MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tlogan | 2025-04-06 15:52:00+00:00
It is fascinating how the positions of the two major U.S. political parties have flipped on tariffs. Democrats, who historically supported protectionist trade measures, now oppose tariffs, while Republicans—once champions of free trade—have embraced them. Yes, party platforms evolve, but this kind of sudden reversal is still remarkable.

What’s even more bizarre is the mental gymnastics on both sides. Some argue that tariffs somehow benefit CEOs and the wealthy, even though stock market reactions consistently show that tariffs hurt corporate profits. Others on the right now frame tariffs as a fundamentally “Republican” principle, despite decades of GOP support for free markets and globalization.

Here’s my prediction: many CEOs and wealthy individuals will gravitate toward the Democratic Party. Why? Because tariffs reduce profits, and Trump’s policies seem designed to benefit a narrow segment of the rich rather than the broader business class. Over the next 8 to 16 years, we may see the GOP fully reposition as the party of the working class, while Democrats become the party of the affluent elite.

Personally, I’ve always favored genuine free trade, which is why I’ve leaned Republican. But now, I’m not so sure. I used to argue with my liberal friends that tariffs are essentially a regressive tax—they raise prices for everyone, especially hurting lower-income consumers. The counterargument, of course, is that tariffs could incentivize companies to bring production back to the U.S.

But let’s be honest: that’s not happening. Tariffs raise prices, but they don’t magically bring manufacturing back home. From my conservative perspective, companies should have the flexibility to offshore production—especially if they face pressure from unions or rising domestic costs.
by mlsu | 2025-04-06 15:52:01+00:00
In tech specifically: is it the same mechanism? I mean, does commercial advertising and political propaganda flow through the same channel?

I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove.

I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary.

And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects).

I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.
by crdrost | 2025-04-06 15:52:05+00:00
Yes! I call this sort of top-down programming "wishful thinking." It is these days much easier to explain to people, because machine learning tools.

“if you can just trust that chat GPT will later fill in whatever stub functions you write, how would you write this program?” — and you can quickly get going, “well, I guess I would have a queue, while the queue is not empty I pull an item from there, look up its responsible party in LDAP, I guess I need to memoize my LDAP queries so let's @cache that LDAP stub, if that party is authorized we just log the access to our S3-document, oh yeah I need an S3-document I am building up... otherwise we log AND we add the following new events to the queue...”

It is not the technique that has most enhanced what I write, which is probably a variant on functional core imperative shell. But it's pretty solid as a way to break that writers block that you face in any new app.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-06 15:52:26+00:00
This is pretty immaterial from an exploit development perspective:

1. The forked process has a copy of the program state. If I'm trying to steal in-process secrets, I can do it from the forked process.

2. The forked process is just as privileged as the original process. If I'm trying to obtain code execution, I don't care which process I'm in.

This is why Chrome at al. have full-fledged sandboxes that communicate over restricted IPC; they don't fork the same process and call it a day.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 15:52:46+00:00
This is fundamentally impossible to do perfectly, without being able to read user's mind and predict the future.

The problem you describe is of the same kind as ensuring humans follow pre-programmed rules. Leaving aside the fact that we consider solving this for humans to be wrong and immoral, you can look at the things we do in systems involving humans, to try and keep people loyal to their boss, or to their country; to keep them obeying laws; to keep them from being phished, scammed, or otherwise convinced to intentionally or unintentionally betray the interests of the boss/system at large.

Prompt injection and social engineering attacks are, after all, fundamentally the same thing.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-06 15:53:00+00:00
> No alternative platform: Presumably on purpose.

It's not on purpose, it's a lack of IT coordination and has been a long-standing issue in the government. As an example, until about 2010-2012, nearly every US military base hosted its own email server and employees (military, civilian, contractor) received an email address like first.last@base.af.mil (replace af with another branch as appropriate). Now it'll be first.last@us.af.mil.

They consolidated each branch's email and other comm systems over a number of years with good and bad results. Cross-branch communication could still be improved, but it's much better than it used to be. Cross department and agency communication is still broken. And the only purpose is so they can retain control of their fiefdoms.
by dahart | 2025-04-06 15:53:13+00:00
Commercial speech is also widely recognized to have lesser First Amendment protection than personal, political, or ideological speech, and there are cases of advertisers losing in court, c.f. Spann v J.C. Penney, as well as decisions that explicitly limit the First Amendment protections of commercial speech.

