MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by const_cast | 2025-04-09 21:17:37+00:00
Given the manufacturing is currently being done by people making much less than US minimum wage, I’d have to say retail!

People forget why manufacturing was moved out of the US. Manufacturing jobs sucked major ass. Then they sucked less ass, when unions started gaining power. Then the companies saw their employees had prosperity, said “fuck you”, and left.

We’ve crippled unions to such an absurd degree that the reality is that, if manufacturing came back, the quality of life for average Americans would go down significantly. It’s not 1955 - you’re out of your goddamn mind if you think a factory worker can maintain the quality of life now, let alone afford a suburban home on one income like in the past.
by phillipcarter | 2025-04-09 21:17:51+00:00
A key difference between MCP and A2A that is apparent to me after building with MCP and now reading the material on A2A:

MCP is solving specific problems people have in practice today. LLMs need access to data that they weren't trained on, but that's really hard because there's a millions different ways you could RAG something. So MCP defines a standard by which LLMs can call APIs through clients. (and more).

A2A solves a marketing problem that Google is chasing with technology partners.

I think I can safely say which one will still be around in 6 months, and it's not the one whose contributors all work for the same company.
by rsoto2 | 2025-04-09 21:18:02+00:00
Every country has optimized their own economy so it's incredibly cheap for us to import shoes, or it was. Now it is not, so sure we could try to make some cheap shoes here. But now we have to make cheap shoes, grow cheap citrus veggies, make cheap computer chips, make cheap needles etc etc.

How much capacity do you think the US has to manufacture these things? and what about the supplies?
by bob1029 | 2025-04-09 21:18:04+00:00
Some of us are still building new products with XML RPC techniques.

WSDLs and XSDs done right are a godsend for transmitting your API spec to someone. I use .NET and can call xsd.exe to generate classes from the files in a few seconds. It "just works" if both sides follow all of the rules.

The APIs I work with would be cartoonish if we didn't have these tools. We're talking 10 megabytes of generated sources. It is 100x faster to generate these types and then tunnel through their properties via intellisense than it is to read through any of these vendors' documentation.
by mk89 | 2025-04-09 21:18:18+00:00
VAT is applied to services too, at least here in Europe.

Now, if we were to split VAT in two: 1. tax on imports, 2. tax on whatever goods/services people in that country pay/buy, you could keep just the 2 and have free trade with other countries with zero tax. Or the opposite, do tax on imports and free trade inside your country.

The fact that VAT has always been like that (1 and 2 together), it doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

Not sure why we should care about how a country decides to apply taxation in their own country, especially if that country sets a more or less equal tax for everyone - that's understandable.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-09 21:19:44+00:00
"All". Even if that's true, some time you might travel and be around women who aren't vaccinated, and you get an infection with something bearing the lovely name "genital warts". It has the long-term complications of "cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, mouth, tonsils, or throat". And you can give it to any other women you get with for the next few years, potentially giving them any of those relevant cancers.

So yes. It absolutely makes sense for a man to get it. For selfish reasons, you probably don't want penis cancer. For non-selfish ones, you don't want give other partners cervical cancer.
by the_king | 2025-04-09 21:19:45+00:00
We're building something different, but there is some overlap. Aqua is built for max speed, while keeping accuracy high. To achieve that, inference runs in a datacenter (for now).

You can customize Aqua using custom instructions, similar to ChatGPT custom instructions, and get some Talon functionality from it:

In my own, I have:

1. Breaking the paragraphs with three or four sentences.

2. Don't start a sentence with "and".

3. Use lowercase in Slack and iMessage.

4. Here are some common terminal commands...
by verdverm | 2025-04-09 21:19:56+00:00
Rather rigid thinking in your response(s), but I'm not surprised after this thread. I'd invite you to think more flexibly about what the interface to moldable development can be (note the lowercasing). AI is generally becoming the primary interface for all things, chat is just one medium, but definitely not the only one. It can/will be able to do all the same things that one could do in GT, plus a whole lot more.
by shmoogy | 2025-04-09 21:20:03+00:00
I've been using Gemini pro 2.5 over Claude 3.5 in cursor all week - some people have Gemini do a prd and tasks and Claude do the actual coding. I switch between them but have been pretty impressed with Gemini.

Gemini sometimes fucks up diffs or doesn't actually apply the edits - Claude is rock solid at that. They're both very good though - but 3.7 really likes refactoring unneeded shit and removing code sometimes.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 21:20:07+00:00
Skin cancer is not something I anticipate, since I scrupulously avoid slathering carcinogens onto it. I protect with clothing, umbrellas, and old-fashioned hanging out in the shade [my skin tone is porcelain, minimal freckling, 100% Celtic edition]. 26 years in Phoenix metro with literally no burns and no cancer: homelessness and public transit benches notwithstanding.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-09 21:20:10+00:00
> Just as a tax on consumption of up to 27% in Europe massively reduces Europe's consumption of US exports.

