MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-04-12 04:17:24+00:00
I think China gets a lot of credit for being a "manufacturing superpower" but that kind of oversells what it is.

Look especially at dollar value of exports: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264623/leading-export-co...

The fact that China has 3x the population of the US but only 1.5x the export dollar value of the US says quite a bit. Germany's exporting output is even more impressive considering their population of under 100 million.

NATFA's manufacturing export dollar value is almost equivalent to China.

Complex and heavy industry manufacturing is something where they are not caught up at all. E.g., lithography machines, commercial jet aircraft and engines.

The US/Canada/Mexico are no slouches when it comes to the automotive parts ecosystem. Germany exports more auto parts than China, and the US is barely below China in that regard. I would also point out that certain US/NAFTA and European automobile exports are still considered to be top quality over Chinese models. For example, China is not capable of producing a Ferrari or a vehicle with the complexity and quality of a Mercedes S-Class. That's not to discount the amazing strides that China has made in that area but it is to say that the West+Japan is no slouch in that area.

But to me this is all besides the point anyway. AI is so tied up in open source anyway, this idea that China will leapfrog in AI R&D is somewhat irrelevant in my mind. I don't think any one country will have better capabilities than anyone else. There is no moat.

And ultimately I still predict that Chinese AI will be mostly a domestic product because of heavy government involvement in private data centers and the great firewall.
by lxgr | 2025-04-12 04:17:47+00:00
> It is possible if you are in control of the client, but no browser would stream an mp4 file request by request.

I believe most browsers do it like that, these days: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Au...

> This shouldn't be a problem because there is flow control.

It's leveraging flow control, but as I mentioned this might be less efficient (in terms of server memory usage and concurrent open connections, depending on client buffer size and other variables) than downloading larger chunks and closing the HTTP connection in between them.

Many wireless protocols also prefer large, infrequent bursts of transmissions over a constant trickle.
by philistine | 2025-04-12 04:18:28+00:00
> Braindead regulation.

Only because OP didn't give the full story. Microsoft wanted to close direct access to the kernel. AV companies complained to regulators in the EU. The EU asked Microsoft if they were willing to maintain access to replacement functionality and to stick to using that functionality for its own separately sold AV products. Microsoft said no, and instead of fighting, just let Windows wither on the vine with full kernel access for all the bozos. Crowdstrike was inevitable.
by wavemode | 2025-04-12 04:19:57+00:00
But Earthly is still in business, which sort of proves my point. Something which would never make money on its own (Earthly) can make money with just some cloud-hosted value add.

They've certainly pivoted their product in various ways, as any business does - my point was not to suggest that cloud devtools get free money and don't have to worry about the natural challenges of B2B product development. My point was just that, completely nonviable businesses can at least become viable by selling the cloud.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-12 04:22:01+00:00
That is true up to a point, but getting it to do actual work gets easier with experience. Most power users just jump to MacOS, or adapt to a Linux flavor.

Windows can't help screwing with users, and has been an IT security liability for years. When Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility for much of their installed base in Win11... they also removed 99.9% of the reason IT puts up with their BS. =3
by neilv | 2025-04-12 04:23:00+00:00
Yeah, I was recently deciding which desktop option to use for a Debian Live variant that needs to be straightforward for anyone who boots it. I tried each option (in VMs), and decided to go with Cinnamon.

So, if someone wants a Linux to start with, installing Debian Stable, and selecting the Cinnamon desktop in the installer, is one great first option.

(The Debian default desktop is based on Gnome3, which does a few weird and annoying things. Fortunately, Gnome3 inspired alternatives, like Cinnamon.)
by nashashmi | 2025-04-12 04:23:24+00:00
The reason is as you say: If someone gets too popular or a leadership looks too promising, Israel shoots them or compromises them. Fatah is seen as corrupt and liberal group too conflicted to create any meaningful movements for Palestinians. Hamas is seen as more sincere movement and has stronger support. They are primarily a social movement with a military wing. And so they are a stronger threat to Israel than Fatah could be. Fatah for its part is compromisable and pliable where as Hamas is a conservative strict disciplined movement with no hope for Israel to corrupt them.
by Tabular-Iceberg | 2025-04-12 04:23:37+00:00
Every web browser already has a built in system for matching requests and responses and checking if requests have been pending too long. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

