MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by litoE | 2025-04-04 23:35:44+00:00
> Median real wages have remained relatively flat over the past 15 years, increasing only about 0.3% annually when adjusted for inflation, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. In contrast, the cost of living — particularly for essentials like housing, healthcare, and education — has risen dramatically.

That is plain wrong. The cost of living is THE factor we use to adjust for inflation. Therefore, by definition, the cost of living when adjusted for inflation does not change.
by Clubber | 2025-04-04 23:36:39+00:00
A reciprocal tariff is a tax or trade restriction that one country places on another in response to similar actions taken by that country. The idea behind reciprocal tariffs is to create balance in trade between nations. If one country raises tariffs on goods from another, the affected country might respond by imposing its own tariffs on imports from the first country. This response is meant to protect local businesses, preserve jobs, and fix trade imbalances.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/reciprocal-t...

I think you are arguing that they aren't equal tariffs. I would agree with that. They do seem to be reciprocal though, because the countries imposed tariffs on our goods of some sort.
by yummypaint | 2025-04-04 23:36:55+00:00
Once Apple ends official support for a machine the user has to buy a new MacBook or use an increasingly compromised system. Apple hardware uses an arm architecture that cannot ‘dual boot’ Windows or Linux easily. Once macOS support dies for a modern MacBook it becomes obsolete.

This helped me realize why I don't like MacBooks. They aren't really computers. They are big folding smartphones with keyboards.
by dangus | 2025-04-04 23:36:55+00:00
Seems like you’d have to prove the inverse.

The threshold would be “produce anything that isn’t identical or a minor transfiguration of input training data.”

In my experience my AI assistant in my code editor can’t do a damn thing that isn’t widely documented and sometimes botches tasks that are thoroughly documented (such as hallucinating parameters names that don’t exist). I can witness this when I reach the edge of common use cases where extending beyond the documentation requires following an implication.

For example, AI can’t seem to understand how to help me in any way with Terraform dynamic credentials because the documentation is very sparse, and it is not part of almost any blog posts or examples online. My definition the variable is populated dynamically and real aren’t shown anywhere. I get a lot of irrelevant nonsense suggestions on how to fix it.

AI is a great “amazing search engine” and it can string together combinations of logic that already exist in documentation and examples while changing some names here and there, but what looks like true understanding really is just token prediction.

IMO the massive amount of training data is making the man behind the curtain look way better than he is.
by secabeen | 2025-04-04 23:37:02+00:00
> In Europe most/all of the apartments I've stayed in are basically business apartments (more or less). It's like a long term rental apartment that in best case scenario someone is using as a savings/investment vehicle but on short term.

If that the only thing AirBNB offered, I would have much less interest.

> I'm pretty sure there are people living in less than sanitary conditions all over the world including Western Europe and the U.S. That doesn't mean I have interest in experiencing that kind of "living/sleeping".

Thankfully, AirBNB doesn't have to be all things to all people. As long as there are enough people like me to keep them afloat, they can provide a product that I am happy with, and you can stay at hotels that are immaculately clean.

I do hate the way that many AirBNB hosts have made hosting a business, and would fully support a limit on the number of listings per host. People renting out a space in their house, or a vacation rental in a vacation destination that they also stay in too is fine. People buying 3 or more apartments to rent them out (taking them off the long-term rental market) is terrible, and should be prohibited.
by shw1n | 2025-04-04 23:37:10+00:00
I'm not claiming moral high ground, or that my method is a better or happier way of living life, I'm only claiming it's better for finding out what's true, with the assumption some objective truth exists.

The sentence that covers this in the piece:

"If someone is self-aware enough to consciously acknowledge their choice to remain in the bubble, that’s totally fair. I respect it like I’d respect anyone who chooses to participate in a more traditional religion. My issue is when this view is falsely passed off as an intellectually-driven one."
by atmavatar | 2025-04-04 23:37:14+00:00
The fundamental problem is that political parties (and, in particular, a two-party system) render the existing constitutional checks and balances useless. As long as you have political parties with members spanning all three branches, they are not truly separate branches.

We lived in the illusion that this wasn't the case for nearly 250 years because most of the time, elected officials have largely acted in good faith. However, the Republican party (correctly) determined that when it comes to wielding power most effectively, it's in their best interest to protect its own members in all branches rather than members in each branch thinking of themselves as independent of (or even in conflict with) the other two branches as the constitution envisions.
by rhet0rica | 2025-04-04 23:37:45+00:00
This is not the first quantum-mechanical biological phenomenon to be suggested: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/quantum-science-and-tec...

