MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-09 15:01:27+00:00
The overwhelming majority of AI compute is by either the few bigs in their own products, or by third parties that rent out access to compute resources from those same bigs. Extremely few AI companies are buying their own GPU/TPU buildouts.

Google says Ironwood will be available in the Google Cloud late this year, so it's relevant to just about anyone that rents AI compute, which is just about everyone in tech. Even if you have zero interest in this product, it will likely lead to downward pressure on pricing, mostly courtesy of the large memory allocations.
by foxyv | 2025-04-09 15:02:18+00:00
There is a theory going around that this is an attempt to preempt Trump from using the New Mexico National Guard. As I understand it, after 2008, once the Governor has deployed them, the President can no longer take them over. But, as with all legal matters, this is a big confusing mess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
by tomxor | 2025-04-09 15:02:26+00:00
Expanding on pjmlp's comment [0] buried in this thread:

export MANPAGER="nvim +Man!"

Using Vim's built in ft-man-plugin [1] as the default man pager seems to go pretty far towards resolving what the author is complaining about.

Links work, and it respects the indentation when soft wrapping lines. It isn't doing full reflow or regenerating the page, but it maintains legibility while soft wrapping, and messing up indentation is my main annoyance with less... You can improve less by chopping lines -S by default, but then you have horizontal scrolling so neither is great.

[0] In Vim, you can use K to open a man page for the word under the cursor

[1] https://neovim.io/doc/user/filetype.html#ft-man-plugin
by immibis | 2025-04-09 15:02:46+00:00
"Is the government spying on me?" tends to be a concern that is secondary to things like "Am I getting paid?" and "Can I buy groceries?"

Technologists repeatedly get this wrong. The best money system is the one that lets me buy groceries in exchange for working, not the one that's cryptographically unbreakable. Unless I'm running an illegal internet-based drug empire, in which case, the ones that aren't cryptographically unbreakable are disqualified, since I'd need the government to not be able to trace the money flow in my illegal drug empire. But even real illegal drug empires that are not internet-based mostly use government-issued currency, with measures taken to hinder tracing!
by eduction | 2025-04-09 15:03:58+00:00
This essay seems to be built on a flawed analogy.

Clayton Christensen’s model of disruption (or models, counting his low end version) involves innovation by both the incumbent and disruptor. The disruptor’s innovation is immediately appealing to the low end of the market while the incumbent is focused on the high end.

His example of Hong Kong factories manufacturing Fairchild chips doesn’t fit this template even though he claims it does. It’s just targeting the low end of the market with lower prices. That’s just basic business competition, it’s not disruption as he defined it in this piece.

Side note, I’ve never been a big fan of his giant block quotes, especially when he does not bother to summarize them much. It’s asking the reader to connect to the dots and arrive at the insights he is supposed to be providing.)
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 15:04:10+00:00
One of his preferred "gurus" is a guy who pushed one of those self-help bullshit "if you just believe hard enough, you'll manifest your desires!" proto- The Secret frameworks, and he does appear to operate that way—strident bluster, declaring defeats and "white peace" as unqualified victories, willfully ignoring inconvenient facts, all that stuff. Like, look at the totally-bizarre sharpie incident in his first term, for a trivial but illustrative example.

However, it's worked out well for him personally (less so for those he does business with, or near, or for the US...) so despite being on-paper delusional, I admit the waters are rather muddied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Vincent_Peale#Influence
by griffzhowl | 2025-04-09 15:05:10+00:00
No specific evidence, just that the State department and the analysis branches of various agencies still exist and are staffed by professionals whose job it is to conduct such analyses. It's not out of the question that some of these might have filtered up and in some way influence decisions.

If the tariffs remain in place then one result that is guaranteed is that they will reduce trade between the US and the rest of the world, and reduce the most with the most tariffed countries. Whether that's rational or irrational I guess is the question I'm asking, and I'm looking for reasoned opinions either way
by ericrallen | 2025-04-09 15:05:19+00:00
This is kind of a ridiculous take.

Not going to speak for the author, but some of us just want to be able to write a blog post and publish it in our free time. We're not trying to "maintain systems" for fun.

Some of those posts get zero views, and some of them end up on the front page of Hacker News.
by af78 | 2025-04-09 15:06:07+00:00
Behaving irrationally, intentionally or not, is scaring investors away rather than attracting them.

