MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I'm 17 and built a voice assistant that networks for you
by delamri | 2025-04-30 13:31:38+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Dris! I'm 17, and I built Walker, a voice assistant that connects college students with other ambitious people in under 5 minutes.

Here's the (demo?) video: https://youtu.be/jldOWJ6AMdg

Just call Walker, share your story & get matched with someone on-campus worth connecting with. No downloads, awkward intros, or onboarding.

Plenty of cold DMs & conversations lead nowhere. Walker fixes that.

Currently invite-only @ a few biz/finance schools. Feedback & critiques would be super helpful!
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-30 13:31:47+00:00
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-research-cont...

> The new research being shared this week found that only mild cases rose from 2000 to 2016.

> According to the analysis, 1.2 out of 1,000 children had autism with moderate or significant impairment in 2016, compared with 1.5 out of 1,000 in 2000. By contrast, mild cases rose 139% during that period — from 3.1 out of 1,000 to 7.3 out of 1,000.
by somelamer567 | 2025-04-30 13:31:52+00:00
The 'uniparty' narrative is straight out of Putin's propaganda playbook.

The 'uniparty' narrative denigrates the Western system of multi-party representative democracy and checks and balances, and equates it with Putin's monstrously corrupt and brutal one-party state.

Unfortunately these fascist narratives are extremely effective on underinformed and unintelligent people -- and our enemies know these people vote.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-30 13:31:54+00:00
> Warrant Officer Eaves stated that it was at 300 feet and descending to 200 feet — necessary because the maximum height for its route closer to the airport had dropped to 200 feet. But even as it reached that juncture, Warrant Officer Eaves evidently felt obligated to repeat his instruction: The Black Hawk was at 300 feet, he said, and needed to descend

> Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.

> He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank. Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet. She did not turn left.

As much as the article tries to balance it out that the controllers should have done more it seems that ultimately the pilot flying was distracted and not following instructions from the instructor sitting next to them. It happened at least twice based on the captured recordings.

Was there something in their personal life or career to warrant that - a setback, some family situation? Otherwise they seemed qualified and flew that route a few times already.
by dgimla20 | 2025-04-30 13:32:09+00:00
Duolingo is an awful language learning tool (primary tool or only tool). Here is a Duolingo game.

Translate the following into English:

jvgug5 g54g 4g g45g ! g54 43 43r pgd0f

Here are the words you need to drag and drop into order:

fish to day cat eat My every eat likes

Do 10 of these every day and you'll be fluent when you hit a 1000+ day streak. Do a lot of these to do more of them than other people on the leaderboard to see your name next to "1." with an icon of a trophy.
by jcynix | 2025-04-30 13:32:28+00:00
As I don't use PHP in my server, but get a lot of requests for various PHP related stuff, I added a rule to serve a Linux kernel encrypted with a "passphrase" derived from /dev/urandom as a reply for these requests. A zip bomb might be a worse reply ...

For all those "eagerly" fishing for content AI bots I ponder if I should set up a Markov chain to generate semi-legible text in the style of the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney ...
by dagss | 2025-04-30 13:32:48+00:00
1) Point 1 and 3 can in many families be an impediment to the development of the child rather than a good thing. If you can always call on helicopter parents to solve your issues you do not get the experience that even if you mess up / get into a bad situation, in the end, you can solve the situation yourself -- or if it is not solved, that you at least survive it and life goes on. Important life skills.

2) The entire list can be equally well solved by dumbphones without TikTok and Snapchat. Which is what such bans as this is about.

3) It is always about pros/cons. In Scandinavia phones have (in my view as a parent and married to a teacher) essentially destroyed education wherever they are allowed in the pocket/backpack of the student during class.

Not to speak about downsides to social life. E.g., people not attempting dancing in high school proms because there are videos taken everywhere. People not showering in gyms due to phones. Just two examples. SO MANY things are killed by the phones.

The benefits have to be weighed against the quite massive downsides.

--

They banned phones on the high school where my wife teaches last year and she is basically a changed person. Instead of spending 50% of class time policing phone use, she can, you know, actually teach.

(She still has to deal with a generation addicted to dopamine, but a habit of phone confiscation during class is at least a massive improvement.)
by phkahler | 2025-04-30 13:32:49+00:00
I'm starting to think current measures of "the economy" are bogus. It can't grow indefinitely - that's probably just inflation. If you measure productivity in hours rather than dollars, inflation gets a more direct measure: how many hours do I need to work to buy food?

Making a better product than last year is also a strange way to claim growth.

What would be a better measure?
by DocTomoe | 2025-04-30 13:32:57+00:00
Heavily depends on where you went to school.

