MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by braiamp | 2025-04-29 14:39:21+00:00
That's just a historical artifact of when the concept was created [0]. The thing can be measured by income, production (including intermediary products) and expenditure. The government component comes in the expenditure method. Economists don't differentiate between them as they are just looking at the same data with another perspective, we just don't care.

[0]: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/12/21/p...
by MichaelNolan | 2025-04-29 14:39:22+00:00
I’d be open to making a prediction (on longbets.org) that in the 2025 to 2034 timeframe, more solar, wind, and batteries get deployed globally than any 10 year period of your choice for nuclear. And if you want to limit that to winter time capacity that’s fine by me.

The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.
by phil21 | 2025-04-29 14:39:27+00:00
This might be one of the most paranoid things I've ever read on HN.

The laborer was simply trying to actually get paid vs. deal with the overhead of the app. Somewhat shady perhaps - since it routes around the company taking their cut for finding him the work, and likely avoids taxes. I've paid these sorts of guys cash every single time I've used such a service and exactly zero of them have "shook me down" or cared where I stored the money. They make so little already I'm happy to help them out with a smile.

Cabbies simply want cash for pretty much the same reason. They get charged an astronomical "service fee" by the cab company, and likely are avoiding taxes as well. I agree that such a situation is more shady in general, but I've actually had (NYC) cops side with cabbies on this topic and force me to go get cash at the ATM or get arrested. I also use car services now over cabs whenever possible due to this reason - mostly for convenience, never out of fear of being robbed though.

The chances of you getting mugged/stolen from for using cash are just the same as the chances of you getting mugged for no apparent reason walking home. Perhaps the collective dis-use of cash has reduced these odds, but you specifically is utterly irrelevant.
by blueflow | 2025-04-29 14:39:36+00:00
If you wanna get an abuse address, resolve to the IP and query RIPE for the abuse mail. Every RIPE member needs to specify an abuse address and what they specify is the source of truth for their AS. No need to query a crowdsourced hearsay service.

I did not know of this service until now, so any correct result it has for any of my domains is a matter of coincidence.
by SirMaster | 2025-04-29 14:39:39+00:00
Maybe I am missing something but sales tax is something that the seller pays. It's a % of the retail price and so they collect it from the customer, so it's added in and shown to the customer.

Tariffs are paid by the importer and I would think that they would put that into the price of the good itself based on their desired profit margins etc. How would Amazon even know what to put for the tariff amount? It's not a % of the retail price, it's a % of the import price which the seller doesn't typically share with the end customer.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-29 14:40:02+00:00
You are correct that there is a difference between lying and making a mistake, however

> Lying requires intent to deceive

LLMs do have an intent to deceive, built in!

They have been built to never admit they don't know an answer, so they will invent answers based on faulty premises

I agree that for a human mixing up ".trim()" and ".strip()" is an honest mistake

In the example I gave you are asking for a function that does not exist. If it invents a function, because it is designed to never say "you are wrong that doesn't exist" or "I don't know the answer" that seems to qualify to me as "intent to deceive" because it is designed to invent something rather than give you a negative sounding answer
Show HN: AstroDash – A fast synthwave racing game inspired by SkyRoads
by gobienan | 2025-04-29 14:40:03+00:00
When I was 5, I played SkyRoads and never forgot how it felt. It was one of my fav games as a child. Well...Decades later and I decided to bring that feeling back :D

AstroDash is a fast, synthwave inspired racing game. I tried to take elements from SkyRoads but also F-ZERO and Super Meat Boy. Basically skill, timing, and chasing the highest score. It started as a game jam project, but I liked the game so much that I’m expanding it for a "full" release.

And the crazy part is (at least to me) that AI pretty much created the entire thing. From planning, implementing shaders, collision detection, even the music.

Would love your feedback, Especially from anyone who remembers the original SkyRoads or likes fast, challenging games!
by throwaway35364 | 2025-04-29 14:40:14+00:00
> The optimistic take is that many of those same paper-pushing roles could evolve into far more meaningful work—with the right training and opportunity (also AI).

There already isn't enough meaningful work for everyone. We see people with the "right training" failing to find a job. AI is already making things worse by eliminating meaningful jobs — art, writing, music production are no longer viable career paths.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-29 14:40:33+00:00
I think you are assuming that by "lose" I meant indefinitely, and for any and all future cases... but I explicitly defined what I meant, which was the cases where the rightsholder was made aware of an infringement, chose not to litigate, and then the statute expired, leading to a functional equivalence of losing the copyright in that one instance. I think a lawyer would appreciate the detail, and I don't think I am on trial for my own semantics here either, so I'm not sure what the actual disagreement is, besides that you don't like the way I used the word "lose".
by jmyeet | 2025-04-29 14:40:50+00:00
I'm a little surprised that Duolingo is the model someone wants to emulate because, at least for me, it just doesn't work.