Seen from abroad, trust in the rule of law and property rights has been eroded. Today Trump sends randos to El Salvador, maybe tomorrow he will nationalize enterprises or other assets, with no meaningful opposition from the Congress and the judiciary? Germany is already pulling gold from the US, that had been stored there for decades. Better safe than sorry.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-09 15:06:09+00:00
It's marginal. The difference exists because Function adds syntactic sugar to make the developer experience of calling the compiled functions easy and smooth. The Function call isn't a direct call; whereas the Rust one is.

It's possible to hack Function to perform a direct call and avoid (most of) the overhead, but in 99.99% of use cases this won't matter cos most processing time will be spent in the body of the function, not the scaffolding that Function uses.
by vessenes | 2025-04-09 15:06:11+00:00
This article is a nice reminder that free speech is awesome.

Also, it is terribly unhelpful and uninformative.

Schneier’s blog post on this has tons of useful information in the comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/cell-phone-op...

The EFF wrote the canonical guide to this in 2017: https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017. I don’t know if it has been updated, but there is a lot that’s useful there.

I think the main thing to decide ahead of time is: will you unlock a phone on request, or are you willing to lose the powered-down phone or be denied entry if you refuse? Most of your decisions flow from there.

If unlocked and it leaves your sight, ALL your messages and photos and documents will be stored forever and are available warrantless in probably every country in the world.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-09 15:06:18+00:00
You're right intelligence is multifaceted.

But when you say things like "Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming", I cannot agree because as I said, plenty of people saw this coming. The smartest businessmen did think it was coming, they were right. They got the signal from the noise. They put the puzzle together.

The ones who didn't think it was coming were not among the smartest. They were fooled by the noise and didn't connect the dots.
by maxglute | 2025-04-09 15:06:30+00:00
>Neither company can be "nationalized

In response to shenanigans like TikTok US branch being nationalized, or CFIUS mass reversing PRC MNC portfolios, i.e. shares/purchases of US assets. They can be functionally "nationalized" in retaliation as in just have whatever is in country siezed, as in their presence in PRC. It means WFOE like Tesla losing their factory, whose workers will make domestic cars. Apple losing some R&D centres, all the capex infra build for foxconn can be messed with. Continue hampering capex/engineer export to India or whereever Apple wants to setup their none PRC operation to make process as painful as possible... or simply just kill Apple hardware 90% dead like US tried with Huawei/ZTE.

> replace with domestic companies

Because it's been ~30 years, foreign MNCs who wanted to be in PRC are in PRC. In the short term domestic companies better positioned to soak up domestic demand, which has been independant trend in past few years.

> this number based on

Some PRC finance portal reposted #s from Hurun Research report on US enterpises in PRC last year. There was IIRC Macquarie report a few years ago that tallied 3T in revenue in past 15-20 years or something that comports. Like US is fully of Chinese goods, and PRC is full of US brands, and in both cases US captures most of the value, or at least PRC captures very relatively little merely being margin producer.

> it's hard to get the full impact

Yeah, I'm just pointing out as you did, the situation isn't simple, not because PRC may have 300B more to lose, but potential of US loss maybe closer, not farther accounting diversion, mnc profits... services, ip/patent/licensing fees. I'm highlighting trade diversion/circumvension is not likely going to be on the scale of 100s of billions of US MNC revenue. Hence relative loss likely not as lopsided.

> likely

Full sale was never likely. Some sort of 51%+ US JV (which afaik US investors already owns majority) maybe. But tarrifs obviously blew everything up. So now it's wierd scenario where Trump seems loath to ban, as in very much want US to own so nationalization of US operations doesn't seem unfathomable.
by tengwar2 | 2025-04-09 15:06:30+00:00
I stopped going when they introduced fingerprinting. This is not just a point of principle. While it is not known whether fingerprints are unique (as is often claimed), it is known that the information that is stored about fingerprints and which is used as the basis for matching records is not unique. The equivalent of hash collisions exist. Fingerprints are great as corroborative evidence, but if they are used as the means to find a suspect, you don't want your fingerprints in the system when Cletus Thugfester (the actual perpetrator) has matching prints that are not in the system. Far too likely that you'd get hauled across the Atlantic on this basis, then have to deal with the "justice" system over there.
by clodushid | 2025-04-09 15:07:01+00:00
The primary architect of trumps tariff strategy in his first and second term is Peter Navarro. If you want to understand the tariffs today, just go read one of his many books. His goals are pretty simple:

reindustriaize America

No more free trade

China is evil and the worlds enemy

It should be no surprise to anyone observing trump since he took office that the end goal was always to decouple from China.
by simonw | 2025-04-09 15:07:18+00:00
I think part of it is that many people hadn't yet cottoned on to how powerful the LLM+tools pattern has got.

