MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elmerfud | 2025-04-29 14:23:19+00:00
It makes complete sense to show this. Visitors from other countries are often shocked when they shop here because they see the price of goods on the shelf and then get to the checkout and find out they're having to pay more because taxes are added on top of that price. The reason for doing that is to make it painfully obvious how much tax you're paying.

A tariff is just a tax placed on the other end. It makes complete sense to see all of the government middlemen getting a cut when you're simply trying to purchase a product. The idea is people should be demanding more from the taxes that they're paying or being more involved in the electoral process to get people into office that provide them the representation they want. It hasn't really worked with taxes that get added on, so I suspect that this will have a short-term outcry and then it will become the new normal.

We collectively have such short-term memories that the new normal becomes something we accept and do not question anymore.
by daveoc64 | 2025-04-29 14:23:24+00:00
>I never understood why the HTTP Do Not Track header wasn’t used to signal cookie preferences.

You aren't really giving preferences related to cookies with these "cookie banners".

The laws in the EU require companies to get user permission for certain types of data processing.

Cookies may be involved in that, but they may not be.

Browser features like local storage or session storage would also be covered, and a lot of processing done server-side without the use of cookies requires permission too.

A single indicator like the DNT header or the newer GPC header can't cover all of this, so it isn't suitable for complying with the ePrivacy Directive or GDPR.
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by pluslemon | 2025-04-29 14:23:50+00:00
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by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-04-29 14:24:14+00:00
You may be missing the "and be added to the final price" bit, or interpreting it differently than it may have been intended.

In European countries with VAT, the price on the item / shelf tag / whatever includes the VAT. You don't need to remember what jurisdiction you're in and thus what percentage of sales tax you need to add on to the displayed price to know how much you'll be asked to pay when you check out. If the tag says 12 euro, 12 euro is exactly what you're paying at the register.

Sure, in the US, your receipt will tell you how much sales tax you paid. But that is information you're not given until the point of checkout. Additionally you may not have the explicit tax amount presented to you til you receive that post-sale receipt, you may have to do your own subtraction of the listed price(s) from the total price to determine how much tax you're paying before you commit to the purchase.
by M3L0NM4N | 2025-04-29 14:24:16+00:00
I think Amazon (not Bezos) is relatively conservative in the space of "trying new things", but I'd argue when they have done it, they have a higher success rate than the other mega caps (excluding Apple I'd say). Somehow though, big tech can't seem to spend most of their cash doing it (insert that Thiel quote here).
by doctorpangloss | 2025-04-29 14:24:30+00:00
The kind of person who wants to pay nothing for advice wasn’t going to hire a lawyer or an accountant anyway.

This fact is so simple and yet here we are having arguments about it. To me people are conflating an economic assessment - whose jobs are going to be impacted and how much - with an aspirational one - which of your acquaintances personally could be replaced by an AI, because that would satisfy a beef.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-29 14:24:31+00:00
Emerging markets with next to nill infrastructure and high practical barriers to terrestrial infrastructure due to no roads / legal protection or presence of easements / people will rip fiber right out of the ditch to sell for $0.10 -- I've seen people in developing nations spend their entire month's paycheck on a cell-phone top off.

They might do the same for satellite internet.
by jerf | 2025-04-29 14:24:36+00:00
I did the tree just to match the author's example. I would agree that a bespoke iterator for breadth- and depth-first iteration for any given tree is probably a better way to go. As long as we're in a language like Python, build in something that allows you to examine a branch and decline to descend into it while you're at it.

I don't think this is a large problem in practice because you shouldn't be using dozens of tree types in a given code base, so adding iterators to a tree is no big deal. In general there aren't enough types of iteration available to a given data structure that you need to describe how to iterate on it from the "outside". (Generally when you are doing that, it's too non-trivial to fit into this pattern anyhow; see the Visitor pattern in general.) This strikes me as maybe the sort of default tool you might slap in a library somewhere, but it should be a niche tool. If you're using it all the time you're probably doing something wrong. By default your data structures should be providing iteration packaged with them and it should generally be what you need. And your language should support aborting iteration, in whatever that looks like normally. I'm not sure I know a language that doesn't, it's a fairly basic element of iterator support when you get into implementation.

There are also many cases where a tree iterator will perform significantly better, including CPython. I don't have enough experience with PyPy to know if it could inline the Tree.left and Tree.right calls down to zero penalty at JIT time. Rust and C++ and the other static languages with sophisticated compilers might be able to get that down to fully inlined and zero-cost, but even if they can it's probably better not to push that on to the optimizer as the optimizers will eventually give up if this is composed with enough other stuff. Better to just have an efficient implementation in the first place.
by mcoliver | 2025-04-29 14:24:46+00:00
Love the idea. I wish chrome extensions had a more granular permissions structure and/or reminders/security checkups on installed extensions and their permissions.

