overall.
by hamburglar | 2025-04-09 16:59:32+00:00
From an investment perspective, $50 -> $100 is exactly the same as $75 -> $150. The difference in the number of transactions that actually occurred is trivial. I see the point you’re making but I don’t agree that it matters until the transaction value shrinks to the point where you’re selling things in huge batches (e.g a 5 cent part you sell for 10 cents, but you sell them by the 1000s)
by kleiba | 2025-04-09 16:59:33+00:00
> Before traveling, back up your devices so you don’t lose anything permanently. Then delete anything you’re worried about being misinterpreted or saved by the government. That can include conversations that compromise the privacy of the people on the other end. You might delete messages about politics, contact information for political dissidents, apps that save offline copies of sensitive documents like Google Docs, even your phone’s built-in Notes app.

Mind you, this is for entering the country that considers itself the freest in the world...
by zebomon | 2025-04-09 17:00:06+00:00
The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.

The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.

I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.

A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!
by globnomulous | 2025-04-09 17:00:33+00:00
> The past couple years have been spent trying to figure out what text AI models are good for, and new use cases are being developed continuously.

In other words, people who care about money and only money are pushing for these tools because they're convinced they'll reduce labor costs and somehow also improve the resulting product, while engineers and creative professionals who have these tools foisted upon them by unimaginative business people continue to insist that the tools are a solution in search of a problem, that they're stochastic parrots and plagiarism automata that bypass all of the important parts of engineering and creativity and make the absolutely, breathtakingly idiotic mistake of supposing it's possible to leap to a finished product without all the work and problem solving involved in getting there.

> The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur

This is utter nonsense, and hype-man prognosticators in the tech world like the author of the article turn out pretty much 100% of the time to be either grifters or saps who have fallen for the grifters' nonsense.
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-04-09 17:00:54+00:00
If you read the introduction, it points out that this is not really a substitute for Dan's underlying talk (which is linked/embedded), but merely an addendum of notes for it. The talk is quite digestible imho.

> I’ve given up on the idea of converting this talk into a post form, nor do I think it’s possible. But I wanted to jot down a few notes that are complementary to the talk. I’m going to assume that you have watched the talk itself. This is just the stuff that wasn’t coherent enough to make the cut—the loose threads I couldn’t tie together.
by nsm | 2025-04-09 17:00:59+00:00
Racket is related to LISP and already has a mature GUI implementation that uses native widgets on Windows and MacOS, and on Linux goes to GTK3 or falls back to GTK2. https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/index.html

It is used to create their full featured teaching IDE.

It is worth looking at before re-inventing the stack.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-09 17:01:09+00:00
This is unironically true. There's nothing wrong with wanting to use different tools which are better suited for the task. There's nothing wrong with trying to convince people "this tool isn't right for the job, let's switch". But after all that, if the decision is to stick with COBOL (whatever the reason may be) - a good professional does the best they can with it. If you can't suck it up and write stuff in COBOL, you aren't a very good developer.
by beeftime | 2025-04-09 17:01:14+00:00
Why do I have to pick the factors first? Do I have to use all of them? Why shouldn't I use all of them? If I do, why aren't they already picked?

Why are all of these sliders? Why don't they start at zero? Why do all of them at the default setting result in me winning?

Speaking of, am I winning? Failure and success give me the same feedback. I can play this game over and over until I win? That's not really in the Wordle style.

imo you should be picking from a palette of maybe-relevant factors and increasing/decreasing their order of magnitude and order/operation, then when you submit you're locked into a win/loss state like wordle. This would be much more of a game than what you've got here.
by technoabsurdist | 2025-04-09 17:01:22+00:00
I'm an undergrad at a T10 college. Walking through our library, I often notice about 30% of students have ChatGPT or Claude open on their screens.

In my circle, I can't name a single person who doesn't heavily use these tools for assignments.

What's fascinating, though, is that the most cracked CS students I know deliberately avoid using these tools for programming work. They understand the value in the struggle of solving technical problems themselves. Another interesting effect: many of these same students admit they now have more time for programming and learning they “care about” because they've automated their humanities, social sciences, and other major requirements using LLMs. They don't care enough about those non-major courses to worry about the learning they're sacrificing.
by andai | 2025-04-09 17:01:38+00:00
I used to do this every morning, for the first hour of the day.