Bavaria, Saxony, Baden-Württemberg? Preferrably Gymnasium? Preferrably a state school, not a city school? Hell, you have good chances!

Any other Land? Something on a lower tier? Nah, easy going. There are schools in Germany which are famous for breeding 16-year-olds who can barely read.

Disclaimer: Writer is German, Württemberger, visited a state gymnasium
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-30 13:32:58+00:00
> It’s going to be similar to Brexit.

Agreed, this is the most likely outcome in the short term.

In the long term there are going to be unexpeted knock-on effects. Even a modest definancialization of the American economy makes it more robust to demographic changes and the end of the population-driven growth era. Lowered imports from abroad (especially china) and decreased consumption writ large means lower carbon footprint. Maintenance of airplanes getting more expensive means people fly less (already happening), again, lower carbon footprint.
by rldjbpin | 2025-04-30 13:32:59+00:00
> yet the bazillion scam call centers are somehow not a problem.

the local population is also in the blast radius of scam calls, and is recognized by the government as well. so much so that one receives a disclaimer voice message before getting connected to a call every now and then.

robocalls are also a problem the states continue to deal with, so it is easier said than done about such cat-and-mouse issues.

> So sending someone something offensive is grounds for banning

it took a whole lawsuit to come to this ruling. in vast majority of cases, people and businesses do not resort to approaching the courts for things such as this. especially given the backlog and time/resource costs associated with the whole ordeal. the plaintiff went through the effort, which is quite impressive to be honest.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-30 13:33:11+00:00
Surviving is hardly a desirable outcome. Surviving is akin to a Pyrrhic victory (which is net negative). The loss that follows is greater than the profit from the win even after the most desirable of outcomes.

In the case of the US the result is isolation. That means loss of economic strength as well as loss of political influence. Those are more expensive than they sound because the second and third order consequences are security concerns and more powerful coalitions in opposition.
by eitally | 2025-04-30 13:33:30+00:00
Fwiw, my local public school district (I have three kids at three different public neighborhood schools) does provide kids instruction like this, as well as lots of other programming around empathy, acceptance, drug/alcohol use, common health/physiology topics, driver training, etc. This is my tax dollars being spent on things that aren't core academic topics but imho absolutely help develop youth into better decision makers with a more holistic view of society than many of them might otherwise given their home situations.

The middle and high schools here ban phone use during class, and the high school confiscates phones (and grants detentions) for students who flaunt the ban. In practice, it usually works with teachers using those door mounted phone holders as a way to take attendance. Put your phone in the pouch when you get to class, and grab it when you leave. Occasionally, a teacher will also ban smartwatches if they become too distracting, but this is not common.

That said, many teachers take advantage of their students having phones to augment their methods & curriculum, and afaik this is the teachers' prerogative.
by jsnell | 2025-04-30 13:33:33+00:00
> To steelman it, the US has a far lower dependence on trade as a percentage of GDP than just about any other country, so if any country will be likely to (raw-economic-numbers) survive a shock like this, it's the US.

The reason this line of thinking doesn't work is that these measures affect all the trade that the US does with anyone, but for any other country they affect only the trade with the US. The US relative dependence on the entire world is larger than any individual country's relative dependency on just the US.

To illustrate:

US imports seem to typically be about 15% of the US GDP. EU exports to the US are only 3% of the EU GDP. So we'd kind of expect the shock to the US to be 5x larger than the shock to the EU.
by fabian2k | 2025-04-30 13:33:51+00:00
This is Trump's reaction to this on Truth Social:

> This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!

I'm curious how long he will get away with denying reality like this. The economical situation is likely to have much more immediate effects on people that almost every other topic. It should be much harder for him to do his usual thing once the economy really crashes, but who knows how his supporters will actually react.
by sillyreason | 2025-04-30 13:34:02+00:00
This is just common sense. Resist the urge of confirmatory bias.

Imports surged in q1 to front-run tariffs. Imports are subtracted from GDP. Therefore GDP shrank.

C + I + G + NX = GDP https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2020-04/GDP-Education-by-BE...

https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/gdp1q25-adv....
by jerf | 2025-04-30 13:34:12+00:00
It's intrinsic to any karma system that has a global karma rating, that is, the message has a concrete "karma" value that is the same for all users.

drcongo recently referenced something I sort of wish I had time to build: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843116 And/or could just go somewhere to use, which is a system where an upvote doesn't mean "everybody needs to see this more" but instead means "I want to see more of this user's comments", and downvotes mean the corresponding opposite. It's more computationally difficult but would create an interestingly different community, especially as further elaborations were built on that. One of the differences would be to mitigate the first-mover advantage in conversations. Instead of it winning you more karma if it appeals to the general public of the relevant site, what it would instead do is expose you to more people. That would produce more upvotes and downvotes in general but wouldn't necessarily impact visibility in the same way.
by Shocka1 | 2025-04-30 13:34:41+00:00
These are all good points, and I agree. The Em dash I've noticed a lot. One additional is over usage of adjectives like "robust" or something that came out of the third option in a thesaurus.

