MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-04 22:20:08+00:00
> if any party can do something you are afraid of, focus on the enabling factors that allows them to do that

Perhaps you can enlighten me what these enabling factors are? Because I thought vigorous debate, a free press, and a balance of power between branches of government were the controls; not what enables problematic politics.

Yet it would appear criticism is increasingly cause for expulsion, journalism seen as a justification for lawfare, and that 2.5 of the 3 branches have been captured by an irrational fear and a cult-like trust in a second rate celebrity.

> we can bridge consensus on what everyone is afraid the other party might leverage

Can we? Within my circle those leaning right are too wedded to their tribe affiliation to see the hypocrisy and inconsistencies in their conclusions. If they are unwilling to agree on a consistent set of rules for all then there won't be consensus.
by fldskfjdslkfj | 2025-04-04 22:20:14+00:00
> They had the opposite effect

The Ruble was on it's way to complete devaluation before Trump propped up the Russian economy by signaling he's willing to give them everything in exchange for nothing.

But it's also true that the west never really fully committed to the sanctions, the fact that you still had Russian oligrarchs traveling around Europe with relative ease was a pretty strong tell.
by inciampati | 2025-04-04 22:20:41+00:00
The "intentionally tank the economy to roll over national debt at lower rates" theory completely misses how government bonds actually work. A bond is essentially a promise: you lend the government money for a specific period, and they pay you back with interest at the end. When that bond matures, it's simply paid off. There's no refinancing happening.

What people call "rolling over" debt just means the government is issuing brand new bonds to raise money to pay off the ones that are maturing. These are completely separate transactions, often with entirely different investors. The government continuously sells new bonds and pays off maturing ones as part of normal operations.

Creating a recession to somehow game this system would be spectacularly counterproductive. Tax revenue would collapse while unemployment benefits and other social spending would skyrocket, creating even larger deficits. Any minor interest savings would be dwarfed by the economic damage. Not to mention the Fed sets rates based on economic conditions, not to help government borrowing. This isn't some clever financial strategy—It's just bad economics built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how sovereign debt markets function.
by hydrolox | 2025-04-04 22:20:48+00:00
I get what you're arguing but isn't "Jail the President for doing Presidential stuff" a bit charitable? "Nope, don't see it" isn't so simple, I think a lot of people would argue that this follows from the rule of law set down in the constitution in the form of things like the supremacy clause and implied by our entire legal/political structure.
by valbaca | 2025-04-04 22:20:55+00:00
Reminds me of the Narcissist's Prayer:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.
by billti | 2025-04-04 22:21:10+00:00
I've never understood why countries like the EU pass strict environment and labor laws and then DONT place some kind of tariff or tax on countries without those restrictions. Not only to offset making your own market less able to compete on cost, but to provide a financial incentive for the other countries to up their game on environmental and worker quality-of-life issues (if that is the overall aim).
by claiir | 2025-04-04 22:22:16+00:00
Thanks for the question. Three reasons:

(1) Much like a carbon tax, when the economy becomes accountable for an externality (risk in this case, rather than carbon) it is priced in at every level, ending with consumers, whose demand is price-sensitive. Not all consumer goods of the same class will be impacted equally, creating a natural price advantage.

(2) Once the economy adjusts to these new risk-adjusted prices, POTUS can always offer clemency for specific goods and industries to respond to global supply shocks, providing a large buffer for the now-adjusted American consumer.

(3) Narrowly: it is exceedingly unlikely we won't see production onshoring in any capacity like you suggest. Economic analysis of the first-term Trump tariffs, for example, did indeed find production onshoring.
by settrans | 2025-04-04 22:23:23+00:00
Set aside the 2000 year old history for a moment. Given that the Jews were a persecuted minority across Europe - and indeed faced the a campaign of extermination far worse than early Zionists feared - one can see the moral necessity for their self determination.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it declares that no, it is preferable for Jews to continue to face the Holocaust and other attempts at their genocide than to concede their right to self defense as a people.
by HillRat | 2025-04-04 22:23:31+00:00
There are already ways to enforce those -- for example, Democrats and US labor unions used the USMCA negotiations to enact a "facility specific rapid response mechanism" that lets the US essentially strong-arm Mexico and Mexican companies into improving collective bargaining rights within the context of the trade deal; section 307 products (created by forced labor) have been illegal since 1930 (and enforced more strictly over the past decade, given concerns about Chinese slave labor); carbon import taxes addressing environmental regulations have been proposed in Congress, but haven't been implemented yet. The government also has existing authorities under anti-dumping and countervailing duty (ADD/CVD) legislation, so long as those duties comply with American obligations under international treaties (Trump's tariffs exist outside the ADD/CVD framework, and place the US in noncompliance relative to our WTO obligations).