...however the author's claims definitely do not follow in any meaningful way from the actual experiment. A few cytoskeletal proteins did something non-classical, so we have to re-evaluate the place of life in the universe? What?

I believe this is another steaming pile from the cult of physicists who are convinced that their intelligence is so supreme and special that it must be empowered by a god of the gaps[1]—more specifically a god of the quantum gaps. No such luck, friend.

Remember the story about AI-designed chips[2] — what Stephen Wolfram identifies as "lumps of irreducible computation" in his recent article about the Game of Life[3]. As Wolfram notes, it's really obvious when a new device in Life is discovered by brute-force search, because it has no separable components.

Biology is such a search algorithm; it moves in (almost) entirely random ways, and it sometimes stumbles upon truly incredible things. On a few occasions it actually stumbled onto organization as a viable technique for innovation, as encapsulation makes it easier to iterate on specific components without messing up the whole system. But on the whole, the mess remains a mess, and sometimes that means exploiting the rules—something virtually all learning algorithms are also prone to do if there are flaws in the rules of the game, e.g. [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152407

[3] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what-can-we-lear...

[4] https://www.sociable.co/technology/ai-breaks-simulated-laws-...
by cafeinux | 2025-04-04 23:37:54+00:00
I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.

Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.

One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.

This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.

I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.

All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.

But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.
by stale2002 | 2025-04-04 23:38:12+00:00
> Free speech in the US is about not having consequences for what you are saying.

If a mob harasses you, your friends, you family, your workplace and your children with mass amounts of harassment and death threats, I would say that the target of the harassment has had their rights infringed on even though it wasn't literally the government.

No, you cannot have a mob send mass death threats to people, stalk them, and harass them because you didn't like a tweet that they made a decade ago.

The person who called it "cancel culture" chose the wrong word.

They should have called it "death threat culture" or "illegal mob harassment culture", as that would really drive the point home about what the issue is.

But, of course, you don't care about that or what happens to people's families when they are targeted. Instead, the only thing people care about is "Oh, but what was in that tweet that they made 10 years ago? I need to figure out if their family deserved it!" ("it" being the death threats and harassment, of course)
by sroussey | 2025-04-04 23:38:15+00:00
Maybe if AI knew what it was doing I would not end up banging my head like I did here:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67ef43f4-3b88-800d-a5a3-e3ffea178f...

(Me trying to describe a desk top with a fold down hinged top, and it just drawing whatever)
by jltsiren | 2025-04-04 23:38:38+00:00
I prefer the way it used to be in Finland (and still mostly is). Board members are elected by the people affiliated with the university. Votes might be split 4:3:3 or 5:4:4 between professors, other staff, and students. Some board positions are representatives of the three internal groups, while the rest are outsiders. You get all kinds of interesting people from business leaders to activists to former national presidents in the board, while avoiding politruks elected or appointed by random outsiders.
by azemetre | 2025-04-04 23:38:54+00:00
McConnell has brought the Senate to an absolute standstill during key democratic legislation like several dozen times. Why is he a more effective minority leader than Schumer? Worse, why is Schumer not using the same tactics McConnell did? He knows they're effective.

You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.

All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
by AngryData | 2025-04-04 23:39:40+00:00
The US has a ton of problems with agriculture, but I find half of people's complaints about antibiotic use in US farming reaching far beyond what is actually happening in reality. I often hear people complain about antibiotics being in their milk or beef, but there are absolutely no antibiotics in your milk because a single cow on antibiotics getting its milk in a 10,000 gallon tanker will cause the entire load to be dumped, and it is tested for in every batch. As for beef, maybe once in awhile, but feeding a 1,200+ pound animal enough antibiotics for months to increase its weight that extra 5% is going to cost you nearly as much as the entire animal is worth.