Trying to ban all advertising of course wouldn’t get anywhere (especially under the current SCOTUS), and the article’s author clearly hasn’t really thought through the implications. But there is a legal door that is ajar, in the Central Hudson test, and could potentially be widened by arguing that some classes of today’s advertising are against the public interest; the First Amendment is already not blanket covering all commercial speech.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-06 15:53:15+00:00
> The main issue with Rust is that is has been oversold as a panacea for safety using exaggerated arguments.

I know you know this, but Rust does provide essentially complete memory and lifetime safety if you stay within the bounds of safe. Standard C/C++ tooling has no way to even reliably detect memory safety violations, let alone fix them. It's trivial to write buffer overflows that escape ASAN, and missing a single violation invalidates the semantic meaning of the entire program (particularly in C++), which means virtually all nontrivial programs in C/C++ have UB somewhere (a point we disagree on).

Safe rust doesn't guarantee all the other possible definitions of safety, but neither does any other mainstream language. I don't think it serves any useful purpose to complain that the rust folks have oversold their safety arguments by "only" eliminating the biggest cause of safety issues. Stroustrup harps on this a lot and it comes across as very disingenuous given the state of C++.
by charlie0 | 2025-04-06 15:53:46+00:00
Same here. I've worked really hard to not end up in miserable position. I also realize there are things not in my control. If work changes, you can either change work or just leave. Leaving is often the much better option.

This reminds me of the Zen Koan where the teacher holds a stick.

The teacher says to the student, “If you tell me this stick is real, “I will hit you with it. “If you tell me it is not real, I will hit you with it. If you say nothing, I will hit you with it.”

And so, the student reaches out, grabs the stick, and breaks it.
by drzaiusx11 | 2025-04-06 15:54:19+00:00
as an AuDHDer, noise cancellation and white noise are critical for my mental health (at work and elsewhere), but near constant _interruptions_ of my flow state by coworkers in the same physical space causes me almost visceral pain, and has only been amplified to unsustainable levels (for me) from forced RTO. I started fully remote at my current employer, so I communicate effectively and prolifically on async comm channels like slack, but even that can get to distractible levels for me. I recently implemented schedulable “office hours” for folks to access my time, so we’ll see if that helps in either case.

If my current mitigations don’t help, i’ll be forced to file for a wfh exception, but those tend to be denied where i work (fang). I’m already on medications to manage my stressors (of which there are many), so i feel like i’m almost out of options in an RTO world…

This issue is compounded by presenting as neurotypical, as i’m forced to mask when sharing physical space with neurotypicals. this is exhausting on its own, and i’ve found to be largely unavoidable in a large setting via trial and error spanning 20+ years in industry.

AuDHD is almost a full contradictions of needs. I excel with body doubles, but they can’t regularly interact with me without me loosing the current “thread”. I crave novelty, but require structure. It’s a difficult thing to understand, let alone live with…
by vitus | 2025-04-06 15:54:30+00:00
I think that's an oversimplification, and helps mainly in the case where one sensor is totally offline.

If you have two sensors, one says everything's fine but the other says you're about to crash, which one do you trust? What if the one that says you're about to crash is feeding you bad data? And what if the resulting course correction leads to a different failure?

I'd hope that we've learned these lessons from the 737 Max crashes. In both cases, one sensor thought that the plane was at imminent risk of stalling, and so it forced the nose of the plane down, thereby leading to an entirely different failure mode.

Now, of course, having two sensors is better than just having the one faulty sensor. But it's worth emphasizing that not all sensor failures are created equal. And of course, it's important to monitor your monitoring.
Show HN: Show HN: I Built a News Aggregator Where Users Curate and Share Sources
by LorenzoBloedow | 2025-04-06 15:54:45+00:00
What do you guys think? I built this because it's something I've always wanted.

Just a heads-up: at the time of writing, the source creation service is overloaded, it'll be back in around 5 hours, you can still create collections and do everything else normally, just can't add sources that don't already exist. This overload is due to me not yet being able to afford the paid plan for the API I'm using to fetch the news articles =P
by lynndotpy | 2025-04-06 15:54:55+00:00
This is not the case. Waymo alone has claimed 50 million rider-only miles as of December 2024. That would mean Waymo travelled at least 833,000 miles per hour on its driverless miles! (Unless you mean "minutes" in the literal sense, which can be any amount of time, and would apply to every vehicle.)

It's worth noting Waymo's rider-only miles is a stronger claim than "FSD" miles. "Fully self driving" is Tesla branding (and very misleading, and expects an attentive human behind the wheel ready to take over in a split second.)
by BeetleB | 2025-04-06 15:55:03+00:00
That is not addressing the base rate.

To take a hypothetical extreme: If all cars but one on the road were Teslas, it would not be meaningful to point out that there have been far more fatalities with Teslas.

