MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cavisne | 2025-04-11 17:04:57+00:00
Factually despite all the noise there are no significant tariffs in either direction at this point in time, 98% of trade is tariff free under the free trade agreement. Mexico and to a lesser degree Canada are in a more favorable position than they were before the tariffs as they are the only countries in this position [1]

[1] https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...
by conductr | 2025-04-11 17:04:59+00:00
> Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.

They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied.

Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app and always see the same top titles listed due to it being an alphabetical index, then they quickly think nothing new is ever there. Or, it's too hard to find. So they're tricking people into thinking there's a bunch of fresh/good content. There's also a cultural phenomenon where everyone discusses "what shows have you been watching lately?" so the Trending aspects of their recommendations is to help people get on board with the trend; and, to push momentum and create the trend too obviously.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-11 17:06:03+00:00
At first glance, I'm curious what the point of this is, people who want to believe it are going to believe, it people who don't want to aren't going to. The mainstream science community will probably just disavow most of these studies, and probably for good reason. They won't have good methods or won't be replicable.

But I'm guessing maybe the point is, if you can get these studies published by the NIH, then red-state governments can more easily argue for conversion therapy since it will be "backed by science"
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-11 17:06:16+00:00
This is one of those things that feels like a broken/half-assed/oversimplified implementation got completely proliferated into the world a long time ago and it took several years for the right person to do a full-depth mathematical analysis to reveal what we should've been doing all along. Similar to antialiasing and sharpening, texture filtering, color spaces and gamma correction, etc.

It reminded me of this article specifically: https://bgolus.medium.com/the-best-darn-grid-shader-yet-727f...
by bastawhiz | 2025-04-11 17:06:36+00:00
I simply hate that good services get ruined because there's money to be made by providing a different service to a broader group of people. It's not quite enshittification, it's companies making something that serves a relatively small group of folks well into a thing that serves a very large group of people in the highest-ROI way possible.

Companies no longer have a target user. The target user is whoever can be juiced for as many pennies or eyeball-seconds as possible. There's no persona for user stories, it's "literally whoever we can get this in front of for as long as possible". It's about the lowest common denominator.

Which implies, these products are not "designed" anymore. "Designed" implies that the creator made choices to make the product better for a target user. But there's no target user. When your service has a billion users, it's not possible to design for _anyone_. Mouse traps aren't "designed" for the mice, they're built for the people who don't want mice around. Services aren't "designed" for a billion people to interact with, they're built for the owners to make as much money as possible.
by ookblah | 2025-04-11 17:06:38+00:00
yeah except a lot of those companies almost went bankrupt trying to make those cars for enthusiasts and only for them.

porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring market segment.

i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps, but a lot of these "successes" wouldn't even be around were it not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market segments fare better and you can build a business around enthusiasts.
by xphos | 2025-04-11 17:06:43+00:00
As a computer scientist who worked as a research scientist i was paid more as a Federal Surfguard (beach lifeguard) than i was doing TS cleared work with the government. The GS scale is fundamental a broken wager. When I gradated college the government was willing to pay 75K for employment. I had offers from private industry as internships making more than that per hour. They were easily 15K off my next offer and that was only because I thought I would like defense in general where the pay is pulled lower because they do so much government contracting. After exiting the defense industry I was making what I was predicated to make in 20 years at the government in 3 years in private industry. Not counting stock options etc.

The disparity is extremely but to be honest I liked the idea of working for the government. There was a lot of drive to solve for the mission and smart people. But the level risk mitigation made working extremely difficult. The government impressive getting people to work as hard as they do and I respect it, they were a good employer but political offices severely shackle it from doing even better work. In wages yes but even in allowing experimentation, political appointments waste a ton of energy and time to. Its like selecting the worst person for the Job in a non meritocratic way and expecting things to run smoothly is a poor idea.
by fsflover | 2025-04-11 17:07:44+00:00
It's impossible to isolate applications inside one VM as securely as with Qubes virtualization. You should not rely on intra-VM hardening if you really care about security. Having said that, Qubes does provide ways to harden the VMs: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/hardening-qubes-os/4935/3, https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/replacing-passwordless-root-wit....
by tshaddox | 2025-04-11 17:08:00+00:00
I'm more interested in how we regularly use the term, rather than how we might attempt to come up with a rigorous definition (particularly when that rigorous definition conflicts awkwardly with regular usage).

