MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-04 13:47:16+00:00
> Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs.

Even if it did, is it even desirable?

Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.

The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.

The US, being the most advanced economy in the world, transitioned a long time ago into a finance and service economy. It's kind of fascinating (viewing from the outside) that it want to revert to a more rudimentary economy, and there are people applauding that.
by dagw | 2025-04-04 13:47:48+00:00
induction stoves are more expensive

Not by a lot. At least here in Sweden the cheapest induction stovetop from a brand I somewhat trust is maybe $150 more than the cheapest ceramic stovetop from a similar brand. Once you move into the midrange, the price difference is virtually gone. As to cookware, unless you use mostly copper cookware, I found that virtually all my pots and pans were compatible.

If you're thinking about induction and want to test your pans, grab a magnet and touch it to the bottom of your pan. If it sticks, the pan will work.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-04 13:47:49+00:00
Preach!

How is it that my FF preference (something like 'Always show scrollbars') is regularly just ignored.

I want my scrollbars! And I wat `em fat and in my UI's color scheme!

And why the HELL would a web designer think this is a good idea. Maybe their beret and hipster pants are too tight?

Thanks for being here for my rant. I owe you one :-)
by docdeek | 2025-04-04 13:47:52+00:00
> To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.

Google suggests that line would be about 127 miles long, or about 200 kilometers. That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
by latexr | 2025-04-04 13:47:54+00:00
Obviously it’s referring to its reactivation.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/20/three-mi...

What the heck did you think that line meant? How would a reactor not producing power be used to power anything?

But even if it were unable to provide any power, which would have made absolutely no sense, it still wouldn’t have supported your point. It’s obvious the article is talking about the specific case of AI and not tech hysterias in general.
by tekla | 2025-04-04 13:47:56+00:00
The fact that the average score for Harvard and similar for other elite colleges for the ACT is 34-35 means that the national average is worthless for the purposes of elite colleges. Majority of people who would even bother to apply for them are basically perfect across the board grades wise, so its worthless to brag about it.

Bar making exams harder, the only other way is subjective methods. I detest subjective methods, but making exams harder is very unpopular
by crazygringo | 2025-04-04 13:48:49+00:00
I'm so tired of this caveat.

It's generally pretty obvious if the explanation makes sense. And you can locate the original paper(s) as well to verify.

And you know what? My PhD friends get things wrong all the time too. I need to verify what they say as well.

"This is not a guarantee"? You're right. Nothing is a guarantee, but a lot of things are awfully helpful.
by cmiles74 | 2025-04-04 13:48:59+00:00
AccuWeather has been lobbying to remove weather data from the public view for years. The idea here is that AccuWeather will have access to this data and then sell forecasts to the rest of the country.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/05/16/plan-to-privatize...

Trump's nominee to run the NOAA? The CEO of AccuWeather!
by light_hue_1 | 2025-04-04 13:49:32+00:00
For the same reason that Americans and Canadians feel so poor. And the same reason why Trump is in office.

A total failure of the field of economics.

Just like economists insisted that the economy is doing badly because of vibes, they also insist that many people are part of the middle class based on an arbitrary threshold that isn't what it used to be.

Housing, energy, and education have increased astronomically compared to 30 years ago.

The cost of housing doubled in 10 years in my city. All while the schools got worse and the cost of college is astronomical. The cost of childcare doubled in 10 years as well. Energy bills also doubled in just 4 years.

What used to be a great stable income, we're even above the official line for what counts as middle class, is now just scraping by.

Being middle class used to mean that you were financially secure and could say have kids and a house. By that metric many people have fallen out of the middle class.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-04-04 13:49:54+00:00
I can't keep the gens straight because I bought a late-model right after a new gen was released. It's definitely not the 9th because lenovo basically said "don't buy this", and it's the model before they added the awful external camera bump for a webcam I'd use 2x a year.

Ironically, battery life while actively using it is decent, not as good as the 4th gen, but I could squeeze 8 hours out of it. I use whatever cpu throttling utility that lives under the default KDE power controls. I trust it works because compilation times are quartered when you go from power saving to high performance.

