MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by evgandr | 2025-04-09 01:56:11+00:00
I'm living in Russia. Can't say that we lived wealthy any time, maybe near 10 years at the beginning of XXI century. So the culture of repairs and repair shops is widely adopted here.

It is so widespread that even a special sort of frauds have been invented. First, a fake "repair shop" where you can lose money on paid "diagnosis" of broken parts or on extremely high cost of "repair". Which is just an installation of less broken parts or non-original and cheap parts ordered in China.

Second is a fake repairman, who comes to fix someone's PC and charges unreasonably high price for simple things, like cleaning the case from the dust or changing the thermal paste. Or even installs viruses to convince the user of the "real problems" and takes the computer to the "repair shop" where the obviously working parts will be stolen (swapped to smth cheap chinese parts) and the user ofc gets the unreasonably large paycheck for these operations.

Usually the technically illiterate people are the main target of such scammers.

---

I'm still using the PC from 2013 year and the heavily modified Thinkpad X220. Yes, maybe some operations (mostly the modern Web-related operations) take more time than on the modern computer (mostly because of JavaScript). But editing text, programming, watching videos and listening to audio still works pretty well.

Maybe, some day some time, the battery will be a problem. But it is detachable, so the main problem is the BMS (Battery Management System), which prevents me from just swapping the old battery cells for the new ones.

But for now it has 2K screen (installed it because photo editing with 1366x768 isn't easy), new WiFi card with new WiFi revisions support and so on. Can say what this laptop have enormous repairability compared to the new laptops. One flaw — the CPU is soldered to the board, so I can't change it to something newer, like I can do with much older laptops.
by robocat | 2025-04-09 01:56:18+00:00
Brazil government should open Pix to tourists in South America.

I would loved to have used it in Argentina & Brazil.

I tried to find a way to use Pix as a tourist (I'm from New Zealand). It would have been really super handy in Argentina tourist destinations (lots of Brazilian tourists so Pix accepted). Argentina was so painful for transactions I ended up buying Argentine Pesos using crypto. Argentina missed out on thousands of dollars export income from me because I hated their payment bullshit so much that I just left Argentina and went to Brazil instead (with different shenanigans). Turned out I enjoyed Brazil more too (great people).

I also wanted to use crypto because it is such challenging fun to play with using it for money (versus speculating), plus I wanted to learn how to manage the risks of using crypto (so I was willing to pay spreads and risk losses; since I highly valued educating myself).

One American I met had taken thousands of USD in cash to Argentina because blue dollar exchange rate (cambio / cuevas) to gain much better ARS per USD than other ways to pay as a US tourist. More reliable too (I had a few problems paying by card which sucked).

South American governments charge expensive fees and have crappy exchange rates to withdraw their money from ATMs: foolish foolish foolish dickhead governments. I hated their greed so much I just won't return to Argentina (goodbye 10x - 100x the export income versus the gains they nicked from me). Plus ATM limits to withdrawal well below a couple of hundred NZD (or USD) so I couldn't withdraw enough cash to spend - just damn retarded - print some more ya fools. Result is I'll warn friends against travelling to some South American countries (especially Argentina). Tourists are fickle - treat them fairly and make it easy for them to spend money, or they'll visit a different country that cares about earning export income. New Zealand has heaps of tourists so I know both sides of the equation (Overseas visitor arrivals to New Zealand totalled 3.3 million in the 2024 year; with a population of 5 million).

I really really loved Brazilians - I'd return ASAP if Chilean LATAM airlines didn't dominate costs (USD1600).
by jhp123 | 2025-04-09 01:56:22+00:00
First of all, thank you for conceding my second point, that you were mistaken when you said "Incorrect."

> “Withheld” has a specific meaning in this context

okay, but the person you replied to didn't say "Garcia could not be deported to Switzerland, because the judge withheld the order." He just said the judge withheld the order, which is correct. And then you responded and said it was wrong.

Actually, no one is talking about the legal basis for deporting Garcia to Switzerland or Djibouti, except you, because he wasn't deported to Switzerland or Djibouti but to El Salvador.
by airbreather | 2025-04-09 01:56:45+00:00
I have two leading questions.

1) Why did you decide to become an engineer? Did you have some hobby or other background that you had a passion for, or was it because you thought you could do this degree and make good dollars?

2) If you became an engineer for the right reasons, can you maybe leverage that interest and start an enterprise of some kind? And I don't mean a start-up, I mean a business offering services and/or products to a market that needs them.

I don't see a single reply here at this stage that does not seem to take for granted that upon graduating you must work for someone else.

The idea that "I went to MIT/Stanford/Berkley/whatever, I deserve a job, and a good one that pays fuckloads" seems to permeate the whole thread.

Well I will tell you that College/University for engineering is just a very elaborate hazing ritual, it doesn't get you shit in reality, apart from a possible entry ticket into somewhere where the real learning and work start.