My point is simply that we absolutely do not refer to a home dishwasher as a robot. Nor an old thermostat with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Nor even a normal home PC.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-04-11 17:08:02+00:00
First of all there is (EDIT: almost) zero trade between the US and Russia currently, same with North Korea. (EDIT: perhaps some token signal of wanting to negotiate over Ukraine? or perhaps even more “sinister” - getting US political opposition to falsely argue Trump is a Russian agent and make themselves look silly)

Second, yes part of the strategy is to force allies to self assess themselves and their dependence on US power. Trump and Nixon had a personal relationship and his fundamental strategy in business is based on creating uncertainty, it’s literally like point 1 of his “Art of the Deal” and however another part of that strategy is being willing to walk away.

We are living through a turning point in history where current US administration has reversed the open policy to China and for national security reasons are working to re-industrialize and militarize quickly as a strategy to deter Chinese ambitions.

It’s fine to disagree and argue the neoliberalism strategy of globalism isn’t dead but politically it is. Of course that world order is fighting to survive where it can, UK, France, Germany all putting up resistance to the rise of neo-mercantilism and nationalism but we will see if canceling elections, restrictions on speech and jailing politicians will work to block it.
by ehsankia | 2025-04-11 17:08:03+00:00
As bad as Netflix is, honestly the UX is the best amongst major streaming services.

For me, the cardinal sin of a streaming service is, if I open your service every single day and watch the next episode of ONE show, then the next time I open your service, PLEASE HAVE MY SHOW AT THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE.

This is such a simple and obvious user journey, but the majority of streaming services, on purpose or not, fuck it up. The number of times I've opened a streaming service, scroll through the entire home page with the shitty tv remote, then had to type the name of my show manually in search. Makes me want to unsubscribe right then and there and just use Plex instead.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-11 17:08:32+00:00
>Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time.

What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.

Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to make additional seasons even if they announce them it's still forever before they come out.
by ryao | 2025-04-11 17:08:35+00:00
The advantage of electron was that the client side scripts in the renderer and the backend use the same language and the two can share data easily (although not so much these days given disabling that is done for security). Whenever I use electron, I have communication between the backend and the renderer client side scripts go over a socket. This made the code fairly portable, such that I was able to do proof of concept port of an electron application I wrote for use in health care to a WebKitGTK version written in around 100 lines of C with the backend nodejs process still running. Interestingly, this cut memory usage in half, with half of the remaining memory usage being the nodejs process. I assumed replacing nodejs with pure C code would lower memory usage even further, but this ran on a CM4, so there was no pressure to reduce memory usage, and I abandoned the C port because using electron as is was more convenient.

There really is not much special about electron or tauri. You can do the same thing in any language that can use WebKit as a library.
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-11 17:08:42+00:00
I don't actually believe you are trying to argue in good faith here.

> At what point will you start connecting the dots and realise that all these means to some different end always end up benefitting Israel, and no one else?

Many US companies and US oligarchs benefit from the actions listed here. You are focused on Israel as if no one in the US is profiting from these actions.
by jononor | 2025-04-11 17:09:42+00:00
Pivoting every month! After 24 month and after raising VC money. That does not sound good. There are very few things that can be uncovered/learned in one month that would justify pivoting away from it, even in B2C. Even while throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, one needs to actually wait for the thing to actually hit the wall, at the very least...
by pentamassiv | 2025-04-11 17:09:58+00:00
My professor always said: "The sum of the problems is constant"

You can code faster, but then you might overlook things. You can work a lot and earn a lot of money, but you might struggle with nurturing your friendships. You can have a partner but then you'll have arguments with them. You can remain single but then you'll have to deal with loneliness.
by michelpp | 2025-04-11 17:09:58+00:00
Main contributor here, had a lot of fun working with automerge and its amazing C API around the core Rust library and collaborating with Supabase. This allowed me to take advantage of expanded datum features and improvement in postgres 18 driven by a feature I needed for another project storing large in-memory sparse matrices [1][2]. Based on these new features, lots of rich object data model API can now be used very efficiently from sql when doing multiple complex operations in a function.

This is still experimental bleeding edge stuff that's only available on the unreleased pg 18 so far (using the current dev mainline branch) but will open up a lot of possibilities in the future. Future improvements I hope to make to pg_crdt include implementing the sync() api for easy peer-to-peer synchronization and a full round-trip example application. Word is automerge 3.0 will have some nice new features and I look forward to that.