Trump's tariffs don't really serve any specific policy goals other than "trade is bad and everyone should buy more from us than we buy from them," which is self-evidently absurd; why are we punishing Madagascar because we buy their vanilla and they're too poor to have extensive need of our services-based economy? Beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies inevitably beggar us as well, as we're likely to find out quite soon.
by fundad | 2025-04-04 22:23:31+00:00
It should be obvious that this market correction is the desired outcome for this administration and its defenders.

If there weren't so many people whose livelihood or investment portfolios benefited from free trade or government spending the economic indicators wouldn't react as badly. Punishing or disincentivizing economic activity they don't like is more important than increasing GDP or asset values.

It may seem like a weak argument because of the circular logic but that shouldn't surprise any of us.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-04 22:24:15+00:00
> Trump is the only one willing to play ball with the Chinese

Biden was also willing to do so. For example, he put a 100% tariff on electric cars.

> But we do have a huge debt problem in this country.

Which is largely Trump's fault. He increased the debt by $8T versus Biden's $5T, and people costing his promises on the campaign trail concluded that his promises would increase the debt at twice the rate that Harris's promises would have.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-04 22:24:32+00:00
What's especially interesting is that the market already had tariffs priced in, yet what Trump announced was SO bad that the markets have dropped another 10%...

My European friends and family are amused... China is going to take the US' place in the world economy, Europe will become more self-sufficient and innovative, the US turning mercantilist will simply reduce their influence in the global marketplace... There's not much the world truly NEEDS from the US... Stuff like semiconductors were outsourced long ago, ASML and TSMC are the most important companies in that equation, neither are American.
by nearbuy | 2025-04-04 22:24:33+00:00
Of course Picasso's life experience influenced what he chose to make. This isn't what the parent comment is talking about.

The claim was that current LLMs (though I assume they meant generative AI in general, since we're talking about image generation rather than text) are unable to produce anything novel. Meaning they either don't think Picasso's work is novel, or they don't think a human could have prompted an AI to make a new type of abstract art before having trained it on it. Whether the AI would want to do this is irrelevant. AIs don't want anything. They do what a human prompted. And while WWI may have shaped Picasso, learning data from WWI isn't necessary in order to make a cubist painting when prompted to stitch multiple perspectives into a painting. It's blending perspectives that are available from old data. And blending things in a new way is novelty. Most novel art falls into that category.
by fcatalan | 2025-04-04 22:25:00+00:00
Those texts aren't nonsense. The prompt has a meaning, the LLMs are able to understand it, and are able to reply with coherent and understandable responses crafted in the same way the prompt was written. For me it's a very clear example of something that is very far from any training data coming out of the models. Intelligent? No, but for me it points to the idea that "language is solved".
by _--__--__ | 2025-04-04 22:25:38+00:00
This is about a meta analysis from 2018 and therefore misses that the biggest recent growth in the anti-porn movement has been among secular feminists. It also has nothing to say about the way that onlyfans et al "revolutionized" the porn industry by creating a multibillion dollar MLM that exploits both its creator/employees and consumers with different but equally questionable fictions that normalized the purchase and production of pornography to new segments of the population.
by anthomtb | 2025-04-04 22:25:39+00:00
I use Strava for mountain biking and the Athletic Intelligence is just comical.

"This ride was longer and harder than usual" - no sh*t, the map, elevation profile and my legs have already informed me.

"You set 3 new PRs" - I can see that with one flick of the thumb thank you.

"Consider a rest day" - consider? None of my job, spouse, equipment or body is too keen on doing that again for a while.
by bigbuppo | 2025-04-04 22:25:51+00:00
A few years ago I actually purchased a Netware license, right at the start of Covid. It was an ordeal, and not because of Covid. Multiple retailers and distributors stopped selling Netware/Attachmate/Micro Focus products because of that purchase. Micro Focus was completely uninterested in handling Netware sales in any way, shape, or form, except to existing customers with big maintenance contracts.

I can also speak from personal experience that it was just that side of Micro Focus that was uninterested in making any sales. The AMC (cobol compilers) division was great and I'm happy they ended up at Rocket after the OpenText merger.
by isleyaardvark | 2025-04-04 22:25:52+00:00
I don't think steelmanning an argument works if the argument is made in bad faith. Steelmanning should be about trying to understand legitimate reasons for a positions, not bullshit arguments. About being fair and intellectually honest, and not about trying to act like a PR firm for the other person.

That said, if you want to make sense of the reasons behind the tariffs, I can offer a couple that would be reasons why Trump would implement tariffs.

1. While they are within his power, they are a cudgel he can use to hurt his enemies and show favoritism (and be open to bribes to get them lifted).

