MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lnauta | 2025-04-09 08:00:38+00:00
This is exactly what has been playing out in the Netherlands the past couple of months: the weather institute (KNMI) released their own weather app that is functionally the same (in some cases superior) as the commercial apps that want your consent to track and serve ads.

The commercial parties sued KNMI, even though they use the public data provided by KNMI. Luckily they lost: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2025/02/knmi-weathers-legal-app-sto...

And as a bonus, there was some Streisand Effect when this was in the news, and people have been moving to the KNMI app in droves.
by enopod_ | 2025-04-09 08:01:56+00:00
There's a similar system here in Switzerland, called Twint. It is run by a group of banks though, and I don't know if the central bank is involved. Each bank issues its own App. It had a slow start, but suddenly got a lot of traction, and nowadays you can pay literally everywhere with it. Online shops, regular shops, restaurants, the bars in the stadium of your favorite football club. Person to person payment is also possible. You can also easily create a QR code if you set up a stand at a flea market or something like that, but it's not necessary, since all you need is the cell phone number of the recipient. Everybody with a cell phone is using it, even my grandma. It's a huge success. It works like a regular bank transfer between bank accounts. The banks get no information about what was paid with it, only the amount and from where to whom. The only downside: The banks set fees according to the market, so it's in competition with bank transfers, but also with credit cards like Visa and Master, or Paypal. It's still possible to pay very small amounts of cash like CHF 2.- or 3.- though. Recently, I had a walk with my kid and we walked past a stand where kids sold self made popcorn and cookies. They asked 1.- per piece, and they accepted Twint. I bought some things and paid by Twint to the cell phone number of the kids dad they gave me. :)
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-09 08:04:15+00:00
>"I believe someone scraped this name and stole the domain."

I believe it is a bit harsh accusing someone of theft because he registered a domain before you did or doing some action before you did. Merely having an idea doesn't give you the right to a property before you pay for it.

Let's suppose I have found my dream home and I take my wife out for dinner and talk loud about why is that house wonderful, why does it have a huge potential and how I've talked the owner into making a nice discount. I brag loudly about how that house is almost a steal.

Because I have some things to do at work, I will be able to speak with the real estate agent in one or two weeks, only to find out it was sold to the gentleman sitting on the next table in the restaurant.

Should I go to the police and open a theft complain?

Of course, domain scrapping and squatting has some gray moral areas but are not against the law.

When I have an idea I like, I go register the domain first. Even if I will not pursue that idea further. At worst I will lose 5 to 10 dollars. At best I will make something out of it. Or I can even sell the domain along with my idea to someone else who might want to use it.

I don't search the domain names using registrars or various domain tools. I only use Whois services I trust and I usually buy the domain short time after that.
by pavish | 2025-04-09 08:04:38+00:00
Glad to see Echarts getting the recognition it deserves. It is arguably the best open-source visualization library out there.

Here are some points others haven't mentioned:

(a) Uses canvas by default. Faster than any other library I've used.

(b) Extremely flexible. Want to write your own widget on top of the graphs (eg., a customized tooltip). Possible!

(c) Provides a lot of metadata. Want to get the position of a point in the rendered chart, to use in your code? Entirely possible!

(d) Works really well when importing into legacy web apps. They even provide an option to get a customized build on their site.

(e) Very good at handling streamed data. The animation is very smooth between data changes.

I've been using it for almost 7 years now for various production and personal projects, and it's still my go-to library. Their docs have come a long way since then.

They do have long standing bugs that get annoying, e.g, dealing with 0 when using log scales, provided there are workarounds for it. I haven't noticed any blocking bugs for most common usecases.
by zmmmmm | 2025-04-09 08:06:08+00:00
Sure, yes, the fact that the US now is in a weak position built up over decades is just the reality that has to be faced.

The path out of it is painful - starting with reducing US debt, and using a full complement of measures to diversify sources of goods and services (including bringing them domestically where it makes sense). It's something you do over a decade, in partnership with your allies, not a week on your own.
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-09 08:06:16+00:00
The UK is much more run down and low-quality than the rest of Europe.

EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.

The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-09 08:06:48+00:00
>Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.

I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.

How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?

>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.

>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.

Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.