As an HN specific side note, there was a choice to make initially to use either Rust via pgrx or the automerge C API. At the time (and maybe still?) pgrx did not support expanded datum, which I think would be an amazing addition, but it was out of my scope, and my familiarity with the postgres C extension API made us choose C. Happy to discuss further improvements in this regard as I go up the Rust learning curve myself.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/647219.1736019347...

[2] https://onesparse.com/docs.html
by MetaMalone | 2025-04-11 17:09:59+00:00
I think strengths are more difficult to define than weaknesses, because they are very context dependent. “Speed” may be useful in certain situations, but in many cases “speed” can be harmful in more ways than just overlooking details. You miss out on opportunities to learn, to ask for help, to become better at thinking critically as a software engineer.

What the idea of “strengths being weaknesses” reflects is how much we identify with our present state of ability. It seems like we get it backwards. We ask our jobs to fit us as people, rather than how we as individuals can become best for the job.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-04-11 17:10:07+00:00
Librem 5 is starting to get old, can't argue with that, but it's not quite 10+ years old yet. It's a 2018-2019 design based on a SoC that went into GA in 2018. Even though its ARM cores weren't state-of-the-art at that time already, it has bigger caches, stronger GPU and faster DDR that what you would usually find paired with similar cores earlier, giving it a solid boost when compared to, say, PinePhone, which uses a CPU that seems very similar from a quick glance at specs on paper until you actually try to use it.

I've been using L5 as my daily driver for years now and I don't feel very constrained with its performance just yet. The most painful things are related to lack of features in its SoC rather than its age - such as no hw video encoding or camera ISP, which means that things that other phones do efficiently in hardware have to be done in software. i.MX 8M Quad isn't the best suited SoC for mobile phone use-case, but it was the best that was available back then given other constraints of the project.

Today there's still no abundance of such choices, but there actually are a few more interesting ones on the market. I hope we'll see some projects following through soonish, as I'll eventually need an upgrade path for my Librem 5 indeed.
by mmh0000 | 2025-04-11 17:10:12+00:00
I will start by saying, I completely agree with you!

But, then, I have to behave like a typical computer nerd and say..

Well ackchuallyyyyyy:

> "This is not a really a problem in "regular" programming languages"

Browsers do stupid: <!--[if IE 8]>

Linux does stupid: #!/bin/bash

C/C++ (preprocessor marcos) do stupid: #ifdef

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comment_(computer_programming)
by Rucadi | 2025-04-11 17:10:23+00:00
you could try to statically link them if the package support it, it does so by using musl

nix build github:NixOS/nixpkgs#pkgsStatic.git

return the pacakge as:

ls -lah git

-r-xr-xr-x 1 rucadi rucadi 5.1M Jan 1 1970 git

ldd git

$ not a dynamic executable

So you don't really need to really grow the container
by topspin | 2025-04-11 17:10:33+00:00
"but that's a decision based on cheap labor, not one that's inherent in smartphone design"

This is the heart of the matter. The US has abandoned skills because cheap labor in Asia. An example from the story about dealing with touch screen tests: they're employing disposable workers to toy with pinch and zoom testing; something easily automated with a simple machine and image comparisons. How sad. This is an actual regression in technology.
by dughnut | 2025-04-11 17:10:34+00:00
I feel the appeal of your argument, but people just aren’t fungible, and the incentives in a public in private identity are completely different.

I work at a consulting firm, and, trust me, you want state employees doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary. Ideally, you just have enough people to administer the funds and then all work anyone cares about should be routed to private entities through a competitive process (market discipline for consultants is key here). My experience is that the people at the state are highly likable, but in terms of productivity are close to worthless or are a major obstacle to productive work. I work for a department of transportation where the leadership in the materials division does not actually know what density is or that it is measurable. I would expect someone with good grades in high school to understand this. Every single construction contract for highways has about a 15% overage on crushed rock. The weight to the material is determined by a “50% compaction factor“ and if you’re thinking “that sounds like a made up concept“ you would be correct. This has been happening for years and nobody is allowed to use the correct number because that would embarrass someone with a long tenure. The state Congress needs to liquidate the whole agency.
by wormlord | 2025-04-11 17:10:45+00:00
> A particular worry in the Treasury market is that a doom loop could arise from the “basis trade”. This is popular with hedge funds and has minted fortunes at some of America’s largest. It attempts to profit from the difference in price between Treasury bonds and Treasury futures contracts, caused by high demand for the futures from asset managers. Traders exploit this by buying Treasuries and selling futures contracts. To amplify the returns, they borrow using the Treasuries they have bought as collateral, then recycle the cash into even more Treasuries. Thanks to this procedure, hedge funds are short some $1trn-worth of Treasury futures.

