MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-09 22:52:39+00:00
>> Social security wasn't taken away and probably never will be.

In the US, the "trick" is usually just to extend the age at which you get social security. Life expectancy is not universally equal, they vary widely based on gender, race, economics. For some subsets of our population Social security has essentially be eliminated for half the cohort because it starts past the average life expectancy.

(to be clear, I think this is atrocious)
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-09 22:53:14+00:00
Friend is working on a SaaS startup solo as a non-technical founder. Been building using Replit and Cursor with Claude 3.5 and 3.7 and launched with live customers.

I preface because he's been using AI basically every day to build his SaaS.

His comments today:

> also gemini 2.5 is beating claude
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-09 22:54:12+00:00
This wouldn't be informative as to the effects of fluoride, because the results would be confounded to hell and back. Just to give the most obvious example, the states that go for this are going to be the ones where the legislature is more skeptical of government interventions to improve public health, and that's going to affect outcomes in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with fluoride.
by hermitShell | 2025-04-09 22:54:37+00:00
True, and now I believe China has kept their industrial might while also pursuing higher technology. So they have the mine and the steel plant and the car factory. I recall Musk commenting that through human history, it’s more normal for China to be the most advanced nation on the planet, not the USA. Still, brutal place to live and work. Ultimately you have to offer people a chance at happiness, or else internal failures tend to sabotage all external signs of success.
by tomasol | 2025-04-09 22:54:55+00:00
> do I also need to compile activities to WASM

Yes, currently all activities must conform to the WASI 0.2 standard. This is the simplest for deployment, as you only need the obelisk executable, toml config file. The webhooks, workflows and activities pulled from a OCI registry on startup.

To support native code I plan to add external activities as well, with an interface similar to what Netflix Conductor uses for its workers.

> Finally, do you see the component's interface as the right layer for capturing IO?

An activity must encapsulate something much higher level than a single IO operation. So something like "Configure BGP on a router", "Start a VM" etc. It needs to be able to handle retries and thus be idempotent.

Regarding performance, a workflow execution can call 500-700 child executions serially, or around 1400 child executions concurrently per second.
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-09 22:55:03+00:00
I've also lived in London for 8 years, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here. I made the difficult decision to leave and abandon everything I've built there because I could no longer sustain paying Switzerland-level prices for Eastern European level of quality.

> has London

Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.

> the highest wages in Europe

Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).
by jorvi | 2025-04-09 22:56:09+00:00
Thank you for mentioning AutoEQ, I didn't know about it and it looks like a great resource :)

I wonder why laptops don't come with an internal speaker DSP profile loaded onto the EEPROM. This seems like one of those things that you really just want to do in firmware.

IEMs and headphones come EQed out of the factory AFAIK, but apparently quite poorly. I ran the autoEQ profile on my Moondrop Aria beater IEMs and it both cut through the muddiness and opened up the soundstage quite dramatically.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-09 22:56:19+00:00
> The ART-5 is a mastication simulator that mimics human chewing motions, adapts to food texture changes, and provides immediate, reproducible computerized feedback. FRIL release studies in the chewing simulator used PEB buffer that includes protease inhibitors and not human saliva.

It seems to just be a single line of each type of tooth.. but it does look dog like in profile.

https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.ymthe.2024.12.008/asset/b...
by tastyface | 2025-04-09 22:56:46+00:00
I sometimes fail to understand how a fellow human being can utter this sort of thing and not immediately feel nauseous. Because that’s how I feel just from reading it.

(Especially since many of these fine folks claim to be devout Christians. I guess in their Bible, the Good Samaritan calls ICE Prime to throw the traveler in the back of their on-demand deportation van.)
by aeternum | 2025-04-09 22:59:17+00:00
Yes, the problem is you have more money chasing that same quantity of goods and thus you get inflation.

IMO a better way to achieve the UBI goal is to instead focus on universal basic goods. We're already nearly there with staple foods. For example bulk rice is now so cheap it's basically free. We could do the same with housing via prefab high density similar to Japan (mostly not done because it is illegal in the US). Internet and water is also near zero cost.

You would achieve the goals of UBI good-by-good without the inflation.
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-09 22:59:35+00:00
ok - but.. here in California, look at houses that are 100 years old, then look at the new ones.. sure you can list the improvements in the new ones, on a piece of paper.. the craftsmanship, originality and other intangibles are obviously gone in the modern versions.. not a little bit gone, a lot gone. Let the reader use this example as a warmup to this new tech question.
by yeslightway | 2025-04-09 23:00:08+00:00
What happens if you ask an LLM to “think” about your goals and dreams 24/7?