The real problem with the software engineering discipline is that we are too easily distracted from solving the actual business problem by pointless architecture astronautics. At best because of boredom associated with most business problems being uninteresting, at worst to maliciously increase billable hours.
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-12 04:24:59+00:00
If the big architectural differences between Electron and Tauri came out in Electron's favor for your project (i.e., if differences between rendering engines were a real problem in practice), then I'd say it would almost certainly be a mistake to choose Tauri just to avoid having to do FFI. Of course, if rendering engine differences aren't a problem in practice, then the choice is much lower-stakes and what you're currently doing will probably be fine.
by sfx77 | 2025-04-12 04:26:47+00:00
You are conflating the current conflict with the history of peace accords. Currently Israel wants to get rid of Hamas and rightfully so, after the October 7 attacks. I was referring to the multitude of peace attempts preceding this conflict where Israel conceded above 90% of what the Palestinian leadership wanted more than once, yet the Palestinian leadership refused. "Colonialist expansionist"? How many people speak Hebrew in the middle east? What expansion? If you want to look at an actual colonialist expansionist force you will look to Iran, who funds Hamas, Hizbollah, and the Houthis, they are currently colonizing Lebanon, Syria, and are using the Palestinians as pawns. Israel is a tiny country the size of New Jersey with less than 10 million people. Iran is 90 million people.
by ticoombs | 2025-04-12 04:27:21+00:00
I always try and push back on those beliefs, about reasonings why they believe it will be faster or more efficient than some other solution.

I've found , if you could type cast those people, they would be a tech architect who only uses "web scale" items. (Relevant link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GpOfwbFRcs )
by backslash_16 | 2025-04-12 04:27:53+00:00
In case anyone wants to point me in the right direction or give me some pointers, I’m a lifelong windows developer who switched to Linux (Ubuntu 24.04 lts) on my personal desktop and a laptop (I’m fully in on the switch) and it’s not great.

I think we need to accurately represent the shortcomings so people who switch aren’t surprised.

So far those are:

1. Laptop - Battery life is bad compared to windows. It’s about half. 2. Laptop - sleep doesn’t work. 3. All - multi-monitor setup with different pixel scaling doesn’t work for many applications.. unless you dig into all the Wayland options and issues and figure out how to launch all these apps under Wayland. 4. All - In general Wayland vs X issues. I can’t screen share with zoom. 5. All - Bluetooth driver issues - my Bluetooth headset won’t connect as an audio input and output device at the same time.

Now to be fair, I think all these are okay trade offs but they are a conscious choice. If you have anything outside a standard one monitor, wired peripherals setup you will probably hit issues you need to debug.

I started paying for Ubuntu pro to put my money into it, so I’m hopeful for these kinds of things in the long term.
by jen729w | 2025-04-12 04:29:09+00:00
I just cancelled my house insurance plan as we're moving out. Actually my partner did it, and she told me that there was a ~AU$50 cancellation fee.

My natural instinct was to be ropable. But then I realised that I had actually been paying an annual insurance policy, monthly. I wasn't paying a monthly insurance policy.

Presumably when we signed up, there was a monthly option. Presumably it cost more. And so I can hardly be annoyed that they're essentially making up that difference now that I've chosen to terminate that contract early.
by archargelod | 2025-04-12 04:29:21+00:00
With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them.

Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.

In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.

One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.
by sfx77 | 2025-04-12 04:30:14+00:00
Again, you are not differentiating between targeting and collateral damage. Hamas broke a ceasefire and targeted civilians. Israel went in to destroy Hamas with the unfortunate result of civilians dying as collateral damage. When you say 50k, there are several problems. For starters you are quoting the Gaza Health Ministry which is Hamas and is provably unreliable. On top of that about 40% of those are Hamas fighters, which you are failing to differentiate between. If you take the time to look at urban warfare statistics, you can see that the IDF has put more effort into preserving civilians than any other army. If you don't believe me just reference John Spencer who is the head (and founder I believe) or urban warfare studies at West Point. You're also ignoring the biggest point, which is that Hamas attacked Israel, which pulls Israel into a war they did not want. During the ceasefire, why was there not a push for peace by Hamas? Why did they think murdering innocents, raping teenagers at a music festival, and kidnapping families and babies is the right course of action? It's amazing to me you are defending this in even the most remote sense? Why did Gaza not build itself into a productive economy and instead elect Hamas, a totalitarian religious regime into power? It's a ridiculous argument to even begin to try and make excuses for this.
by sillywalk | 2025-04-12 04:32:12+00:00
It read that as: "In September, RFK Jr. will officially announce that vaccines cause autism."

It's all "Not The Onion" these days, with these bits from the article the most hilarious/horrifying:

"leading autism organizations have not been consulted about the planned research."

and

"The Department of Health and Human Services has hired David Geier, a man who was once fined by the state of Maryland for practising medicine on a child without a doctor's license and has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the federal research effort."

A Kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.
by fnord123 | 2025-04-12 04:32:46+00:00
Htmx and datastar use backend rendering. So you write the html in the backend and serve that. In the case of an array, you render them as Todo ítems.

