MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IsaiahShapiro1 | 2025-04-04 16:27:31+00:00
I've been experimenting with ways to combine dark bureaucracy, international policy, and modern web design. The result: TariffOS - a dead-simple, high-polish app that lets you impose tariffs between 198 countries on imports like "military-grade TikTok data" or "kim Jong Un-approved haircuts."

You pick the countries, the tariff rate, and get a real-looking official trade declaration you can share — complete with fake economic justifications and Moist Capital backing.

No signup, no paywall. Just vibes. Built with Next.js, Tailwind, and Framer Motion. Would love thoughts from the HN crowd.
by mfeole | 2025-04-04 16:27:35+00:00
No, color is a subjective experience a conscious being has. Different colors each correspond to different mixtures of wavelengths, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing. Color is the thing that you see with your consciousness. The difference is fundamental: wavelengths exist independently of the existence of conscious beings, while colors only exist if a conscious being can capture photons and has a certain brain system that can interpret those photon's wavelengths.
by NickM | 2025-04-04 16:28:41+00:00
The article is flat out wrong. The reason purple and violet look similar is not a trick of the brain, and has nothing to do with the color wheel "wrapping around"; it's a natural result of the frequency response curves of the three types of cones in our eyes. The two colors stimulate our cones in the same way, so of course they naturally look similar.

Most diagrams of our cone frequency responses are subtly wrong. Diagrams typically show three separate smooth, overlapping peaks, centered around red, green, and blue. What they leave out is that our L-cones (the "red" cones) also have a separate little sensitivity bump way off in the violet end of the spectrum. So when you see violet light, it's actually stimulating both the cones that are most sensitive to red light and the ones that are sensitive to blue light. This is pretty much the same stimulation pattern you get if you send both pure red and blue light into your eyes together, which is why purple and violet look so similar.

If you Google "cone sensitivity diagram" you'll mostly find the misleading versions of the diagrams, but you can see one that includes the extra bit of high-frequency L-cone sensitivity in this paper, for example: https://hal.science/hal-01565649/file/Vienot_ConeFundamental...
by theamk | 2025-04-04 16:28:43+00:00
It is that simple. You can pass arguments to `bash -c` with no problems(just don't forget a dummy $0). If you don't want exception spam, replace `check=True` with explicit exit. Here you go, it's 5 lines now.

#!/usr/bin/env python3 import sys import subprocess result = subprocess.run(["bash", "-c", """ echo I am in bash, I have $# args, arg1 is "$1" set -x "$@" """, "dummy.sh"] + sys.argv[1:]) sys.exit(result.returncode)

python's shell tooling is really good (if a bit verbose). And another cool thing is "shlex.quote", so you can write something like:

subprocess.run(["bash", "-c", f"rsync {shlex.quote(filename)} somehost: | some-script"])

and have "filename" safely inserted into script fragment.. No command escapes, and newlines, quotes, backticks etc... are all handled properly.

The bash syntax highlighting will disappear, correct, and that is a downside. But hey, you are supposed to be rewriting this in python, so it's just more motivation :)
by kurofune | 2025-04-04 16:29:31+00:00
Spain is one of the best places in the world to live if you have a steady income, you don't have to be wealthy to be happy. I've lived there for many years working for Spanish companies, with spanish salaries.

But seeing how you blame mass immigration, mostly uneducated and low-skilled workers, for the fall in wages of the educated people leaving the country, I wonder if your vision isn't too myopic and narrow on economic issues due to political bias.

As for the struggles of the young people in the country, because real state is inaccessible, I agree with you, but it's a problem in most capital cities of the civilised world.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-04 16:29:31+00:00
> Well, Switzerland cowardly decided not to react or retaliate, even though those tariffs make no sense.

I'm not sure that reactionary tarifs are the correct action. Flagging products as American or pulling them from the selves seems much more affective.

If you counter-tariff you just tax your own citizens. If you decrease supply then it actually hurts US.
by bluGill | 2025-04-04 16:29:40+00:00
IT need not be federal. Your state can do more than the federal government - some of the most effective changes are things the constitution doesn't give the federal government power over. Require 50 amp capability to every parking spot for example is something only the states can do (possibly you can limit this to residential). For that matter states could just build good transit systems, while there are federal subsidies most states are big enough to go alone and pay for it out of the savings from their road budget.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-04 16:29:45+00:00
Trump sought to illegally install himself as president in 2021 by having fake electors deny the actual results of their state's presidential elections and just decide that Trump should win anyway. He was only prevented from doing this by a combination of organizational incompetence from his team and Mike Pence refusing to go along with the plan.