As it is the content scripts manifest permission for https://*/* for content.js is always so jarring to see. For those that don’t know this allows the extension to run that script on every site you visit after clicking accept ONCE when you install the extension. That means it can see financial info, health info, legal info, your diary, etc…

Now this makes sense from a usability perspective (I never have to see a cookie banner ever again!), but the author could change content.js at any time and the extension would continue to run without prompting the user.

This is not an attack on you Mitch! It sure looks like you’re trying to provide value in this world rather than take it. Rather it’s an attack on Google’s extension security model I’m really shocked google has not taken a more careful and nuanced stance to protecting users from a security standpoint.

I write this as a fellow chrome extensions dev. I wish I had better more granular permissions structures to protect my users and give them more information about what I am requesting and why along with regular reminders so they can make informed decisions about what they want to share.
by pandemic_region | 2025-04-29 14:25:37+00:00
This 1000 times. It takes courage to open up to mistakes. As a relatively young industry, we have a lot to learn still to move away from the instinctive blaming culture surrounding such failures. In this case, it's only a file being downloaded a couple of times, nobody died or got injured.

For those interested in this topic, and how other industries (e.g. Airline industry) deal with learning from or preventing failure: Sidney Dekker is the authority in this domain. Things like Restorative Just Culture, or Field guide to understanding human error could one day apply to our industry as well: https://sidneydekker.com/books.
by deskamess | 2025-04-29 14:26:05+00:00
I was in a situation where I had to guess. It would be nice if there was a hint (after a successful guess) on why that box was 'ready for solve'. i.e., what other reveals can lead to this box being ready for a Innocent/Guilty choice.

I did enjoy the game though. Re-reading the clues is helpful - reinitialize your context window!
by wisty | 2025-04-29 14:26:45+00:00
Tools can either increase or decrease employment.

Imagine if a tool made content writers 10x as productive. You might hire more, not less, because they are now better value! You might eventually realise you spent too much, but this will come later.

ADAIK no company I know of starts a shiny new initiative by firing, they start by hiring then cutting back once they have their systems in place or hit a ceiling. Even Amazon runs projects fat then makes them lean AFAIK.

There's also pent up demand.

You never expect a new labour saving device to cost jobs while the project managers are in the export building phase.
by mapt | 2025-04-29 14:26:53+00:00
Most of the "Ghost Cities" that you read about ten years ago are now normal cities full of people. The Chinese innovation was building the cities before you moved people there, "opening" the city empty and then watching it slowly fill up with residential and commercial over a decade or two. This was always the plan. In the US, our current plan for cities is "Don't build them at all". In the US media we obsessively create headlines over Those Wacky Chinese And Their Weird Things, but we come up well short in this particular comparison.

For historical finance-culture reasons (they're reflexive savers, and there aren't many other investments allowed), China does have a lot of real estate investment relative to population, even considering their rapid urbanization, and not all of it is looking to be sustainable; In retrospect there's been a bit of a bubble. But >90% of it? There are hundreds of third/fourth-tier cities housing hundreds of millions of people that might have drawn fire originally under "Ghost City" theory.

In a worst-case scenario, what Chinese people get instead of a return on their nest egg investment is inexpensive houses/apartments with more living space, and maybe the option to support themselves without a DINK family.
by ajross | 2025-04-29 14:27:12+00:00
> Spending isn't producing.

Now you've ruled out lots of other stuff though. Is loaning money "production?" Is spending for services (like, software development!) "production"? Is investing in assets like real estate "production"? All those activities create wealth!

Now you've got a definition where only primary production, like farms and construction and mining, have any value. And that's silly too.

No, all economic activity creates wealth. The idea of "spending" being separate from "producing" only holds at the microeconomic level where you are playing a zero sum game with a single bank balance.
by coldpie | 2025-04-29 14:27:26+00:00
Yeah but the question is how you, as a user, should best protect yourself. I'm saying clicking the "No" provides no advantage over using a browser that just protects you from tracking by default. Then it doesn't matter whether the website is following the law or whether the EU (where I don't live) will enforce the law or change it in the future or whatever.

> Now, that won't work for all and everything, it never does. There will always be malicious, scammy, malware, criminal and illegal webservices around.

Yeah, exactly. So if I have to protect myself from those websites anyway, I may as well apply the same protections to all websites. Clicking the "No" does nothing for me.
by hollerith | 2025-04-29 14:27:29+00:00
Yeah, well, I for one trust HN to perform that function more than I do Twitter. Specifically, Twitter is more likely to delete old tweets out of a profit motive or an ideological or propaganda motive.

Parenthetically, a solution that relies on a blockchain can be much better than either. Blockchain tech does have some merit although the world doesn't need hundreds of blockchains: a few will do (and the official git repo for Linux could probably suffice as one of them).
by ave_b_2011 | 2025-04-29 14:27:33+00:00
It’s important to note the western myth of “ghost cities”. It goes that the cities were built and were never intended to be, and forever will be empty and unpopulated.