I started doing it to cope with severe unmedicated ADHD. I found the only way I could get any work done was to turn off my phone and unplug the router.

(I downloaded offline docs, and if I got really stuck, made a note of what to Google later and just switched tasks.)

I then found that I enjoyed getting stuff done so much, that I'd usually keep it off until after lunch.
by andrewrn | 2025-04-09 17:01:40+00:00
Hey, I appreciate the thoughts.

Yeah these are things I considered. As a person I have a nasty habit of over-optimizing super hard and never shipping because I am paralyzed by all the considerations. So I forced myself to ship it and face the music. If I end up working on it more, making it a more pure estimation experience is the first thing that I'll do. I also maybe mis-titled calling it "order of magnitude" here. Its more just general estimation.

Thanks again.
by rapawel | 2025-04-09 17:01:43+00:00
Thanks for checking it out — and good questions.

You're right: the site is SXG-enabled, and the point of the demo is to show that Google can prefetch and serve it even when you're offline — but only if you search for a specific phrase on Google. Random searches won’t trigger the right preload.

The 4-digit code is intentionally hardcoded — it's not a security check, but a way to make sure the user follows the instructions and gives Google a bit more time to prefetch the content before going offline.

The progress bar also helps with timing — making sure the preload has a chance to complete.

After reading your comment, I added a link to a blog post in the final step of the instructions, in case the demo doesn't work as expected. (If the page is cached from an earlier visit, a refresh helps — it's got a long browser cache.)

Thanks again for digging into it!
by ajmurmann | 2025-04-09 17:01:55+00:00
It's worse than a sales tax. Tariffs have a few market-distorting effects that a sales tax doesn't.

* Domestic consumers and companies are incentivized to potentially go for the 2nd best product. This over time can impact productivity as the tooling will decline over time as inferior solutions are bought.

* Reduced competition. We've seen this with the 25% "chicken tax" on pickup trucks. Arguably one culprit in US automakers falling behind is that they had a protected market around pickup trucks where it was hard to impossible for foreign competition to keep them on their toes. So US automakers retreated more and more into this safe haven.

* Destruction of economies of scale: If everyone wants the entire supply chain to be replicated in their country, we obviously loose economies of scale and thus efficiency. This sounds like it would be small but having multiple Shenzhen's is just not viable and we'll have to deal with higher prices and less product choice.

* Galapagos island syndrome: Over time separation of markets can lead to incompatible technologies which amplifies all other points.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-09 17:01:59+00:00
Meta: wish more watches had a day (of the week) display/complication.

Date (of the month) is fine, but Tuesday to Friday often tend to blur together nowadays (especially post-COVID hybrid), and it'd be nice to have that option.

* https://teddybaldassarre.com/en-ca/blogs/watches/day-date-wa...
by crazygringo | 2025-04-09 17:02:37+00:00
It's a great question, and the answer is that you're missing the change in demand.

Let's say Foot Locker tries to keep the same absolute profit $50 and retails the shoes for $125 instead of the previous $100.

Now demand goes down, because more people will skip a new pair of sneakers. So Foot Locker's absolute profit goes down.

But they still have the same fixed retail space, advertising, and labor as you said.

So to try to keep their profitability, they need to increase the price more, which reduces demand even more, but it settles somewhere higher. And the place it settles (where total absolute profit is maximized) tends to be around the same 100% markup as before.

It doesn't need to be exactly the same, but as a general rule of thumb, these things do tend to work in proportional terms rather than absolute terms. And we're fortunate they do, because when manufacturing costs fall, that means absolute profit per unit can fall as well (while percentage remains the same), because it's made up for by more people buying.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-09 17:02:47+00:00
> I find they demo nicely for other languages, but aren't very good at non-trivial C++

I haven't found they are terribly good at non-trivial anything

They will produce a 80-90% solution that then takes me longer to find and fix that 10-20% than it would have taken me to build it from scratch myself

My suspicion is that people get so wowed by the instant and effortless 90% correct solution that they wind up downplaying how much time and effort that remaining 10% winds up taking
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-04-09 17:03:03+00:00
Do people really prefer Yes-Men models? It appears that you are right but I find it surprising.