You might be using a template system for that. E.g. Jinja2, moustache, askama, templ, etc depending on your backend language and libraries.
by uptownfunk | 2025-04-12 04:33:22+00:00
Everything I need can get done in python, so I don’t even need to deal with rust and cpp. Adding language interop between r and cpp is now just another thing on my plate, so just stick to Python and pay the cost of less elegant code for data manipulation which I am okay with because now I just need to read it and not write it.

There’s a ton more python code out there so the LLM reliability in python code just makes my life easier. R was great and still is, but my world is now more than just data eng, model fitting, and viz. I have to deal with operationalizing and working with people who aren’t just data science and most org don’t have the luxury of having an easy production R system so I can get my python code over the line and trust a good engineer will be okay smeshing that into the production stack which is likely heavy Python. (Instead of saying oh we don’t work with R we do Python Java so it will take 3-5x longer).

Another sad truth is the cool ml kids all want to do pytorch deep ML training / post training / rlhf / ppo / gdpr gtfo so you are not real hardcore ml if you only do R. I know it’s stupid but the world is kind of like that.

You want to hire people who want to build their careers on the cool stack. I know it’s not all the cool talk the hackers here play with but for real world application I have a lot of other considerations.
by derefr | 2025-04-12 04:33:51+00:00
You're not buying "a year's worth." Adobe can't roll a truck up with all your future project rendering hours on it and dump them on your lawn, such that they would have a valid legal argument of "you can't cancel, we already gave you the whole thing." What Adobe are giving you, each month — each second, even — is the DRM licensing functionality built into Photoshop continuing to spit out a "valid" signal. Because that activation is a continuous online process, you receive that service on a second-by-second basis (or maybe at most on an online-activation-check-granularity basis.)

That being said, maybe we're talking past one-another here.

Where I come from (Canada), even if you prepay for a service that charges annually (no "annual charged monthly" language needed), as long as that service can be common-sense-construed as delivering value on a finer granularity (by the month, by the second, etc), then if you only use that service for some fraction of the plan length, and then cancel it — you are then legally obligated to a pro-rated refund of the remaining plan length. So if you cancel an annual-billed service after a month? You get 11/12ths of your payment back. If you subscribe to a monthly-billed service on January 1 and cancel on January 2? You get 30/31ths of your payment back. Etc.

Under such a legal doctrine, there is no difference in the total amount owed between "billed monthly" when subscribed for one month, vs "billed annually" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled, vs "annual, billed monthly" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled.

If you're curious about the set of countries where this doctrine applies, here's a page from the Microsoft Store support outlining the set of countries where they will give out pro-rated refunds for subscriptions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/countrie...

(And if it isn't sickening to you that in general, corporations will write logic into their billing systems to support this, and then only activate that logic for countries where they're legally obligated to do so, while — now with intentionality — continuing to squeeze everyone else for services they've knowingly already cut off... then I don't know what to tell you.)

---

And yes, if you're wondering, there are a few exceptions to this pro-rated refund doctrine.

One is real-estate leasing — because chancery courts are weird and make their own rules; but also because a lot of the "work" of being a landlord is up-front/annual. (Though, admittedly, we also have laws here that force real-estate annual leasing contracts to revert to month-to-month after a low set number of years — usually 1 or 2 — with the month-to-month lease rate carried over from the "annual, paid monthly" rate.)

The other is for commercial leasing of assets like vehicles, construction equipment, servers, etc. This is because corporations have much more predictable optionality, sure — but it's also because corporations don't "deserve" protections in the same way individuals do. (Same reason investment banks don't get the protections of savings banks.)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-12 04:35:19+00:00
> Why are you setting the bar at "exceptional"

Because that is how they are being sold to us and hyped

> If it means that you can write your git commit messages more quickly and with fewer errors then that's all the payoff most orgs need to make them worthwhile.

This is so trivial that it wouldn't even be worth looking into, it's basically zero value
by throwaway48476 | 2025-04-12 04:35:56+00:00
Windows is so horrifically slow now. Somehow they added input lag to notepad and Explorer. Microsoft got rid of all the competent people years ago so now every new feature or product is electron based and bolted on. No one there is capable of refactoring core apps like office.

It would have been better if they'd done nothing. I've switched to mac and linux.
by C-x_C-f | 2025-04-12 04:36:58+00:00
A similar result was found by J. Gagné [0] five years ago, though I don't think he publishes his results outside of his blog (which is well worth a read by the way).