A lot of the MCP buzz is more "wow, you can give an LLM access to custom tools and it can take actions on your behalf!" - if MCP is the first time you've truly understood that, I can see why you'd be very excited about it.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-09 15:07:28+00:00
I really like the implied general principle of the wall kick - if the user tries to do an action in a state that doesn't allow it, if there's something that's useful and pretty close, do that instead.

For instance, I'm building a tree editor with vim movement keys, and I found that a "j" that brings me up to the first child or next sibling node is strictly more useful than a "j" that only descends to children and a "l" that only goes to the next sibling.

Obviously, you have to be very careful to avoid introducing footguns, but the idea of "don't dogmatically adhere to operation semantics" is good.
by taeric | 2025-04-09 15:07:44+00:00
Getting used to browsing info pages in Emacs is something that is rather nice. You can do similar with man pages, there. Often times, it will let you jump directly to the source code of includes and such, if you want to take a peak at the actual code.

To that end, I fully agree with the idea. The richness of existing man pages is far nicer than many people seem to realize.

I do find a bit of dismay at the folks that want to ditch some of that richness and move to markdown or similar. That lets you layout some things fine, I think. I am 100% convinced that as you try to get all of the linking and general semantics of the existing solution done, you will find that you have added a lot of "schema" expectations to markdown that isn't there by default. And then you will start to build "markdown schema" tools to check that what you have fits some standards. And then...

Seriously, just look at a lot of the data that moved to JSON from XML. I saw they are trying to add namespaces to JSON in some projects. Truly terrifying to see people slowly and poorly add the features of the more complicated thing they avoided the first time around.
by epolanski | 2025-04-09 15:08:54+00:00
For me what has helped is to realize the triggers that make me distracted which is why I emphasized the emotional part.

I tend to distract myself under stress/boredom e.g., when I realize this is happening I get back to working and resist the urge of distracting.

In time, you get better, you need to train it till it starts being more natural.
by HankB99 | 2025-04-09 15:09:31+00:00
Will I be struck down or downvoted into oblivion if I mention man2html? Definitely not light weight since it also installs Apache, but I do like to view man pages in the browser. I think 'python3 -m http.server' could be substituted for the server and perform well enough for a single user system.

It's unfortunate that Markdown isn't better standardized so it could be extended to better meet the needs for man pages. (Do we need a new standard to rule them all? Yes, I'm thinking of the XKCD comic.)
by vessenes | 2025-04-09 15:10:28+00:00
One big area the last two years has been algorithmic improvements feeding hardware improvements. Supercomputer folks use f64 for everything, or did. Most training was done at f32 four years ago. As algo teams have shown fp8 can be used for training and inference, hardware has updated to accommodate, yielding big gains.

NB: Hobbyist, take all with a grain of salt
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-09 15:10:31+00:00
> While I don't love Dollar General or shop there very often, I have a hard time understanding why it's a "swindle."

In the case of Dollar General specifically, it is literally a swindle, with high levels of violations of deceptive pricing laws (higher prices at checkout that marked) — and which has followed up on those by removing customer-facing POS screens in many stors, high levels of weights and measures violations, and — swindling a different side of the community — labor and occupational safety violations.
by jackb4040 | 2025-04-09 15:10:56+00:00
Best comment from last time this got posted:

I kept on reading expecting to see motion prediction, multiversion, or similar given the name and focus on games, but no. This is a totally normal database, designed for low latency and with support for WASM stored procedures. You can host your own server or they will rent you one. Don't get me wrong, this looks very nice. It looks like a solid building block for persistent worlds in multiplayer games. You'll just have to do your lag masking netcode yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593913
by tim333 | 2025-04-09 15:11:15+00:00
Well that's one take on it. From the western perspective Taiwan was part of China and when the communists overthrew the government in the mainland with military force it retreated to Taiwan. Now Taiwan is effectively an independent democracy and the commies want to overthrow its government militarily against the wishes of the locals as usual. The world's democratic governments generally oppose the overthrow of democratic governments by dictators who want to grab some place by killing the locals.

