MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sebmellen | 2025-04-05 03:14:46+00:00
Right, and I think that’s largely true.

Whether or not the “right wing working class” are right in their root cause analysis, the domestic situation in the US is catastrophic enough to demand explanation:

“If we are the richest country on earth, why can’t I afford a house and healthcare?”

Answer 1: You are being taken advantage of by wealthy elites within your country!

Answer 2: The whole world has made Americans front the bill for a regime of global peace, security, and a trusted reserve currency, at the cost of you, the American worker!

Depending on which answer you choose, and which camp you ally with, your worldview will differ.
by topspin | 2025-04-05 03:16:00+00:00
Perhaps there is a place for a simpler alternative. My comment was pretty tangential to this discussion about the merits of SPI vs USB vs whatever. My point is that I believe some benefit can be had by software developers in understanding how components can be integrated together using a primitive as simple minded as SPI. I used the qualification "some" again, as well. I don't offer any revolutionary insights, but if you survey how SPI is used in practice, you'll learn some things of value, even if you never use SPI yourself.
Ask HN: Year Deep Dive in ML
by TheAlchemist | 2025-04-05 03:16:24+00:00
I'm planning to spend significant time this year on ML and I'm looking for advice, feedback from people that did it successfully.

I have quite a lot (>10Y) of experience in software and everything data already, and at some distant point in the past I did play with NNs a bit - I have a decent (for a non practitioner) understanding - but that was before LLM, transformers.

I'm not necessarily looking to learn things that could get me a job in the field in the short term, but much more on developing a deep understanding of underlying concepts, play with new architectures.

I watched some Yann LeCun talks recently and I quite agree with his view that current trajectory of improving LLMs is a waste of time. It also makes me think about the Capsule Networks (which were looking promising last time I checked, but apparently disappeared completely by now).

So: 1. What resources would you recommend 2. Any advice from your 'journey' 3. What are good forums where one can ask questions
by lunarlull | 2025-04-05 03:17:15+00:00
> Imagine what the vibes would be on the West Coast if there was a huge set of policy changes that decimated and liquidated the high tech industries. All those software and engineering jobs just vaporize in a span of 20 years.

> Then the media makes you the butt of jokes. Calls you “flyover country.”

The people in your analogy are not the same types suffering from rust belt rage. One group is willing and very wanting to learn and grow and build, and the other is openly antagonistic to any sort of growth.

That's why they became flyover country. I don't think that would happen on the west coast if your scenario were to occur because of the different culture.
by curt15 | 2025-04-05 03:18:05+00:00
>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.

Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
by Leprowix | 2025-04-05 03:18:53+00:00
What personally made me switch over is when i had a client project for a restaurant that needed to setup delivery/takeouts it took me literally 2 days to have everything up running setup!

I was even able to configure that when orders are placed on the website they would get a phone call with a automated voice telling them an order #xxx has been placed all with no code whatsoever and this was integrated by default!
by amluto | 2025-04-05 03:18:55+00:00
The entire new tariff scheme is napkin math. Although it could also be napkin math done by some LLM.

If it was real math, it wouldn’t assume that there is some magical trade elasticity that is completely linear in the tariff rate. And real math might notice that the prices of goods that are subject to tariffs are an utterly absurd measure of value, cost, movement of money, or anything else.

Consider:

A US company does a bunch of R&D and designs a widget. They pay $10 each to a Chinese factory to manufacture it. They warehouse the widgets in Hong Kong. Each widget purchased by a US customer results in a “$100” item being imported. $90 stays in the US. $10 goes to China.

The same company does exactly the same thing except they ship in bulk to a US warehouse. The imported item is now “$10”. The tariff is 1/10 as much, the napkin math sees 1/10 as much trade imbalance, but the economic effect of the import is identical.

Or maybe they ship from Hong Kong to a French customer. This should be seen as an export from the US to France with $90 and an export from China to France worth $10. But I think it’s invisible to the napkin math.

Now consider that the US is home to some wildly successful companies with names like AMD and Nvidia. They sell chips for thousands of dollars each, worldwide. They pay TSMC quite a lot less to make them. If they warehouse in the US, they may be screwed now! If they ship from Taiwan to a buyer somewhere else, the US has, in effect, exported quite close to the full sale price of that chip, but no trade goods ever touched US soil. Can the napkin math sees that?

You can bet that several other countries use brains instead of napkins and will have no difficulty thinking that they could retaliate by restricting or taxing of these US-designed goods even if they’re imported from elsewhere. And China is working very hard to make their own alternatives, and they will surely be willing to export them.