>What are you giving them to work with?

Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-09 08:07:18+00:00
This has always been the case with ML.

ML is good at fuzzy stuff, where you don't have a clear definition of a problem (what is spam? what is porn?), "I know it when I see it", or when you don't have a clear mathematical algorithm to solve the problem (think "distinguishing dogs and cats").

When you have both (think sorting arrays, adding numbers), traditional programming (and that includes Prolog and the symbolic AI stuff) is much better.

LLMs will always be much worse than traditional computer programs at adding large numbers, just as traditional computer programs will always be worse at telling whether the person in the image is wearing proper safety equipment.

For best results, you need to combine both. Use LLMs for the "fuzzy stuff", converting imprecise English or pictures into JSON, Python, Wolfram, Prolog or some other representation that a computer can understand and work with, and then use the computer to do the rest.

Let's say you're trying to calculate how much proteins there are per 100 grams of a product, you have a picture of the label, but the label only gives you proteins per serving and the serving size in imperial units. The naive way most programmers try is to ask an LLM to give them proteins per 100g, which is obviously going to fail in some cases. The correct way is to ask the LLM for whatever unit it likes, and then do the conversion on the backend.
by WinstonSmith84 | 2025-04-09 08:07:18+00:00
> I just did a $25,000 wire internationally with a currency exchange in the middle and it cost $75. It went through in one business day.

This is exactly what I'm talking about and I'm not certain whether you're sarcastic .. Paying $75 on a 25k amount with a transaction time of 24 hours to complete is absolutely insane. You'd have used USDT or USDC or any other stable coin, you would have paid <$1 of fee and got the transaction done in seconds.
by palata | 2025-04-09 08:08:22+00:00
IMHO it is random anyway. At least to some extent: you can check that the candidate seems somewhat competent (i.e. filter out all those who just cannot write code). But finding the one who would be the best fit for the position? No chance at all.

I believe a big mistake is to focus on the technical skillset for hiring. And then you risk ending up with a team of supposedly "all stars" (which is often debatable) that hate each other, can't stop arguing or just create a toxic atmosphere.

What I would do is try to find, among the candidates that seem competent enough, a good colleague. Someone with whom I will enjoy working. I am convinced that a team of friends will beat an individual jerk in the long run. It's great to have a team of superstars, but if they care more about their stock options than about your shitty product (really, who is proud of optimising Facebook's ad revenue? They must be there for the money), then maybe you are just building a company that will waste a lot of potential on a failed metaverse, or a failed VR headset, or a failed TikTok competitor.
by roenxi | 2025-04-09 08:08:32+00:00
Although these are all qualities of good devs, they are qualities of a lot of middling devs too. Reading the documentation and understanding the tooling isn't that rare.

Although I will say the "Status Doesn’t Matter" thing is a symptom not a cause. If there isn't any question you're one of the best then status doesn't matter - people know you're the best and there is no need to remind them. The people who fight strongly for status are the insecure ones who think they need to remind people otherwise they'll lose their place in the pecking orders. Typically people who are a few steps shy of the best - silver medallists if you will - are the ones who need to spend a lot of time reminding people they are almost the best.
by brabel | 2025-04-09 08:08:42+00:00
Here in Sweden we have Swish which seems to be very similar (just send money to anyone with a phone number/QR Code), but Swish is a private company, not government.

Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).

And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).

So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??
by maeln | 2025-04-09 08:09:49+00:00
The same can be said about the other side. It is rarely phrased has "LLM is a useful tool with some important limitations" but "Look the LLM manage to create a junior-level feature, therefor we won't need developers in 2 years from now".

It tends to be the same with anything hyped / divisive. Human tend to exaggerate in both direction in communication, especially in low-stake environment such as an internet forum, or when they stand to gain something from the hype.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-09 08:10:10+00:00
> What are the theatres where the US is supposed to be able to put on a strong showing? It doesn't seem to be Europe, they've got war on their doorstep and if anyone thinks the US is helping they should reflect on their reasoning

I think you have this backwards: the US was helping considerably, and then got taken over by pro-Russian conspiracy theorists.

But the bond stuff isn't "tribute" or nationalism; remember, it's being made by private sector investors, not national governments. Fairly straightforward calculation: which way is the exchange rate expected to move? Interest rate? Risk of default?

