MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnaccount141 | 2025-04-30 15:19:42+00:00
Context matters. In a vacuum, the 85% rule is fine. In reality, it excludes a single company whose CEO not only holds a position in the administration making the rules, but who clearly holds enough influence that the president himself shot a Tesla ad in front of the white house.

Given such visible conflicts of interest, the administration should be bending over backwards to dispel perceptions of impropriety. The fact that they aren't, and that these coincidences keep occurring, should be telling.
by everforward | 2025-04-30 15:19:44+00:00
It's probably true, because I think wood pulp for paper doesn't have rigid requirements on type of wood, or size, or strength. There are also alternative materials if we had to, like hemp. There's probably a dozen others; I wouldn't be surprised if grass trimmings could be turned into toilet paper.

The threat to lumber for building is a much greater concern because there aren't ready and price-comparable alternatives.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-30 15:19:50+00:00
> Because if you look at the entire history of presidents with the notable exception of Barack Obama, every president has been a geriatric white dude.

That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.

> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman

Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
by marble_actual | 2025-04-30 15:20:03+00:00
Hello! I would like to announce the first release of my emulator that allows playing x86-64 games on RISC-V devices. Since this project is new, higher end titles don't yet work, but games like Celeste, Balatro, The Binding of Isaac are currently playable, including some Windows games via wine.

The emulator employs just-in-time recompilation and some tricks to improve performance. We work on improving it every day and getting more games working, while also working towards supporting 32-bit games.

Read more in our latest blog post: https://felix86.com/GPU-Trials/
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-30 15:20:18+00:00
I think you are confusing nature with economic vitality. There needs to be economic value inherent in a location for a city to thrive. Having grass and water doesn't mean much at all in this regard. You need things like natural harbors, navigable river ways or mine-able resources.

Pretty much all the good spots for cities have already been claimed, hundreds of years or even millennia ago. These are the spots people live in, and the spots people want to live in (as evidenced by ever increasing cost to live there).
by pxx | 2025-04-30 15:20:23+00:00
I don't think your example is really a counterexample. Work-provided Blackberries allowed you to be more responsive to work messages while communicating over an ostensibly secure medium.

on the other hand, making sure that people use AI for performance reviews would be akin to measuring the percentage of work days that you used your blackberry. that's not something that anyone sane ever did.

somewhat in the same vein, nobody ever sent a directive saying that all interoffice memoranda must be typed in via blackberry.
by gabigrin | 2025-04-30 15:20:50+00:00
You theoretically could. Not sure it's the right tool for the right job.

We believe that many programming tasks are better done with textual coding.

Interpreting Flyde (the visual programming language behind Flowcode) flows and running them (see https://github.com/flydelabs/flyde/blob/main/core/src/execut...) ) will not benefit from being visual. It's mostly synchronous, borderline fractal logic.

A great use case for visual programming would be a task that involves several LLM calls, third-party vendors, and some transformation logic on top.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-30 15:20:52+00:00
The closest I've seen to a convincing explanation of this came from a recent Some More News episode. The host argued that, while Democrats at the Federal level have pretty fucking clearly been far better for normal Americans this century (and longer, but let's consider the last 25ish years) with things like the CFPB and ACA and bringing down fentanyl overdose death rates (to say nothing of economic performance under Democrats versus Republicans, going back quite a bit farther than this century), they have simply not done enough, and the perception is still, by death through a thousand cuts, that things are getting worse.

Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.

Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.

This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".

Fertile ground for a fascist conman.

There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-30 15:21:06+00:00
Some years back there was talk of an atomic clock that came in a very small package (matchbox / cigarette pack size?). Iirc, saw a price indication of $1500 somewhere.

Something like that still around, and/or available? Any updated designs?

Personally I have no need for ultra-accurate timekeeping. But hey... an atomic clock is way cooler than a Nixie clock or oven-controlled Xtal oscillator. And no... huge 2nd hand atomic clock found on eBay etc doesn't cut it. Too big /heavy / power-hungry.
by burning_hamster | 2025-04-30 15:21:36+00:00
Huge fan of Distill here (and your personal blog).