(Don’t forget: The UK and Israel have CPU design expertise. ASML is dependent on tin zapping tech from San Diego, but they’re an EU company. And it looks like the successor to that tin zapping tech might be free electron lasers, and that technology come from US national labs and universities, but other countries also have FELs, and the nerdy physicists who fiddle with them are not happy with the US government right now.)
by tw04 | 2025-04-05 03:19:34+00:00
Good? I want it to be expensive and difficult to send me text messages. I can count on one hand the number of non humans I want to have the ability to send me a text and if this makes spamming financially impossible, I’m willing to deal with the baby getting tossed with the bathwater. There’s nothing so urgent I need from a small business that it can’t be either an email or a text from an employee instead of an automated system.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-05 03:19:46+00:00
Edit:

Sort of, but not in the way you are thinking about it.

People want help with this yes, but they shouldn't be outsourcing it.

The founder needs to ask literally thousands of questions to the market (can vary depending on how simple or complex the market is). If they haven't asked these questions, then they shouldn't be outsourcing it.

If they have asked all the questions, they know who to approach, what to say, how to say it. Then they can hire consultants to help them build the sale engine, which is actually all about adopting the best tools, distributing work, hiring, performance management, incentive structure, etc.

The parts that are specific to the startup (who to connect with, what to ask, what to say) need to be figured out by the startup and done by the founders. The parts that are more generic to all companies (hiring, training, performance management, team structure, tool stacking). Can be outsourced, and probably should be if the founders don't know how to do these things or really don't want to.

Edit 2:

The reason the founders shouldn't be outsourcing this, is that the founders are the ones to decide which part of the market to focus on and what to prioritize in the product. If they try and outsource it to someone else, there is an extra layer of noise in the communication between the two.

There is also this thing called the innovators bias (lots of cognitive biases really) that will exacerbate the situation because the founders with the power will over-weight their own incorrect instincts against what they hear from one person (consultant), but they will more appropriate weight their instincts against what they hear from dozens to hundreds of actual possible customers.
by ttyprintk | 2025-04-05 03:21:46+00:00
What changed my mind was the Signal group chat with Mike Waltz. Absolutely none of the statements from officials appeal to the critical thinking element of opsec. And he’s been employed in this role since the early 2000s. If he can’t learn it, then practically speaking, then it cannot be taught to the kind of person who gets elevated to that role.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-05 03:22:57+00:00
> that led to interest rate rises

Interest rates didn't rise because of industrial revival acts; they rose because they had been artificially low for a decade and someone had to throw water on the economy to cool it lest hyperinflation hit.

> and a TON of tech layoffs!

The nature of tech layoffs and what has happened in the Midwest over the last 50 years are completely different. When a guy is let go from Meta, he's let go from a job that earned him well over the median salary for Americans. Provided he hasn't blown it out his ass on courses at microdosing at Esalen, he should have something in savings. He has resources. He has connections. He has opportunities. When you work in an area with that much money in it - remember, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg each have a net worth that puts them on par with the yearly gross economic product of small American metropolitan areas - you can recover.

When a guy was let go from an automotive parts supplier in Michigan in 1988, he's making near that median salary. He has far less cushion. The nature of his work does not allow him to simply open his laptop and toy around with new business ideas, or open a startup; his former employer was the employer in town. When it went under, the town went under, and he had no way to get out.

And that's before accounting for what the rusting hulks of machinery did to the town. Chemicals dumped before regulation poison the water and soil. Major swathes of real estate needing millions of dollars in cleanup before any real redevelopment can occur. Maybe the Feds will get around to it with the Superfund in a generation or two; the developer from back east sure as hell isn't going to pay for it. By the way, can the town - which is already short on funds - give them tax increment financing for that redevelopment? They'll never come out ahead otherwise. You can't just convert a former brake pad manufacturing plant to lofts like you can with a former tech headquarters in San Francisco.

> And are you saying that the US media doesn't pillory Californa as a liberal hellhole? I actually don't even know what distribution of media you consume that doesn't handwring over the morality of liberals.

... where are you getting that from OC's comment?
by theamk | 2025-04-05 03:23:13+00:00
Yeah, the naming was pretty bad for a while, but it seems today `#!/usr/bin/env python3` is a safe bet. And pip/virtualenv should not matter - remember, we've are talking about "python-without-dependencies"

As for tabs vs spaces - I really don't get it... My editor (emacs) picks the style automatically, I don't think I even had to set this up. But most of the python code I see use 2 or 4 spaces, so if someone puts tabs, it's immediately visible 8-character indents, which makes me alert (and then I turn on whitespace highlighting in my editor).
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-05 03:23:26+00:00
> If you know that the US is pissed off because you're hoarding dollars because its the reserve currency and its causing the USD to rise too high

But you don’t know that! The explicit US position is that their tariffs are purely retaliatory, based on a formula they invented a few days ago which claims to compute an effective rate consisting of tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Export tariffs would make the formula as currently constructed go down, but the US would clearly see you’re juking the stats rather than actually removing trade barriers, and adjust the formula to account for it.