Up till now the US offered moderate interest rates, favourable direction of exchange rate movement, and imperceptible risk of default. There's still no reason to default other than madness and a desire to strap on the suicide vest and become Argentina.
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-04-09 08:10:36+00:00
> The future is not about extremes

Yea, but right-wing ideologues are doing their best to prevent this and instead convince everyone that we must be ideologically pure (privatise everything for the sake of it) rather than just find the sweet spot and do what works.

Inviting scientists to come to Europe is a good sign that on this continent we're still open to reality and would rather know how things are than pretend they are how we want them to be.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-09 08:10:54+00:00
I've yet to see that proven though; alongside web technology based GUIs is also the concept of evergreen applications, that is, stuff that gets updated and kept up to date all the time, and force pushed to end users.

And while on paper a web application built 20 years ago still works today as it was, the same can't be said about the technology used to develop and build these; there's a ridiculous amount of churn in the libraries and frameworks, to the point where you have to set up your github actions or whatever to frequently keep your stuff up to date, because if you run more than six months behind, any updates will break your carefully balanced setup.

Of course, that's a choice. Ultimately there's no real need to use Typescript, a framework, or a collection of libraries, and if you do choose them, there's the huge complex but fragile ones like Angular and React and their ecosystems, or smaller ones leveraging modern web tech developments or solving only a single problem. (I'm aware React was intended that way originally but in practice it's a whole ecosystem you're pulling into your application)
by irjustin | 2025-04-09 08:11:00+00:00
> it's not just turtles all the way down

If you drill far enough... well anyway

> I don't know of any machine where dollars go in one side, are destroyed, and euros are created on the other side.

The Treasury is the machine you're looking for. And the wire transfer, SWIFT, usually, is the tool of choice. In a sense, yes dollars are "destroyed" in that they leave that monetary system. Banks like BoA hold a few kind of ledgers with the country's central bank one which gets discounted during the outflow.

So euros are then credited to whatever institution you transferred it to. That country just became that much richer.

This is why places like HSBC, CITI have free transfers for intra-bank but you still pay $15 for the same via wire transfer? Why would you ever want to do that? beats me, but the point is you can and it has a very real affect on the system other than some internal database going +/-.

But in the end, it's the country's central bank credit/debiting any institution and then just... printing? when it wants? but other countries... m1... foreign debt.

so yea, turtles.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-04-09 08:11:17+00:00
Yeah, I find setting it in voice mode and then directing it to a specific site that I'm interested in discussing is super useful, so I start off in ChatGPT*, then I switch windows to what I'm interested in looking at. For instance, I want to go over a GitHub repo. I can ask it to verbally ask it to go there and then chat with it as I read through the README file, and it provides great a soundboarding experience. No pun intended. Heck, I'm even dictating this response through Wispr Flow, which I have found to be more useful than I had anticipated.

* Gemini lets you do this by actually streaming your screen through and verbally chatting about whatever is on screen. While interesting, I find the responses to be a little less thorough. YMMV.
by blackbrokkoli | 2025-04-09 08:11:27+00:00
Interesting idea!

I think this could really benefit from lazy signup, a demo directly on the landing page, or at least way more screenshots.

Given that making a checklist in my notebook or established organization-app of choice is almost 0 friction, signing up or downloading an app feels like asking a lot without seeing the clear benefit 100%.

Good luck with this :)
by re-thc | 2025-04-09 08:11:40+00:00
> error in terms of who really holds more cards in the trade battle, specifically with China.

This isn't 1v1 though. Maybe there was a time when US vs the rest would work, but now?

The problem is this isn't about import / exports of physical goods.

Once tariffs and bans happen on digital goods, services, etc the US is toast. Has Trump forgotten about them? China is already onto things like US films.

Game studios, Disney, Netflix, Hollywood, etc are all on the firing line.