Even more illustrative, if 10 people on motorcycles had died from Teslas, and 1 person had died from that sole non-Tesla, then that non-Tesla would be deemed much, much more dangerous than Tesla.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-06 15:56:08+00:00
I mean what does lidar do but tell you distance? A rangefinder optic from 1940 can also tell you distance with two little offset windows purely optically and accurately. Millions of rolls of films shot on this principle of optical distance finding. And yet, this is no good now, because IMO its musks idea and thats enough to poison it among the armchair engineers than any other reason. Telling to this point is how everyone just parrots the same comment that optical self driving is bad without actually providing evidence to support their point. Just arguing on precedent established in forums and social media.
by graemep | 2025-04-06 15:56:59+00:00
It would be not as bad if it was intended for schools, but even then its still too prescriptive to require kids to read everything. The list PDF ends with this above the space for signatures:

> By signing below, we attest that _____________________________________ has read a complete and unabridged version of all the books as recorded on the Excellence in Reading 9-12 grade list above, and that this record is true.

If it was a list of "good books you might enjoy reading", I would have no problem with it. it is the idea you must read them all, even ones you dislike, that I think is wrong.

In the case of the plays it is preferable to see them than to read them.
by geor9e | 2025-04-06 15:57:17+00:00
It's not though. There's no govenment enforcement on either of those parties. The ban is worded below from a government page, and puts the entire burden on the website host to enforce it all.

> Website hosts are accountable for the reviews on their page. Businesses and online platforms will be legally required to take steps to prevent and remove the publication of fake reviews that are published on their websites. This could include, for example, having adequate detection and removal procedures in place to prevent fake reviews being published.

By the government's own wording, it sounds like any competent Amazon seller and competent Amazon reviewer can continue buying and selling fake reviews with each other over Facebook, Gmail, and PayPal, just like they have for years, with no consequences, even if they publically admit to it to a government prosecuter. They just have to stay under the radar of Amazon. Don't do too many under one account; make sure to sprinkle a lot of legitimate reviews in with the fakes. Amazon just needs to say in court that they did their best to look for these people.

All Amazon can do is look at the data they have—which is pretty much just the actual reviews written by actual people on actual products—and do some data science, astrology, and tea leaf reading to call some of them fake reviewers. When really, there's no possible way they can detect a skilled one. They don't have subpoena power to check their Facebook messages or PayPal transactions.

There are people who have been getting hundreds of $100-plus dollar products from Amazon free for 5+ years by just writing a quick fake review for it. There is a huge ecosystem of factories in China with Amazon seller accounts and fake review agents in Lahore, Pakistan, and places like that, who intermediate this, and then spreadsheets of thousands of products you can choose from, from hundreds of different sellers.

So will Amazon go to the trouble of infiltrating these networks to find the exact product pages that are being offered in exchange for fake reviews? As far as I can tell, Amazon wants fake reviews to happen. It's how a new product gets it's initial reviews. Nobody's going to buy a product with no reviews. I don't think the government is going to be able to burden Amazon with hiring Pinkerton detectives to infiltrate these networks; that type of enforement work doesn't seem like something that a court could require a private business to do. And the government hasn't said these networks are against the law; just that the website hosts can't host their reviews. So, I doubt this will have much effect on Amazon. It will probably only be enforced on more flagrant websites, where all the reviews are just AI-generated slop.
by redox99 | 2025-04-06 15:57:56+00:00
It's just like Mark Robers video[1], where he makes all these wild claims that you can't solve X issue without LIDAR and tests an old version of Autopilot. When another user correctly tests with the latest hardware and software, it passes the test[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&pp=ygUQbWFyayByb...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzZhIsGFL6g
by thewebguyd | 2025-04-06 15:57:58+00:00
> If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X.

This has largely been my experience working in IT as well. I think folks in the tech world take for granted how "normal" continuous learning is for us, and how undesirable it is for others in the workplace. Your average office drone very much does not want to learn something new. They want to use what they always have, and keep the same workload.

Even just attempting a switch from Windows to macOS, when their workflow is almost entirely a web browser, damn near caused a full on worker revolt at one organization I worked at. Training didn't fix it, because the desire to learn wasn't there in the first place.

That's the kind of inertia that needs to be overcome for something like open source adoption at the end-user level. It's comparatively simple for the back-end to transition, but without an already willing user-base, the front-end average office worker is not going to achieve the same level of productivity for a really long time.
by pmags | 2025-04-06 15:58:28+00:00
For those trying to keep abreast of the measles outbreaks in the US.