Poultry is an area where it might be a bigger problem because chickens grow WAY faster than cows and they live in absolutely deplorable conditions on factory farms. Birds need to be clean to stay healthy, and they can't stay clean stacked in little tiny cages or packed into dense flocks, and so they end up dosed with antibiotics because otherwise they need like 10x or more the land/floor area to not have swaths of the herd top die from natural diseases. A cow or pig covered in shit is just a cow or a pig, cow shit is basically dirt by time it comes out the other end it is so thoroughly digested, a bird covered in shit is going to be packed with disease and parasites.
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-04 23:40:33+00:00
Exactly. Most people of Jewish faith I have met puts the interests of Israel above those of the United States, because it is in their religion to return to the homeland. Look no further than Pelosi arguing that if the Capitol burned to the ground, as long as Israel prospers, elected officials will remain committed to Israel (and the crowd at that Jewish council cheered on). Btw, one cannot find this video anywhere anymore (you will find it on Facebook using Pelosi Capitol). I wonder why.... People advocating for Israel at this point are traitors to the United States and should be treated as such. When elected officials like Pelosi would rather the capitol burns to the ground but Israel prospers, I feel nothing short of dread. But students writting opeds opposing Genocide is the story...
by stoneman24 | 2025-04-04 23:41:47+00:00
I agree, some people are trying to determine some grand clever plan behind the trump actions. I don’t think there is one. He has a history of believing that tariffs work and the position & cabinet (specifically selected fellow ideological devotees) to implement the policies that he wants.

He believes that the American economy can weather the storm and other countries will fold in any further negotiations in order to reduce the tariffs. But the world economy is more interconnected than ever with complex multinational supply chains. He has certainly made the rest of the world re-evaluate America whether is a stable economic friend.

He is a reality TV star wanting the headlines, with a very limited economic understanding and no concern for the small people that will be hit.

Some of the entourage believe and others just to be in room for the economic benefit/power that they and their friends can extract. If you know the massive uncertainty is coming, then you (or someone you know) can make money. Even if it’s cashing out at the top, watching the crash and buying the dip on the recovery.

Not sure where we will end up but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a painful journey to a unhappy state that someone else will need spend time, energy and resources to try to recover from. I am certain that the ordinary Joe and Jane will be hit hardest.
by benatkin | 2025-04-04 23:43:14+00:00
A good way to promote that it's open source is to describe it as being self hostable and have a get starting page that quickly says how to self host it.

As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with spartan open source projects.
by resters | 2025-04-04 23:43:30+00:00
1) Grok-2 was akin to GPT-3.5

2) Grok-3 comes out a month after DeepSeek R1 was open sourced. I think Grok-3 is DeepSeek R1 with some added params and about a month of training on the giant cluster, possibly a bit of in-house secret sauce added to the model or training methodology.

What are the chances that XAI just happened to have a thinking model close to as good as revolutionary DeepSeek but happened to launch it 30 days later?

It was both smart and pragmatic for XAI to simply use the best available open source stuff and layer their own stuff on top of it. Imagine they doubled the parameter count and trained it for 30 days, that would not even use half of the GPU power!
by whartung | 2025-04-04 23:45:42+00:00
I have lots of project’s smoldering (or not) on my hard drive.

One of them is a years long passion that consists of several, large, yet to be connected chunks. Those are at what I think I’ll call about the 75% mark.

I must say, that one of my favorite was when I decided to pound out a 6502 simulator over Christmas break one year.

My singular goal was to get Fig-Forth assembled and running on it. I wrote the simple CPU simulator and an assembler over the span of 2 weeks.

It’s hard to describe the experience of debugging an unfamiliar code base, in assembly language, against a buggy CPU, using a buggy assembler, and using another buggy web based 6502 simulator as a baseline.

“Computers are deterministic!” Hah! Not this one!

But it was a fun, seat of your pants Christmas blitz.
by neilv | 2025-04-04 23:45:56+00:00
I was leading a Tcl project around then, and, though there were some very neat things about the unusual Tcl evaluation model, I wasn't a fan of using it for nontrival work. For example, it wasn't a natural fit for working with graph structures like I had to, and like you might want for browser DOM.

(That said, Tcl would've been much better than JS, and I suspect that Ousterhout would've figured out some smart things to make it good for the browser.)

Maybe 5 years later, I was meeting with Tim-Berners Lee, and I kinda pitched Scheme to him, without planning to, but he was very interested when he asked what I'd been working on.

But then he went and did a conference keynote, in which he promoted Python as the language for ordinary people doing Web stuff. And I think he referenced one of the things I'd written in support of Scheme... as an anti-requirement for his populist vision for the Web. :)

(I wish I could've been involved in that, because I could've made a case for a populist spin on Scheme at the time.)
by tcdent | 2025-04-04 23:46:29+00:00
I have a guy doing some construction work for me right now and when he found out I write software he asked if I could help him out with a website.

"Ehh I don't really do that kind of software..."

If I was to give this guy a simple marketing site, that he can take to go host on his own, that I can hopefully vibe-code into existence, what should I use?