I built ManifestGPT, an app that (maybe) helps manifest your goals by “thinking” about your intentions non-stop. It re-prompts itself every few seconds with your goals and dreams

Example: https://manifestgpt.com/manifest.html?id=8dcad5956de0

The idea came from noticing how visualization or meditation can influence human action and perception. Some say it’s psychology, others say it’s magic, I lean both :) One day, talking to a friend, the idea came up: what if AI could do this for you? Like Manifesting as a Service :)

If you create an account, manifestations run in the background even after you close the tab. It might do nothing, or it might work :) If you are curious here’s more about the thinking behind it: https://manifestgpt.com/about.html

Would love to hear your thoughts. If you try it, let me know what happens

I tried it to get into X25 with another idea. Didn’t work. There must be a bug in the code :)
by indigodaddy | 2025-04-09 23:00:19+00:00
I've been enjoying just trying to one-shot little pages that I think are useful with v0.dev. It does a pretty good job and I like that I can just one-button deploy to my Vercel account (which "just works"). Here's one I did today:

https://v0-github-repo-stream.vercel.app/
by mncharity | 2025-04-09 23:01:19+00:00
If I were doing something vaguely similar, I might emphasize:

- Bounds rather than point estimates. Hard bounds (definitely more/less than this) and soft bounds (likely). With associated payoffs/penalties. A point estimate too, but bounds first. Like error bars in a plot.

Perhaps even "bet your certainty" custom hardness. Perhaps an advanced "draw your payoff curve", so one might draw a hard step-function low bound with some soft slope on the high bound. So one might draw a big-payoff pointy spike, at the risk of missing entirely. A pretty UI might even multiply the curves for you. Perhaps one gets points for each component estimate, not just the final result - though might need an LLM to cope with the variety of possible steps in reasoning.

- Order of magnitude. That's "is it more like 1/10, 1, 10, 100, 1000" etc. One can do "high/middle/low order 10^n". But oom estimation a different mindset than linear. Exponential not linear. Linear slider as UX smell.

- Permit multiple chains of reasoning. An argument that nicely establishes a hard lower bound may be of no help in firming up a high bound. And a bound may need to be hammered with multiple chains of reasoning to tighten it up.

Fermi estimation can be the aggregation of exponential-rough-quantitative reasoning with attention to confidence/uncertainty.

In a group setting, one might have: "Ok everyone, how many cats live on this block? Is it more like 1, 10, 100, 1000, etc? Can anyone suggest a bound?" "I saw one in the window this morning - so hard lower bound of 1." "Unless it's been taken to a vet." "The town human population is 10^6, so it seems unlikely the block has that many cats..." "What does everyone think?" "How confident?" "Can anyone suggest another chain of reasoning? Can we tighten up the bounds?" "Could we do a stepping stone problem, the number of households on the block?"

Perhaps a "bet coins" on the answer before grading? One advantage of bounds vs more-common point-estimates is it pulls up the handling of confidence where it can be seen and improved. So anything which encourages reflection and self-evaluation, like betting, might help with that. Another advantage of bounding is it makes each attempt at narrowing bounds, on each component, into it's own little fractal estimation problem. So an initial estimation question proliferates many others. I wonder how a UI might emphasize that...?

But all that riffs on the Fermi estimation aspect, not the Wordle aspect.
by mattmanser | 2025-04-09 23:01:21+00:00
I wouldn't worry too much, 20 years ago when I entered the industry (with a philosophy degree), the adverts which emphasised degree pedigree over experience were common.

I have watched that diminish over the last 20 years.

The unspoken secret in programming is that a CS degree basically signals absolutely nothing about programming skill. You can get a 1st in CS and be a rubbish programmer, you can get a chemistry degree and be an amazing one. A lot of CS is utterly irrelevant to programming, and the vast majority of programming skills are not covered by CS degree.

Once you're past 2-3 years experience it stops being relevant, before that it's a way to filter CVs by managers who want to pretend their CS degree wasn't a complete waste of time.

If they're asking for a CS degree for a senior role it's basically advertising they're a clueless company.
by the1024 | 2025-04-09 23:01:27+00:00
That's a great point - we built this moreso to learn a bit about how the AI models interpret ranking products, and less so to actually be a trusted source of recommendations. Seeing the citations come through has been really fascinating.

The use case for that is to better understand where the gaps are when looking to capture this new source of inbound, given people are using AI to replace search.

There's definitely a whole bunch of features missing that we'd need to make this a genuinely useful product recommendation engine! Price constraints, better de-duping, linking out to sources to show availability, etc.
by henning | 2025-04-09 23:01:41+00:00
You can also use simple string search functions for this Advent of Code problem.

I used this approach for implementing orthography rules in a stenography application (implementing rules like `artistic + ly = artistically`) and in the benchmarks I did, a few lines of searching for character indexes was an order of magnitude faster than regexes. Each of my functions is about 3-10 ish lines of simple code compared to a 1-line regex.