As someone who has been using regular dashes and words like "robust" for years, I've had to purposefully dumb down things like my resume/CV and internet comments. Like many of us here, I'm coming from a generation that actually had to write 100% of the research paper instead of an AI generating it for me. So I always took great care to aim for something close to perfection in writing.
by deng | 2025-04-30 13:35:11+00:00
> This was the expected result.

You may have expected this (and if so, I hope you bought some good PUT options), but most economists certainly did not expect this already for the first quarter. On the contrary, there was more the expectation that because of the looming tariffs, people planning to buy larger goods this year would rather expedite the purchase and do it now to avoid rising prices later, leading to a boost in orders. It is quite probable that this has actually happened, and that makes this number even worse.
by davidw | 2025-04-30 13:35:12+00:00
If that's what you want to happen, you say "in a year, we're going to cut off this aid" so that there is time for someone else to step in.

But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.
by dashundchen | 2025-04-30 13:35:32+00:00
Let's not forget the MBS overriding the advice of the Saudi investment board to give $2 billion dollars to Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner. Funds with hefty fees that have barely been invested.

https://www.reuters.com/world/kushner-has-discussed-us-saudi...

These corrupt assholes don't even try to hide it.
by afpx | 2025-04-30 13:35:55+00:00
I don't think a lot of them view that as a bad thing. Some feel that 'American culture' is more closely aligned with 'Russian culture' than it is to 'Western systems culture'. Also, a surprising number describe themselves as 'Lincoln Republicans' and cite how Lincoln had to overstep his reach - to break the short-term rules to ensure survival of the Union.

(Personally, I think they got played.)
by bombcar | 2025-04-30 13:36:14+00:00
The solution is almost always more teachers (though at some point you have two teachers per kid and that’s likely to be excessive).

A class of five can handle darn near anything; a class of fifty needs everyone to be as nearly identical as possible.

You can artificially increase the number of “teachers” by combining classes of different grades sometimes. 12 year olds can do great assisting 6 year olds.
by bluGill | 2025-04-30 13:36:34+00:00
There is no such thing as a 12th grade level. 6th grade is all the farther English is taught. There are sometimes things called levels above that, but they are not levels in English they are levels in some specific specialization and have more to do with that specialization than reading. (doctors would not be expected to understand deep computer science writing even though doctors have very advanced reading skills in a medical domain).

I understand Spanish only goes up to a 5th grade level while Japanese to 9th. This is a reflection on how complex the writing systems are, and not the kids, intelligence, or school systems.

The years after you have your basic reading down are used to learn other skills that are of general use in life for everyone.
by palmotea | 2025-04-30 13:36:37+00:00
> It's mostly Trump though. Trump is responsible for his actions.

Eh, kinda sorta. Trump is responsible for his actions, but the people who created the conditions for him are responsible too. There are a lot of leaders are very interested in having the buck to stop with him because it lets them off the hook.

IMHO, Trump's tariff policies were poorly thought through, and that's something that's all on him. But reshoring manufacturing is going to be costly, and those costs will land on people who aren't yet used to bearing them, and that's also on his predecessors who allowed the offshoring in the first place. If they'd never done that, there'd be no Trump and no pain of reshoring.
by fsloth | 2025-04-30 13:36:51+00:00
Sure, different countries have different norms.

In Finland 16 olds are not allowed to drink and access to alcohol is state controlled.

IMHO learning foreign languages, math, history, biology and physics is not child care.

This is in preparation to getting access to upper secondary education (vocational or academic). Usually you start this at 16.

This is not a simple question but one part of the answer is that students are a) ready for upper secondary education b) their grades can be used to grade access to schools with top upper secondary schools being extremely hard to get into.

Ofc if you ask “why would a society do this” I guess the reason is that an educated population is expected to be more productive AND because the law requires schooling up to 18 it also implies all students must have access to free schools with close to zero material costs. So it’s intended also to level the playing field for all social classes.

Is this worse or better than germanys system is impossible for me to tell.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-30 13:36:51+00:00
> [isolation] means loss of economic strength as well as loss of political influence.