Now I'm someone who has always been good at taking tests. It's a skill you can develop. At one point I got 85% in a French test knowing absolutely zero French. There are tricks such as:

- Use of punctuation can give the answer away (eg a trailing "!")

- Other questions can unintentionally give you the answer to a different question (eg it might conjugate a verb you're being asked about elsewhere);

- Questions end up being correlated. So a given question might have 2 plausible answers and that answer will also answer another question. So you can answer if one way in one and another way in the other and you're pretty likely to get one of them right;

- Multiple choice tests tend to evenly distribute answers so if you have 29 Cs in a 4-answer 100 question test already, it's less likely that a further C guess is right. Yes, people can intentionally re-weight the answers to avoid this but almost nobody does.

- For other topics like math you often get marks for each step. Depending on how that marking key works, you can often get marks writing essentially nonsense that leads to a completely wrong answer;

- When in doubt, guess something. This goes for multiple choice and written answers. Don't spend any time on it. Tests that deduct points for wrong answers are rare and you know about it beforehand.

- Apply probability. So in a 100 question 4 answer multiple choice test where you have a 50% chance of knowing the answer, you should really get 75-80% on that test just from eliminating obviously wrong answers and simply guessing the rest.

My point is that you can't really turn this off once you learn it so I can pretty much guess my way through any Duolingo questions and that means I don't learn anything.

Even when you have to assemble words into a sentence, the answer is pretty obvious and it can get even more obvious in other languages (eg nouns in German are capitalized).

I think I did Spanish Duolingo almost every day for a year and remember none of it.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-29 14:40:55+00:00
"Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0].

> Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs

No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive. and I would know, I've had to use one to help me manage an eating disorder!

There is already so much bullshit in the diet space that adding AI bullshit (again, using the technical definition of bullshit here) only stands to increase the value of an interaction with a person with knowledge.

And that's without getting into what happens when brand recommendations are baked into the training data.

0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
by 7373737373 | 2025-04-29 14:41:00+00:00
Making himself richer by overpromising the idea of him (personally, of course) building a great future to tech- and finance bros

Dude would live a better life and leave a better legacy if he would focus more on chilling, empathy, and building rockets to get humanity to the stars

He's the richest person in the world and wastes his time with political bullshit, while he is one of the very few and privileged who have the resources at their disposal to actually attempt and support grand experiments
by frickinLasers | 2025-04-29 14:41:08+00:00
Okay, but the I-5 doesn't bother with loops and tunnels. It just barrels right over the top of the mountains, including a 5-mile section of 6% grade according to the sign (https://www.crashforensics.com/tejonpass.cfm). Trucks struggle to crawl over the top at like 30 mph, with tires. It's not exactly a roller coaster hill to be overcome with inertia.
by john-h-k | 2025-04-29 14:41:18+00:00
I don't think is apple/google. This sounds like the kind of thing small companies do. I would be very surprised if that was FAANG

I am not a fan of leetcode interviews myself, but I don't think the FAANG process is that bad. I am interested in any specific examples of authors of projects being rejected from big-tech companies for a role where they would work on their own thing
by SilverBirch | 2025-04-29 14:41:49+00:00
I don't think this post really understands what Elon Musk was saying in the context he was saying it. He was responding to a graph showing the Altanta Fed predicting a recession. There was nothing more to his tweet than "I guess this a plausible reason this obviously bad thing is actually good". It comes from the same vintage as Kathy Wood's "Our massive losses are actually a good thing because we can offset our future taxable gains". Like... obviously this is just self-serving bollocks, why engage with it other than to laugh.
by wolrah | 2025-04-29 14:41:50+00:00
> I'm pretty conservative about adopting third-party libraries (due to the long-term issues each one has the potential to cause), but an app updater is probably worth it.

Especially for a Mac-only application where Sparkle (https://sparkle-project.org/) has been around for almost two decades now and has been widely used across all sorts of projects to the point that it's a de facto standard. I'd be willing to bet that almost every single Mac "power user" on the planet has at least one application using Sparkle installed and most have a few.
by lazide | 2025-04-29 14:42:07+00:00
(Efficient) High voltage AC is ‘easy’ due to how well transformers work, how durable they are, and how simple they are. AC does have issues with inductive loss when buried (or near anything conductive), however. For the same reason Transformers work and are awesome.

High voltage DC is hard as it requires solid state components which are expensive to make, and prone to blowing up (aka relatively fragile). AC to DC and vice versa also adds non-trivial losses.

High voltage DC (to a first approximation) doesn’t suffer from inductive losses however, which makes it much more efficient when near conductive stuff like the ground or seawater.

It’s also ‘simpler’ (doesn’t have things like phase or frequency) which is convenient if doing things like transferring power between two power grids with dissimilar frequencies or phase.

