MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-04-14 08:37:11+00:00
This is very good. An economist who understands that you shouldn't dazzle yourself with numbers and instead look at the real movement of goods and obligations. One quibble:

> Higher interest rates encourage domestic spending,

Shouldn't that be higher rates encourage domestic saving? Low rates encourage debt-driven spending, high rates put a higher premium on deferring consumption and saving instead. Other than that everything in this article is directionally correct.

Coda: https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/spread/greece-10-years-...

Just now, Greek bonds are deemed a lower risk investment than US government bonds, because the tariff announcement has spooked the market.

The Republicans are not going to cut the debt: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7vnnv6n29no they're going to do deficit funded tax cuts again. The tried and tested Liz Truss budget.
by clarionbell | 2025-04-14 08:38:22+00:00
Pretty much. Furthermore, investment is much smaller, upkeep much lower, transportation easier. And since rats live faster, and shorter, lives, you can get new batch of mine detector rats sooner than you would with dogs. Even under optimal conditions.

This means that if something bad happens, say death of multiple animals due to disease or unfortunate accident. The replacement can arrive much sooner.

The downside is that you have to replace them much more often. But the positives outweigh negatives.
by graemep | 2025-04-14 08:39:18+00:00
Thanks for the explanation. I have heard of the concept of community property, but did not know where it came from historically. I also did not realise it had this effect - which makes sense now you explain it.

I do not think this is the explains of the decline in marriage though. AFAIK marriage has declined across the west - other US states, and certainly in many European countries.

People marry expecting to cooperate so I find it hard to believe this is a common reason not to marry on any case. The idea behind community of property must have been that the expectation of a marriage is that it will endure for life and the spouses are committed to each others' best interests. That is how it is supposed to work!

I think (and everything points to it being the cause here in the UK) is that without the social pressure to marry in order to co-habit people think of marriage as just a ceremony (on which they spend ridiculous amounts) and a piece of paper. They do not realise the legal benefits of marriage. In fact, many people assume that if they co-habit long term and have kids the law must be fair enough to give them reasonable rights, and some even think we have common law marriage here. It leads to distressing results when relationships break down, or a partner dies (especially without a will, or when a will is contested).
by arijun | 2025-04-14 08:39:59+00:00
That explanation seems like it would not line up with the mathematical reality of the situation. It seems like one of those handwave-y things that always confused me as a child. “Gravity is just massive objects deforming space like a weight deforming a sheet, and things fall into the well they make.” Ok but what would make something fall into the well, there is no gravity.
by eloisant | 2025-04-14 08:40:46+00:00
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

I'm not sure how that works, because I've been at a US company that did layoffs and they suddenly announced the layoff saying the impacted employees would be notified within a day.

Except for France and other European countries, where they announced the beginning of the process meaning the number and list of people let go wasn't decided yet (it would have been illegal).
by bruce511 | 2025-04-14 08:41:56+00:00
Frankly there's not much gleaned from stock prices over a short term. The market can be very reactive to events, but then quickly recover once the "new normal" is established.

There are certainly indications that the economy will contract (but by low single digits at worst.) 30% swings in stocks represent either highly inflated valuations before, or radically different outlooks after. That may be true for a stock here or there, but not the market as a whole.

The US bond market is a more interesting signal. That will affect future-debt cost, and that significantly moves the needle.
by whiplash451 | 2025-04-14 08:42:31+00:00
100%. You can offshore "please write code doing X for me" but it's much harder to offshore "please generate value for my customers with this codebase" which is a lot closer to what software engineers actually do.

Therefore, I do not anticipate a massive offshoring of software like what happened in manufacturing. Yet, a lot of software work can be fully specified and will be outsourced.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-14 08:43:05+00:00
This is a cost saving play by the car parks operators.

Here in the UK we had car payment stations: You enter your car registration number, you pay by card or contactless. Done. Safe. It works.

BUT, this is more expensive for the operator to install and maintain than just sticking a notice to tell you to install an app and to use it to pay.

That being said, usually the QR code is not required it is just to make it "easier" as the notice explicitely says which app to install and provides the unique reference of the car park, too. You may also be able to pay over the phone rather than using the app. This is all shown on the article's first picture.

So, really they could just remove those scam-prone QR codes. I suspect that they don't care, though, and even profit from those scams since they can fine you for not having actually paid.
by esskay | 2025-04-14 08:43:51+00:00
It feels pretty off that Laravel and Symfony, arguably the two largest benefactories to PHP being in such a good position have donated so little. Those contribution values are lifetime, Laravel hasn't funded it for over 3 years now, meanwhile its a multimillion dollar business with a huge amount of financial backing.

