MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dezzadk | 2025-04-04 07:19:07+00:00
Interesting. I think the software is absolutely tasteless. For a long time it had to update "twice", asking you to restart steam 2 times in a row. It defaults to showing an "ad" on startup. Its chat had a bug that had hidden messages everytime someone wrote you, so you had to reopen the window several times to see it.

Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.

Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
by watwut | 2025-04-04 07:19:38+00:00
> US rates are far lower than the EU's.

This is a lie. And no, VAT is not tariff. And no, Trumps formula does not measure tariffs.

> efforts to uncover and stop corruption in the US Federal government.

There were no such efforts. There were efforts to knee cap both transparency and agencies that used to act against corruption. Trumps previous administration was drowning in corruption and there is no reason to think this one is different. Musk is effectively giving government contracts to himself.
by powersnail | 2025-04-04 07:20:45+00:00
I can think of so many pieces of software that does that: having a local state, having a remote state, and keeping them synchronized whenever internet is available. It's how email apps work. That's how all cloud drives work, and Dropbox is more than a decade old at this point. It's how notes apps work. Etc. etc.

Really can't see how this can be regarded as a recent idea.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-04 07:20:45+00:00
It isn't funding education in itself that lowers GDP, it's high tax rates. Investors put money where it gets the best returns. Suppose one country has a 20% tax rate and the other has a 60% tax rate, i.e. they keep 80% of the returns instead of 40%. Then they don't invest in the second country unless the returns are twice as high to begin with, and in most cases they're not.

Governments making beneficial use of tax dollars can counteract some of that, because the investments would increase productivity there (e.g. more educated workforce), but for that to work the government would have to make net positive investments against the losses resulting from higher tax rates. That's notoriously difficult and governments more often fail than succeed at doing it efficiently, and there is a strong incentive for corruption. If any significant amount of tax money is directed to cronies or politically connected constituencies, the possibility of not causing net harm quickly plummets.

Moreover, government spending has diminishing returns. Collecting enough in taxes to have a basic government that can at least enforce laws against violence and provide transportation infrastructure has very high returns. The first $10M you spend on police might cause the number of unsolved murders to go from 1000 to 500. The next $10M you spend might cause it to go from 500 to 450, because the remaining ones are harder to solve, and because there are fewer remaining to solve. At some point additional spending isn't getting enough of a benefit to be worth the cost. And the same for infrastructure and education and all the rest of it.

The exact breakeven point is obviously a matter of some debate, but there is generally a negative correlation between higher tax rates and GDP per capita, implying that most current governments are either taxing at inefficiently high levels because the marginal government program isn't worth the cost, or that there are productive investments governments could be making with the existing money but instead they're allocating it to something else, e.g. because of government corruption or mismanagement.
by tinco | 2025-04-04 07:24:04+00:00
Their wishlist is composability, being able to write performant code, being able to perform other low-level operations, being able to use assembly and a reasonably easy build system.

I'd argue that's not just a fairly common list of desired features but that if there's more than 1 of those desires not in your own list then there's probably better languages than Rust to consider.
by singhrac | 2025-04-04 07:24:10+00:00
Eh, I write a lot of Python and while it's unnecessary, it can make code easier to read if not overused.

if (config_fn := base_dir / "config").exists(): ...

is just a tiny bit shorter than this:

config_fn = base_dir / "config" if config_fn.exists(): ...

but if you do this enough times (if you are handling a lot of possible errors / missing data, etc.) it can definitely shorten the code.
by nroets | 2025-04-04 07:24:16+00:00
I fail to see how corporations are responsible for the climate crisis: Politicians won't tax gas because they'll get voted out.

We know that Trump is not captured by corporations because his trade policies are terrible.

If anything, social media is the evil that's destroying the political center: Americans are no longer reading mainstream newspapers or watching mainstream TV news.

The EU is saying the elections in Romania was manipulated through manipulation of TikTok accounts and media.
by autumnstwilight | 2025-04-04 07:24:28+00:00
Honestly that part of the article and some other comments have given me the idle speculation, what if that was the solution to the, "Humans no longer feel they can meaningfully contribute to the world," issue?

Like we can satisfy the hunting and retrieval instincts of dogs by throwing a stick, surely an AI that is 10,000 times more intelligent can devise a stick-retrieval-task for humans in a way that feels like satisfying achievement and meaningful work from our perspective.

(Leaving aside the question of whether any of that is a likely or desirable outcome.)
by ionwake | 2025-04-04 07:25:16+00:00
Please don't be offended by my opinion, I mean it in good humour to share some strong disagreements - Im going to give my take after reading your comment and the article which both seem completely OTT ( contextwise regarding my opinions ).

>meaning behind them is not dependent upon the perspective of an external observer.