● Total cases: 607

● Deaths: 2 (both children); maybe a 3rd death in NM but still under investigation as to cause of death

More info from the CDC here: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html

It would be interesting to know how the growth in cases this year compares to the outbreak in 2019 that previously prompted Trump to insist that children be vaccinated:

“They have to get the shots. The vaccinations are so important. This is really going around now. They have to get their shots,” Trump told CNN’s Joe Johns on Friday when asked what his message is for parents. -- https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/politics/donald-trump-measles...
by rollcat | 2025-04-06 15:58:38+00:00
> Has anyone found effective tools for maintaining this synchronization between documented architecture and implemented code?

Yes, it's called structure, discipline, and iterative improvement.

Keep the documentation alongside the code. Think in BSD terms: the OS is delivered as a whole; if I modify /bin/ls to support a new flag, then I update the ls.1 man page accordingly, preferably in the same commit/PR.

The man pages are a good reference if you already have familiarity with the employed concepts, so it's good to have an intro/overview document that walks you through those basics. This core design rarely sees radical changes, it tends to evolve - so adapt the overview as you make strategic decisions. The best benchmark is always a new hire. Find out what is it that they didn't understand, and task them with improving the document.
by specialist | 2025-04-06 15:58:49+00:00
Older me thinks cultural literacy is important. Like the origin of idioms, catch phrases, parables, tropes, identity, etc.

Although I read A LOT as a kid, I skipped most of the classics. (Meaning: anything not sci-fi, fantasy, or non-fiction.)

Around 30yo, I got Gulliver's Travels as a gift. Wow. I loved it. Provided context for so many common clichés.

So I started to check other classics off the list (as able). I wish I'd started earlier. Face palm slap.

Good, bad, or indifferent, being exposed to the origins of ideas expanded my worldview and gave me appreciation for what followed.
by AlexCoventry | 2025-04-06 15:58:58+00:00
It seems to me that the solution is to run this stuff in a securely isolated environment such as a VM, dedicated machine, or VPC, where you don't care about the secrets it has access to, and don't really care about corruption of the data in the environment. Then you have to carefully audit any products you take from that environment, if you want to run them in a more sensitive context.

I don't think this is really an MCP problem, it's more of an untrusted-entity problem.
by lxgr | 2025-04-06 15:59:24+00:00
Some load balancers are also routers (if they route based on service capability and not just instantaneous availability) or vice versa, but this kind isn't always, to my understanding: The experts aren't necessarily "idle" or "busy" at any given time (they're just functions to be invoked, i.e. generally data, not computing resources), but rather more or less likely to answer correctly.

Even in the single GPU case, this still saves compute over the non-MoE case.

I believe it's also possible to split experts across regions of heterogeneous memory, in which case this task really would be something like load balancing (but still based on "expertise", not instantaneous expert availability, so "router" still seems more correct in that regard.)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-06 16:00:01+00:00
The easy solution is, don't call system functions. Instead:

• Work out what you want to do, conceptually.

• Design a safe abstraction that would allow you to do that. (Consult the Win32 API documentation for concepts to use.)

• Implement that abstraction using the Win32 API.

That last step is way easier than trying to use the Win32 API throughout your program, you'll end up with significantly less unsafe code, and if anything does go wrong, it's much easier to fix.
by XCabbage | 2025-04-06 16:00:05+00:00
Of course it does, but this proposal entails banning search engines, right? I can imagine definitions of "advertising" that don't encompass search, but this author doesn't intend them; he explicitly states that he is not just classifying "paid" advertising of products as advertising but all "third-party" advertising, "full stop", and acknowledges this would make Google "cease to exist" in its "current form". He clearly intends his proposal to include banning search engines, entirely.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-06 16:00:08+00:00
> If tariffs are so bad, why do most countries have them?

The average global tariff rate is 2.6%:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...

Most countries have an average / mean tariff rate of <10% per the World Bank and WTO. Further, most countries probably have zero tariffs on most products, with higher ones for specific reasons:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good

Tariffs have been falling for decades:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/03/22/u-s-tarif...
by crote | 2025-04-06 16:00:35+00:00
A lot of people believe you need to be a hard-working genius to get rich, so anyone rich must logically be a hard-working genius. Similarly, they believe anyone poor must be a lazy idiot.

In reality getting rich has more to do with opportunity, connections, and luck - but accepting that means you've got to accept that the American Dream has always been a lie. It's much easier to convince yourself that people like Elon are geniuses.
by edgineer | 2025-04-06 16:00:53+00:00
I see two meanings: 1. He's protesting DOGE's reignition of the SSA codebase overhaul 2. He's making a joke that you don't dare touch a running legacy system because you'll break it

He probably means the second, but the first was my initial thought (I hear COBOL programmers make upwards of $1000/hr). Fixing these old systems has been on my mind.