This was among the greatest threats to democratic self governance in well over a century.

I'd say that Trump 2.0 is more eventful than Trump 1.0, but I absolutely would not call Trump 1.0 uneventful.
by rafram | 2025-04-04 16:30:10+00:00
JavaScript does work like that, but `for` creates a new block scope for each iteration, so variables declared with `let` in its initializer are redeclared each time. Some other languages ([1]) just make accessing mutable locals from a closure into a compiler error, which I think is also reasonable. Old-school JavaScript (`var`s) chose the worst-of-both-worlds option.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/54340101
by banqjls | 2025-04-04 16:30:53+00:00
https://www.bbvaresearch.com/publicaciones/espana-motivos-tr...

From last year. There is a version in English.

Regarding renting, it’s legally almost impossible to kick out a squatter, which means most people choose to leave their empty homes closed instead of renting them, which, added to mass immigration, has led to a surge in rent prices.
by superkuh | 2025-04-04 16:31:14+00:00
It's a fun mischarecterization. But the old sites were/are far more functional and less fragile. A single animated gif of the CONUS radar, for example, is way better user experience, incomparibly less fragile and easy to host, than a complex javascript application and associated backend databases, servers, etc. Just put the gif on akami, host the simple static html on noaa servers and it lasts a decade with no one touching it. It was how it worked for near 20 years.

But re: your mischaracterization, I thought I was clearly saying that they'd find another way to attack politically. It's just that the modern fragile web setup made NOAA particularly vulnerable.
by twodave | 2025-04-04 16:31:44+00:00
I could see a "Devil's Plan" style game show where, for one of the challenges the contestants have to come up with AI prompts that produce results, that then get fed into another AI prompt to determine whether they satisfy the conditions or not. E.g.

[ Challenge Image: An aquarium full of baby octopodes, containing a red high-heeled slipper in the center and a silver whistle hanging from a fern on the right-hand side ]

Then the contests have to come up (under pressure, of course) with a prompt that produces their own rendition of that image, and the game will decide if their image contains enough of the elements of the original to score a point.
by bluGill | 2025-04-04 16:31:47+00:00
Compromise. I love driving tiny cars, but once in a while I need to haul a large load (you can't rent a truck for this in many cases - I've tried: normally it isn't allowed in the contract even when it is there are restrictions. All that assumes you can find something for rent when you need it. So I drive a large truck. (well once a week I drive a large truck, most of the time I bike)
by settrans | 2025-04-04 16:32:08+00:00
"The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence."

Although I laud your unassailable argument highlighting yet another instance of double standards against Jews, ultimately there is little upside in engaging with the "no, no, technically there is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism" crowd. I am sad that Hacker News is rife with this kind of bigotry, but I don't see the tide of this battle turning anytime soon.

In case, dear reader, you are one of the intellectually curious ones who holds the opposing viewpoint, ask yourself why you demand that only the Jews lack the right to self determination?
by gcp123 | 2025-04-04 16:33:16+00:00
The tragic irony of Objectivism is perfectly captured in Peikoff's life story. A man who dedicated himself to a philosophy of radical independence ended up defining his entire existence through dependency. First on Rand, now apparently on his caregiver-turned-wife.

I met Peikoff at an ARI event in 2009. He was surprisingly warm in person, but you could see the weight of being "the heir" in how defensively he responded to even mild questions about Rand's work. Now reading about the fracture with his daughter over the estate, it's like watching Atlas Shrugged's plot play out in real life: the bitter disputes over Rand's intellectual property mirroring the novel's battles over physical resources.

What's most disturbing isn't the personal drama but what this reveals about how Objectivism operates in practice. For a philosophy obsessed with reason and independence, its institutional guardians seem remarkably focused on excommunication, loyalty tests, and controlling access to primary sources. The gap between preaching individualism while demanding conformity has always been the movement's central contradiction.
by ninalanyon | 2025-04-04 16:33:20+00:00
If anyone wants to avoid adding a full scale computer just to get TV out I recommend the late Don Lancaster's The Cheap Video Cookbook and Son of Cheap Video.

