MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roenxi | 2025-04-05 05:01:08+00:00
> the idea that a pencil is the product of global trade, I don't buy, you can make national pencils without a sweat.

It is, obviously, possible. Pencils are about as simple as it gets. But it is hardly a no-sweat process. It made international news when China declared itself capable of producing a ballpoint pen using only native tech and materials. It was a point of significant pride to the Chinese government at the time - as well it should be, it was something of a manufacturing and policy tour-de-force.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
by tomwojcik | 2025-04-05 05:01:08+00:00
I'm in the same boat. Ever since I started working professionally, I was always praised for delivering first, and it shows in how I work. I'm a maker, I love to deliver. I have a few side projects as well, a few that are relatively completed and I haven't even deployed them, because they were just fun to build. Some are deployed, and I enjoy polishing them.

On the other hand, I remember that time you enjoy wasting is not a wasted time. I don't sleep well if I don't just chill and forget about the world, from time to time. It's like in the Sims. I aim towards my creativity and entertainment need bars to be filled. While coding, I often increase the fill of both bars.
by jredwards | 2025-04-05 05:01:14+00:00
I think the combination of malice and incompetence remains the most credible theory:

Trump believes that the he/the US has the more powerful position in all of these relationships and wants to impose his will on the rest of the world and make them submit to his/US superiority. Which might actually work if he picked one target at a time. But you can't beat up the whole school at once. The fact that he can't do this to everyone at once, combined with his utter misunderstanding of what trade imbalance actually means, will lead to an outcome that is bad for everyone, but worse for the U.S. than most.

There are two other theories that I think have some shred of credibility, and they're both worse:

1. Trump intends to use his apparent ability to unilaterally impose or negate these taxes at will on a granular level to force countries, companies, and individuals to come groveling to him for favors, allowing him to use the presidency to further enrich and entrench himself.

2. Trump is divesting of dependence on allies because he thinks they might soon be adversaries. That's the most harrowing potential interpretation, but it relies on the notion that he has any kind of foresight. This is really only credible if you genuinely believe that it's Putin pulling his strings. Which is a possibility that's hard to dismiss.
by walterbell | 2025-04-05 05:01:50+00:00
Miran is CEA chair, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Economic_Advisers

> The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the president of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.
by thethimble | 2025-04-05 05:02:02+00:00
The plan is crystal clear:

1. When equities crash, market liquidity floods the bond market causing yields to drop

2. Refinance debt at these lower rates massively reducing interest burden

3. Cut government spending to cause rates to drop further

4. Reduced rates with a balanced budget results in non-inflationary borrowing and an economic upswing

Along the way, eliminate taxes for those earning below $150k.

If all of the above happens at the expense of equity holders so be it.

This plan has been made clear by multiple people from within the administration (namely Bessent who is one of the greatest macro investors of all time).

Now there’s many things to criticize in this plan (and lots of risk and unknown possible second order effects), but to describe it as “genuine chaos” or ineptitude is strange.
by blackguardx | 2025-04-05 05:02:22+00:00
What is the most challenging concept about transistors? I think the classic valve analogy (AKA Art of Electronics "Transistor Man") works to a large extent. To fully understand the physics requires a lot more but in between, there are relatively simple equations that describe the main current flow as related to the control terminal's voltage or current depending on the transistor type.

To go from single transistor to multi-transistor circuits was a big leap for me, but most of it is understanding how particular subcircuits work and recognizing them as blocks of a larger circuit.
by nradov | 2025-04-05 05:02:24+00:00
It does matter what the project is. Not all are "good".

My last significant side project was the opposite of "blissful". In order to preserve and migrate some important personal data I had to reverse engineer an obsolete, undocumented file format. Then I had to use a confusing and badly documented commercial library to convert the data into a modern file format. I had to figure everything out through trial and error with nearly zero support. It was a frustrating pain in the ass from start to finish and while I'm satisfied with the results I didn't enjoy a minute of it.
by lrvick | 2025-04-05 05:05:56+00:00
I use it for all my projects at several orgs, with several languages. I am the founding engineer of the project so I am likely a bit biased on ideal developer UX though.

Just drop a Containerfile in your project with pinned hashes of all dependencies and you will likely get deterministic results of your own software basically for free.