(Yes brother like cmon)

Regarding the author, I get the impression he grew up without a strong father figure? This isnt ad hominem I just get the feeling of someone who is so confused and lost in life that he is just severely depressed possibly related to his directionless life. He seems so confused he doesn't even take seriously the fact most humans find their own meaning in life and says hes not even going to consider this, finding it futile.( he states this near the top of the article ).

I believe his rejection of a simple basic core idea ends up in a verbal blurb which itself is directionless.

My opinion ( Which yes maybe more floored than anyones ), is to deal with Mazlows hierarchy, and then the prime directive for a living organism which after survival , which is reproduction. Only after this has been achieved can you then work towards your family community and nation.

This may seem trite, but I do believe that this is natural for someone with a relatively normal childhood.

My aim is not to disparage, its to give me honest opinion of why I disagree and possible reasons for it. If you disagree with anything I have said please correct me.

Thanks for sharing the article though it was a good read - and I did struggle myself with meaning sometimes.
by natmaka | 2025-04-04 07:26:19+00:00
> still a far cry from fossils related deaths

The question is not "which amount of fossil fuel, which amount of nuclear?" but about renewables and nuclear.

>> Because those who refuse to be exposed to induced risks can prevent most of it

> ??? In cities the bulk of deaths are cyclists/pedestrians

Being ultra-alert, or avoiding crossing any street or even avoiding any area where motorized vehicles zoom around is possible. Avoiding most of the effects of a major nuclear accident or of some wandering "hot" nuclear waste (during the upcoming 100000 years or so...) is way, way more difficult.

> Coal power plants are literally generating more radioactive ematerial

This is not about preferring coal to nuclear but about preferring renewables to nuclear.

> The entire french nuclear waste

(I'm French. ) Our "solution", named "Cigéo" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cig%C3%A9o ), isn't even ready (more than 60 years after the first industrial reactor diverged) and is officially imperfect (there are risks, French ahead: section «Déchets» in https://sites.google.com/view/avenirdunucleraire/#h.e4d4cdh3... ).

Better avoiding producing such stuff, IMHO. Renewables...

BTW check the trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
by cedws | 2025-04-04 07:26:20+00:00
>But he looked around. “We were surrounded by people that were in their late 20s or 30s all day. And I realized that if I didn’t go to college, this is what life would be like.”

Lol, I can relate. I started working in an office when I was 16, now 24, and regretting wasting my youth grinding when I could have been having fun in a period of your life you only get to experience once.

Don't grow up too fast kids. Make stupid decisions and ride out your youth as long as you can afford to.
by whstl | 2025-04-04 07:26:40+00:00
> Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics.

That's painting things with a broad brush and a wrong one at that.

Ironically, there's plenty of avant-garde art that is 100% about the aesthetics, to the point people complain they were "made without technique".
by rob74 | 2025-04-04 07:27:29+00:00
The Guardian has investigated further: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...

In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.

For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.
by Doxin | 2025-04-04 07:27:34+00:00
> outside of enriching them with the spoils of my effort when I'm through

For what it's worth, to me and I assume a lot of other people, this ruins the game. There's nothing I dislike more than getting invited to a survival minecraft server (or whatever) and having someone dump diamond everything on me as a gift. What even is the point of playing the game anymore at that point?
by tjpnz | 2025-04-04 07:27:37+00:00
>I don't see why an AI can't generate IP, even if the AI is being sold. What's not allowed is selling the generated IP.

Where I live Studio Ghibli are known to be active on C2C marketplaces looking for counterfeit goods. If you were to list a home pressed Totoro pillowcase it would be taken down, sometimes proactively by the marketplace. From that perspective I struggle to see much discernable difference given OpenAI are offering a paid service which allows me to create similar items, and one could argue is promoting it too.
by Animats | 2025-04-04 07:27:50+00:00
The big problem in open source intelligence is not in-depth analysis. It's finding something worth looking at in a flood of info.

Here's the CIA's perspective on this subject.[1] The US intelligence community has a generative AI system to help analyze open source intelligence. It's called OSIRIS.[2] There are some other articles about it. The previous head of the CIA said the main use so far is summarization.

The original OSINT operation in the US was the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service from WWII. All through the Cold War, someone had to listen to Radio Albania just in case somebody said something important. The CIA ran that for decades. Its descendant is the current open source intelligence organization. Before the World Wide Web, they used to publish some of the summaries on paper, but as people got more serious about copyright, that stopped.

DoD used to publish The Early Bird, a daily newsletter for people in DoD. It was just reprints of articles from newspapers, chosen for stories senior leaders in DoD would need to know about. It wasn't supposed to be distributed outside DoD for copyright reasons, but it wasn't hard to get.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/d6fd3fa9ce19f1abf2b...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/us-intelligence-services-ai-model...
by Xylakant | 2025-04-04 07:29:09+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm one of the managing directors at Ferrous Systems, so biased.