There is potentially fuckloads to learn that you would have never been taught, big differences between academia and industry.

I am in another country, but not that different, and 30 years out the engineers that I studied with that really made bank all basically went straight into starting their own business upon graduating.

As one example, the guy started a business designing mineral processing plant electrical and control systems, started out delivering very small parts of projects, just kept grinding and building capabilities, and now he owns breweries and wineries for fun and is delivering projects all over the world worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There are other examples from my cohort.

If you can't find employment otherwise, what have you to lose? And tbh, if you don't do something like this now, next thing you will look up and you will want to buy a house, or will have a pregnant wife and you just can't risk your job with the man, because the baby, etc etc etc.

So your situation isn't the engineers equivalent of Pretty Lady, or whatever fantasy script society peddles, maybe that could turn out to be a good thing, you never know.

Footnote: I have a four year degree in Electrical and Control Systems Engineering from a University in another country, in the top 100 of the world for Electrical but virtually no one would have ever heard of it outside my state. I graduated in early 90's and only 2 engineers had good "company" jobs to go to, they were both trades who had left their trade to study engineering and were preferred.

I had been working part time my last year and then went full time, after graduating, with the small local electronics design and manufacture company for crap cash. But significant parts of what I learned there in the 2.5 years, I still use today. But, in retrospect I regret not taking my own advice I gave you above, and I am not prone to regrets.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-09 01:56:54+00:00
The US doesn't have sufficient supply of manufacturing skills to do this. Maybe Framework could, but there isn't capacity for most manufacturing of products to move to US assembly. You also can't underestimate the difficulty of that training, it's not just training the workers doing the final assembly, it's the entire org chart being built around manufacturing. China and Taiwan (for consumer electronics) have decades of recent experience in doing this and have highly optimised processes, the US has never had these skills at the volume that Asia does currently, and the last time it was remotely close was decades ago.

If the US decided that the 20-year priority was to be great at manufacturing then sure, it could probably get back to being world-class at this, but there's a reason why countries typically progress out of being manufacturing economies into being service economies – it's just a worse business to be in.
by 1024core | 2025-04-09 01:58:02+00:00
I was in Mexico City recently, and boy did I hate rummaging around for cash to make payments. True, many places accept credit cards, but that seems like an unnecessary tax on the merchant (credit cards charge nearly 3% in fees).

A system like Pix (or UPI from India) would be a godsend for Mexico. However, any such system should have support for tourists (non-residents visiting the country briefly).
Show HN: Audio2anki – Use Whisper to turn YouTube vids into listening practice
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-09 01:58:12+00:00
This is a hopefully somewhat straightforward Python script I wrote which chains a few tools together to generate Anki flashcards for listening practice. I figured it may be helpful for anyone else currently trying to square the circle of how to practice listening with spaced repetition in a way that is as scalable as reading or writing.
by simonw | 2025-04-09 01:58:38+00:00
I've built a number of systems that run a database and a separate search index (Elasticsearch, Solr, Xapian). The hardest part by far is keeping the search index in sync with the database. I gave a talk about this a while ago: https://simonwillison.net/2017/Aug/16/denormalized-query-eng...

Using the search engine built into PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite makes this problem SO MUCH less difficult.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-09 01:59:01+00:00
Noticed it uses HTML5 canvas to render data by default. To screen readers, am I correct in understanding that this is equally accessible as when people share screenshots of text?

There is an SVG option that looks identical but it doesn't say when you're supposed to use that, or why canvas exists (and is the default) if SVG would work equally well. Then again, setting an example chart to use SVG rendering (I was looking at the basic scatter plot functionality, since I use that most often), I can't seem to tab or otherwise navigate through the data points, so it may just be impossible to get the data read out to you like "first data point, year 2006 students 25 939" (if the axes were labeled "year" and "students", for example; they're not labeled in the example but it could still read out the positions of the points)
by ein0p | 2025-04-09 01:59:13+00:00
Yeah, instead we should just print money and hang that debt around our kids and grandkids necks, all while further deindustrializing. That's a bold strategy breadwinner, let's see how it plays out for your grandkids in the long term. "Wealth" isn't the only metric of a strength of a nation, especially when you can just literally print money. You kinda _have to_ also make stuff. Selling $1 Chinese chotchkes for $5 is not a long term viable economic model for a superpower.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-09 01:59:43+00:00
Is this a common, known technique or did he just come up with it in the spot?

I assume not every building can do this, or else the city would run out of water? Or it depends where you live?