I mean, I know how to do this stuff, but handing him a node package seems wrong.
by timpark | 2025-04-04 23:48:18+00:00
The guys who created Space Quest kickstarted another sci-fi comedy adventure game... 13 years ago. It went (and is still going) poorly, and Kotaku just posted about the ordeal today:

https://kotaku.com/spaceventure-space-quest-kickstarter-stea...

I backed the project, but at one of the lowest levels, so I'm not really mad. It's just kind of sad.
by defrost | 2025-04-04 23:49:38+00:00
It's an odd piece of procedural technicality.

* Trump declared emergency Tariff powers.

* An appeal was made to stop this.

* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"

* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."

* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)

with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.

Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
by duxup | 2025-04-04 23:50:28+00:00
>“In the first term everyone thought they were president,” a senior White House official said.

I think the issue is that Trump thinks any opinion not in lock step with his own is a problem. That's not "thought they were president" that was more likely people who know about a thing and maybe the president should know about that too ... that's why you surround yourself with qualified people, not hangers on ...
by dmitrygr | 2025-04-04 23:50:39+00:00
The main hang-up is that ARM uses PC as a general register a lot and in ways that make translating ARM instrs rather messy.

ADD R0, SP, PC, ROR SP

is entirely valid, even if nonsensical, instruction. But you must translate all valid inputs, else you risk breaking things. That may be a contrived example, but here is a common one: if one has a jumptable of relative offsets somewhere, pointed to by R10, even this is valid:

LDR R0, [R10, R0, LSL #2] ADD PC, R10, R0

That gets messy to translate
by dangus | 2025-04-04 23:50:48+00:00
I don’t think that was their claim that they knew this.

I think it’s hilarious that apparently few have learned from Theranos or WeWork.

OpenAI is in a precarious position. Anything less than AGI will make them look like a bust. They are backed into a situation where they are heavily incentivized to lie and Theranos their way out of this and hope they can actually deliver something that resembles their pie in the sky predictions.

We are at the point where GPT-5 is starting to look like the iPhone 5.
by iambateman | 2025-04-04 23:50:51+00:00
Airbnb’s original promise was magical, thrilling, interesting - get to stay in unusual places that are full of charm and possibility.

But that promise was broken for me when Commaleta played back the video of her front door camera and counted that we had 10 people walk in her door, not eight. She proceeded to accuse us of throwing a party, when we absolutely did not, and tried to charge us $1000 extra dollars.

At that point, I decided that Airbnb’s hosts were too much of a wildcard in most travel situations.

By the way, the story above is from 10 years ago and I will never forget her name for the rest of my life…she turned what should’ve been a relaxing, beautiful week into a miserable arbitration process. It’s hard for ABNB to succeed long term when one experience like that can ruin everything.
by lliamander | 2025-04-04 23:51:27+00:00
> Which is why all US military clothing is mandated to be domestically produced (Berry Amendment).

Cool.

> But how much industrial capacity do you want to take up making clothing?

I actually want the market to decide that. But that is fundamentally what we do not have. It has been more or less the result of conscious trade policy (by all governments involved) to incentivize production in other countries.
Show HN: Skype is closing down, I built a replacement
by joshmead | 2025-04-04 23:52:21+00:00
You may have heard Microsoft is closing down Skype in a month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052#43202881

As someone originally from the UK who spends a significant amount of time in Morocco, I constantly faced the challenge of making affordable and straightforward calls back home, especially to essential services like my bank or credit card company - Skype always made it easier for me with their outgoing to calls to a regular phone number. I used Skype 2/3 times a week.

When I heard they were closing down, and saw a post by @levelsio on X, I put my head to creating a replacement, and here it is: https://www.zippcall.com

It allows you to make international calls from your web-browser to regular phones (landline or mobile/cell) in any country.
by AngryData | 2025-04-04 23:52:29+00:00
Ehh, I don't think the problem is so much that we eat meat, it is how we produce it. Beef for example is raised primarily with alfalfa, a legume that puts nitrogen in the soil for free rather than having to turn fossil fuels into nitrogen fertilizer or spending substantial fractions of the total world's electricity generation on its production. Plus the fertilizer from the cow shit itself. Its not like we are short on land capable of growing grass, farmland utilization has been dropping for decades, a lot of those places get regular rainfall and alfalfa is nearly free to grow and harvest.

Of course getting people to learn about these things and politicians to adopt sensible policies about it is a whole other game.