2. Trump has a weird obsession with tariffs, even after he lost a trade war with China in 2018 and had to bail out farmers with a bailout larger than the one to General Motors.

3. Also, as one of Trump's Wharton business school professors has stated numerous times, "Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had."
by janalsncm | 2025-04-04 22:26:12+00:00
> everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources

It’s not just easier. If there are no other options, it doesn’t matter what congestion toll you put. The only option is car.

> putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can

Sure, but for most people the demand for transportation before and after normal working hours is inelastic. A smart policy takes that into account and doesn’t inconvenience people for going to/from work.
by lossolo | 2025-04-04 22:26:26+00:00
> They had the opposite effect, for reasons that still remain somewhat unclear.

It's clear that Russia redirected most of its exports. Just look at how much oil India is now buying from Russia — before the war, it was around 5%, and now it's over 40%. They rerouted a large part of their trade, created shadow fleets, and many EU exports still end up in Russia, but through proxy countries like Kazakhstan. (You can see this in the trade statistics between the EU and former Soviet bloc countries before and after the war.)

But the situation here is entirely different. The US has placed tariffs on much of Asia, the EU, and several other regions. There's nowhere for the US to reroute trade in a way that allows it to import the same goods at the same or lower prices.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-04-04 22:26:36+00:00
> The economists who claim that tariffs will harm normal Americans were also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy.

Nobody can predict the future, least of all economists. Having said that I think economists were not wrong on the headwinds that Russian economy would face. They just failed to account for extraordinary measures that dictatorship could take.

And even with said measures there had been a steady deterioration of the economic situation... The real question is what is the state of their mineral (cough gold cough) production rates and reserves. They might just be able to buy their way out of the current situationship.
by ajross | 2025-04-04 22:26:50+00:00
With all respect, that's not a steelman argument in favor of tarrifs. It's a stack of whatabountism fallacies. "Tariffs are Good" does not follow from "People who say Tariffs are Bad were wrong about other things". Everyone is wrong about lots of stuff. The world is hard to predict.

You don't shoot a hole in the bottom of your life raft because the person pleading with you not to was wrong about how many people it could hold.
by joe_the_user | 2025-04-04 22:26:57+00:00
I believe people are arguing for tariffs now are mostly not arguing that tariffs are good but that the world needs to level the playing field and that the US imposing tariffs now is a way to force that to happen. The US has lost quite a bit of industrial production to China and other nations over the years and argument is that this isn't simply low Chinese wages but a variety of trade barriers and trade subsidies. The rosy scenario is that Trump imposes these measures, other nations offer concessions and the barriers are mostly lifted with trade now being more in the US' favor.

The problem with this scenario is that every nation naturally has it's own idea of what is fair and that many things that are trade barriers are around politically sensitive issues (safety and purity standards, etc). So getting other nations to immediately drop stuff isn't that easy.

The analogy is war - after a short engagement, the trade-warring nation will "come home victorious". Like regular war, this scenario often doesn't come to pass.
by hk1337 | 2025-04-04 22:26:58+00:00
That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space. If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.

tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
by mandeepj | 2025-04-04 22:27:00+00:00
> The things that dominate middle class budgets: food, housing, medicine, education, are surprisingly local

> The economists who claim that tariffs will harm normal Americans were also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. They had the opposite effect, for reasons that still remain somewhat unclear.

> It is also notable that Chinese competitiveness has only increased as they have engaged in decades of state economic planning and market barriers. The economists who have told us since Reagan that this is inefficient and stupid might be ... wrong.

You are quite wrong there with all of those three points.

#1. a lot of food items come from Mexico, South America, Asia also. Housing material from Canada and China. A lot of meds come from Asia especially India. Majority of Stationary is manufactured in China as well.

#2. Russia is struggling with economy. But remember it has a lot of help from China, Iran, N Korea, and India. That offset a lot of sanctions. Europe is still buying gas from them.

#3. I’ve to remind you this - China exports in trillions.
by thyristan | 2025-04-04 22:27:21+00:00
The Hamas government isn't democratic, but it was democratically elected. And voters knew whom they were voting for, Hamas didn't change, they were a terrorist organization back then as well. Voters democratically elect all kinds of dictatorships. Still their fault.

Indigenous people (legitimately imho) started a war over that territory and lost it. Started a few more and lost those as well, together with some neighboring states. If you lost the war for that land, it isn't your land anymore. Simple as that. And terrorism isn't an acceptable means of warfare.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-04 22:27:35+00:00
Why should corporations respond to all of this by taking a lot of risk and invest in capital? The tariffs aren't based on any sort of sound strategy, just one poorly educated person's black and white, simplistic worldview full of insecurity.

They change practically by the hour; first they're on, then they're off, then they're on, then they change, thne they're bigger than anyone expected.