Here are some standalone projects that are built deterministically with stagex:

- https://codeberg.org/stagex/repros

- https://git.distrust.co/public/airgap

- https://git.distrust.co/public/enclaveos

- https://github.com/tkhq/quorumos

- https://github.com/siderolabs/toolchain/blob/main/Pkgfile#L5...

- https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui/blob/main/docker/sui-node-...

- https://github.com/tkhq/tkcli/blob/main/src/Dockerfile
by ahartmetz | 2025-04-05 05:06:33+00:00
IMO: In the end, everything we do is out of inner motivation, and love is no exception, so: all selfish. But that is not to be taken too literally - being unselfish can feel good, too, and is therefore "selfish". Rand's recognizing moral character or whatever as the base of love seems completely random, not how any of that works. We're smart animals! Biological creatures. We need to reproduce. It gets messy.
by weard_beard | 2025-04-05 05:06:39+00:00
The function can be understood as a traffic cop at the intersection of a major road and a small 1 lane road.

He has instructions to only let cars down the major road if cars also come down the small road.

When a small trickle of cars come down the small road the intersection can act like a dimmer switch. It can also take a very small signal, and with a secondary more powerful input, amplify it.

But if you quickly alternate between no cars and lots of cars that dimmer switch acts like a toggle switch giving you 1s and 0s.

The physics is basically, when you sandwich two elements in close proximity that give up their electrons in a very specific way you get the macro phenomenon described above.

The reason the elements give up electrons this way also happens to be at the heart of a lot of cool concepts of math and is a demonstrable proof of some physics that used to be just theory. Learning the physics of transistors can teach you concepts that tie together the history of science from Ancient Greece to Quantum physics.
by dleary | 2025-04-05 05:06:56+00:00
If the population grew from 100k in 1700 to 300k in 1750, and if the homicide rate was right around 2 per 100k, then that would mean that the total number of homicides in New England, over the 50 years span was less than 300.

Do you really believe that fewer than 300 murders occurred during this time?
by condensedcrab | 2025-04-05 05:07:13+00:00
One can argue that the high level of unionization in the 1950s at around a third of the workforce help set an expectation for job compensation. Kind of a “herd-immunity” against low pay.

Maybe it’s not union jobs as you point out, but I agree that there’s a real cost of living crisis where minimum wage jobs are simply too far from a reasonable (not even comfortable) existence.
by walterbell | 2025-04-05 05:07:53+00:00
> The Dutch, for example, own ASML, but this doesn’t really give them any power, because their tools are relatively “open”.

https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Tracing-...

That a Dutch company, ASML, commercialized a technology pioneered in America’s national laboratory ecosystem and largely funded by Intel also has important lessons for policymakers interested in protecting and promoting the next emerging technology.
by necovek | 2025-04-05 05:09:37+00:00
I did not raise it, but what was raised was "coding speed": as in, the speed to type code into an editor.

That's not "engineering", but "coding".

Engineering already assumes a lot more than just coding: most importantly, thinking through a problem, learning about it and considering a design that would solve it.

Nobody raised communication or the human factors.

Current LLMs can indisputably help with the learning part, with the same caveats (they will sometimes make shit up). Here we are looking at how much they help with the coding part.
by canucker2016 | 2025-04-05 05:10:34+00:00
And from Steven Levy's Hackers, she was one of the women in the hot tub for the cover and ad for the game Softporn Adventure, published by the company that was soon renamed to Sierra On-line.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure

Interesting to read the link to the Leisure Suit Larry game.
by tastyface | 2025-04-05 05:11:40+00:00
Democracy tends to require a revolution to break free from those authoritarian regimes, to say nothing of thousands (or millions) of deaths along the way. And we're still waiting for Russia, China, Cuba, etc. to reveal their glorious democratic forms. (By your logic, communism must be one of humanity's greatest achievements since it elevated a number of feudal countries to superpower status. Nevermind the millions of dead in famines, gulags, genocides, etc. But hey, at least crime rates were low!)
by loktarogar | 2025-04-05 05:13:05+00:00
I am not sure I could achieve the distribution success of these two. That's worth celebrating.

If I could, I am not sure that I would. This app seems actively harmful. I don't think it can actually do what it claims to do, and that's going to cause real people problems.