They each have their place.
by ineedasername | 2025-04-29 14:42:45+00:00
Per Newt Gingerich’s strategy, in the early 90s it actually became the de facto standard for the GOP as a whole to shift to this language. It was deliberate strategy, it didn’t happen by accident. It was pretty brazen and cynical too, with the title giving away the real intent:

“Language: a Key Mechanism of Control” https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/454/gopac.html
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-29 14:42:59+00:00
> Other than differences in the limit to the number of messages you can encrypt before nonce exhaustion or the number of bits of secrecy or authentication strength provided, the external interface and use case of your system perfectly matches that of AES-GCM or other popular AEAD constructions.

Ahh, but that’s not a trivial part of the design and why this is strictly better than using a single AES-GCM key with AD. And also it’s more generic across whatever type of key you choose to derive.
by danaris | 2025-04-29 14:43:01+00:00
There is no neutrality.

No, seriously: "political neutrality" as a concept is inherently and fatally flawed.

The closest you can ever attempt to come is either

a) maintain/support the current status quo—this is obviously a big problem for anyone the status quo is not serving

b) tailor whatever you're saying/doing to try to cleave to the exact current center of the political landscape—this is obviously going to be very fraught and highly subjective; no one actually does this

Anyone who says they're "apolitical" or who tells you to make something "politically neutral" is nearly guaranteed to be just a beneficiary of the status quo advocating for preserving it, often without even realizing that's what they're doing.

Ultimately, it's much more honest and positive in the long run to be honest about your own biases and, yes, be as transparent as possible.
by davidvgilmore | 2025-04-29 14:43:02+00:00
Our namesake is Vannevar Bush's "Memex": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

We like the ethos of peaceful scientific progress.

And we're most passionate about advancing technological progress, which is what the original Memex aimed to do by increasing scientists' productivity.

Our Memex is a small contribution to technological progress, but it's one I am at least proud to make
by phil21 | 2025-04-29 14:43:10+00:00
> its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”

Sure it is. That's exactly how it achieves the higher profitability. Safety margin costs money. Otherwise known as inefficiency.

Slack in the system is a good thing, not a bad thing. Operating at 95% capacity 24x7 is a horrible idea for society in general. It means you can't "burst mode" for a short period of time during a true emergency.

It's basically ignoring long tail risk to chase near-term profits. It's a whole lot of otherwise smart people optimizing for local maxima while ignoring the big picture. Certainly understandable given our economic and social systems, but still catastrophic in the end one day.
by jayd16 | 2025-04-29 14:43:24+00:00
More than the trying to find another object kind of math, I was mostly thinking about address aliasing ie cleared handles pointing to re-used space and now live but different objects. You could just say "don't screw up your handle/alloc code" but it's just something you don't have to worry about when you don't roll your own.

The live C# but dead Unity object trick is mostly only useful for dangling handles and IDs and such. It's more that memory won't be ripped out from under you for none Unity data and the usual GC rules apply.

And again the difference between using the GC and rolling your own implementation is pretty big. In your hash map example you still have to solve the issue of how long you keep entries in that map. The GC answers that question.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-29 14:43:45+00:00
I don't think it makes you weird, and taxes really aren't that much of a puzzle to put together, outside of the many deduction-related edge cases (which you can skip if you just take the standard deduction). My federal and state returns last year added up to 36 pages, not counting the attachments listing investment sales. Still, they're pretty straightforward. I now at least use online software to do them, but that's only to save time filling out forms, not for the software's "expertise." I have no doubt I could do them by hand if I wanted to give myself more writing to do.

If I can do this, most people can do a simple 2-page 1040EZ.
by IggleSniggle | 2025-04-29 14:44:03+00:00
I'm currently at a small ad tech firm and while I can't speak for other outfits, we definitely are extra careful about respecting user consent indicators. Because we are small, it's not easy to do this, because there are many possible ways for users to "reject". This includes situations that merely imply non-consent due to inaction, rather than active non-consent like a reject cookie indicator, or living in a jurisdiction that makes non-consent automatic (as it should be!). Many of the "reject cookies" tools are especially useful because even if a website doesn't respect your choice (and therefore tries to send data to us) your browser can still tell us if you are non-consenting. This means it's easier for us to notice non-consent and drop the data as soon as possible, before any logging or analysis can occur.

We do not materially benefit from this in any way, nor do we market it. I am not a spokesperson for my company nor do I want to be publicly identified with it. I'm advocating here because you said "not a chance" but there is a chance.

It's not just that we are worried about some sort of regulatory enforcement, either, although existence of such regulations does help convince the less scrupulous people from pursuing a bad path.