Every few years some dumb shit like this blows up and then the "experts" hem and haw about why reform actually can never be done and "we MUST keep gambling with instruments you see!" it's just so transparently stupid at this point.
by input_sh | 2025-04-11 17:11:00+00:00
There was an option to pay like $20 for literally nothing just to support the idea of an open source phone. I did so many years ago.

Worst $20 I ever spent. The amount of spam I've gotten as an "investor" is fucking ridiculous. The amount of times I've opened my email to see an "investment opportunity" from Todd Weaver (originating from multiple email addresses, no functional way to unsubscribe) is downright insulting.

From the bottom of my heart: fuck Todd Weaver, whose name is at the bottom of hundreds of spam emails I've received going back years.
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-11 17:11:09+00:00
You have to understand consultancies in IT are just brokers. They buy in "inventory" of "profiles" at as low a cost as possible, and sell that inventory to their customers for as much as possible.

So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr. Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some freelancers for $60/hr. That's it.

As your gov agency is capped on paying it's own recruits $25/hr for the position, very few will end up as 'native' gov workers, and the once that do will get poached swiftly by the consultancies.

Now these juicy contracts are not sold piecemeal, but in huge bulk. Not 3 guys for 2 months for a project, but an umbrella contract for delivering 2.000 full time profiles over the next 2 years. Very few consultancies can credibly fulfill on such commitments making the market fairly small and not too competitive. The few that participate have no incentive to spoil the roost and derail the gravy train. No explicit collusion is required. It's an iterative prissoners dilemma situation where the few players all know each other and frequently switch sides.
by vladms | 2025-04-11 17:11:20+00:00
Regarding "what else has to happen": I would say something catastrophic. Nothing comes to mind recently.

Security is good, but occasionally I wonder if technical people don't imagine fantastic scenarios of evil masterminds doing something with the data and manage to rule the world.

While in reality, at least the last 5 years there are so many leaders (and people) doing and saying so plainly stupid that I feel we should be more afraid of stupid people than of hackers.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-11 17:11:37+00:00
This is why I suggested the URL for the submission page be unique- having a session nonce / token or similar. That way, once the user checks out you invalidate the checkout session, and if the user hits the back button you redirect them to the appropriate page.

I specifically called out the issue of re-submitting certain forms and proposed the above solution. I don't think relying on cache headers is going to be sufficiently reliable.
by ruben_varnish | 2025-04-11 17:12:05+00:00
Sorry for not replying. But good to see you got your answer in the end.

Tip, Although not entirely what you asked, but related: what about using more caving in your CI/CD Pipeline. Customers see incredible time savings when using Varnish on that context (mostly with Enterprise w/MSE4 as you will need a massive cache, but it can be useful even with Varnish Cache grounding on your pipeline and workflow). If you are interested, read more here: https://www.varnish-software.com/solutions/data-ai-accelerat...
by 7speter | 2025-04-11 17:12:06+00:00
Yes, the US can spend away their troubles, as long as it maintains treaties it signed on to, can, at least, to some degree, demonstrate some maintenance of its debt, and doesn’t alienate its trade parters, much less the whole world.

If you think I’m just being a partisan, take a look at the US Bond market for the last two weeks.
by Foxboron | 2025-04-11 17:12:29+00:00
They are not.

Arch hovers around 87%-90% depending on regressions. https://reproducible.archlinux.org/

Debian reproduces 91%-95% of their packages (architecture dependent) https://reproduce.debian.net/

> Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nix, Fedora, Debian etc. I just recognize that Nix has done a lot of hard work in this space & Fedora + Debian jumping onto this is in no small part thanks to the path shown by Nix

This is completely the wrong way around.

Debian spearheaded the Reproducible Builds efforts in 2016 with contributions from SUSE, Fedora and Arch. NixOS got onto this as well but has seen less progress until the past 4-5 years.

The NixOS efforts owes the Debian project all their thanks.