> In retrospect, I deeply regret trying to run Distill with the expectations of a scientific journal, rather than the freedom of a blog, or wish I'd pushed back more on process. Not only did it occupy enormous amounts of time and energy, but it was just very de-energizing.

Scientific peer review pretty much always is incredibly draining, and (assuming the initial draft is worth publishing) it rarely adds more than a few percent to the quality of the article. However, newcomers are drowning in a sea of low quality SEO spam (if they bother to search & read blogs at all and don't go straight to their LLMs, which tend to regurgitate the same rubbish). The insistence on scientific peer review created a brand, which to this day allows me to blindly recommend Distill articles to people that I am training or teaching. So I, for one, am incredibly grateful that you went the extra-mile(s).
by redbell | 2025-04-30 15:21:50+00:00
Really cool work, love it!

I first discovered this about three months ago in a reddit comment under 'r/geography', and I still, from time to time, use it and enjoy it. Back then, I posted it here in HN, but zero traction!

Anyway, for those interested in previous discussions, here we are:

(2020), 556 points, 266 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787

(2017), 193 points, 66 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327973

(2019), 155 points, 49 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898538

(2015), 105 points, 36 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182024
by azinman2 | 2025-04-30 15:21:53+00:00
What’s different is the US is wayyyyy richer and more comfortable than any time previously in history, or at least was until recently (in terms of PPP of the avg person). When you grow up in those conditions, it’s like you’re the kid of a rich person who made all the money, and you now feel entitled to it without any of the work it took to get here, and without experiencing the pain without it or the lessons learned along the way. Instead you start to complain that you can’t do XYZ (buy a home, have a family, pay for healthcare), but because you didn’t create these conditions or experience life before, you just blame others without any of the tools to correct it for yourself.
by aziaziazi | 2025-04-30 15:22:05+00:00
The smart ones will head to the hardware store instead of rushing to the paper: bidet-washing-tube will makes you free of toilet paper for life.

Cost: 10-30$

Installation: 20min with basic tools on your existing toilet.

Usage: tons and tons of online tutorials because 1/3 of the world already use that daily. But you can also figure it out yourself easely, it’s way easier than managing node_modules on a shared project.

Even cheaper alternative: a simple plastic bottle half-full and half bend. Many cheap labours in my city (Paris, fr) use one at work (cook, night cleaners, construction…). While the bourgeoisie fight for pooping clean during a world crisis, their Pakistani labor do they shit as usual. We should be inspired.
by dralley | 2025-04-30 15:22:46+00:00
>Trump is 100% convinced his (long disproven both theoretically and empirically) trade theory is true, and no one can talk him out of it.

Also nobody tries particularly hard. The secret to longevity in a Trump administration is to effusively praise the boss constantly and minimize direct contradictions. Which turns into "good tzar bad boyars" - the boss is never wrong, only badly advised.
by scschneider44 | 2025-04-30 15:22:50+00:00
We just open-sourced Egret-1, a new neural network potential for predicting molecular energies and forces at DFT accuracy — but several orders of magnitude faster.

It’s designed to cover a wide chemical space, from stable bio-organic molecules to challenging transition-state structures, and works out of the box with the ASE calculator interface.

We’re releasing three models:

Egret-1: general-purpose

Egret-1e: optimized for thermochemistry

Egret-1t: optimized for transition states

All models are MIT licensed and publicly available on GitHub.

GitHub: https://github.com/rowansci/egret-public

Use them on Rowan: http://rowansci.com

If you’re doing anything with ML potentials, molecular dynamics, conformer generation, or quantum chemistry in general, would love to hear your thoughts or feedback.
by libertine | 2025-04-30 15:23:17+00:00
> There’s no such point.

Well, I disagree; the people of a nation contributing to and supporting genocide are responsible in part.

> This is the main reason why Russia is still not under full trade embargo and Russian citizens can still get visas.

I don't think those are the main reasons:

- Embargo would have a global economic impact and would have to be militarily enforced; Also, it wouldn't be enforced everywhere as Russia has borders with countries that aren't sanctioning them.