The FLS was written with that specific intend in mind, but that mostly limits the scope of the spec that Ferrous Systems is/was interested in maintaining. We were also not interested in adopting large scale contributions on parts that Ferrous Systems doesn't need - we're a small outfit after all, 20ish people, and we don't have the capacity to maintain a full specification.

However, that's no fundamental barrier that limits the specification per se - now that the Rust project is adopting it, others can contribute and pick up maintenance slack. We'll certainly continue to contribute to the things that we are interested in seeing, but if someone wants to build a compiler based on the spec, they can contribute the parts needed.

On the upside: The spec in its current shape is good enough to certify the compiler and I know people have started building other things on the FLS. Structurally, the tooling and the content is fine - so I believe it can serve as a good nucleus for the Rust languages spec.

As for the "strange" aftertaste in the process of adopting the FLS that's mentioned in the article:

I don't believe that the Foundation/Project adopting the Ferrocene Language Specification is bad. While Ferrous Systems as a company holds no official position in the project, we consider ourselves very much part of the project. We have people that head working groups, one of our employees was in the governing council, my brother and co-founder is founding member of the Foundation. Rust-Analyzer is maintained by my esteemed colleague Lukas. We draw on the project - after all we certified the projects rustc as we found it. We contribute to the project as part of the work we do. We started writing a spec because no one had written one, and specifically *we* had a need. And that's essentially how things work in open source: We scratch our itch - and in the process lift the tide for everyone. The project taking some time to figure out what the project wants is not surprising: They have their needs, we have ours, and they often overlap but they're not identical. We're not the rust project. The project is not Ferrous Systems.
by lnrd | 2025-04-04 07:29:14+00:00
I think the problem is mostly plastic components, especially miniatures. These requires injection molds and then manual labor to remove the parts from the sprues, clean them and glue them together (as miniatures are expected to come assembled in board games).

I think the labor cost alone makes it not possible to manufacture them in the west. But also ignoring that, consider that injection molding for miniatures can be more expensive in the west in itself. Usually because factories work on a different scale and have higher requirements for minimum order quantities, but also because they do not work usually with miniatures so they would need to adapt their tooling, expertise and know how for this specific kind of product.

Imagine a factory injection molding chairs suddenly receiving a quote for a bunch of miniatures, they can do it, but they are going to charge you for the time needed to figure out how, and for the changes in the lines.

Consider also that usually miniatures 3D files are stl or obj because they are sculpted, while the factory might work only with cad as that's the standard in manufacturing. These two are radically different and there is no easy conversion from stl to cad, which would require it being re-modeled in most cases.

Also, with a chinese factory you can expect to give them 3D files and they will take care of everything (designing molds and avoiding undercuts). I'm sure this has separate cost in the west as it involves a specialized expertise which is for sure more expensive than in China.

Btw here's a nice writeup from a person that tried to open a game factory in the USA, he doesn't even mention plastic parts though. https://www.superheumann.com/post/my-year-in-manufacturing-g...
by jjav | 2025-04-04 07:29:36+00:00
> If you're unemployed and living on whatever odd jobs and government assistance you can get, tariffs won't make one bit of difference in your life.

Of course it will, since price inflation is going to hit the low (or no) income people the hardest.

And if the government assistance you mentioned is all cut away, it's going to be much worse.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-04 07:30:10+00:00
> [If commissioning some work and] keeping the artwork on their refrigerator in their home, then no infringement has taken place.

I'd like to push back on this: Is that legally true, or is it infringement which just happens to be so minor and under-the-radar that nobody gets in trouble?

Suppose there's a printer in my room churning out hundreds of pages of words matching that of someone's copyrighted new book, without permission.

That sure seems like infringement is happening, regardless of whether my next step is to: (A) sell it, (B) sell many of it, (C) give it away, (D) place it into my personal library of other home-printed books, or (E) hand it to someone else who paid me in advance to produce it for them under contract.

If (A) is infringement, why wouldn't (E) also be?
by lovich | 2025-04-04 07:31:11+00:00
It doesn’t remain to be seen, we know the fertility rate for America isn’t high enough to maintain replacement rates without immigration. Here’s one article but you can find many with google https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2024/3/22/us-de...

The current admin is saying they are going to stop immigration. I don’t find it comforting or plausible if you’re telling me that we have to wait and see because they might fuck up one step of their plan and that’ll make the other steps less painful
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-04 07:31:26+00:00
The subject is deadly serious, and I only wish I could amplify it more. The abdication of reason and responsibility to machines is desperately dumb and no good will come of it.