It's unfortunate that that disqualifies me from making that kind of money. It's unfortunate that they are allowed to do so.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-05 05:13:08+00:00
I could get on board with tariffs on known bad actors like China, but they hit everyone needlessly. Europe has been a great partner, Mexico and Canada even more so

The problem with any of these narratives is it burns decades of good relationships and allows our enemies, for lack of a better word, to fill any void that is left over. I’m sure China is trying to woo the EU right now as we speak, and I couldn’t blame the EU for not taking some of their possible proposals, as they now need to replace hundreds of billions of dollars of trade overnight

Free trade with western/ US aligned countries actually works extremely well. China being the largest of the bad actors (but hardly the only one) is problematic, so I understanding targeting that, but not our historically close Allies
by Smeevy | 2025-04-05 05:13:15+00:00
We're well past hypotheticals here and it is pointless to talk about what we "could" do. The decision has been made to let food and medicine expire in warehouses and to withhold funds to aid organizations both domestically and abroad. There's no second part to this plan. Promises have been broken and will not be renewed.

Also, local NGOs absolutely care about sustainable solutions to problems. Aid workers are not some mustache-twirling, dependency-creating villains.

The argument against "giving a man a fish" is very convenient for people that don't want to do anything to help. Starving people need food. They don't love starving. They're not starving out of spite or to make us feel guilty. Even if it's their own fault they're starving, basic morality mandates that we try to help. I'm not religious, but less misery in the world, by any means necessary, seems a worthy goal.

As for Russia and China helping out rural America, I wish they would. At least someone would be helping then. I would, in fact, welcome their assistance in urban areas as well. I do regular volunteer work with a little free pantry nearby and it is cleaned out every single day. That is a societal failure and the US government just made it worse on purpose.

I'm responding out of order to your statements, but the "both sides" argument you have here is a false equivalence. I don't love the Democratic party, but there is a wide gap in cynical manipulation of the law and procedure between them and the Republicans. Are you intimating that Democrat legislators sat on Supreme Court nominees while waiting out a Republican presidency? That a Democrat-controlled congress abdicated their budgetary and oversight responsibilities to a Democrat president? There is a clear difference in respect for institutions between our two political options and saying "they're both bad" seeks to minimize the misconduct of American far-right conservatives and overstate the failings of our wembling, capitulating, center-left Democratic party.

I understand that you are most likely tired of reading this from me and I appreciate the time you have taken to do so.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-05 05:13:24+00:00
Note that the prompt given here does not ask for a way of calculating the effective foreign tariffs imposed on the US (what the formula is used to dishonestly present) but to calculate the ideal US tariffs to level the trade deficit.

That is, the LLMs do not give the formula the US actually used for setting US tariffs with this prompt asking for ideal US tariffs, instead, the response to this prompt about ideal US tariffs gives the calculation that the Administration used to calculate the effective foreign tariffs, not the US tariffs.

Also, given that tariff rates must be a percentage, any answer is probably going to end up being a ratio, and the prompt naturally indicates that the numerator should be the trade deficit the US has with the country. So. this is essentially expressing surprise that when suggested half of the formula in the prompt, the models all come up with the same (and I would argue quite obvious once you've gotten that far) denominator.

I don't think this indicates that that used an LLM, I think it indicates that they decided that all trade deficits shoule be ascribed to manipulation that was effectively tariff-like, and presented as a tariff rate imposed by the foreign country, and, having made that decision, the formula fell out naturally, and is what any reasonably knowledgeable human given the assignment—as well as any non-hallucinating, modestly capable LLM—would produce given the way the assignment already implicitly provides both the shape and one of two key pieces of the formula.

(Of course, expressing surprise at AI doing something in a response and not realizing it was mostly just regurgitating what was already decided by the prompter and fed to it in the prompt in a slightly different form is quite common is quite common these days, though using that mistake as a basis for an accusation of using AI is somewhat novel.)
by habosa | 2025-04-05 05:14:04+00:00
I just finished this book a few weeks ago, it was excellent. I don’t normally read nonfiction, and when I do I avoid reading about business or technology. Despite this book being all 3 of those things I highly recommend it.

One of the most thorough and well written pieces of journalism (it reads like a book-length magazine feature) that I’ve ever encountered. The characters and company felt so alive.
by Gigachad | 2025-04-05 05:14:19+00:00
I’ve observed in Australia, the closer you are to the CBD (the main city postcode), the healthier the people are, once you get to the outer suburbs is like an entirely different country. The streets look different, the people are all obese, the cars are bigger, etc.