Could be. In the long term, the world needs to reckon with the fact that our implementation economic systems (capitalist, socialist, fascist) depend on population growth, and isolation could also mean removal from the chaos that ensues when the existing political systems can't cope. Assuming the US improves its situation, which believe it or not is oh so slightly better as a result of what's going on now.
by rldjbpin | 2025-04-30 13:37:26+00:00
> They previously asked VPN companies to log and gather every bit of information they could about their users including their name and address (effectively driving all VPN companies out of India)

in NordVPN (a paid mainstream provider without Mulvad-like conviction to privacy), you can connect to an Indian server without ever providing your personal details when signing in.

i wonder how much these rulings are enforced in reality. there is definitely no great firewall situation and outright jailing for breaching this law so far. but on the other hand, it is just a lower temperature setting in the frog-boiling process.
by kazinator | 2025-04-30 13:37:27+00:00
I believe Apache is logging complete requests. For instance, in the case of clients sent to a honeypot, I see a log entry appear when I pick a honeypot script from the process listing and kill it. That could be hours after the client connected. The timestamps logged are connection time not completion time. E.g. here is a pair of consecutive logs:

124.243.178.242 - - [29/Apr/2025:00:16:52 -0700] "GET /cgit/[...] 94.74.94.113 - - [29/Apr/2025:00:07:01 -0700] "GET /honeypot/[...]

Notice the second timestamp is almost ten minutes earlier.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-30 13:37:28+00:00
>To steelman it, the US has a far lower dependence on trade as a percentage of GDP

The US being the centre of trade is basically the entire foundation of its GDP. It is the reason the US $ is the global reserve. It is the reason the world holds t-bills. It's the reason silicon valley is in San Francisco and the centre of the music and movie industry is in LA. It's the reason the financial capital of the world is in NY. It's why science revolves...revolved...around the US.

If you're living in the richest large country in the world, it's worth contemplating why that is. Is it US exceptionalism? No, it's that the US came out relative untouched from two world wars that seriously harmed most of the world, so it become basically the central hub. The geographically-safe, still wealthy friendly power.

That is all dissolving at an astonishing pace, and the reality will be a harsh one. Like the other post said, the US isn't going to suddenly be poor, but instead it's just going to be an endless drain as the world reorients.

And I mean you can say "oh well we'll do without!", and...okay? I guess it's just the new minimalist world!

As to the "the US will be harmed less than others", while I actually believe the US will be one of the hardest hit countries of all, because most of the US economy relies upon an illusion, it's a silly self-comfort anyways because the US is the cause of all of this. It's like salting the land and then gloating because your crops weren't grow well anyways.
by toss1 | 2025-04-30 13:37:31+00:00
Yup

Heard an interesting analysis by a Bloomberg Radio guest, running down the advantages/disadvantages between US and China. They came out mostly balanced, but the big imbalance is the population. The US population is a LOT less tolerant of disruption, and the Chinese population is more tolerant, and less informed, e.g., no one there even knows the rates are ~145%.

I'm inclined to agree. I see the US population as fully and multi-generationally accustomed to the luxury of comfortable living with a decent safety net. When things start to get really hard, the US population will get rapidly un-governable, while the Chinese will be both more ignorant, more controlled, and more willing to take some suffering for the country's good, while the US has been all about "ME" for quite a while.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-04-30 13:37:42+00:00
A bacterial infection is an objectively verifiable condition. You can see the bacteria under a strong enough microscope. There’s no such definitive way to diagnose autism, it’s diagnosed based on the definition we came up with to describe a cluster of symptoms.

If everyone dismissed the increase in diagnosed bacterial infections as due to the discovery of bacteria, a lot of medical research into diseases like TB would have stalled.

It is worth looking at the increase in diagnoses to understand if there is some kind of underlying mechanism (for example parental age or environmental pollutants for autism) which could explain it rather than just dismissing it as an illusion, especially if we don’t understand the underlying cause of autism.

RFKs rhetoric is clearly unhelpful and aimed at targeting autistic people, but the idea that “we have more people diagnosed with this condition than we ever had before, is there something to it beyond just relabelling?” is a valuable starting point for research.

Caution is warranted (vaccines causing autism, despite being completely debunked, is an example of how NOT to research something like this), but throwing the baby out with the bathwater helps no one.
by pacoWebConsult | 2025-04-30 13:37:48+00:00
It's been about 100 years of congress abdicating their responsibility and delegating rule-making to agencies under the control of the executive, as well as the federal government coalescing power through the commerce clause and various other means. The US Government was never designed to be this top-heavy, and certainly not designed to allow one branch this much control. Natural consequences of a congress asleep at the wheel. More focused on quick public opinion wins through ham-fisted rules without having to actually write and maintain legislation than reducing the influence and power of the federal government and ceding power back to the states as designed.