MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by motorest | 2025-04-03 14:53:25+00:00
> I don't see anyone mentioning that the United States needs to manage its massive national debt, currently in the trillions, by issuing Treasury securities.

It's very hard to even assume that's a concern of the current US administration, based on not only the fundamentalist goal of radically cutting taxes and regulations, coupled with the fact that it's purposely pushing a recessive economic policy that defies any logic or reason.

The very least that you'd expect is a progressive tax policy that didn't excluded corporations and mega-rich. You're not seeing any of that.
by efitz | 2025-04-03 14:53:33+00:00
I have often observed something about how we build software; I just realized that my observations are of a more fundamental human problem.

First, people are not good at defining problems. They may describe the problem that they want to solve in terms of an outcome, but often times the outcome that they want also includes some aspect that benefits them personally that is separate from the problem that they are describing.

Second, people are not good at separating problem from implementation. in fact, people are horrible at this. I think people have a very difficult time envisioning that the problem and the existing solution implementation (which itself might be making the problem worse) are separate things. so most people rarely consider and often actively oppose, radically different solutions.

In the political sphere, ideology Influences how one frames the problem that one wants to solve, and limits the universe of acceptable solutions. This exemplifies the two points that I raised above.

For example, when talking about healthcare policy, the two main “sides” in the US, both have ideologies that define outcomes in terms of consumer access to medical services, and which constrain allowable implementations to something that resembles insurance, with key differences being about who pays and what is covered and how much coverage one gets.

Just for the purposes of elaborating on my premise, I would point out that not all healthcare delivery systems in the world are designed around the insurance model, And that such a model includes vested interests, regulatory capture, and often incentivizes many participants to optimize in ways that don’t forward the implicit goal of making more people more healthy.

Please don’t reply with your opinions on my imperfect example; I don’t want to have a healthcare policy discussion. I just wanted to provide an example my main points about how humans approach political problem-solving.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-03 14:53:37+00:00
Trump has explicitly stated he wants to eliminate income taxes for people earning under $150k.

Ironically (but not really if you can clearly understand his platform, any why so many bernie bros became trumpets), Trump is doing a lot of ostensibly good things for the uneducated working class at the expense of American "elite" class. The autoworkers union president literally spoke yesterday at Trumps event cheering the tariffs. A union, cheering Trump.

The stock market is off a cliff, but how many factory workers actually have an appreciable amount of stocks? Poor middle America doesn't give a fuck about that. They give a fuck about having a place to go to work and make a good living.

Trump is doing what he was elected to do. Whether or not it is possible without making things much worse seems like a long shot, but his core base has a "I don't care if we destroy the system, the system sucks!" attitude, awfully similar to Bernie bros.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-03 14:53:48+00:00
From further down the page:

> A COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19 disease (e.g. trauma). There should be no period of complete recovery between illness and death

It does not include cases like someone dying in a car crash who happened to be COVID-positive.
by mapt | 2025-04-03 14:54:15+00:00
It's hard to imagine that there's a way they thought this through in several redundant dimensions.

I understand rationally that there was an economy before the US plunged the world into neoliberalist global free trade in order to build its trade empire, and there will probably be an economy after... but likely not a US trade empire.

But another thing is investment uncertainty. The mechanism by which protectionist tariffs are supposed to work functions over a timespan of a decade or two - foreign imported goods are made more expensive, and so when investors believe they're confident in future tariff conditions, they spend money on domestic factories to produce goods, which have a large setup cost and gradually pay back the difference relative to their good-importer competitors that are paying high tariffs.

If investors can't form a confident prediction on future tariff conditions, investors can't invest; The sheer uncertainty of having a lunatic making up random numbers for every country over lunch and then rolling them out at close of market is instead going to scare them off. Trump has gone back and forth over tariffs with Canada and Mexico over the past couple months, and this doesn't just demonstrate that tariffs can be set extraordinarily high for arbitrary reasons, but that they can be set back to zero for arbitrary reasons. Both of these transitions cause economic ruin for one investor or other; If it's going to happen every few months then nobody is going to build factories or launch import supplychains, at least not for competitive prices. The risk of going bankrupt tomorrow (or in four years when the next administration takes over and abruptly cancels every tariff) on what is basically a coinflip then gets priced into consumer goods for both producers and importers.