I honestly think that we don’t put enough emphasis on how bad cars are for your health.
by Teever | 2025-04-05 05:14:19+00:00
I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is the root of all evil in our society. Every violent criminal, every death of despair, it all can be tied directly to white collar crime.

White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.

This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.

If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.

A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.

But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.

I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
by saturn8601 | 2025-04-05 05:14:40+00:00
The rich are about to get a massive tax cut. They cannot possibly spend all those savings on things like food or consumer goods. So where does it go? Assets: Housing, more stocks, antiquities. Any truly rich person will have a diversified portfolio of assets. So what if some of their stocks go down temporarily? They will go back up eventually and the rich can afford to wait out much longer than any normal peon. Its not even a nefarious thing either. If anyone were in their position it would be the prudent thing to do. The most important thing is they have to put this money into something now before it erodes. Buy up all the stocks, buy up all the land, buy up all the vintage collector items, hell even buy up all the retro video games, just do it now.
by colechristensen | 2025-04-05 05:16:01+00:00
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month.

A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental etc issues)
by csense | 2025-04-05 05:16:12+00:00
> "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others"

Doesn't work. We opened trade to China in the '70s. They took advantage of us, stealing IP, manipulating currency, paying their people terrible wages, crapping all over the environment. We let their companies freely in the US, they very severely restricted US business ventures in China.

Detroit, a former shining city in the industrial heartland, is now a bandit infested ruin.

In the US, a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support owning a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, a car, and multiple children.

For me, coming from the Rust Belt, it's incredibly, painfully obvious that globalization's basically destroyed the US economy. I'm constantly amazed to meet well-meaning, intelligent people who don't seem to understand this fact.
by mirzap | 2025-04-05 05:18:23+00:00
But that's the point he tries to make. When you "teach" LLM with some knowledge, you teach it a set of patterns. It won't necessarily drop the code that infringes copyright. Say you load Gumroad code into Gemini Pro context and say something like: "Check this app. Analyze the implementation of feature XY... I need you to help me implement feature XY... but in Go". Then, you can recreate an entire platform that will look nothing like the original but will have the same features and open source it.
by ycombinete | 2025-04-05 05:21:14+00:00
I understand how you feel.

Trying to live in a relationship with a Christian philosophy only works if both parties in the relationship have the same mindset.

It’s a shortcut to being abused if one partner turns the other cheek, and the other keeps on slapping them.

I’m still not sure if this identifies poor partners or a poor outlook.
by nestorD | 2025-04-05 05:21:35+00:00
It is a direct ancestor but I find that what most people picture when they hear Old English (and have no prior knowledge of it) is something closer to Middle English, which is somewhat redeable by modern English speakers, rather than something like `Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas.` [0]

[0]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-eng...
by lovich | 2025-04-05 05:21:40+00:00
>I really appreciate you following up with a cordial tone, it's so nice to have a respectful conversation with a stranger on the internet in this day and age.

This feels sarcastic?, but I'll assume it isn't for the sake of the conversation and since that's easy to misinterpret over text

> In general, these jobs can mostly be performed without a college degree.

> Contrast that with service jobs that can broadly be performed with a college degree:

Are these not apple to oranges comparisons? "can mostly be performed without a college degree" and "service jobs that can broadly be performed with a college degree" seem like different buckets.

On top of that "can broadly be performed with a college degree" means nothing. You could describe people in comas as being able to "broadly perform a coma with a college degree". Especially when retail is being pulled up as one of the major buckets.

>So, on average, manufacturing and extraction jobs not requiring a college education pay 40% more than service jobs of the same requirements.

Yea again, this is disingenuous. You're now comparing "manufacturing and extraction jobs not requiring a college education" with "service jobs of the same requirements" but mere sentences ago you were bringing up data on manufacturing jobs that _did not_ need a college degree, and numbers on service jobs that _did_ need a college degree.

I know believe the numbers in this link aren't matching up with this conversation because they are logically inconsistent
by cavisne | 2025-04-05 05:22:08+00:00
Yes this was the case for Venezuela, they started taking flights again when the El Salvador news came out.

Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act.

If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.