Perhaps you think the US is being strategically deceptive about its motivations? I do see a lot of people offer that as a “defense” of the US position, although I don’t clearly understand how this is meant to make things better. How should foreign trade negotiators know which HN commenters are telling them the real position and which ones have been taken in by the misdirection?
by elwebmaster | 2025-04-05 03:23:39+00:00
It probably has its advantages but until the UX reaches what we get with “docker run” this technology will never achieve its potential. When developing we need to think not only about what is possible but also how people do things currently and how does that compare to what we are proposing in terms of ergonomics. How many commands to get from 0 to hero with incumbent solution? How many with proposed solution? You get the point.
by analog31 | 2025-04-05 03:23:52+00:00
I learned from the 1st edition, in 1984. It's worth noting that the book was actually written for scientists rather than engineers. I was a math and physics major. By a long standing tradition, an electronics course is a standard part of the undergrad physics curriculum.

My dad had "Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt et al., 1962. His employer put a bunch of scientists through an electronics course.

The contrast was pretty remarkable. It's all about vacuum tubes, with some introduction of transistors. The 1st edition of AoE had a reasonable amount of material on digital circuits for back then, but I imagine a similar contrast between 1984 and today.

The span of 40+ years has certainly changed how I do electronics.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-04-05 03:23:54+00:00
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)

I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS

My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
by sebmellen | 2025-04-05 03:24:10+00:00
In reality, Canadians have bravely fought and died for American interests in the Middle East. Don’t take any of this as my personal view, or as a repudiation of the interpersonal camaraderie that Americans, by and large, still feel with Canadians (although I understand it’s no longer universally reciprocated).

However, as a matter of industrial economic reality, NAFTA likely benefited Canada more than it did the US, and the US does subsidize NATO and Canadian defense by extension. What barriers are there to an independent Canadian defense industry?

(Although I would argue that NAFTA benefited both countries, and we should continue our free trade agreements!)
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-04-05 03:24:40+00:00
> When the publisher of the article was also the actor in that scandal, I don't think it's ad hominem to wonder whether they're trying to whitewash the term.

No one working at the CIA today was there during MKULTRA, which was founded around the time Eisenhower was elected.

> Are you saying that MKUltra was actually so much more than the scandalous parts, to the extent that the CIA can just throw the term as innocuous into fluff pieces, as if there weren't overwhelmingly negative associations?

Again, I am saying that you don't know or have not presented convincing evidence otherwise, and to me, it sounds like you are just saying speculative shit.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-05 03:25:56+00:00
Is there a good reason we want to do this though? It doesn’t pay very well and the work is seasonal.

This feels like “adding any job no matter the job” is the goal, as opposed to investing in our citizenry through education, training and using subsidies to help with the transitioning to better paying employment like high tech manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, professional trades etc.

We should really be focusing on the quality of jobs added and encourage that growth, preferably with an eye on long term stability
by robocat | 2025-04-05 03:26:01+00:00
The last trip to Brasil I had problems with AirBnB - both incorrect listings (e.g. wrong location) and listings that weren't actually available.

I've used booking.com around the world and I can't recall any serious problem. When dealing with an issue, AirBnB error flow often sucks and booking is mostly fine.

When AirBnB works out great, you can find some real magic, but when it fails it really sucks.

I've found booking.com is usually more hotel-like and professional (e.g. contactable and reliable).

I still use both but I'm careful to choose depending on perceived risks.

Disclosure: long booking.com
by farmeroy | 2025-04-05 03:26:03+00:00
SO I worked as a professional musician for over a decade before a career change to software development... and since that change, the act of _listening_ to music has completely disappeared from my life. I cannot work or study with music on, I do not put music on when I'm home alone, I do not listen to music when driving... And for many years I gave up completely playing music even as a hobby. So although for most of my life I would have been shocked that someone could entertain the idea of living without music, I am actually now more shocked that people can do things like study or program with music on at all. In all that time though I was always impressed and surprised by what people would consider music :D
by lolinder | 2025-04-05 03:26:19+00:00
Honestly? I think the biggest cause of JavaScript hate is that a huge percentage of developers have very little choice but to use it.