See https://archive.org/details/donlancaster_socv1/page/n3/mode/..., https://annas-archive.org/isbndb/9780672217234
by KeplerBoy | 2025-04-04 16:33:39+00:00
Nothing really changed. AMD already has a c++ (HIP) dialect very similar to CUDA, even with some automatic porting efforts (hipify).

AMD is held back by the combination of a lot of things. They have a counterpart to almost everything that exists on the other side. The things on the AMD side are just less mature with worse documentation and not as easily testable on consumer hardware.
by mfeole | 2025-04-04 16:34:09+00:00
But wavelengths are a property of the waves that exist in the wild, while color is a property of our brains interpreting those wavelengths. There's a fundamental difference there: one could say that wavelengths exist independently of the existence of conscious beings (even if no one measures them), while colors only exist if a conscious being can capture photons and has a certain brain system that can interpret those photon's wavelengths.
by sequoia | 2025-04-04 16:34:29+00:00
apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge.

To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.

My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.
by amai | 2025-04-04 16:35:20+00:00
"Britain is a wealthy country, but the gap between our richest and poorest 10% is now, the US excepted, the highest in the developed world"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/20/britai...

"For those born in the 1940s and 1950s, incomes would typically double from their late 20s to their early 50s. However, those born in the 1960s only saw income grow by around 50% over that period, whilst those born more recently look set to see weaker growth still as they age."

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and-wealth-inequality-exp...
by tomp | 2025-04-04 16:35:21+00:00
Did we read the same article?

They clearly mention, take into account and extrapolate this; LLM have first scaled via data, now it's test time compute, but recent developments (R1) clearly show this is not exhausted yet (i.e. RL on synthetically (in-silico) generated CoT) which implies scaling with compute. The authors then outline further potential (research) developments that could continue this dynamic, literally things that have already been discovered just not yet incorporated into edge models.

Real-world data confirms their thesis - there have been a lot of sceptics about AI scaling, somewhat justified ("whoom" a.k.a. fast take-off hasn't happened - yet) but their fundamental thesis has been wrong - "real-world data has been exhausted, next algorithmic breakthroughs will be hard and unpredictable". The reality is, while data has been exhausted, incremental research efforts have resulted in better and better models (o1, r1, o3, and now Gemini 2.5 which is a huge jump! [1]). This is similar to how Moore's Law works - it's not given that CPUs get better exponentially, it still requires effort, maybe with diminishing returns, but nevertheless the law works...

If we ever get to models be able to usefully contribute to research, either on the implementation side, or on research ideas side (which they CANNOT yet, at least Gemini 2.5 Pro (public SOTA), unless my prompting is REALLY bad), it's about to get super-exponential.

Edit: then once you get to actual general intelligence (let alone super-intelligence) the real-world impact will quickly follow.
by creddit | 2025-04-04 16:35:44+00:00
Anyone who has read Moby Dick knows that this passage:

> And since whaling technology had come along so much since the 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants, allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of kerosene.

contains a distinct factual error. The whalers were processing their catch at sea even in the 1800s. Probably not as efficiently, but still they were not dragging their catch back to land for processing.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-04 16:36:03+00:00
That's what you get when you expect AIs to be like humans and be able to reason. We would be pissed if a human artist did that, so we are pissed when AIs do it.

A human, even one whose only experience of an Italian plumber is Mario will be able to draw an Italian plumber who is not Mario. That's because he knows that Mario is just a video game character and doesn't even do much plumbing. He knows however how an actual non-Italian plumber looks like, and that a guy doing plumbing work in Italy is more likely to look like a regular Italian guy equipped like a non-Italian plumber than to a video game character.

And if asked to draw a Viking, he knows that Vikings are people originating from Scandinavia, so they can't be Asian by definition, even in an Asian context. A human artist can adjust things to the unrealistic setting, but unless presented with a really good reason, will not change the core traits of what makes a Viking a Viking.