You do have to handle cases like the character not being found, but I've had zero issues with the code and, in terms of what actually executes, it is vastly simpler. This is why the saying goes that if you make something twice as fast, you may have done something clever, but if you make it 10x faster, you stopped doing something dumb.
by saulpw | 2025-04-09 23:01:57+00:00
I also presumed the elections were fair, but there is evidence that they weren't (beyond the usual tactics of disinformation and voter disenfranchisement). Analysis of voting patterns in swing states looks pretty suspicious, to the extent that a pretty simplistic algorithm could even be deduced[0].

[0] https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv
by decimalenough | 2025-04-09 23:02:07+00:00
Having visited last year, the scenery around Toshogu Shrine in Nikko isn't all that different, if you manage to visit like we did first thing in the morning as soon as they open and before the tour buses rock up. (The shrine is surrounded by acres of sacred forest where construction is prohibited.)

The cities like Kobe and Nagasaki, on the other hand, are completely unrecognizable.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-09 23:02:54+00:00
That's my point, for the first decade or so they didn't even bother considering it to be a taxable form of income, which sent out the message that it's not a significant threat to the US government. In the time since all they've done is tax it the same way they tax conventional fiats; it's never been treated as a credible threat by the United States government.

I think there are some sound-bites from Trump-45 calling it a scam (in strong contrast to Trump 47) but even then then he never tried to do anything about it. If trump gets on Truth social tommorrow and fires off a tweet about how Bitcoin is a chinese threat designed to destablize US hegemony and circumvent tariffs and he's going to sign a legally-questionable EO to ban it, bitcoin's price would go up "bigly". Same would apply to the EU or any other major economy, although i will grant that it might not be to the same degree since nobody pisses people off the way trump does.
by subsubzero | 2025-04-09 23:03:00+00:00
A few things to unpack here:

Lets say a nike shoe costs $120 or so today(searching air jordans in google lists a huge number of shoes at that price point), in my mind this is quite cheap as I wanted a pair of Air Jordans in 1990 and they were the same price, $120 for kids shoes roughly 35 years ago. Adjusted for inflation thats roughly $303 USD in 2025 dollars. So basically through outsourcing manufacturing to China and supply chain efficiencies Nike has brought down their product price by roughly 1/3.

Another thing to think about is the insane amount of money offered to athletes in sponsorship deals, I believe Jordan was one of the first athletes to command big money from a company(they made a movie about it a few years ago). This cost paying hundreds of athletes millions a year is a huge cost on Nikes bottom line.

In addition to the sponsorships some athletes have profit sharing (Jordan for sure) so a percentage of sales go to said athlete. Throw in marketing and you have another huge cost.

Would I rather see manufacturing jobs come back to the US and Nike curtail sponsorship money and profit sharing, hell yes. This is easy money to get back and would bring tens of thousands of jobs back to this country, if people were snapping up air jordans for the equivalent of $300 a pair back in the 90's they will do the same in this day and age. And if don't want to cut back sponsorship money, just raise the shoe prices, things are really really cheap compared to what they cost 30 years ago and Nike would still make a hefty profit.

Fun fact - I always buy new balance shoes that are made in usa, they sell both outsourced and domestic production and would rather have my money go to a US worker. At the very least I hope to see other companies do this so I have a choice, most give no choice and force consumers to buy Chinese made products.
by programjames | 2025-04-09 23:03:25+00:00
I'm a constructivist, but I still believe in proof by contradiction. In fact, I don't think you can believe in proof by contradiction without constructivism. How do you know you can take an arbitrary proof P, and show it leads to a contradiction, if you don't even know you can touch P to begin with?

Anyway, how I would construct a proof by contradiction is:

1. Suppose you want to know if there exists a proof P of length less than N.

2. Do the usual "proof by contradiction" with a placeholder P.

3. You can write a very short algorithm that then plugs in all 2^N possible proofs into your proof by contradiction algorithm.

4. And voila! You have a constructive proof.
by colechristensen | 2025-04-09 23:04:10+00:00
No it's not, it's not science working.

It is either A) underreporting risks or B) not acknowledging risk unknowns and plowing ahead with advice anyway.

This was the major problem and behavior that CAUSED anti-vax opinions. They made safety claims that they couldn't logically make, because they couldn't know. A new vaccine using a new vaccine technology vs a new virus. They did not correctly report the amount of uncertainty and they lost trust. Then folks who "knew better" did their best to manipulate the narriative.

And speaking of manipulating the narrative, you can't use google to find the bits of history that shows the CDC giving contradictory advice because the results aren't there any more. Nearly every result gives the same tone and they're almost all CDC links.

This kind of information control and lack of transparency isn't science, it's power dictating truth.