Uhm, it also reduces consumption of locally produced goods, not just something imported into Europe. Its like...a sales tax, the only reason it is treated differently from a sales tax at all is because of its more fair rebate system.
by Psyferio | 2025-04-09 21:20:41+00:00
I am contributing to a project by a SpacetimeDB community member to get Rapier running within Unity. Instead of trying to get Unity PhyX running on the server, we just use a deterministic Rust physics engine on both client and server. It is a mostly complete drop in replacement as it stands and is deterministic (Unity's PhyX is not). We'll keep improving it!

https://github.com/Daxode/rapier4unity
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 21:20:57+00:00
I tried to find my answer with their document, but the search interface is awful.

Can anyone tell if this factors in the confounder of the very-sick or chronically ill often being teetotalers, so making the "never drink" category look worse for reasons unrelated to any supposed benefits of alcohol consumption? It's my understanding that was supposed to explain prior findings like this.
by 486sx33 | 2025-04-09 21:21:16+00:00
Now they’ll just have to make shoes for $11 or new balance will have to come back to North American manufacturing and make shoes for $40 wholesale

Shipping , customs , duty , port fees , transportation , packaging that can survive across the ocean should all be things that make the product unrealistic to make outside North America, not to mention environmental tariffs that should be applied to products made in Asia.
by bawolff | 2025-04-09 21:21:43+00:00
Vaccines aren't 100% effective.

I'm not sure what the effectiveness of the hpv vaccine is, but if it was 95% effective (totally made up number, i dont know what the real one is), then there is a 1 in 20 chance it wont work for someone. If both of you have the vaccine then the chance of both failing would go down to 1 in 400.

That seems worthwhile to me, given there is basically no downside.

(I guess this doesn't account for the affects of herd immunity)
by tomasol | 2025-04-09 21:22:03+00:00
The biggest motivator for me is that WASM sandbox provides true deterministic execution. Contrary to engines like temporal, using hashmaps is 100% deterministic here. Attempting to spawn a thread is a compile error. It also performs well - the bottleneck is in the write throughput of sqlite. Last but not least - all the interfaces between workflows and activities are type safe, described in a WIT schema.
by indigodaddy | 2025-04-09 21:22:03+00:00
this isn't new.. (edit, well actually they've added the "prompt from scratch" thingy like v0.dev/replit/lovable that idx.dev didn't have before) wasn't really gaining the traction they wanted so decided to rebrand. not a bad idea. I use idx.dev (now firebase.studio) and like it. They may not have a "template" for the exact stack/app type you are working with, but it's pretty easy to just setup a blank workspace and modify the nix.dev file as needed..
by mathgradthrow | 2025-04-09 21:22:53+00:00
The cost of an annuity that pays your basic, fundamental living expenses: Food, shelter, water, etc. can be thought of as a debt that all people are born with. In the US, you can obtain a room in an apartment, basic food, internet access, and transportation (minimal versions of all of these), for something like $15,000/year.

such a lifetime annuity would cost the average 18 year old on the order of 200-300 thousand dollars. This means that an 18 year old starts with about the same level of implicit debt, that a doctor who has just finished medical school has explicit debt, except that student debt doesn't scale with inflation.

A key feature of a society which values social mobility is reducing the debt burden of its children. I don't think the answer on basic income is cut and dry, and I do think its important for people to sustain themselves via their own efforts, but since you likely wouldn't increase the debt burden of a teenager, and you also didn't select the debt burden of the average teenager. You should at least consider the possibility that you would actually choose to reduce, by some amount, the debt burden of the average teenager.
by Clamchop | 2025-04-09 21:23:06+00:00
Us Americans have been taught exceptionalism all our lives. The people consider themselves to have built and to live in the freest and generally most superlative country that ever was.

We were pretty "soft" (dislike the term) on the land borders and on immigration. Fairly easy to enter, to claim asylum, to live and work on different sides, and so on.

I don't have an answer for the question of if we should be making our border security as intense as it can be elsewhere, but I don't love the story of just doing as other countries do. We're exceptional, right?