I know its all donations and not expected, but them kicking in ~$30k a month would realistically be nothing to them, but benefit the PHP foundation massively. The same goes for Symfony.
by red75prime | 2025-04-14 08:43:53+00:00
> Lack of it is the very thing that makes LLMs general-purpose tools and able to handle natural language so well.

I wouldn't be so sure. LLMs' instruction following functionality requires additional training. And there are papers that demonstrate that a model can be trained to follow specifically marked instructions. The rest is a matter of input sanitization.

I guess it's not a 100% effective, but it's something.

For example " The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions " by Eric Wallace et al.
by benrutter | 2025-04-14 08:43:54+00:00
I think anyone who tells you they can make sense of what's happening is being overconfident.

I definitely see where you're coming from expecting a bigger drop, I guess the key thing is that nobody yet is sure what the future of the latest pretty major anouncements looks like, we're currently just seeing bets.

It's possible that tariffs stay high, and US companies like Apple and Nike that depend on global supply chains either relocate, or become outcompeted by foreign companies. In that scenario, I think we'd see a major drop in indexes like the S&P-500, probably out doing the financial crisis in 2008.

It's also possible that the tariffs end up being an overblown bargaining chip, or get walked back as the current US administration realises they are unpopular and loses interest in them. In that case, you'd probably see the S&P take a hit because of the uncertainty, but it's not the same as US companies all finding their supply chains are unworkable.

So I guess the tldr is, shrug, who knows? We're just seeing the market guessing at the moment, the actual economic damage will happen over the next year as things progress more clearly.
by rcarmo | 2025-04-14 08:44:35+00:00
There is one thing I pointed out in https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/03/22/1900 and seems to be missing from the article:

"... MCP tends to crowd the model context with too many options. There doesn’t seem to be a clear way to set priorities or a set of good examples to expose MCP server metadata–so your model API calls will just pack all the stuff an MCP server can do and shove it into the context, which is both wasteful of tokens and leads to erratic behavior from models."
by xelxebar | 2025-04-14 08:44:44+00:00
It's not racism so much as conservative protectionism. The smaller the town, the more their functioning relies on the cooperative efforts of individuals. Like, the fire brigade is likely just a handful of farmers who agree to do drills and respond when necessary.

When that cooperative necessity permeates every part of your life, it's pretty natural to be slow to trust. Villages already have enough oddball characters that they don't really care about a random foreigner so much as they care whether you are dependable and trustworthy.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-14 08:46:09+00:00
For anyone not from India — India does layoffs in every way. From “cut on zoom in 90 sec” to “please know that you have to resign and serve your two months notice and then go”; to also “if you want you can serve the notice period, or you can just leave today and still get the pay for two months”. I have experienced the first and last and in the case of last for some reason I had chosen to serve the notice.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-04-14 08:46:36+00:00
> Most relationships do not survive being ripped away from the spatial and temporal context

I think this is very true, and with college buddies it's very different from workmates. Because in college, you are with them at classes, but then you hang out with them between classes, then you meet them in cafeteria, then you meet them at a party or in the student club, then you meet them at dormitory etc. All these contexts are different and that helps to build more diverse relationship, which is not focused on a single place.

At work, in my experience I'll meet them in the office and then maybe wave a hand on the way out of the parking lot, if ever.
by Mashimo | 2025-04-14 08:46:55+00:00
Remote deicing of the windows in the winter sounds rad and more then just a gimmick.

Even with gloves on it can be quite cold to remove the all the ice from windows. Or you sit in the cold car for 5 minutes waiting for it to defrost on it's own.

And yes, if your climate control is broken I would pay to fix it.

Edit: When you share a car and have no dedicated parking spot the location information can also be interesting.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 08:47:30+00:00
The point is this: vulnerable code often makes it to production, despite the best intentions of virtually all people writing and reviewing the code. If you add a malicious actor standing on the shoulder of the developers suggesting code to them, it is virtually certain that you will increase the amount of vulnerable and/or malicious code that makes it into production, statistically speaking. Sure, you have methods to catch much of these. But as long as your filters aren't 100% effective (and no one's filters are 100% effective), then the more garbage you push through them, the more garbage you'll get out.
by california-og | 2025-04-14 08:47:49+00:00
I did consider that, but the 1980 IBM Displaywriter uses a filled downwards triangle, not a house character, to indicate the center line [0].

But you're right that the Displaywriter inspited 1984 DisplayWrite DOS program [1] did use the house character for the same purpose. (Although, CP437 also included a filled downwards triangle character at 0x1F.)

[0]: https://youtu.be/YnU_woucebE?t=169

[1]: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/ibm_displaywrite.p...
by arijun | 2025-04-14 08:48:05+00:00
I’m not really sure what you’re trying say, but I would assume Waze’s valuation came from some combination of their user base, their crowdsourced data (to know where there is an object in the road, or a car stopped on the side of the street, for example), and their algorithms, which I remember finding far more accurate than anyone else’s back then.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-14 08:48:20+00:00
Could. Beware of trying to read modern political topics in ancient history. It is a trend that never goes out of fashion, but complicates understanding of really distant times and polities.