The free internet is built on ads. I still believe in the free internet. I still think we can make it work. I welcome regulation and regulatory enforcement even though it's hard for a small outfit like us, because it reduces the chances that our ad tech has to compete with less scrupulous people. I think we've survived as a small outfit since roughly the dotcom era because we've tried to be good stewards. People wouldn't need uBlock if there was better regulation/enforcement, and companies like mine, who are trying to do the right thing (even as we operate in the loathed ad space), would benefit.

I'm worried about AI on this front because it means in the future your ads will be served up to you out of a black box instead of out in the open where we can all inspect who is trying to get what from us (and block bad parties via eg uBlock), and, to a degree, who is trying to shove what down our throats.
by karpour | 2025-04-29 14:44:10+00:00
I recently tried looking up something about local tax law in ChatGPT. It confidently told me a completely wrong rule. There are lots of sources for this, but since some probably unknowingly spread misinformation, ChatGPT just treated it as correct. Since I always verify what ChatGPT spits out, it wasn't a big deal for me, just a reminder that it's garbage in, garbage out.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-29 14:44:13+00:00
Sloppy coding all around. If you don't want to program something right, why don't you just direct users to the website to manually update it?

On one hand it's good that the author owns up to it, and they worked with their users to provide remedies. But so many things aren't adding up. Why does your screen recorder need to check for updates every 5 minutes? Once a day is more than enough.

This screams "We don't do QA, we shorts just ship"
by monkeyelite | 2025-04-29 14:44:18+00:00
This is solved by iterators in C++. The idea of an iterators is to generalize the concept of a pointer —- something which refers to a location in your data structure.

For example the most basic operations of a pointer are to advance and dereference.

std::map is actually implemented as a tree. To iterator its members you can do

for (cost auto &pair : map)

The only requirement for your custom data structure to work is to implement begin() and end() which return iterators - “pointer like” objects.
by DoughnutHole | 2025-04-29 14:44:47+00:00
> It can’t replace a human for support

It doesn’t wholly replace the need for human support agents but if it can adequately handle a substantial number of tickets that’s enough to reduce headcount.

A huge percentage of problems raised in customer support are solved by otherwise accessible resources that the user hasn’t found. And AI agents are sophisticated enough to actually action on a lot of issues that require action.

The good news is that this means human agents can focus on the actually hard problems when they’re not consumed by as much menial bullshit. The bad news for human agents is that with half the workload we’ll probably hit an equilibrium with a lot fewer people in support.
by john-h-k | 2025-04-29 14:44:50+00:00
Excellent time to mention rust's `ControlFlow` enum which allows doing this exact sort of thing https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/enum.ControlFlow.html

Not as ergonomic as a direct tree-iterator, but I can't see of an elegant way to introduce that in an imperative language while keeping the forking/recursion aspect clear
by mapt | 2025-04-29 14:44:54+00:00
It could easily turn out to be a not very severe problem, like "Use rayon instead of polyester for your clothing" or "No more styrofoam, because styrene monomer offgassing in your lungs"; The issue is that without a lot of dedicated study (probably animal studies into the millions of individual-exposure-years) we wouldn't even know. These things are too ubiquitous in modern life to readily separate them from us with careful non-experimental study design.
by mempko | 2025-04-29 14:45:02+00:00
There are plenty of examples where government is vastly more efficient than private sector. Medicare is vastly more efficient than private insurance. USPS is more efficient than private carriers. Another example is government pay. Usually much lower than the equivalent job at a private sector company. That's because private sector companies fail ALL THE TIME, and the COST of that inefficiency (waste of a failed company) is passed on to you via higher prices for those functions.

Also efficiency shouldn't be the goal of everything we do all the time. Sometimes resilience is more important, which comes at the cost of efficiency.
by braiamp | 2025-04-29 14:45:04+00:00
Nah, it's dumb. He's saying a dumb thing because he doesn't understand the use and importance of it (and also its limitations). We (economist) count everything because excluding an economic agent that has a massive effect on the economy, is such a intellectually foreign concept that we don't even consider it. There's no rational honest argument that would make sense.

BTW, government expenditure only appears in the GDP calculations by expenditure. It doesn't appear in the income nor in the production. The later one the one you are actually thinking of.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-29 14:45:06+00:00
I used to work as a bench tech at a defense contractor (microwave equipment).

Every tech had a little bottle on their bench, with a special lid, that would have a small amount of liquid always in it (you'd pump it, to bring up more liquid). These bottles are still used, today.

This was for removing solder flux. Worked great.

At the end of each row of tech benches, was a red bucket, full of the same stuff. We'd use that to wash entire boards.

If you got the liquid on your skin, it made the skin turn white, and flake off.

Smelled like acetone had a one-night-stand with gasoline.

The liquid was trichlor[0] (not the pool kind).

Our management swore that it was perfectly safe, and that we could even drink it.

This was in the early 1980s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1-Trichloroethane