The most frustrating of Trump's projects are not just when he shreds your rights or shreds precedent or tries to topple the government, but when he looks favorably at a policy you think is a good idea (like having a manufacturing sector) and chooses to pursue it by running around with a flamethrower setting everything ablaze because on some lever somebody's taught him about the Broken Windows Fallacy wrong, as a joke, and he's upgraded it. During his administration, we circle the wagons and declare that the policy is a terrible idea. Post-Trump, the absolute ruin that the execution of that policy predictably brought will discredit it for the rest of your adult life.
by interroboink | 2025-04-03 14:54:28+00:00
I did! [1] There was some initial activity, and we got it narrowed down to a range of commits, but did not get any real smoking gun. To be fair, I also put in less effort once I found I could just copy the 11.3 loader and get things working. And also some stuff came up in my own life that prevented me from devoting more time to it, alas.

It eventually got auto-closed for not being tagged to any non-EOL versions. I did recently confirm it was still a problem on newer releases, but that hardware died not long after, so I didn't pursue it.

My best guess is that it was some BIOS-level oddity. It's also possible that it was due in some way to the hardware (slowly) dying; I can't be sure. But it was a very clear "worked on release X, stopped working on release Y (and beyond)" sort of behavior.

[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=257722
by belter | 2025-04-03 14:54:35+00:00
> I am astonished at how effectively the administration has blown up every pillar upholding the US economy, short, medium, and long term.

They are only 73 days In....

"France’s Macron Urges EU Companies to Pause US Investments" - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-03/france-s-...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-03 14:54:38+00:00
Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences.

But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
by pornel | 2025-04-03 14:55:03+00:00
Use of a dense matrix is an artificial constraint you've imposed yourself, but that only disproves feasibility of your proposed solution, not the entire problem in general.

A similar problem, n-body simulation*, has n² gravitational interactions. You will similarly hit a wall if you try to do it with a dense n² matrix. However, there's a hierarchical solution that takes advantage of the sparsity and exponential decay, and can solve it in (n log n) with an imperceptibly low loss of precision.

Social interactions are sparse, and group interactions can be optimized with clustering. Fine-grained simulation of the entire society is such a massive chaotic problem with so many variables, that some loss of precision from clustering is completely insignificant compared to the inevitable simplifications you'll have to make in the design of the model itself.

* I mean the naive one with a fixed timestemp, not trying to solve chaos.
by mtmail | 2025-04-03 14:55:05+00:00
"other than users are bored of the topic and it's too repetitive". That's a reasonable explanation though. I already see Trump/Elon/US-Politics news on every other social media and don't want HN to turn political. HN users flag stories about earthquakes, protests (e.g. Hong Kong), war, terrorist attacks because other media is reporting them plenty already. I see HN as addition to other media not a full replacement were most events of the world need to be posted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42937206 tried to explain it a bit when DOGE news was all over.
by kogus | 2025-04-03 14:55:13+00:00
I agree with you. To just offer a counterpoint, I sometimes see quotes like this one:

But plenty of economists looked at the economic hole left by the 2008 financial crisis, and concluded the stimulus policies on the table weren't nearly big enough to fill it. The size of the hole is all that matters. Whatever level of deficit spending is required to fill it is the right level of deficit spending.[1]

or this one:

We need the government to be out there borrowing money because of the long-term investments it's making in our economy[2]

The line of reasoning seems to be

1) The government is special because it can go to extreme measures to repay loans if necessary (i.e., print more money or raise taxes)

2) The reliability of the government means that it can borrow at a low rate (say, 3%) and make investments that are worth far more than that (say, 10%).

Put those together, and the government's borrowing amounts to a net benefit to society.

This argument reminds me of the 'then a miracle occurs' comic [3]. It doesn't hold water because

1) The extreme measures are very harmful - they cause high inflation and hardship amongst taxpayers.

2) Even if we accept that government investment makes a good return (a highly questionable assertion), that return does not go to the government. If the government borrows money to build a new road, then there is no doubt some economic benefit, but the government does not receive that benefit, and they are on the hook for the repayment anyway. So government spending does represent a pure cost - not an "investment". And in any case, interest payments represent investment that can no longer happen.