[0] https://coffeeadastra.com/2020/05/23/the-physics-of-kettle-s...
by t0lo | 2025-04-12 04:37:10+00:00
Israel authorised 20 civilians to be killed for every 1 hamas fighter at the beginning of the war https://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-military-idf-civili.... That's laughably inhumane. Not even russia comes close to this brazen disregard for human life. This is about recognising that all innocent human life is equal, and whichever civilian population is receiving the most suffering deserves the most aid and support consequently. 1 Palestinian life has the same value as 1 Israeli life.
by john01dav | 2025-04-12 04:38:42+00:00
GMOs in and of themselves are fine. It's just a technology. Banning something just because it's a GMO is stupid policy, and definitely over regulation. GMOs are a technology. One can modify a plant or other organism for many purposes. Furthermore, concerns over intellectual property rights over GMOs are a question for how to regulate this technology, not a reason to ban it.
by theamk | 2025-04-12 04:40:10+00:00
What a confusing article about a trivial thing. I am surprised it has not been deleted yet.

Summary (because I've wasted my time on it, so might as well spare others pain):

1. Let's say you want to get unique IDs from database _before_ inserting data. This means you now have to do 2 transactions/database queries: first query to allocate yourself a unique ID value, and second query to insert an entry with this ID.

2. This is slow, so you decide to optimize: you allocate a unique ID value only every X rows (where "X" is a large number of 1000). So you allocate an ID, database gives you 123, and you insert records 123000, 123001, 123002, 123003... Once you get to 123999, you've need to ask database for another ID.

That's it, that is the whole algorithm.

Note I don't see it used widely - most of the time database can allocate the id number automatically during insert (sequence type or integer primary index). If this does not work, then there are plenty of UUID algorithms that can allocate record IDs without any database hits at all.
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-12 04:40:29+00:00
I think if you ever find yourself saying Erlang is about one thing, you've lost the plot. Erlang has a bunch of features that each would be powerful in their own right, but they aren't special--there are other ways to solve the same problems, and some of those ways even have merit. But Erlang chose the set of features they did with a very high level understanding of how those varous features would interact. I honestly think it's one of the greater achievements humanity has accomplished. It lacks the obvious elegance that, say, Lisp, has, but I think the sum of parts in Erlang was probably a lot harder to make.
by sfx77 | 2025-04-12 04:41:05+00:00
Even if that's true the civilian to combatant death ratio is around 1:1, while in most urban combat scenarios it's 9:1. You are still overlooking what Hamas did on Oct 7. Don't forget that Hamas started this conflict. You can keep attacking Israel to try and keep me on the defense, that doesn't make you right or even convincing.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-12 04:42:37+00:00
At the risk of an unpopular view, and the inevitable downvotes, I think it's worth stating the following;

If your business model is raising money from VCs then doing things VCs want is important to getting paid.

All businesses tailor their output to suit their customer. Your customer is VCs. So you need to tailor your output accordingly.

In this sense your business partner is not wrong. There's no point on working on things that excite you, if it doesn't excite them. That's a hobby.

Sure, pivoting too often is also wrong. So you should try to improve that.

At this point it's probably worth sitting down with your partner with the fundamental understanding she is right; You need to find something to attract the next investor. However you need to stick with it, success or fail. You've thrown a lot against the wall, now it's time to choose.

Of course you'll likely fail. Most businesses do. VC based businesses at an even higher rate because your customer base is so small. But even failure is OK because VCs are looking for founders, not successes.

Make no mistake; founding a startup is hard work. Not fun stuff. Not interesting stuff. Mostly it's just work.

Being a founder isn't about coding. It's about business. You need to bring more to the table than just coding. Just like your co-founder takes an interest in the technical side, so you need to take more than a passing interest in the business side.

In any business, sales is the most important thing. Without them you will fail. Tech supports sales, not the other way around.

I'm sorry that this sounds harsh. I don't mean it that way. I wish you success. That success starts with you realizing the truth at the heart of your partners position. Start there. Fix your relationship.

Good luck!
by mmooss | 2025-04-12 04:42:50+00:00
It is revolutionary to say specialization doesn't apply to countries, no matter how many times someone on HN says it. Removing competitors in other countries doesn't add competition to the market.

> Ore isn't really specialization at all, it's resource availability.

You just made that up. What is it based on? Also, resource availability is definitely part of specialization - countries specialize in what they can do more efficiently than other places, which depends partly on resource availability. It also depends on infrastructure, capital, laws, regulations, skills, labor, and many other variables.

People haven't copied Apple and SV because it's very hard to do it. Nobody does it with any successful company. You just can't copy those things.

> Not be dependent on a single supplier

Again, by reducing suppliers - and essentially worldwide in this case - you reduce competition. Now the public subsidizes a local supplier who is not good enough to compete, and therefore the public also gets a substandard product with little hope of competition arising.