It’s hard to imagine in the west just how fast china is urbanizing- and the immense scale that the government is preemptively tackling a housing crisis.

GDP is it a useful measure? Maybe? Maybe not? What is your argument and how does the GDP numbers support it?
by eminence32 | 2025-04-29 14:28:21+00:00
> Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day.

I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California
by throwup238 | 2025-04-29 14:28:29+00:00
Amazon AGL handles direct to warehouse shipping for importers. Amazon won’t be the importer of record for you (the IOR is the one responsible for making sure tariffs are paid) but since they’re the ones handling the goods at the port, they need all the documentation from the IOR which will include tariffs paid.

It doesn’t apply to parts imported and assembled in the US before going to the Amazon fulfillment warehouses, but it does work for their direct to warehouse imports.
by lucasoshiro | 2025-04-29 14:28:47+00:00
This is heavy biased to C++, which is a language that already has too many features that people just want to use. This is a very specific case to be placed as a language feature, and could be just a lib.

If this becomes a C++ feature, imagine how many data structures we would need to support?

Many other languages, specially the FP languages, allow to do that as a library. Even the languages that are only inspired by FP. Example, Ruby:

class BinTree include Enumerable def initialize v, l, r @v, @l, @r = v, l, r end def each &block @l.each(&block) unless @l.nil? yield @v @r.each(&block) unless @r.nil? end end

Using the Enumerable mixin includes many FP-based methods, such as map, filter and reduce by only defining each, which in this case is DFS.

Then we can proceed to define a binary tree:

tree = BinTree.new( 1, BinTree.new( 2, BinTree.new(4, nil, nil), BinTree.new(5, nil, nil) ), BinTree.new( 3, BinTree.new(6, nil, nil), BinTree.new(7, nil, nil), ) )

Iterate over all the elements:

tree.each{|v| puts v}

Iterate over the even elements:

tree.filter{|v| v.even?}.each{|v| puts v}

Stop iteration when finding a value:

tree.each do |v| break if v == 1 puts v end

And so on. The same can be done in Python, Kotlin and many others.
by doodpants | 2025-04-29 14:28:49+00:00
> Flowcode is a visual programming platform that tries to combine the best of both worlds (code and visual). Over the years I found myself repeatedly drawing architectures and logic. It was always my dream to just press “run” instead of having to write them in code afterwards. But none of the visual tools I found were flexible and transparent enough for building real products.

Sounds intriguing! ...so why doesn't the website actually say any of this?

When a person visits the site, the only things they can do are log in, sign up, or "get started", without any indication of what they're even getting started with. Can I please know what the product/service is before I have to decide whether I want to try it out?
by rayiner | 2025-04-29 14:28:52+00:00
> I'm not saying these things aren't true

But it still seems like you’re disagreeing with my conclusion?

Yes, consumers love cheap goods. And businesses love to make short term profits even if it means selling out the future by gutting American companies and turning them into mere distributors for Chinese companies. That’s why you need the government to intervene to change peoples’ behaviors.

There is a reason we tax cigarettes and other things that are bad for us. We do it to change people’s behaviors, to get them to consume less of the bad thing. Yes, like with tariffs, it makes the bad thing more expensive. That’s the whole point! Amazon is a bad company with a bad business model, and I don’t actually care who is the one who takes them out.
by abrax3141 | 2025-04-29 14:29:17+00:00
SHRDLU was written in Lisp, albeit a pre-CL list. So it was quite easy to bring up by writing macros that make CL work like older Lisps. We did the same thing with Bernie Cosell's ELIZA:

https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/eliza-clones

Although IPL is a direct Lisp predecessor, it can't be easily mapped to Lisp. Indeed, Lisp and IPL-V were contemporaneous for about 5 years, but Lisp was so much simpler and more elegant that it rapidly supplanted IPL. As a result, Ed Feigenbaum and I are probably the only living person who know IPL (and I only barely know it as I just learned it in the past few months!), whereas Lisp has been essentially endemic for 60 years! (I'm hoping I'm wrong that Ed and I are the only folks who know IPL. If you know of a native IPL speaker who I could talk to, I'd love you to DM me!)
by jamil7 | 2025-04-29 14:29:20+00:00
This is kind of my take as well, most places I've worked at including the current place I work have more work than the team can get done. Features and fixes get cut or depriorised all the time to try release at a reasonable cadence. If the product you're selling is software then to me it makes sense that you'd not cut anyone from a software engineering team if your margins suddenly get better via LLM productivity gains. Rather you can argue to even increase a team size because increased velocity is a competitive advantage. On the other hand if you work somewhere where software is not the end product but a support function, you might be seen as a cost centre in which LLM productivity gains could be seen as a means of freezing hiring or reducing headcount.
by berkes | 2025-04-29 14:29:24+00:00
There's proper and good tracking possible just fine.