I don't think this is a great comment I'm writing, but it's how I feel about things right now.
by gorpy7 | 2025-04-09 21:23:08+00:00
Maybe there should be a universal basic job. jobs can be rated by how much value is created- it can’t be moving rocks from one location then back again. maybe that’s too hard to calculate. weekly, if you create enough value, you’ve earned your basic income. This might be 2 days of road work. you get 40k for this. take responsibility and up your skills with the remaining time. I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to give money out just for being- i understand there are sales taxes etc. I hate the idea of creating jobs, it has always felt wrong. If the jobs fulfill a valuable and timely need, sure. But i’d rather kill jobs, i say, if you can automate your job with no loss in value, you should be paid at least double that for the rest of your days. If we focus on creating value, we’ll all benefit. it’s just a matter of measuring value i suppose. things like teaching a valuable skill should be of enormous value- as an example. call me crazy.
by slt2021 | 2025-04-09 21:23:23+00:00
Immigration is a double edge sword. Sure, it brings highly educated people on the top end, but also less educated at the bottom curve.

and on balance it changes demographics dramatically, that also shapes US policy in the future. It will be harder for USA to continue to be bloody warmongering machine with Military industrial complex dictating the policy and bombing countries and blowing up civilians around the world.
by runako | 2025-04-09 21:23:53+00:00
> We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger. Is that a world where “Designed by Apple in California, Made in China” still makes sense? What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

The likely answer lies in the fact that this would mean China & America are both high-income countries. There are likely to be other countries looking to be "the next China" to ascend the income ladder. As is now, rich countries will outsource work to those poorer countries.

This doesn't have to be zero sum.
by weakfish | 2025-04-09 21:23:56+00:00
God, the boto3 python docs are _insanity_. The lack of type hints, having a single method for getting a client that could be for 100 different services…

For the uninitiated, boto3 is the official AWS python library. To get a client for, say, S3, you do `boto3.client(‘s3’)` - instead of the sane thing, like, you know, `boto3.s3.S3Client()`
by Funes- | 2025-04-09 21:25:03+00:00
On top of that, which is absolutely true, saying "listen to the person above me" (instead of something along the lines of "guys/to anyone reading this, listen to...") while replying directly to someone makes it seem like you're exhorting them--that you're advising them to look for some other reply that runs counter to their point, instead of addressing the general HN crowd. "I thought that'd help me, but..." also seems to counter their point further instead of agreeing with it.
by munificent | 2025-04-09 21:25:06+00:00
Trump thinks of himself as a powerful, insightful deal-maker. He pathologically needs to feel like he is doing something and his comfort zone for what kinds of things to do is "stuff that feels like business deals".

He knows very little about government and policy, but tariffs and dollars and percentages feels familiar to him. He's got a lever, and he can't resist yanking on it to show that he's in charge.

Whether yanking on the lever actually benefits the country or him is entirely besides the point. He's a narcissist and narcissists can't let go.
by duxup | 2025-04-09 21:26:38+00:00
>As I like to say “we need to keep politics out of the classroom and away from the kids”. However conservative values are exactly what we are and plan to continue to bring into the district.

- Board of regents director Heather Booth

Policing ideas in books in a library ... yeesh.

> LGBTQ is only regarding sexual preference which doesn’t belong in any school

It's amazing how American Conservatives have become the ultimate "snowflakes". They're not just upset that someone might see something in a book ... they want to remove other people's chances to even read it.
by tweetle_beetle | 2025-04-09 21:26:39+00:00
These aren't quite what you're looking for (an SSG theme that does fixed content layouts with pagination, etc with minimal styles by sounds of it), but inspired by similar ideas:

- https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg

- https://github.com/weitblick/epub

- https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
by const_cast | 2025-04-09 21:26:49+00:00
> Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

I think the implication here is that such a society is not built on markets or even money, but rather by individuals working together to foster a collective community that meets everyone’s needs.

Yes, communism. The more advanced we become technologically the more sense it makes. We’re largely at a point where most jobs are made up - created to give people something to do because if we don’t then they die.

We’ve pushed consumerism to the absolute max. Now, most goods are pretty much worthless. But we have to buy them, or we die. That’s how markets works. We work, and we consume, or else.

That made sense when the work we were doing was beneficial and the stuff we’re consuming was needed. We’re past that now. Most people are working to produce something dumb, or worse, evil. New addictions, new poisons, new bombs, and new problems to be solved by new software.
by xrd | 2025-04-09 21:27:03+00:00
I did not know about Kalshi until today. A blog I really like pointed me to this discussion:

https://moontower.substack.com/p/dire-wolf

Also, I really like Michael Lewis's podcast about the rise of sports gambling. My favorite episode is this one about a guy named Rufus Peabody, who changed sports gambling with his data driven approach.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules/episode-4-...

The best line: "Theoretically? Theoretically a dick does not fit..."
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-04-09 21:27:55+00:00
Throwing it out there that, as a US citizen who has been looking at and wanting solar for about 3-4 years now, it's extremely unaffordable through the installers I've looked at previously. Some installers have quoted a total of double the cost of materials because they maintain the labor of a 1 day installation is worth 100% the cost of batteries and panels - which often brings the total to $30k-$40k USD. Some of these agreements you also have to read closely because there are some total garbage ownership rights in the contract, saying you are renting the panels and don't own them. I haven't looked yet in my new state because interest rates stopped falling after Biden left office, but my previous state made the entire process a racket.
by nottorp | 2025-04-09 21:28:51+00:00
> it helps to know who Brendan Eich is, where he worked when he invented JavaScript, and what Netscape wanted to achieve with it

That may have been relevant 15 years ago, whatever Eich wanted to do with JS, it's been out of his hands for a long time.