I would also point out that back when we ran briefly ran a surplus in the late 1990s, economists were not exclaiming about how terrible this was, or how paying off the debt represented a missed opportunity or a catastophe in the making. Everyone agreed at that time that surpluses were good, and that paying down the debt was good. The current "this is fine" thinking smacks of economists who have a predisposition to accept and justify the status quo, whether it is objectively good or not.

So all of that is to say that I'm with you - government debt is bad. We are in danger of some combination of insolvency, default, or very high inflation. And once we enter that spiral it will be impossible to get out of it without permanent damage to the economy and the global standing of the US (such as it is).

[1] https://theweek.com/articles/618419/why-americas-gigantic-na...

[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/us-debt-econo...

[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sidney+Harris+comic+miracle+occurs...
by jampekka | 2025-04-03 14:55:28+00:00
> So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication.

That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem. And that could be well called subservience instead of work ethic.
Show HN: Strain Seer – From demo-day hack to engineering blueprint
by keminghe | 2025-04-03 14:55:29+00:00
Hi HN! I'm Keming.

Hackathons have a throwaway-project culture. When my strain analysis (research) tool won 3rd place at Make OHI/O, I decided to break that pattern.

During the actual 24-hour competition, I pushed beyond the usual expectation. I built a working app with full test coverage and deployed it live. But after everyone packed up and went home? That's when the real work began.

I challenged myself to transform this quick hack into production-grade software. I built CI/CD pipelines that automatically test and deploy. I published Docker images that run on both AMD64 (Intel) and ARM64 (Apple M1/M2) architectures. I wrote the kind of documentation I always wish existed when I explore new projects.

What emerged isn't just a tool for analyzing material deformation - it's my personal blueprint for sustainable software development. Every automation pipeline, every README, every test represents a best practice I've learned and implemented over the years.

The repo stands as proof that hackathon projects don't need to die after demo day. I'd love your thoughts on what I've built and what I could improve next.
by ehaveman | 2025-04-03 14:56:17+00:00
when i track nutrition i always get stuck on things like "are the values for a chicken thigh with the bone in or out? do i weigh the meat pre-cooked or after i cook it? do i weigh the bones after i'm done eating and subtract that from the initial weight?" im probably overthinking it.

love the look and i'll keep playing with it but right off the bat i ran into a couple issues:

when i start typing on the search box on the home page it eats the first character (so as i type chicken, what shows up in the next screen's search field is just 'hicken'). and when i search for chicken thigh i don't get any results - seems to just stop filtering? when i press enter in the search field when "chicken thigh" is entered i get a "something went wrong" error.
by bsenftner | 2025-04-03 14:56:22+00:00
People receiving UBI will have any additional income they generate deducted from UBI. This is human nature.

I do not personally feel that people receiving financial aid is parasitism, but I do understand that is what it will be called by it's opponents, and they have the power to frame public opinion far more than the proponents of UBI.

I do not see the points advocating UBI realistically addressing how every day dirty human politics will distort the reasoning and create emotional negatives that will drive public opinion about those on UBI. I believe UBI would be great in a more mature civilization that we do not have. Also realize that UBI removes economic power from those on UBI; if the economic powers can, UBI will not be issued in normal currency, it will be credits towards only certain approved things. If the economic powers can, those on UBI will lose their vote, or be regulated back to 3/5th of a vote. Do not underestimate what happens when one group gives up power to another. It is never pretty.
by qudat | 2025-04-03 14:56:28+00:00
> Would you be willing to share how it’s doing on the business side? Hints on how you’ve grown users or how many folks are willing to subscribe?

Yes, absolutely. Here's our year-end-review where we talk numbers: https://blog.pico.sh/status-011

Ultimately, what keeps us going is we want these services to exist for our own side-project development and it's an extra boost of motivation when others use our services.

All of our marketing is through HN/lobsters/reddit since that's our target demo.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-03 14:56:50+00:00
Dark souls exists because Demons Soul existed. But if you ask Sony or even FromSoft, they'd never say Demons Soul was a success. It just didn't bomb so dosasteroisly as to prematurely cancel an entire sub-genre.

You can have disappointments and even failures while Also admitting they lead to successes by not giving up. That was all I was saying.
by itishappy | 2025-04-03 14:56:57+00:00
> I don't understand the problem with this... Not wanting to kill unborn life but still wanting to be able to protect yourself and your family when someone breaks into your house.