The web ate almost everything else for a host of reasons, and JavaScript is still the only language that the web natively supports. You can compile to JS or use WASM with occasional callouts to JS, but you can't get away from it entirely.

Most other languages have a greater sense of choice surrounding them. For backend work you can pick pretty much anything, and mobile is still a small enough chunk of the ecosystem that if you really hate Swift you can just find a job that isn't iOS dev. It's not so easy to get out of web dev without dramatically shrinking your job pool.
by lenkite | 2025-04-05 03:27:02+00:00
Did you also call Obama's inaugural funding as corruption, when he was donated $53 million in 2009 and ~$43 in 2013 ?

Did you also call Biden's inaugural funding as corruption when he was donated ~$62 million ?

Donations included several billionaires - including the Gates family.

Is raising Presidential inaugural funds considered as "corruption" only for one party ? Or only when it crosses ~$100 million like President Trump did ?
by bawolff | 2025-04-05 03:28:16+00:00
> As stated by the leadership of both Mexico and Canada, USMCA will need to be renegotiated to address issues identified by all three parties

On the canada side, i think the issue identified that needs to be addressed is the US president being a dick.

(I'm not being sarcastic here, that is my genuine impression. If you disagree can you cite a source for what issues canada wants addressed? Obviously times are a bit weird since we are having an election and its considered bad form for the gov to do anything during election season)
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-05 03:30:00+00:00
This is an interesting question, but it seems at least possible that as long as the fundamental operation is simply "generate tokens", that it can't go beyond being just a form of next-token prediction. I don't think people were thinking of human thought as a stream of tokens until LLMs came along. This isn't a very well-formed idea, but we may require an AI for which "generating tokens" is just one subsystem of a larger system, rather than the only form of output and interaction.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-05 03:31:07+00:00
The last admin attempted that, creating well paying union jobs in clean energy and chip manufacturing. But it takes time, TSMC took 3-4 years from breaking ground to startup in Arizona. The electorate expects results immediately, which is impossible. And so, the thrashing continues. You can’t sell long term investment in the US, there is no will, but systems take time and investment to come up to speed.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-05 03:31:35+00:00
Nothing in what I posted was about solicitation.

It's about years of routine communication between a business and it's own customers that stops. Like my clients who had to stop providing product support over SMS - even tho that what their customers prefer.

It's about I can't send or receive texts from my personal numbers to anyone because my MNVO carrier can't afford the cash and ceaseless headaches that TCR impose.

SMS spam continues to flow. Legit traffic is cut off unless the ransom is paid.
by Clubber | 2025-04-05 03:31:38+00:00
Tariffs were the catalyst, but high interest rates certainly put downward pressure on markets, which was the intent, to cool inflation. Also the profitability underperformance of AI is very similar to all the .com companies who constantly lost money but had soaring stock prices. Companies like Microsoft and Google have poured billions into AI and it doesn't look like they are going to get a ROI any time soon.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-05 03:31:51+00:00
I don't think of it as the classic conspiracy in the sense of a La Cosa Nostra meeting in Apalachin.

It's more like a shared set of ideas, and those ideas are crazy, at least if you don't have a net worth that is enough to ride out all but the most historic of social upheavals. And part of avoiding that most historic of social upheavals is not laying off people for the sole profit of it, at least not without a good excuse.
by Sn0wCoder | 2025-04-05 03:31:52+00:00
Watched the video and super excited to see where tech like this ends up in a few years. Was on the quest to find a split keyboard last week and ran across this. Ended up with a UHK, but man I thought hard about buying one (pair) of these. I was just worried about dust, dirt and overall longevity. Seems like something that would need to be worked on every month or two. The kit is reasonable and might be a fun (next) project.

https://svalboard.com/

Would be interested to hear about anyone's experience that owns one of these. How do they hold up? How long did it take to get used to using? Would you recommend to a friend?
by compressedgas | 2025-04-05 03:31:54+00:00
> One way to mitigate the problem is to define strict design rules which minimize problems but that would also mean we minimize creativity.

This is not true. Creativity thrives among constraints. The kind of design rules that minimize bugs in programs do nothing whatsoever to limit the kinds of programs you can write. The only things that design rules should make impossible are things that you wouldn't want anyway.
by pimlottc | 2025-04-05 03:32:06+00:00
If you're feeling dejavu reading this article like I was, you might have read this previous piece on Vice [0] four years ago which also drew on Ken William's book, including many of the same quotes. It was discussed here as well [1].

0: https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-d...

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667