Maybe what I'm getting at is this [0] poem of Taylor Mali. Somehow we all lost our nerve to challenge really, really bad things, wrapping up messages in tentative language. Sometimes that's a genuine attempt at balance, or honesty. But often these days I feel an author is trying too hard to distance themself from ... from themself.

It's a a silly bugbear, I know.

[0] https://taylormali.com/poems/totally-like-whatever-you-know/
by atoav | 2025-04-04 07:32:00+00:00
The US is unreliable to do trade with, so I'd simply look to diversify my customer base to not be at the whim of an erratic old man with a narcissistic personality disorder.

In the end I am pretty sure the US can't be avoided, but today the US made sure that those who had good ties to it got punished and the world will remember that. I would like to think the world might ask it self if the USD should be still be the lead currency.

The rest of the world wasn't at fault that US capitalists decided to outsource their manufacturing base to cheaper countries. I guess someone in the US got damn rich doing precisely that. Those are the people you should blame.

Additionally tarrifs cut two ways, if countries react as tou would expect them to. The EU got the biggest single market in the world, and the US just made it harder to sell their stuff there — again, beyond pure costs, reliability is an issue in itself. Why would the EU buy something from the US when products from elsewhere have less tariffs and you don't have to deal with the scenario of an erratic political leader making it up as he goes which makes it somewhat impossible to rely on a plan.

Having bad leadership is a thing that costs a nation dearly. I don't see why the rest of the world would feel inclined to carry that cost.
by FRParker | 2025-04-04 07:36:01+00:00
Hoel referenced a tweet referring to the larger trend as "grey goo". I've thought of it as the "greying of reality" at past intervals, but "grey goo" really hits at the core of the issue. The goo sticks to a person, ever so slowly (yet steadily) impacting his perception of the world. Over time, it has a cumulative buildup and effect not unlike that of mercury.

Truly, you are correct. There is fast approaching a time (more like an era) where the vast majority of people, at some point or another, will be forced to disconnect from the web, or lose their minds. While I do understand that algorithms are a mirror of the user, however distorted it may be, I think that has been a big driver of the nostalgia trends one sees on social media. It's a coping mechanism used by a lot of people who sense, in varying capacities, that something has gone rather wrong. It's a reaching for substance. This is not to say that nostalgia has never existed before now, but rather that the trends are indicative of a much more public, unified, and shared desire for the past than would otherwise exist is this issue were not so widespread.

I, too, find it to be quite sad how the "grey goo" is becoming increasingly hard to avoid online. I suppose it's better in the old style forums about niche topics than it is on the main line social media sites. Perhaps, in all of this, that will be the silver lining.
by hjnilsson | 2025-04-04 07:36:17+00:00
It’s probably the same way monks copying books felt when the printing press came along. “Look at this mechanical, low-quality copy. It lacks all finesse and flourish of the pen!”

I agree with you that it is sad. And what is especially sad is that the result will probably be lower quality overall, but much cheaper. It’s the inevitable result of automation.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-04 07:36:48+00:00
I haven't actually looked at the numbers but my impression is that all those attempts are coming from people from the more developed and less corrupt northern countries. Maybe from their perspective you can trust the state to do the right thing %100 of the time? I don't know if that's the case but whoever is coming up with these must be living under the rock because anyone following what's happening the last few years and especially the last few weeks must be terrified of giving too much information to the state because in fact the developments in the USA show us that the state can be captured and data can be accessed by people outside of the legal frameworks. Even if your state is perfect, your mortal enemy can indeed take over and have access to these tools to do god knows what.

I expect this attempt to fail like all previous attempts as there are enough people with sense in the EU.
by bananapub | 2025-04-04 07:37:40+00:00
ahh, and flagged already!

in a previous age, say two months ago, it would be a career ending scandal for anyone senior to fire anyone based on what some fucking lunatic from Rumble said, but this is how eighty million Americans wanted the country run last year, and is how every single Republican politician wants it run now - if they didn't, they'd be speaking out and supporting impeachment.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 07:37:47+00:00
Isn’t it a somewhat unfair characterization that ”C3 promotes itself more” and ”is pushed on HN and other social media” and that because of this C2 for some reason experiences harm?

C2 is over 11 years now. C3’s recent breakthrough this last half year is unlikely to have had much impact on its ability to grow the last 10 years.
by Animats | 2025-04-04 07:39:22+00:00
The nice thing about using a potentiometer for position sensing is that you don't have to home the thing.

There are lots of alternative sensors, but most are bigger, heavier, or more expensive. If 1% precision is good enough, pots are fine. The next step up is Dynamixel servos, which have a nice daisy-chain digital interface, encoders, about the same form factor as toy-type servos, at about 10x the price.[1]

[1] https://www.robotis.us/dynamixel/