Even sports like NBA, major league, etc would all crash. A large part of their income is from advertisements and broadcasting deals overseas.
by andy12_ | 2025-04-09 08:12:32+00:00
I mean, it could very well be that it generates image patches autoregressively, but in a pyramidal way (first a very low resolution version, the "canvas", and then each individual patch). This is very similar to VAR [1]

We can't really be sure until OpenAI tells us.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02905
by teamonkey | 2025-04-09 08:12:52+00:00
> if you read your SICP you will come across the aphorism that "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

In the same way that we use AI to write resumés to be read by resumé-scanning AI, or where execs use AI to turn bullet points into a corporate email only for it to be summarised into bullet points by AI, perhaps we are entering the era where AI generates code that can only be read by an AI?
by pjc50 | 2025-04-09 08:13:51+00:00
> dollar that encourages more and more consumption

Under consumerist capitalism, more consumption is generally considered to be a good thing. See all the people complaining about the price of eggs under Biden. I wonder how they're doing.

The tariffs mean that Americans will be able to afford less stuff. That's the stated objective: buy more expensive American goods rather than cheaper imports. It remains to be seen how a country which got started around a riot against import taxes is going to handle this.
by keepamovin | 2025-04-09 08:14:04+00:00
The a smart way to look at it. But for full generality, I consider cancer particles emitted from tumors such as during surgery as pathogenic vectors of cancer whether an underlying cause involves microbial hosted or just the cancer cells themselves cancer definitely has a bit of a panspermia thing going on.

That’s why I never wanna spend time in cancer wards. It is most definitely contagious across multiple vectors in unique ways.
by twixfel | 2025-04-09 08:14:14+00:00
I have lived in Germany for 5 years but am from the UK and I don't see much difference overall. The UK is just a bit more individualistic, much less racist, and has London, which has the highest wages in Europe. Germany has less income equality but far worse wealth inequality—most people in Germany will never own their own home because although Germany is rich, Germans are poor. Healthcare is better here, though. It's just a case of picking your poison I think. Also, believe it or not, Germany has its shithole cities too, I've visited a few of them.

But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
by Thorrez | 2025-04-09 08:14:38+00:00
Is the article saying we should build everything here? The article says that machine tools drive manufacturing innovation, and machine tool makers sell them close to home. So if the US doesn't make machine tools, the US will fall behind in manufacturing innovation.

The article is saying that the US should desire to have advanced manufacturing. I don't think the article is saying that the US should manufacture everything.
by braza | 2025-04-09 08:14:43+00:00
> Whereas a programmer who's either straight out of school or fresh off their first internship or short-stint job is essentially all potential. So you draw their line on the basis of just a few early dots, but the line can be steep.

> It's not that different from something like the NFL scouting combine. Teams fight to find the promise of The Next All-Star. These rookies won't have the experience that someone who's already played in the league for years would have, but they have the potential to be the best. Someone who's already played for several seasons will have shown what they have and be weighed accordingly.

I know that DHH is good at programming, but I am sure he has never scouted in collective sports and/or knows the difference between programming and seeing potential in sports. Since I have been on both sides, I have a few words on why his assertions do not hold water.

At the time that you do scouting, yes, you might want to have the promising QB/WR on your team, but those guys do not have what developers have, which is, for the lack of a better name, "skills transitivity" between their positions.

A QB that has some characteristics like strategic thinking and skills to read defenses (like Peyton Manning), precision for long-distance throws (like Tom Brady), or being a dual-threat plus pocket mobility (like Russell Wilson) but it's very unlikely that with those skill sets, you'll become a great wide receiver or even a Tight End/Wide Receiver.

As a developer, yes, one can optimize the process to have the most stellar coder, but by the force of their craft, the more time they have, the more their skills enhance transitivity to other parts of the same craft.

And the good thing is that, contrary to the promising QB, over time if his not the stellar player, his skills won't make him able to transition to other parts of the team.

In concrete terms, a developer that learned in their years 1-2 to work with TypeScript, in the years 3-4 worked with Java, and in the year 5 started to touch Docker will have a way more skill set and transitivity than someone picked out of the college that you do not know for sure how their learning will affect their skills transitivity.

And another flaw in the argument, maybe a minor one: stellar potential most of the time needs to find stellar environments and conditions to thrive. The NFL teams know so much about it at terms of fundamental level that even when the worst team of the previous season generally selects the 1st pick QBs in the draft, they know that if the conditions does not change, in a few years that stellar talent will go somewhere else.