Both Han China and the Roman Empire were fairly long-lived entities. The US hasn't even made it yet to half of Han China's lifespan, and maybe an eighth of the Roman state lifespan (too many people don't realize that Byzantium was a Roman state).

Deriving lessons from their longevity is tricky, though. The structure of the economy changed profoundly in the meantime. For example, in absence of engines, every old empire would require a large body of non-free labour to even exist.

Literacy and easier sharing of information is yet another thing that happened in the meantime. For example, country-wide rebellions are feasible, even though not necessarily more successful. If Spartacus could broadcast his message all over the Empire, his revolt could have ended up very differently.

We take it for granted that continent-wide politics is basically synchronous. That wasn't the case when it took months to reach the outskirts of the realm. An eager outpost commander could start a war without the metropolis even knowing, much less condoning his action.
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-14 08:49:01+00:00
OK, I'll give it a go...

"Any glow from an item will move in a void at the same rate. Each item has mass. Mass is the same as a glow. Mass will bend the area near it. Each item will move on a bent path in that area. If you move at a fast rate, time will seem to slow. An item will feel a pull down if the item goes up and does not stop."

That's way more work than it seems! Not being able to use -s or -er words is a real problem.
by ajb | 2025-04-14 08:49:12+00:00
There are companies that support billions of economic output in countries which require a notice period. If they thought it was a risk that they would be taken down be a rogue employee, they have the option of putting them on 'gardening leave' during the notice period. This is extremely rare; they know the risk is insignificant so they are more keen to get any remaining value from the relationship (work, handover).

In our industry and many others, being a professional and maintaining good relations with your ex -colleagues, who form your professional network, is much more valuable than any emotional satisfaction from screwing them over, even without the risk of going to prison.
by raesene9 | 2025-04-14 08:50:06+00:00
Conceptually, I don't think CSPMs are answering complicated questions, however there's quite a lot of complexity (IMO) in scaling the answers consistently, and keeping up to date with all of the tests that need to be implemented.

If you think about the number of services that AWS/GCP/Azure have, adding good compliance checks across even a portion of those is quite a lot of work :)

A small example from an area I know something about is maintaining the CIS Kubernetes benchmarks (which are used by a lot of CSPM products as a source of rules).

Here you've got the different Kubernetes distributions and then each of the cloud distributions has its own CIS benchmark as the checks are different depending on the cloud in use. Then you have changes over time as different clusters run different versions of Kubernetes, so have different checks. Then you add in that the benchmarks don't release with every new version of Kubernetes, and you can end up with quite a complex matrix of checks.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-14 08:50:23+00:00
> [Neutrinos] have a mass of less than 0.45 electron volts, physicists report in the April 11 Science.

For reference, a proton has a mass of 938.272 MeV and an electron has a mass of 0.5110 MeV, so this is extremely 'light' in comparison, less than a millionth of an electron.
by jean_de_baill | 2025-04-14 08:50:29+00:00
Where AR glasses realy shine is when used with Samsung Dex. I have been traveling with my XReal Air 2 Pro plugged into my Samsung Galaxy S23 (in m picket) connected to a Bluetooth mouse and foldable keyboard. It packs into a poutch. It is definitely not usable for long (eye strain, blurred edges) but enables me to get some work done on the go ( editing, email, spreadsheets, etc.. )
by eloisant | 2025-04-14 08:50:34+00:00
I can't talk about the Netherlands but if it's like France: the process is very different in the case of layoffs, where you want to reduce the workforce for economical reasons (e.g. shrinking revenues), and firing an individual employee. In the first case employees are not let go on the basis of the performances.

Firing individual employees for performances or because they made a serious offense is a different completely process. Whether they get a severance package or not depends on the reason of the firing.
by csmachines | 2025-04-14 08:50:51+00:00
I'm 100% human, but also 100% amateur. Until 5 minutes ago, I understood <ctype h> to be necessary for me to use typedef to enable me to refer to structs by an alias, instead of writing "struct"! The perils of being self-taught. Now I can see the only errors thrown up when I remove the include are isdigit and isalnum! This is why I posted on HN!

EDIT: I think I can fix the isalnum bug risk that you identified by checking that the value of the ch variable in the get_string_input function is non-negative before allowing it to be appended to str.
by perching_aix | 2025-04-14 08:50:58+00:00
> is quality discussion for you?

If it was, why would I be evaluating whether you're improving it or not? Surely a discussion only needs improvement if it has room for it, right?

> edit: you are another coper europoor.