And at the end of the day, is it just a matter of aesthetics, that your walls don't get stained? Or is it doing other things to preserve value?
by packetlost | 2025-04-09 02:00:16+00:00
#2 is basically the whole justification for the military industrial complex. Why do you think so many tax dollars go to the big ominous "military spending" bucket? It's not going into some black whole, it props up hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and R&D jobs. Even then, it doesn't justify blanket tariffs on entire countries, it would justify tariffs on specific industries that are seen as strategic, which is not what's happening.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-09 02:01:01+00:00
https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29598

[0] Slightly tangentially, to be ignored, until later (after careful reconsideration of doubts raised in your [1]: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/29610[2])

In particular, to consider how unification of the 2 notions of excludability/rivalry can lead to the 2 actions of subsidies/taxation coalescing (thus going "beyond good & evil")

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43621295

[4] https://www.econlib.org/the-correlation-between-excludabilit...

>Yet in the real world, both excludability and rivalry lie on a continuum.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-04-09 02:02:12+00:00
"Not clear" doesn't mean "won't be done", and the headline misstates reality (all of the staff aren't actually being terminated) which makes me doubt the objectivity of the entire piece.

A simple consolidation of program offices doesn't seem like the worst idea in the world and it (along with other relatively benign scenarios) fit with what's been observed.
by beloch | 2025-04-09 02:02:17+00:00
Also, if most countries continue to trade freely with each other but there are import/export taxes on just the U.S., the U.S. becomes an unattractive place for any products with international supply chains or that are amortized across an international market, both in terms of manufacture and sales.

There was a good post here the other day on bicycle manufacturing that pointed out that, while cheap, high volume, low-end products may indeed be practical to manufacture in the U.S. primarily for the U.S. market, it may not make sense to manufacture many high-end products behind trade barriers. Such products have low margins and need free access to the world market to make sense to build. Those that are currently manufactured outside the U.S. will likely stay outside the U.S. while those made in the U.S. may have to consider moving. Some will likely just no longer make sense to import into the U.S., leaving a void in that market, and some won't make sense to build at all.

Breaking the world market up into regions, as the U.S. is currently attempting, reduces the world's ability to make specialized, low-volume products.
by timewizard | 2025-04-09 02:03:40+00:00
Humans have five distinct "visual cortexes" in the brain that process input from the eyes. There's two layers to the system and they provide outputs to various parts of the brain. Your blink and flinch response is highly sensitive to some of these outputs.

Birds have two. One feeds the other. Their field of view for binocular vision is often not large. They completely lack the power to "fill in" details of occluded objects the way that we can. Which is the true power of our vision outside of pure pattern recognition used to find sources of food.
by josephg | 2025-04-09 02:03:42+00:00
Maybe, but I doubt it. Transformer models got all that investment because small transformers work and large transformers work better than small transformer models. We can extend the line and predict what happens when the model is scaled.

Small Cyc doesn't do anything useful. Large Cyc doesn't do anything useful. Why should we make huge Cyc? If we extend the line out, all evidence predicts that it'll still be useless.
by koyote | 2025-04-09 02:04:09+00:00
I remember most banks having it when it first came out, I used it a couple of times to pay friends but few people knew about it.

It was pretty simple and worked well, especially compared to having to give bank account details.

That being said, I am in Australia now which has a similar system and I'd say 95% of my friends just give me the bank details instead of saying 'just use PayId with my phone number'.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-04-09 02:04:41+00:00
Makes sense, I have worked in and around CNI stuff for k8s and generally netns+veth is how most of them work. That being said we run k8s on bare metal, there isn’t any reason why running things on bare metal excludes netns usage.

> Most VPCs (also AWS) don’t currently support "true" IPv6 scaleout behavior.

Thats a shame.

> if IPs were truly immutable and unique per workload, attribution becomes trivial

I would like to see that. IPAM for multi-tenant workloads always felt like a kludge. You need the network to understand how to route to a workloads, but the network when running on ipv4 has many more workloads than addresses. If you assign immutable addresses per workload (or say it takes you a month to chew through your ipv6 address space) it makes it so the network natively knows how to route to workloads without the need to kludge with IP reassignments.

I have had to deal with IP address pools being exhausted due to high pod churn in EC2 a number of times and it is always a pain.
by karim79 | 2025-04-09 02:05:29+00:00
Depends largely on what you need to grow your company, in terms of the supply chain and whatnot. I suppose there are indirect costs as well, in terms of the stuff you need to buy and how those things have been influenced by these stellar economic choices made by the geniuses that be.

I would say wait for things to level-out before pursuing capital. Everything has gone to shit for the time being.
by mooiedingen | 2025-04-09 02:05:31+00:00
Absolutely, as the great Fravia+ RIP :( once said, it is in your advantage to know where and how to find possible solutions for your problems. And i am willing to even go so far as to say:

The more you thrust the models, the less cognitive load you are spending checking and verifiefing which will lead to what people call ai but which actually is nothing more than a for loop over in memory loaded data. That those who still think that: for Μessage in messages... can represent any sort of intelligence actually has already brainwashed on a new itteration of the "one armed bandit" where you click regenerate indefinatly with a random seed being distracted from what is going on around you
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-09 02:06:30+00:00
IPO window is closed/dead for at least the next 3-6 months. Both Klarna and Circle have paused their upcoming IPOs. Even the corporate bond market is seizing up at the moment. Uncertainty is toxic to long term investment.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/04/08/why-has-the-cor...