I very much prefer more disagreeable, critical models. GPT 4o and o3-mini will sometimes not tell you that you, e.g., didn't attach a file you asked to be analyzed and will instead hallucinate its contents, presumably not to upset you. Of course, their hallucinations are way more annoying.
by Lendal | 2025-04-09 17:03:04+00:00
I think you underestimate them. They'll just buy shoes from another country, import them in secret, repackage them, and sell them as American made Nike. They could easily strong-arm Nike to make a deal to go along with this. They'll do a "tour" of the "factory" that makes nothing, and MAGA will eat it up. They'll show us doubters all how wrong we were to doubt the carnival-barking-clown savior of America. And then he'll get a third term out of it.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-09 17:03:07+00:00
I used to travel to the US once a month for years and years (from Europe or Asia). It was either for business, or for vacation with the family. The larger the airport, the shittier the border but at least this was a moment to go through and that's all.

Now, as a French, I seriously consider being detained for something trivial and getting into a net of bureaucracy which would certainly extend my stay in the US. And I will not do that.

My grown-up children are suggesting vacation in New York and some other places, we will go to Asia instead where I was lucky enough to have only good experiences (especially in some countries). Nobody will care in the US but this is one less person to visit.

I would love the Americans to continue visiting us as nothing changed for them but I can totally understand that they will slow down as well, expecting unpleasantries.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-09 17:03:14+00:00
that’s exactly how investments work. you build out something or fund the building out of something and then some of the returns are repatriated to the investor.

in this case, you invest in building out a compliant and easy money transfer service. in other cases, you invest in a toll road, etc. etc.

the whole point of investment is it is a win-win
by sshkhr | 2025-04-09 17:03:22+00:00
Earlier this year, I decided to set up a couple of software based systems to reduce my screentime. They have been largely been successful. I have reduced my average daily phone screen time from 5-6 hrs to 2-3 hrs, around 1.5 hrs of which is 'wasteful' (reddit, HN, instagram) and the remaining 1.5 hrs is actual communication time (email, calls, chat). On my computer, my screen time is nearly all productive time by my standards. Some of the things I did are:

For my phone:

- Deleted all apps for social media, all browsing has to be via browser.

- Used SocialFocus (https://socialfocus.app/) to remove feeds and recommendations from all apps, any post access happens via shares or search

- Also turned on a timer for social media (45 minutes each for reddit/insta).

- Turned social media black/white instead of color.

- Used dumbify launcher (https://dumbifyapp.com/) to turn my menu bar into a text based one instead of icons.

For my computer:

- Used Cold Turkey (https://getcoldturkey.com/) to set up blocks for various websites, subreddits etc.

- Locked up my Cold Turkey block with a long random text string, which increases friction if I want to unlock and as a result reduces my inclination to do so.

- Use News Feed Eradicator (https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator/) to remove feeds from websites which have some utility for me (e.g. LinkedIn) but can be a time sink.

Honestly, these steps have worked quite well for me thus far. I have managed to get back into reading (both fiction, non-fiction as well as academic textbooks), freed up time to spend with family and friends, and also gotten into watching TV shows - something I had not really done in the last 2-3 years due to being hooked on short form media
by roguecoder | 2025-04-09 17:03:27+00:00
It is not that expensive to run double-blind fluoride experiments. There are hundreds that have been run over decades. There is a Scotland that the found an 81.4% reduction in cavities. A double-blind study from New Zealand found no benefit to osteoporosis is postmenopausal women. Etc. Etc.

If these neurocognitive effects were actually measurable, they wouldn't need to cherry-picking population-level correlation studies to find effects that are within the margin of error of the tests.
by root_axis | 2025-04-09 17:03:30+00:00
Too technical and nerve-racking for my loved ones traveling across the border. The solution most people I know (who are not born in the u.s.) have landed on is don't post or share any political articles, memes or reels, especially in DMs. If someone sends you political content, delete the message afterwards. The silver lining is that eschewing that content has some mental health benefits.

I would imagine that stories, snapchat, and disappearing message features are probably safe, but I tell my loved-ones that it's not exactly clear what type of meta-data might remain on the device even using those features.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-09 17:03:55+00:00
Hopefully not, Canada likes to peak into US records for stuff like a DUI from years ago from some guy who slept in his car at the bar so he would not drive home drunk, resulting in a policeman arresting him and then him being barred from the usual process of entering Canada.