Strong words from someone who recurringly goes into US vs. EU discussions just to post inflammatory garbage. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43417884

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411189

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43374322
by jdietrich | 2025-04-14 08:51:30+00:00
The government saw the basic problem in 2019 - a fragmented market with over 30 different parking apps - and funded a pilot to create a single unified parking payment platform. Unfortunately, the new government isn't interested in supporting the project further.

https://npp.org.uk/

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/feb/22/uk-wide-parkin...
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-14 08:52:51+00:00
Slow CPUs and GPUs work much better on Linux than on Windows, but when the problem is a shortage of RAM, Windows will hold out much longer before grinding to a halt.

In an era of soldered-on RAM, this is becoming a rather annoying problem. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't offer the same APIs Windows does to take preventative action before running out of RAM. Windows' auto-growing page file also makes for a less crashy experience than Linux' static swap partitions (or constant-size pagefile). Plus, Windows comes with memory compression (zram/zswap) out of the box, configured to use both memory compression and disk swap to catch these situations.

I wish Windows wasn't such a slog on the CPU and GPU because making Linux work in low-memory situations is an absolute pain.
by Galanwe | 2025-04-14 08:52:51+00:00
> in dollar terms, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 are both still traded higher than a year ago.

The key here is "in dollar terms". EURxUSD is up 10% year to date.

If you were a European investor buying the SP500, you would have lost 10% more on FX rate on top of your SP500 loss.
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-14 08:52:56+00:00
Good question.

The answer in the end is because they can.

For most things you never really pay a real or fair price. We have been told in school and by TV/media we live in free market economies but this is not really true anymore.

In so called developed/rich countries nobody really cared since around 2000 because "globalization" and China made everything very cheap.

But now (since covid in fact) when Sony raise their margin on the PS you are seeing it and it hurts.

So why do they jack-up the price in Europe? because they can and MS is gonna do the same.

And most important Europe doesn't have any local competitor...
by InDubioProRubio | 2025-04-14 08:53:11+00:00
The problem is often- a idealised view of the world, where merit and accomplishment is the deciding factor, meanwhile its all diplomacy, social networks and backstabbing at court. Then again, these "meritless" systems are parasitic on the meritocratic workers producing the actual value and progress.

The cooperate cruft grazes on blissfully unaware engineers. Which is why they should try to be poisonous to the cruft wherever they go.
by EE84M3i | 2025-04-14 08:54:38+00:00
CSPM is most valuable for large enterprises that have many cloud tenants as they can provide visibility across the entire footprint in one place.

Consider an enterprise that wants to say "list all the cloud storage buckets we own that are not in the US and are publicly readable and have a name containing 'foo'" - and they have several of each of AWS, Azure and GCP organixations because of acquisitions that aren't fully integrated yet.

Wiz answers that in ~5 seconds, with a rich query language and a bunch of prebuilt rules and detections on top of it, including for tracking compliance with various frameworks.
by coldtea | 2025-04-14 08:54:45+00:00
>Wouldn't that be their problem?

Not as much, as they can route around the issue, selling elsewhere. The import (or things "made in USA" but depending on imports) represents like X% of US good consumption, but each players' US exports represents a much smaller (and falling) share of their total exports.

The world is much wider in 2025 than it was in the 1980s or even in 2000 or 2010. 2025 United States's Share of Global GDP: 12.7% (project to fall to 11.x in the next 5 years). It was around 40% in 1960s, and 25-30% in 1990. US represents in average 20% of China's exports across various categories. The max % seen is about 25% for consumer electronics segment.

The rest is cope.
by angra_mainyu | 2025-04-14 08:55:45+00:00
I think there is a bit of a false equivalence going on - Roman elites held immense power with far fewer human rights constraints compared to modern wealthy individuals. No, I do not accept hyperbolic wailing of the "being a wagie is literal slavery" sort.

1) slavery and ownership of lives: they could literally own slaves. No matter how much anyone will want to twist "working for corporate" as slavery, there is simply no comparison to such direct dominion.

2) magisterial power: consuls and praetors could even sentence people to death with barely any resistance. You're welcome to find me an example in the first world.

3) land and resource control: we are in an era where the masses have a much larger share of land and resource ownership compared to then (e.g: latifundia).

4) judicial immunity: yeah, we all know the legal system isn't perfect but you don't have the same extreme levels of abuse you had back then unless again, you appeal to corrupt 3rd world countries.

5) military command: I don't see the billionaires in the first world with their own personal armies.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-14 08:56:39+00:00
IIRC Major American universities get a lot of money from successful alumni. Isn't this an equivalent of the old fashioned Roman games and bread?

Today, we are collectively less into gladiators and more into colleges.

"The rich in many countries are no longer paying much in the way of taxes"

The taxation levels in OECD countries are way higher than whatever any Roman emperor could dream of, and the top 1 per cent usually pays ~ 30 per cent of the total income tax revenue.