Most of my complaints revolve around the fact I can't enable legacy sleep modes that actually save power. I blame microsoft for pushing their new sleep modes that mostly benefits windows.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-04 13:50:12+00:00
I can't think of any typical case where you're destructuring arrays in React without const/let.

The only time you start a line with a delimiter in JS that I can think of is a rare case like `;[1,2,3].forEach(...)` which also isn't something you do in React.

While I still hate semis, these days my approach to formatting is just `echo {} > .prettierrc` and using the defaults. It's a nice balance where I never write a semicolon myself, and I never have to dick around with config.
by gghhzzgghhzz | 2025-04-04 13:50:29+00:00
Everything that provides any service or assistance to normal life has been sold off and rented back to us at enormous cost, often with many of extra financial scalping included in the systems we are forced to rely on. And a percentage of the extracted wealth is used to push political and public narrative to incentivise the selling off more.

Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care.

And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives.

A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens.

We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year.

Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems.

I could go on.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-04 13:50:49+00:00
It feels perverse to say, but I feel like the UK doesn't have enough income inequality.

The effective pay of a person making £80k per year in London isn't really all that different from a minimum wage worker in social housing. Especially when things like child benefit, student loans, and potential council tax reductions are involved.

I think it's better to be at the top of the working class than the bottom of the middle class.
by a4isms | 2025-04-04 13:50:57+00:00
I suggest the simplest explanation of how Trump is different from other felons is right there in Wilhoit's observation on conservatism:

"In-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it, alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it."

He may have been convicted, but he faced no consequences. He was not bound by the law, so not only did his convictions and investigations not deter him, the lack of consequences emboldened him.
by tirant | 2025-04-04 13:51:08+00:00
Not only that. By increasing income taxes so steeply the State is incurring in perverse incentives or negative incentives, so people decide to not work a 20% more time to earn 20% more if that extra money is going to be taxed at a 50% rate.

Perverse incentives are an absolute disaster for the economy of our countries. Recently the socialist party approved in Germany an income limit for parents to receive income replacement benefits when being on parental leave. What was the result? From my group of friends in all cases the lesser earner from the marriage (the woman most of the time) has stopped working in order to not reach the income limit. This results in less income tax collection for the State, a poorer family and a less productive company. No one wins.
by jcgl | 2025-04-04 13:51:21+00:00
The problem is that it’s _not_ simply data. Definition: is information collected from the world.

This is data from the world that has altered and augmented with stuff from a model. The informational content has been altered by stuff not from the world. Therefore it’s no longer data, according to the above definition.

That isn’t to say that it can’t be useful, or anything like that. But it’s _not_ information collected from the world. And that’s why people who care about science and a strict definition of data would be offended by calling this a dataset.
by Nursie | 2025-04-04 13:51:28+00:00
> Councils expanded the number of SEND pupils eligible for free school transport, increasing spending from £9m to £20m - how is that being poor?

Because the money is sucked out of the council coffers and they then can't provide a lot of the basics. It's not an improvement in quality for people who are, for instance, not SEND pupils. The point being that more and more expenses like this appear each year and then the budget is gone when it comes to looking after the library, fixing potholes etc, Small every day things that make the country look and feel like it's functioning are ignored until everywhere just feels a bit grim and broken.
by goatlover | 2025-04-04 13:51:54+00:00
Winston Duarte was the real mastermind with Marco being his tool, if you've read the books. The show hinted at it, but didn't cover the last 3 books. Duarte was using Inaros to buy time to build up Laconia with alien weapons, while Earth/Mars dealt with the Free Navy and recovered from the attacks.
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2025-04-04 13:51:56+00:00
>>>saying the TikTok ban is detrimental to US-based big tech?

Not op, but yes.

>>>Seems like a forced sale is beneficial to them.

Short term. Long term you are establishing a precedent that you can intervene and take away the power of any large tech player. If it can happen to tiktok it can happen to others.

Im not against tikton ban, but im against it in its current form , since its not for the right reason. (China plays unfair with us corps, we should reciprocate our treatment of their own in our borders. The law instead claims some US patriot act natsec prerogative bs)
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-04 13:52:01+00:00
The thing Minecraft did alright was to not actually try and host their own servers, thus not being responsible for what people did in-game online.