Canada ending their intelligence sharing with the US would be a big win for citizens in the US and Canada. They basically rely on sharing records with a government with a very hostile and notoriously flawed justice system (that in practice results in quite racist results) and then using it to judge US citizens, which favors other immigrants from countries with weak or less flawed criminal systems or ones that do not share information with Canada.
by andai | 2025-04-09 17:04:05+00:00
I've been doing a lot of mindfulness meditation lately, and also learning about self soothing, emotional processing etc.

I found that now that I can access blissful and peaceful states at will, and deal with difficult emotions without getting overwhelmed, my "need" for compulsive behaviors has dropped massively. There's no longer so much pain to medicate.

It's like you say, we use this stuff because we don't know a better way.

As for social media, there's also the systemic issue of atomization in modern society. People spend so much time alone now, so that's another great pain to cope with.

I wonder why that is. How did we get here?
by Hilift | 2025-04-09 17:04:08+00:00
> Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point?

There is no point debating the administration or supporters. Peter Navarro hatched this idea, and he is nearly alone in his logic.

However, a broader debate is useful. A professor in Europe recently pointed out that Nixon did the same thing in the 1971. The intent was to destabilize and reset the dollar value compared to other currencies. He basically set off a grenade in the office. He proposed "New Federalism", and "Nixon's decision to end the gold standard in the United States led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. According to Thomas Oatley, "the Bretton Woods system collapsed so that Nixon might win the 1972 presidential election.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Economy

By the way. Bretton Woods and Treasury monetary policy after WW2 was crafted by Lauchlan Currie. Currie was a renowned economist and worked at US Treasury from 1934. In WW2, Currie was Franklin Roosevelt's chief economic adviser. Currie was also a Russian agent. His US passport and US citizenship was revoked in ~1954 and he lived the remainder of his life in Colombia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauchlin_Currie
by proteal | 2025-04-09 17:04:20+00:00
I’m about to graduate from a top business school with my MBA and it’s been wild seeing AI evolve over the last 2 years.

GPT3 was pretty ass - yet some students would look you dead in the eyes with that slop and claim it as their own. Fast forward to last year when I complimented a student on his writing and he had to stop me - “bro this is all just AI.”

I’ve used AI to help build out frameworks for essays and suggest possible topics and it’s been quite helpful. I prefer to do the writing myself because the AIs tend to take very bland positions. The AIs are also great at helping me flesh out my writing. I ask “does this make sense” and it tells me patiently where my writing falls off the wagon.

AI is a game changer in a big way. Total paradigm shift. It can now take you 90% of the way with 10% of the effort. Whether this is good or bad is beyond my pay grade. What I can say is that if you are not leveraging AI, you will fall behind those that are.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-09 17:04:43+00:00
What's interesting to me is how many of these advancements are just obvious next steps for these tools. Chain of thought, tree of thought, mixture of experts etc. are things you'd come up with in the first 10 minutes of thinking about improving LLMs.

Of course the devil's always in the details and there have been real non-obvious advancements at the same time.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-09 17:04:57+00:00
> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

But Stallman is a kook.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
by rcxdude | 2025-04-09 17:05:59+00:00
You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.

I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.
by moojacob | 2025-04-09 17:06:07+00:00
How can I, as a student, avoid hindering my learning with language models?

I use Claude, a lot. I’ll upload the slides and ask questions. I’ve talked to Claude for hours trying to break down a problem. I think I’m learning more. But what I think might not be what’s happening.

In one of my machine learning classes, cheating is a huge issue. People are using LMs to answer multiple choice questions on quizzes that are on the computer. The professors somehow found out students would close their laptops without submitting, go out into the hallway, and use a LM on their phone to answer the questions. I’ve been doing worse in the class and chalked it up to it being grad level, but now I think it’s the cheating.

I would never do cheat like that, but when I’m stuck and use Claude for a hint on the HW am I loosing neurons? The other day I used Claude to check my work on a graded HW question (breaking down a binary packet) and it caught an error. I did it on my own before and developed some intuition but would I have learned more if I submitted that and felt the pain of losing points?