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-tariffs-trade-... | https://archive.today/iKHbX
by unstatusthequo | 2025-04-09 02:06:37+00:00
I don't understand the willingness of the masses to willingly give governments complete access to all of their transaction data. At least in the U.S. bank transactions are feebly masked by institutions. I have no doubt the government gets bank transaction data, but with Pix, it's just making it even easier to monitor what you're doing. Is it that the transparency makes it feel good? No middleman selling it or giving the facade of private transactions?

I do not see how this is better than cryptocurrency, which, while not fully anonymous aside from Monero, is at least decentralized.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-09 02:08:01+00:00
This will be how he gets rid of political enemies.

If you think that's hyperbole, ask yourself whether you really, truly believed back in January that people were going to be seized off the street and deported to a movie-villain super prison in El Salvador, and taht the administration would admit it deported people in error and then shrug and say it had no way of retrieving them.

In other news, the government wants to spend $45 billion building new detention camps: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-adminis...
by pmags | 2025-04-09 02:08:45+00:00
The administration's record to date with respect to USAID, CDC, NIH, and Dept of Ed, suggests a vanishingly low probability of any "relatively benign scenarios".

Based on past actions I think the appropriate Bayesian prior for pretty much all such public health efforts is now "they've intentionally broken it" until proven otherwise. I'm happy to update my prior if evidence to the contrary comes to light.
by iandanforth | 2025-04-09 02:09:01+00:00
Have you tried? It works well for other books, e.g. here's a scene from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" which is conveniently in the public domain.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67f5d652-f7f4-8013-b2f2-3c997ea513...
by sans_souse | 2025-04-09 02:09:29+00:00
I will use search as part of any research based learning so long as it remains a functional option. So long as there's some chance of the AI giving incorrect data where precision is necessitated to learn the fact, I will remain leary and manually search those specific areas later on. At the very least.

Operator words still do work in google, albeit less so than in the past - they still do the job.

I see the AI as being there to do the major leg work. But the devil's in the details and we can't simply take their word that something is fact without scrutinizing the data.
by cduzz | 2025-04-09 02:10:20+00:00
This seems like a really cool project.

Some observations...

First I'd get some legal advice for how to convert this idea / product into a thing that you own and have a stake in, but that's distinct from you. This means you'd be able to collect money and attribute that money to the product, you'd be able to sell it to someone else and walk away from it, etc. This legal construct is important; probably not _necessary_ but very useful.

You seem to have a reasonable community contributing to and using the project; that's your most valuable asset. Make up a brief roadmap of where you'd like to take the project in six and eighteen months, share that with the community. Think about how some projects, like Elastic.co, grew based on community feedback and how ultimately perhaps those companies felt they needed to change the company in ways that many in the original community disagreed with. There are lots of sides to that coin, and you as the founder need to think about how you'd want to develop the product.

Lastly, once you've got a clear accounting mechanism of how to track money from it and costs of it, you should just .... start asking people for money. "How much is a support contract worth for this?" "How much is it worth to you to focus on developing this feature instead of that?" Obviously -- be very cautious if people are offering money in exchange for fractional ownership of "the thing" but even that may be palatable... but make sure you've had someone representing your interests read the contract...
by valunord | 2025-04-09 02:10:32+00:00
LOL these are all garbage suggestions. What we really want is no new changes to the UX, but rather a focus on performance and tightening down system services to ensure less CPU and RAM utilization in addition to bug fixing.

Further, most people who use desktop systems, want a return to some older paradigms.

The person who wrote this article is out of touch with reality.

There are a plethora of ways to have pasteboard/clipboard history and even share it. Pastebot is my main choice, but PastePal is another good one.
by gparra13 | 2025-04-09 02:10:46+00:00
Hey there, this is my first post on hacker news. As well as my first project to ship, pretty hyped about it.

If you need a source to find MCP servers especially the newest and most exciting ones. Feel free to check out my site. Have a section for AI tools in general as well.

I decided to add a feature were you can upload a file and have gemini 2.5 read it and recommend you a MCP server to you.

LMK what you think!!!!
by mmckeen | 2025-04-09 02:11:17+00:00
Also commonly used for high-performance networking and security use cases, for example https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-containe....

Basically anywhere you'd previously need to write a kernel module but now can have user space run arbitrary kernel code that's secure and won't crash the kernel.

You can also now write custom schedulers in eBPF with sched_ext.