But also, MC is simple enough that "a dick" is five blocks in a particular organization... and it quickly becomes boring, not to mention uncreative. Building dicks isn't as fun as Everything Else in the game.
by mritchie712 | 2025-04-04 13:52:13+00:00
I've used Numbers as my todo list for about a decade now. I've tried other things, but I've always come back to it. I have a table with:

* name

* priority

* DUE

* status

* notes

And a formula that sorts based on due / priority. Typing "done" in status removes it with a filter.
by skydhash | 2025-04-04 13:52:19+00:00
How much time do we need?

Industrial invention used to be judged by actual usefulness. If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish. Same with computing. But now we're two years after the first release to the general public of LLMs and no one can provide an actual, reliable use case for it. Instead, it's mostly about destroying values, hindering workflows, and crippling the internet.
by Leszek | 2025-04-04 13:52:21+00:00
FWIW, I think the parent meant "function scoping vs lexical scoping" rather than "block scoping vs lexical scoping". You're correct that function scoping is technically a form of lexical scoping (where the scope is the function), but if you want to be _really_ pedantic, the ecma262 considers let/const to be "lexical binding"[0] as opposed to var being a "variable declaration"[1], where the former declares in the "Lexical Environment" while the latter declares in the "Variable Environment". These happen to be the same environment record on function entry.

[0] https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-let-and-const-declarations [1] https://tc39.es/ecma262/#sec-variable-statement
by n4r9 | 2025-04-04 13:52:35+00:00
Intuitively, the richer and more productive a country becomes, the better care they can take of the populace. Education, transport, welfare etc... . Yet it feels like the opposite is happening. We're seeing transport costs and tuition fees endlessly rising, cuts to disability payments, and broken promises to lift caps on welfare. All in the name of "stimulating the economy".
by nine_zeros | 2025-04-04 13:53:28+00:00
> I mean, genuinely, the problem here is not that Trump is a convicted criminal. There are many people who are "convicted felons" who are far more ethical, intelligent, and possessed of better leadership qualities than he is.

Convicted criminal + blatant lies = disregard for society, disregard for people, disregard for rules/norms/laws. It all adds up to who he is and what he values and represents.

NOBODY should be surprised at this administration's disregard for society. You should be actually surprised if he does anything good/lawful.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-04 13:53:32+00:00
> Why is the country being destroyed like this?

Long story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Costs

That's a start.

And a rise to dominance of populist conspiratorial thinking. ContraPoints had a good intro video about it recently.
by bigboateng | 2025-04-04 13:53:49+00:00
Hey HN,

I've just released BrowserState, an open-source TypeScript/JavaScript library that provides persistent memory for browser automation stacks. It lets you seamlessly persist and share browser sessions across local storage, Redis, AWS S3, and Google Cloud Storage. It's immediately compatible with popular automation tools like Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and AI browser agents that expose userDataDir.

Why I built BrowserState: I've been doing browser automation for over 7 years, starting during the YC batch of 2019 when tooling was minimal and learning often meant hitting painful roadblocks. Sessions frequently broke, authentication was fragile, and bot detection was relentless. Now that browser automation is widespread, I wanted to tackle one of the biggest recurring issues: reliably preserving browser states across runs and environments.

How BrowserState helps:

Persistent Sessions: Fully restore browser contexts including cookies, local storage, IndexedDB, service worker caches, and extensions.

Bot Detection Bypass: Maintain consistent fingerprints and browser identities, drastically reducing bot detection risks.

Easy Onboarding: Zero setup—just mount your state and automate immediately.

Scalable & Portable: Easily share sessions across servers, local development, and cloud infrastructure without vendor lock-in.

The Redis backend just launched and is stable for production use. AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage are also stable, but I'd love your feedback from real-world applications.