And you could also do the reverse and form an opinion about him based on JS :) Might not be very flattering.
by chimeracoder | 2025-04-09 21:28:52+00:00
> If it has an association with preventing cancers, not sure why they were so reluctant to immediately open up the patient pool.

Because approval involves evaluating a risk-benefit tradeoff, and the benefits for those groups are wildly different, as are the risk profiles, due to the way HPV strains[0] work. If they tested against a wide and heterogenous population from the start, it would risk demonstrating insufficient effect, which would eliminate the possibility of the vaccine for everyone. Instead, by testing against the group most likely to benefit from it (women, and specifically women of the age to have no prior exposure to HPV) they can see whether the vaccine has any potential at all, and expand from there.

As it turns out, the vaccine was incredibly effective for them, and as we studied it further, it turned out that other groups which had potentially lower benefits (men, older women) or higher potential risks (teenage girls) had a risk-benefit tradeoff that still overwhelmingly supported approval for those groups.

[0] yes, plural, because there are hundrends, and the vaccines (again, plural, because there are more than one) protect against a handful of them (although that fortunately includes the strains that account for 80-90% of HPV-caused cancers
by slt2021 | 2025-04-09 21:28:56+00:00
there will always be states-hostages to the US Navy and US Air Force that will be forced to purchase USD, for example Gulf States that basically pay ransom in term of keeping the petrodollar and investing in USD.

The moment oil producing gulf states decide to stop buying USD bonds, they will receive "democracy".

The whole intent to fight Iran is not only to protect Israel, but also to choke off China's major oil supplier. If Iran folds into US control, it will be easier to choke China in terms of energy supplies
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-09 21:28:57+00:00
You're right; execution and defensibility are much more important than merely having an idea. One thing I’ve learned is that a good moat often comes from distribution, community, or even data feedback loops more than tech itself.

I now focus less on what no one has ever done and more on what people have done, but can be improved for a specific group. Niching down creates natural defensibility.

I Would love to hear more about your approach to building a moat if you're ever up for a brainstorming session!
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-09 21:29:15+00:00
The article itself says this, but this likely has very little to do with healthcare. We in the US have a higher murder rate, we drive more, walk and cycle less, air and water pollution is worse. We've had free movement between states far longer than the EU has existed and facilitated free movement between member countries, and while labor mobility is great for the economy, it makes for weaker communities and social bonds when everyone is a transplant.
Show HN: A Wordle implementation in pure SQL
by panpan2 | 2025-04-09 21:29:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I made a Wordle clone where the game runs inside PostgreSQL. The game state lives in tables, and a SQL function acts as the game engine — you pass in an input, and it returns the new state.

Other than the game loop to feed inputs, everything happens in SQL. This was a fun project in pushing SQL beyond its usual use case, sharing in case others find it interesting too.

I guess you could extend this idea to any turn-based game (as long as you have the patience to implement it in SQL).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 21:29:41+00:00
Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.

Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness gracious.
by antonvs | 2025-04-09 21:29:54+00:00
> … but it was somewhat expected, a calculated risk.

The way many of them think of it is that illness and death due to disease, starvation, lack of medication, problem pregnancies, etc. are acts of god and a part of life. They don’t want relief from that, if it comes with a government that has the power to change things they don’t want to change.
by necovek | 2025-04-09 21:30:07+00:00
"Objects" implies a few more properties than a simple data carrying container: while it might be expressed in a particular language using classes/objects, you really don't care about any of the "object"-like features other than the ability for it to contain attributes.

Generally, you can go a long way with simple, combined types which are closer to maps/hashes/dicts than to "objects" other than syntax (.attr vs ["attr"]).

And really, that would be my preference: combine a query builder (some ORMs have great ones too) with native types representing the data read from the database.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-09 21:30:08+00:00
There were a lot of smart things that could be done "about China" and then there are a lot of dumb things...we chose the dumb things.

We could...oh...increase are R&D on automation, AI, green energy, electric vehicles dramatically, we could focus on better education and better infrastructure for our cities (like lightrail in Seattle to where I live that doesn't take $200 billion and 2 decades to build). We could have just fought China with a better product. We could lean into our chip advantage that will only last at most a decade anyways. And many of those fit in with Conservative philosophy even (who doesn't want less regulation and cheaper/quicker construction, well, at least moderates like me would).

But no, we doubled down on culture wars and going back in time to when America was more self sufficient but less rich.