The point (as I understood it) isn't that they're incompatible, the point is that they're disparate beliefs and one doesn't necessary imply the other, but our political system treats them as if they do. There simply is no party for people who support abortion and gun control or for people who oppose abortion but like guns, but there are people with those beliefs.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-03 14:57:05+00:00
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge.

“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
by bastadanii | 2025-04-03 14:57:17+00:00
As a designer myself (and writer of this post) I'm not really worried about AI taking my job. If you notice, all designs look extremely similar between each other and I believe uniqueness will be something very valuable in the future. I do believe AI makes processes much faster (I dont code, so I could skip asking a developer to create these webs and just have the AI create them) but customization, branding and brand's tone & voice are not really at risk as for now. We'll have to see how this evolves in the future.

I definitely agree we all need to learn these tools and use them in our favor, but I'm not sure they'll directly take our jobs as for now.

I remember having the same kind of fear of loosing my job around 10yrs ago when templates and came up, but we just learnt how to include them in our workflows and continued working from there.
by sfink | 2025-04-03 14:57:43+00:00
> For example, most doctors believe in vaccines, but that's not group think, it's based in evidence that they have studied. From the outside, it might seem like group think.

I'm willing to bet that in most cases, that is groupthink. It's hard to tell, because the conclusion is identical to one based on evidence, so you can't infer from the opinion whether it's groupthink or not.

Sometimes you can tell by how someone holds a belief. Defensiveness, unwillingness to consider ways in which their chosen belief is not 100% wholly good, or shouting someone down are evidence of groupthink. For example: if someone brings up that in the past some inactive virus vaccines contained live viruses and a doctor claims that it never happened and could never happen, that's either groupthink or just a doctor sick of arguing with uninformed patients who has given up bothering with explaining the intellectual basis of his beliefs.

My personal suspicion is that the 1% don't exist, that everyone's opinions and beliefs are a mishmash of tribalism and intellectual conclusions, it's just that the balance is very different in different people. I try very hard to make my stances intellectually based and evidence-driven, yet I continually discover that more and more of my deeply held policy positions aren't as clear cut and the real world is more nuanced than I thought.

It's not like nuance is a binary thing (by definition!)
by johnisgood | 2025-04-03 14:57:58+00:00
That is what I thought.

BTW when you hover over the ingredients, you just get back the name. Are you guys going to do something with it in the future? Right now there is a visual feedback (the cursor changes), but it is not useful yet. I am not entirely sure what I would have expected, perhaps a description of what it is, and upon clicking on it, it could have information gathered from various sources, like examine.com and what have you, but that would be a huge change on its own, the short description upon mouse hover-over should work for now and may not be a huge change.
by rimunroe | 2025-04-03 14:57:58+00:00
> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.

It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.
by scottiebarnes | 2025-04-03 14:58:20+00:00
If the consumer price index, which is a metric the Fed uses, goes up, then inflation has gone up. Every dollar buys you less (less purchasing power), and the nominal price has increased. To me this indicates inflation. Of course, you need to calculate how this balances out in terms of jobs/wages and the flow of investment, but that's really hard to figure out at this point in time.

I'd expect the CPI to go up in the event of global tariffs at a baseline of 10% assuming all things go ahead as described.
by devmor | 2025-04-03 14:58:24+00:00
Yeah, that's fair - it's very easy to tell that LLMs are not the end state, but it's near impossible to know what comes next.

Personally I think LLMs will be relegated to transforming output and input from whatever new logic system is brought forth, rather than pretending they're doing logic by aggregating static corpora like we are now.
by freedomben | 2025-04-03 14:58:28+00:00
Yeah, I remember that being discussed pretty heavily in the early days of systemd (especially the socket activation model & parallelization) but (IIRC) there were some concerns about how it would integrate with the rest of the linux world which did things a lot differently than Mac OS, especially in the server space where Linux has to be near-universal with nearly any conceivable application running on top of it. That definitely smells to me like a subjective determination and there were people at the time who disagreed with that analysis, so I'm not presenting it as fact, just my recollection of the winning argument(s) at the time.

Edit: Yes, I looked at the original "Rethinking PID 1" post and that seems to be the case[1]

[1]: https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html