Quick start:

npm install browserstate

Example (Redis):

import { BrowserState } from 'browserstate';

const browserState = new BrowserState({ userId: 'user123', storageType: 'redis', redisOptions: { host: 'localhost', port: 6379 } });

// mount user session const userDataDir = await browserState.mount('session123');

// Use with any browser automation framework // Example with Playwright: const browser = await chromium.launchPersistentContext(userDataDir, { headless: false });

// When you're done, save changes await browser.close();

// Save changes back to Redis, GCS, etc await browserState.unmount();

BrowserState is fully open-source (MIT licensed), immediately usable, and requires no signup.

GitHub: https://github.com/browserstate/browserstate

I'd appreciate your feedback, questions, and suggestions—thanks!
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-04 13:53:53+00:00
As one example: 10 years ago we had winters with typical snowfall and summers that weren't constantly in the extremes. 10 years from now we'll have some other notable difference that is noticeable in everyday life, particularly given the disappearing groundwater around the globe (we can even set aside the guaranteed continued loss of biodiversity) and rising ocean temperatures.

We won't be in a post-apocalyptic hellscape in 10 years if that's your measuring stick for negative effects.
by mjburgess | 2025-04-04 13:54:04+00:00
So if your point is an LLM is something like a person kept in a coma inside solitary confinement -- sure? But I don't believe that's where we set the bar for art: we arent employing comatose inmates to do anything.

> I generally consider these two to be the same thing.

Sure words themselves bend and break under the weight of hype. Novelty is randomness. Everything is a work of art. For a work of art to be non-novel it can only incorporate randomness.

The fallacies of ambiguity abound to the point where speaking coherently disappears completely.

An artist who finds a cave half-collapsed for the first time has an opportunity to render that novel physical state of the universe into art. Every moment which passes has a near infinite amount of such novel circumstances.

Since an LLM cannot do that, we must wreck and ruin our ability to describe this plain and trivial situation. Poke our eyes and skewer our brains.
by itishappy | 2025-04-04 13:54:18+00:00
> Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex harmony part would be distorted together.

I'll fight this by agreeing with you. Saturation (a form of mild distortion) on the master is what I like to refer to as "the shit" because a nearly imperceptible amount really makes a track cohere. It takes a super light touch though, but I'd bet (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.
by sparkle_fish | 2025-04-04 13:54:33+00:00
Yes, why not? To the best of my knowledge Norway is still thriving. Ideally more countries would get on board with such ideas and there will be fewer palpable places for them to relocate to.

From the article, “The model in Norway is that everyone should contribute relevant to ability and therefore those that have a greater ability to pay taxes, should pay a little more.” This seems more than fair, particularly while failing tax systems are leading to unprecedented levels of inequality.
by _verandaguy | 2025-04-04 13:54:40+00:00
I think for many of us saying this out loud (or typing it out on sites like this) is a coping mechanism.

During Trump 1, there were some adults in the room -- congress seemed to be less complacent, the cabinet appointees had more independent (and more pragmatic) judgement, and the scale of purges across the government felt like nothing compared to what's currently going on.

There's none of that now. Congress is complacent and arguably complicit in an ongoing constitutional crisis, the admin is just breaking a number of laws without even putting in the work to have plausible deniability, and with every passing day the corruption's growing to levels that many of us who've been born and raised in the modern economic west just haven't seen in a few generations.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-04 13:54:44+00:00
> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow.

The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
by pj_mukh | 2025-04-04 13:54:58+00:00
"would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans."

I'm tired of this line. We are animals first and foremost. Complicated animals, but animals nonetheless. We will never consistently be this. The best of us will try but most of us will animalistically react to the incentives in front of us in selfish ways.

We are better of thinking of systems and the incentives they create than hopelessly waiting for us to become not animals. Aligning good goals with personal profit is the name of the game.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-04 13:55:18+00:00
> NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore?

You are not thinking far ahead enough. This is just the first step.

Step 1: these Amazon and Google cloud contracts are extraneous; let's cancel. The public can always find an alternate way of getting the research data.

Step 2: the number of times such research data is accessed has drastically decreased, suggesting that the public has not found them useful; let's cancel the research projects.

Step 3: these researchers aren't doing any research any more; they don't seem to have any work output; let's fire them for cause.