The actual truth is that the risk of cancers as a result of HPV have a pretty high chance of being prevented if young females get the vaccine, but as you get further away from that group the risk avoided by getting vaccinated gets progressively smaller and runs into the safety uncertainty of taking the vaccine. When you're doing population level risk management you also have to do things like comparing the risk of getting hit by a bus going to the clinic against whatever the clinic could do for you. It is often safer to do nothing than to avoid a very tiny risk because of the very mundane risks you face day to day.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-09 23:04:38+00:00
Normal economics does not talk about "exporting currency". You generally buy stuff with currency, which when the seller is in another country happens to mean that dollars (probably) move across borders and thus in some odd sense the currency is exported. But this is really not what is generally said in this context. Exporting stuff normally means providing goods and services to willing buyers in other countries.
by trhway | 2025-04-09 23:04:42+00:00
It is better to distribute or sell shoes than to make them. It is even better to finance/own the making of shoes or even better - the selling/distribution of them. That is Economy 101, originally known as Das Kapital. The people who read those rules wrong call themselves marxists and insist on everyone producing a lot of the same standard shoes, and selling them to people at cost, $25. The people who read those rules right try to find how and where to make a factory, distribution center or retail store, or at least where to get a share of it :)
by blargey | 2025-04-09 23:05:33+00:00
That number has been falling since 2012 and was around 22% as of 2023 (ignoring the hand-wavy conflation of the entire agriculture sector and stereotypical rural farmers)

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/employment-in-agriculture...

You could just as easily massage statistics to call the US a nation of gig workers or something, but neither is productive or informative.
by ajmurmann | 2025-04-09 23:05:44+00:00
Agreed, complex policies open the door for unintended consequences and have higher enforcement cost. If you do a sales tax or VAT it should be flat. If anyone thinks that it will be regressive or put poor people at a disadvantage, the answer IMO is UBI, even a small one can make up for sales tax on food while avoiding the deadweight loss from nonsense like that Jaffa cake nonsense.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-09 23:05:45+00:00
Scientists in most fields, sure, but that's the case anywhere. If you happen to be an AI expert though, pay at top Chinese companies is very competitive with Silicon Valley.

Also, the structural inequalities of Chinese society dwarf the West, meaning that the Chinese middle class gets a lot more bang for their buck: ridiculously cheap delivery services, taxis, and other services.
by bamboozled | 2025-04-09 23:07:18+00:00
Yeah and another thing I’ve noticed is the current administration has won on negativity and victimhood. It’s damaged Americas confidence and super power branding tremendously .

It seems to be the new image of America as some kind of wounded animal who is acting aggressively to protect itself from China. It might not be the case but perception is important and in my opinion it’s changing fast and in the wrong direction.

It’s almost like Americans are now begging for low tier jobs or something.
by sien | 2025-04-09 23:07:39+00:00
Books in Australia are really expensive. This is because Australian publishers have managed to extract their own big cut from Australian consumers. Part of this is because they publish memoirs from any politician and partly because the printing industry is concentrated in some swinging electorates.

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/cheaper-books-b...

What Australians often do instead is get ebooks through other means. Libraries are also more attractive for cost reasons.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-09 23:07:39+00:00
My theory is they are counting on sting operations to be quite a PITA to set up. They cost money whereas writing tickets all day brings in money. It would probably take a pirate targeting the home of a chief or showing up when the chiefs grandkids get home from school as these pirate often do with vans. Porch Pirates can probably avoid this by looking at order history. Amazon sell a lot of law enforcement gear and gadgets.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-09 23:08:02+00:00
Used this or at least a very similar technique a few times to fix boot issues.

I've got a version of the mounting command that I think is easier to use:

for f in proc sys dev run dev/pts ; do mount --bind /$f /mnt/$f ; done

Change the "/mnt/$f" to whatever mountpoint that you're using which would be "/rescue/$f" to align with TFA.

I don't know what difference it makes to have /run mounted, but once you chroot into the mountpoint you can mount the boot partition etc and run whatever grub or mkinitramfs command you need to fix stuff.

I would leave the /boot mounting to later in the process - after you chroot. This way you can easily check /etc/fstab for where the boot partition lives (or if there is one), so you only need to locate the root partition initially which is generally easy to figure out from the disk sizes.

There's extra steps needed however if the system uses LVM.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-09 23:08:06+00:00
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged

This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.

It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.

It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-09 23:08:25+00:00
But he's also brought the whole of the US down to the mud that he enjoys fighting in.

The US shouldn't be taken seriously any more, world wide. Trump, and his Project 2025 conspirators, have proven that the US system of government had a loophole, and have taken full advantage of it to perform a hostile take over.

US soft-power was what allowed the US to dictate US law to other countries. US law doesn't even mean anything in the US itself, so the rest of the world should be suddenly ignoring a whole bunch of historic US-pressured behaviours.

Given the deportation discussions, I'd say one of the first things to go would be extradition treaties. I'm hoping copyright duration madness retracts entirely back within US borders as well.