- As far as I know, Russian citizens can't get Visas everywhere; several European countries have banned all sorts of visas for Russian citizens.

In fact, there's a case to be made that Russians are being collectively held accountable, for example:

- Sanctions;

- Seizing of Russian State assets (they don't belong to Putin or the regime, these assets actually belong to Russians);

- Visa bans;
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-30 15:24:06+00:00
Commercial atomic clocks of various types aren't that rare. Every cell site has a rubidium standard and/or GPS timing, many data centers probably have a cesium standard, and radio astronomers use H-masers for interferometry.

Everybody with a GPS-disciplined oscillator has access to time and frequency from the Naval Observatory at the sub-100 ns level, optionally augmented to +/- 1 ns with reasonably affordable gear like https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkpnt-gnss-disciplined-oscillato... .

A fountain clock is on a whole different level than any of these. The same researchers who build fountains also work on even better optical lattice clocks, none of which you can buy from Sparkfun. These are research tools that don't have a market, at least not yet.

The SI second definition will likely move from Cs-133 at 9 GHz to Sr-87 at 400 THz before too long ( https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/second-future ), but that probably won't shake up the existing market too much.
by tuyguntn | 2025-04-30 15:24:13+00:00
> "tariffs imposed during the 19th century spurred industrialization and ultimately positioned America as a global superpower"

it's not "the one thing", which contributed to it. There are multiple factors which spurred industrialization, some of them are:

* Europe and Japan was destroyed and they had other problems to deal with * Soviet Union was seen as an enemy * Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job * When many people started working in manufacturing, they needed different optimizations for their process, which lead to more manufacturing

Tariffs may have helped, but they were not the only reason. as an example, look at Brazil today, they have lots and lots of tariffs
by jillyboel | 2025-04-30 15:24:16+00:00
Have you listened to the guy talk? There isn't a comprehensible thought in there, and there hasn't been for years. He's old, older than Biden was when he started his term, and probably suffering from dementia.

edit: The pro trump voting bloc showed up. Comment went from +2 to -3 in a minute. This chain will probably be flagged to death within the hour.
by roughly | 2025-04-30 15:24:16+00:00
> There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer. That's a stick that can be (and probably already is) wielded that might produce results soonish.

I sincerely hope you’re right, but all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings. Maybe when it becomes obvious that they’re not getting anything for all that abasement they change tacks, but nothing in the Trump era has suggested to me that these folks have the tiger by anything but the tail.
by beardyw | 2025-04-30 15:24:17+00:00
I've ended up conflicted about PWAs. Part of me thinks they are a really great idea. But then I don't get the option to add a page within the site to my home screen, just an option to install the app [1]. Also the update process is opaque and hard to manage during development. So I just don't know how to feel.

[1] a work around is to go to the page, switch off WiFi, refresh the page (with error), and then you can add to home screen. It works for me!
by JimDabell | 2025-04-30 15:24:21+00:00
> This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology.

I’ve been around long enough to see resistance to things like the Internet, version control, bug tracking systems, ORMs, automated tests, etc. Not every advancement is welcomed by everybody. An awful lot of people are very set in their ways and will refuse to change unless given a firm push.

For instance, if you weren’t around before version control became the norm, then you probably missed the legions of developers who said things like “Ugh, why do I have to use this stupid thing? It just slows me down and gets in my way! Why can’t I just focus on writing code?” Those developers had to be dragged into modern software development when they were certain it was a stupid waste of time.

AI can be extremely useful and there’s a lot of people out there who refuse to give it a proper try. Using AI well is a skill you need to learn and if you don’t see positive results on your first couple of attempts that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it just means you are a beginner. If you tried a new language and didn’t get very far at first, would you blame the language or recognise that you lack experience?

An awful lot of people are stuck in a rut where they tried an early model, got poor results to begin with, and refused to use it again. These people do need a firm, top-down push, or they will be left behind.

This has happened before, many times. Contrary to the article’s claims, sometimes top-down pushes have been necessary even for things we now consider near universally good and productive.
by georgeecollins | 2025-04-30 15:24:31+00:00
What if that turns out to be not true? China's trade with the US is not that big in $ terms and if they take an economic hit it will be unifying. The USA did this to them. Europe wasn't doing that well before, this jolt could be bad short term, but not that bad long term. And again, very unifying.