But it requires reasoning. Which current image generating AIs don't have.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 16:36:18+00:00
For grabbing the CPU features, there is some rudimentary implementation for x86 here: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/blob/master/lib/std/core/priva... but not properly tested (which is to say, I would not count on it to work properly).

The `@require` here is creating a contract. You can't give a padding that is 0xFF, that's a programming error. However, you might have data which is invalid – in that case the typical error is INVALID_CHARACTER. To pass in a too small buffer is a programming error since the output buffer must be calculated first, so that's why that is not an error either. This was a deliberate change to make the API tighter.

So it's quite possible to add an "INVALID_LENGTH" error, but that should only be there in case one does encryption / decryption where the length cannot be easily determined beforehand i.e. it's part of the unknown input which the function determines. But in the Base32 implementation this is not the case. Either use it with an allocator for it to allocate sufficient memory for the data, or calculate that the buffer you pass in is big enough (or run into asserts if it isn't)
by tombert | 2025-04-04 16:36:47+00:00
That, or these CEOs have no real opinions or principles of their own and simply do what they think will be advantageous for them and their company, and literally no other thought goes into this.

I don't think he "supports" or is "against" this administration, I think it's much simpler: he does not care. I know this is cynical, but if the last three years in the software world has taught us anything, it seems like these tech CEOs regard their employees as expendable, and they're willing to change their political allegiances when they feel like it.

Maybe all of us would do that if put into this position, I don't know, no one wants to give me billions of dollars to run this experiment. Regardless, I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.
by 0xG | 2025-04-04 16:36:56+00:00
So even though in the case of Blockchain the owner has control over the piece (signature), do you think that the disconnect between "signature" and the fungible digital work is too big or meta and we should rather reconsider how we think of art, scarcity and those old dynamics? In this case will the artist signature and chain of provenance and creator<>collector connection be useless?
by kvdveer | 2025-04-04 16:37:39+00:00
I've read somewhere that the poor and the rich get the worst healthcare in the US. The poor because the just don't get any. The rich because healtcare providers will do whatever (they think) the paying client wants, including unnecessary stuff, and hiding unpleasant news.

I'm not in the US, so I can't validate this, however, it does help explain why healtcare outcomes for the rich aren't very good.
by VonGuard | 2025-04-04 16:37:40+00:00
So, I happen to know a bit about this because his cult compound is a state park in Florida, in Bonita Springs. Highly recommend visiting! Say hi to the loose big turtles!

The park is presented as a lovely old commune with vintage bungalows, a rare place where women actually ran things in the late 1800's and had a lot of freedom within the community to create art, plays, and raise their kids. A lot of the women were widows and this was basically the only option for them aside from marrying their dead husband's brother, or some other arcane ritual of the day. They paid for the upkeep and food for the "commune" by staging plays, and the men dealt with the outside world and negotiated for such transactions (to keep up external appearances of a patriarchy, something that was totally expected back then.)

My wife and I were touring the place, having a good old time, and when we entered the community gathering hall/church, my wife started slapping my arm repeatedly to get my attention. She's gasping for air in an almost shocked laughter. She pointed to the giant model of the split-open Earth as interior, like the one shown at the top this article. The whole commune were hollow Earthers!!

Of course, the bloom was then very much off the rose. A few things to know about Teed, in addition to the hollow Earth stuff, which we subsequently learned by reading more deeply into the interpretive museum text, therein:

1: Teed believed he was Jesus Christ, or at least, that he would come back with Christ. When he died, the cult left him on the porch for a few weeks, waiting for him to get back up. The Sheriff had to come and demand they bury him, because the stink was so bad from the rotting corpse in the hot Florida sun. A testament to the power of belief, or delusion, you decide.

2: The last Koreshanty-ist (As they were called) born and living on the Florida property admitted she was wrong about the Earth when she watched the moon landing on TV in 1969 in her bungalow.

3: Teed believed his theory was true because he said if you walked in a flat, straight line in any direction, you would eventually hit an incline. This was absolutely true! BECAUSE THEY LIVED IN A SWAMP.

4: Of course, 100% as expected, despite the ladies running the cult via committee and being very free in the cult society... All men except Teed were to remain celibate, but--OMG!-- there were plenty of babies! Teed 100% did the cult leader thing and had relations with every woman on the property. That's the real reason he built the cult.