Tracking to discover latency, errors, weird behaviour, malicious actors and so on.

Tracking to see what content does well and what not.

Tracking to see what rough demographics (mobile, desktop, country, region, time-of-day etc) visit your premises.

E.g. plausible-analytics or even Matomo do a good job at i) keeping the data rough and broad and without any PII, and ii) storing the data on-premise rather than at commercial aggregators who will either re-sell or use it for own services.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 14:29:28+00:00
> Both supply and demand change depending on the price.

But that's a massive oversimplification. It's like saying programming is "just typing". Technically, sure; accurate, no. There's latency in the real world. Bad actors. Information asymmetries. Regulations. Monopolies. Stuff you can't do without and can't even always decline (ambulance ride for an unconscious person). Fake news about a supply crunch changes demand without changing supply for a while.
by tenthirtyam | 2025-04-29 14:29:46+00:00
Thanks for the reply. In the 50Mhz-modulated-50Hz scenario, however, the modulated 50Hz signal doesn't change under load; it has zero inertia (or infinite inertia maybe) because it's electronically generated.

Any individual station that gets out of sync either works hard to catch up, or gets disconnected.

The problem, as I see it, is that the load signal is equal and equivalent to the sync signal and maybe they could be separated. (e.g. the FM modulated signal wouldn't have to be a sine wave, nor would it even have to be 50Hz)

> what if two or more power stations see a low frequency grid and decide to ramp up more generators?

Seems to me it would solve this problem - they both have a single invariant sync signal.

> Connect a stopped, or sufficiently out of phase generator to a full scale power grid and the puny thousands of pounds of metal that make up a generator are going to get ripped apart

Seems to me this problem is solvable with electronics, but I don't know enough to say how much out-of-phase is problematic. What if, as you say, some heavy load is switched on, the local nuclear turbines slow by a fraction for a few 10s of seconds, and so a home PV array starts leading by 0.01Hz (e.g. home PV at 50.00Hz, local power station at 49.99Hz, so after 10s the PV is fully 36º or 0.6rad ahead). Does this result in the inverter (or the small local windfarm) exploding? Is that a realistic scenario?

> there needs to be more communication across the grid than just responding to the locally observed frequency

Precisely - a grid-wide sync signal, modulated at high frequency.
by ajross | 2025-04-29 14:30:12+00:00
> But is a government dollar really as productive as a private sector dollar?

Yes.

What? A dollar is a dollar, duh. If you want to claim otherwise, you're the one who needs to show evidence. Why should the government selling a $1000 bond and spending it on a free gadget for a craven bureaucrat behave any differently than me putting a $1000 iPhone on a credit card? Money is money.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-04-29 14:30:13+00:00
I would be so embarrassed about this bug that I would be terrified to write it up like this. Also admitting that your users were forced to download 10s or 100s of gigabytes of bogus updates nearly continuously. This is the kind of thing that a lot of people would just quietly fix. So kudos (I guess) to blogging about it.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-29 14:30:21+00:00
When my state jacked up fuel taxes a few years ago, some local gas stations started printing the $/gallon that went to taxes on stickers on the pumps. Seems like a good thing: more information is always good, as long as it's correct. Same thing would be true of this tariff info -- good if correct.

It didn't last on the gas pumps, though, because ultimately people don't have a choice -- most have to drive to get to work -- so they get used to it.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-29 14:31:10+00:00
I agree with your insight: the language of morality. This use of the language of morality seems to be a consequence of the 1980s subsumption of the Republican party by the US' evangelical christians, the "moral majority". By capturing the "values voters", the Republican party got its policies blessed or ordained by God. That means Republicans have to frame opposition in moral terms - it is, to them.
by shadygm | 2025-04-29 14:31:11+00:00
Hey! Great question, and thanks for taking a look!

The main idea behind ROSplat is to make it easier to send and visualize Gaussians over the network, especially in robotics applications. For instance, imagine you're running a SLAM algorithm on a mobile robot and generating Gaussians as part of the mapping or localization process. With ROSplat, you can stream those Gaussians via ROS messages and visualize them live on another machine. It’s mostly a visualization tool that usess ROS for communication, making it accessible and convenient for robotics engineers and researchers already working within that ecosystem.

Just to clarify, ROSplat isn’t aiming to be faster than state-of-the-art rendering methods. The actual rendering is done with OpenGL, not ROS, so there’s no performance claim there. ROS is just used for the messaging, which does introduce a bit of overhead, but the benefit is in the ease of integration and live data sharing in robotics setups.

Also, I wrote a simple technical report explaining some things in more detail, you can find it in the repo!

Hope that clears things up a bit!