After the Trump tariffs in the first term, US sales of Soy Beans to China never recovered. They switched to Brazil. What if the rest of the world just start buying fewer treasury bills (or paying less for the return) from now on? It is possible this could be worse for the USA than other developed countries.
by anovikov | 2025-04-30 15:24:36+00:00
Good half of "wellness" or "nutra" scam "supplements" revolve around promise of losing weight. After all, losing weight is people's biggest health goal in itself plus doing so fixes many other health issues.

Fortunately, weight loss seems to be solved due to GLP-1 drugs and soon, the newer similar drugs that can be take orally (not prions, but things that bend proteins similarly without being prions -> not metabolised in stomach quickly, so one can take them orally). So people who want to lose weight, now actually can do so without resorting to scams - and these drugs are so effective, if i was a scam weight loss remedy dealer i'd have a very hard time now.

So i really question the validity of the article's concern.
by dlisboa | 2025-04-30 15:24:40+00:00
> Fundamentally this is a game of chicken, and China will definitely blink first.

China thinks in terms of decades and their population is very culturally disciplined. They will endure years of economic downturns if necessary. Historically they have.

They also have quite a few advantages being a planned economy, with a higher appetite for wealth redistribution than the US and the hability to shift investments very quickly. This quells most internal dissatisfaction that recessions bring.

They merely have to wait it out, as they have. Trump dropped some tariffs without them doing anything.
by swatcoder | 2025-04-30 15:25:02+00:00
An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.

An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.

HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.
by teraflop | 2025-04-30 15:25:41+00:00
It's no more circular than spending money on education to get a high-paying job, or spending money on changing your A/C filters so that your air conditioner doesn't prematurely fail.

> but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.

A "self-sustaining" feedback loop still has humans in the loop, deciding to reinvest money in future improvements. If those humans decide to shut the loop down then obviously the benefits will stop being realized.
by azinman2 | 2025-04-30 15:26:32+00:00
> It's ~energy independent

Not really. At least in terms of oil, the majority of what’s extracted cannot be refined in the US because all of the refineries were built for non-shale oil. Basically all of the oil gets sent abroad to be refined and then sent back.

Why this isn’t talked about more, especially under the context of “drill baby drill”, I don’t understand. If anything the slogan should be “refine, baby, refine”
by Shog9 | 2025-04-30 15:26:46+00:00
No.

We don't have a cure for autism.

We don't have a prevention for autism.

We don't have a clear cause for autism beyond recognizing that genetics play a role.

We don't even have a clear picture of the scope; one reason rates appear to be increasing is simply that we've gotten better at recognizing symptoms in previously ignored populations. But... We are probably still ignoring symptoms in some significant populations.

It is completely understandable that, as we learn more and the scope of the problem becomes more apparent, folks are alarmed and clamoring for politicians to Do Something.

...it is less apparent that there is anything productive to be done, beyond continued efforts to better understand the situation.

We (as a society) and Kennedy in particular (within his own family), have ample experience with the harms wrought by efforts to Do Something when no effective solution exists.
by lotu | 2025-04-30 15:26:56+00:00
> > Could they collect every phone before school and hand them out after? Sure.. but that's a nightmare.

Yes they could for years NYC schools banned cellphones in schools which ment kids could not bring them in the building at all. Kids left their phones with nearby bodegas or in a van parked outside the school for a small fee. Basically a coat check for phones. This worked perfectly well and required zero effort on the part of the administration.
by snowwrestler | 2025-04-30 15:27:01+00:00
Agreed, and tariffs are an impediment to specialization, which is the basis for innovation that drives long-term economic growth.

Surgeons can push the limits of better and better surgery if they can spend their entire career focused on just that. If they’re required to farm or sew clothes half of every day, they will not be able to advance surgery as far.

The same specialization-driven innovation happens between companies who can trade freely, and between countries who can trade freely. Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for exploring this idea.