A civilized compromise might be a union like the EU with both governments continuing on an equal basis.
by observationist | 2025-04-09 15:11:28+00:00
The supply chain vulnerability in any extension is obvious. The problems with telemetry - any at all - are wide ranging and it's crazy to me that people don't see this.

Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.

For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."

Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.

The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.

This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.

I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.

We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-09 15:11:29+00:00
I think the problem with trying to hand-create symbolic rules for AI is that things like natural language, and the real world, are messy. Even with fuzzy rules you are never going to be able to accurately capture all the context dependencies and nuances, which may anyways be dynamic. Learning from real world data is the only realistic approach, although I don't think language models are the answer either - you need a system that is continually learning and correcting it's own errors.

CYC was an interesting experiment though. Even though it might have been expected to be brittle due to the inevitable knowledge gaps/etc, it seems there was something more fundamentally wrong with the approach for it not to have been more capable. An LLM could also be regarded as an expert system of sorts (learning its own rules from the training data), but some critical differences are perhaps that the LLM's rules are as much about recognizing context for when to apply a rule as what the rule itself is doing, and the rules are generative rather than declarative - directly driving behavior rather than just deductive closure.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-09 15:11:33+00:00
> I don't know if increased volume will decrease the prices by much, they're only higher than premium imports by a little bit.

I don't think its reasonable to expect lower prices for domestic production at all, because the demand for domestic products is only going up (from people that used to buy Vietnamese Nikes).

Personally I think the whole tariff experiment is predictably going to fail, because "increased self sufficiency" does not buy you anything, and at some point people are just gonna push back politically if the cost increases get too bad.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 15:11:43+00:00
FYI for readers, nearly the entire "coaching industry" is a decentralized pyramid scheme siphoning money out of people desperate for an escape from ordinary employment, but without the wits or knowledge to find and execute on a reasonable path to that, by convincing them to first pay for coaching, then to become a coach, at which point of course you need even more coaching...

Very nearly the only ones who make a go of it, do so by becoming predators themselves. There's nowhere near enough actual demand for this "coaching" (which is largely offered by people who have zero expertise in their "coaching" topic) to support the huge number of people trying to do this.

It's also largely women, preying on other women while promising empowerment and freedom. Super gross.

Weird, weird world HN may not be aware of if they've not gone looking (and if you're male, you've probably not seen it marketed at you nearly as much as women do)
by singhrac | 2025-04-09 15:12:00+00:00
I'm having a bit of a Gell-Mann moment here - I'm hearing the exact opposite from every residential and C&I installer I talk to, that solar installations are booming right now.

There are very few states in the US where net metering doesn't exist, with California having the NBT (and Arizona and Utah something similar iirc), and Alabama, South Dakota, Tennessee, Idaho, and Texas all have utility-set forms of net metering. Just because California has phased it out and it's a sunny state doesn't mean you can't install a solar roof in Massachusetts and benefit.

The cost of panels is dirt cheap (even with tariffs). You don't need energy storage if you pay $100/month in energy costs, just offset that. Home Depot will install it if you want!
by zie | 2025-04-09 15:12:07+00:00
VMS systems give you literal decades of uptime. Google, Amazon and other large providers regularly have outages, all the time. They are usually small in duration and localized.

They are completely different mental models and ways of thinking about the problem of reliability and uptime.

VMS(and IBM/360 and other large compute systems) will almost certainly give you stronger uptime guarantees than any modern compute stack, but almost nobody needs uptimes measured in literal decades.

The Hyperscaler/TOP500 computing needs are not optimized for reliability in the same ways OpenVMS does.
by alibrarydweller | 2025-04-09 15:12:19+00:00
The tension this article writes about can be expressed to a tech audience as a compression problem.

Dollar General wins out on low prices - essentially compressing their value prop onto a single dimension, prices. They won't do the Strong Towns things like sponsor a park or thoughtfully curate what they sell to fit community needs. There's no button to press in a DG that says "sell more eggplants please".

The value of a small scale community business is many things on different axes, of which delivering goods for money is one. Much like when you compress a jpeg for size at the expense of image quality, you can optimize for one thing to the total exclusion of others.

For a customer at the till it's totally reasonable to think on that one axis, but it's important that there be voices tasked with appreciating the whole. It's a need of society to think of what's a better lossless algorithm so that we can efficiently enjoy the benefits of all dimensions.