That doesn't make companies say "well, let's expand!" It makes them hunker down. Kill off the least profitable products, cut overhead, etc.

There's time needed to build the necessary manufacturing, train a workforce, etc.

There's prices skyrocketing when suddenly American manufacturers have less competition.

There's also the plunge in sales of goods we sell to other countries.

This is the sort of thing you change over a generation. Not in a day, year, or even four years.

You can't just snap your fingers and say "you'll buy all your CNC machines from AMERICAN companies!" - even if we had enough manufacturing capacity, where are you going to get the workers from, particularly as literacy and education levels have been falling, and the whole education system is getting torn up?

...and where are you going to get all the semiconductors from?

The US famously had to buy titanium for the SR-71 from Russia through shell companies because the US lacked the mining capacity, the refining capacity, and know-how.
by pizzly | 2025-04-04 22:27:44+00:00
Having elite universities scale up the number of seats available can be done. Grow the pie instead of having the current scarcity mindset. This would actually solve much of the current problems. There is no reason you cannot have the same or better quality of education with more students per university. The only reason this problem exists is that by limiting the number of seats you create artificial scarcity and thus higher value.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-04-04 22:27:56+00:00
See I suspect that the problem is not taking any sort of capitalist return concept when implementing a socialist policy... Even if you assume that the government needs to create jobs, it's like nobody has ever done a cost benefit, at any stage. You see hundreds of thousands being spent on one individuals care needs, something that is essentially never going to have a positive return, while productive initiatives either lack funding, or have triple thier cost added by pointless additional steps (that nobody has ever done a cost benefit of either).
by thephyber | 2025-04-04 22:28:17+00:00
The best explanation I’ve seen is the so called MarALago Accord[1]. I think the core thesis is that the US dollar and the US military being so core to all trade in the world had mad the US disadvantaged in terms of trade competitiveness. The accord is a set of goals/approaches to reduce that, theeeby making the US dollar more appealing for exports, other currencies less appealing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_policy_of_the_second...
by dmvdoug | 2025-04-04 22:29:15+00:00
Well, regardless of whatever you think about truly reciprocal tariffs, the Trump Tariffs are not that. They released the formula they used to calculate the levels and it has nothing to do with other countries’ trade barriers. It’s like literally trade deficit with that country divided by imports. Which is utterly unhinged, with no basis in theory or reality. But again, even if you disagree, that is not the definition of a reciprocal tariff.
by aylmao | 2025-04-04 22:29:16+00:00
+1. To me it just seems kind of bland. I used to like her more and made a point of going to MoMA to see her when I lived in NYC, but over time she's done the opposite of "grow on me".

I still think Grapefruit is great. Nonetheless a lot of her work, especially her recent work, seems kind of disconnected form its historical context, not very daring, deep or metaphorical. It doesn't really propose anything new or seem distinctively hers. It's almost performative, like someone doing conceptual, installation and performance art "as a brand" rather than as a means to achieve something that can't be achieved via other mediums.
by inciampati | 2025-04-04 22:29:23+00:00
If tariffs will strengthen the economy while everyone else predicts disaster, you've discovered market insight worth billions. The Dow didn't just drop 2,200 points because investors are confused, it dropped because people with serious money and expertise believe these tariffs will damage the economy. If you're right and they're wrong, there's an obvious move: bet against them and get rich.

p.s. Trump did this before in 2018-2019, giving us some hard data about the economic effects of tariffs on modern america that are guiding the economic consensus.
by ashoeafoot | 2025-04-04 22:29:29+00:00
The downturn would come either way, we are slamming headfirst into global warming consequences, other piled up risks and closing easy access resource ceeilings.

This way though the downfall is at least controlled, comparable to landing a wounded plane instead of breaking up midair. Big Olga never believed its own bull of "infinite growth" and parallel drove plans forward to keep civilization going in pockets once the "8billion can life like kings" bubble bursts. Bill Gates microreactors come to mind.

The rest of us go to hell, aka wars, martial law and civil war, preferably without damaging the pockets and without going nuclear. THANK YOU!

Sorry , to all those that fell for fusion, mars and star trek fantasies.
by billti | 2025-04-04 22:29:33+00:00
I did see a talk where someone was making the case that if the U.S. depends heavily on China for steel, and Taiwan for chips, then if China invades Taiwan the U.S. would very quickly be unable to wage a war with both supplies cut off. So the goal is to build some capacity for such products domestically.

They also tied that to Trump's desire to get out of Europe and deescalate the Middle East, being that if the U.S. was already stretched across Ukraine and say Iran, it would be way to stretched to also wage anything in the far east.

I'm no expert by a long way, but I can see some logic in the argument.