MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-30 20:10:47+00:00
My only complaint with China's intellectual property theft is that they don't share.

It's my genuine belief that the vast majority of intellectual property ownership is purely to draw a moat around a country's oligarchs. Copyright does not protect creators and patents do not protect inventors[0].

Trump's thinking is:

- America used to have lots of tariffs in the 70s, and lots of jobs in the 70s,

- But we got rid of the tariffs and the jobs moved,

- So if I put the tariffs back the jobs will come back!

Problem is, we're not in the same market we were in the 70s, and all those tariffs risk turning us into Brazil. More specifically the reason why the intellectual property system we have is fucked is because it's designed to let corporations move jobs to foreign countries while still maintaining maximum control over the end result. It's designed to facilitate neocolonialism.

The "open and balanced" global market you're decrying was, until recently, heavily tilted to favor American ownership over everything. China and Mexico are there to castrate the unions: if you don't work for peanuts, we move the work to another country that will, and we don't worry about any of the business risk that entails because WIPO and Berne ensure none of the goods the other country makes get to compete with us unless we put our stamp on it.

You know what would really break this system? If China, Canada, or some other country were to junk WIPO and DMCA 1201 and start up a national lab to develop and distribute jailbreaks for shitty disposable American tech. Practically speaking, America can't stop knowledge from entering the country, and it would spur a huge explosion of new American businesses to fix the shit our own oligarchs broke.

In a world where you can't rely on intellectual property bullshit, outsourcing becomes a crapshoot, and it makes a lot more sense to pay workers what they're worth and focus on automation instead.

[0] Yes, they can and have been used by creators in the past, but that's not what the system does today.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-30 20:10:49+00:00
It's still far too much for a HN comment.

You have to scroll down a couple pages' worth before you even realize this might be SO long you need to collapse it. So then you've got to scroll back UP a couple pages, find the teensy [-] link...

It's enough to just post the link to the list of languages. The list itself doesn't belong in a comment here, when it's that long.
by bredren | 2025-04-30 20:11:13+00:00
I was not expecting this comment here but it tracks with my observations.

Things that previously could be taken for granted now require applied thought and physical capability.

For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.

Very, very few good deals will be found there because the marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find the best housing compromises.

Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.

From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat / common size? How about a nice family campsite?

Well you better have set up automation. It’s to the point where public swim lessons can’t be got without a bot. Unless, you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the internet.

It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of good things and experiences.

Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.

The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to cancel their membership.

It is tough out there.
by bjourne | 2025-04-30 20:11:23+00:00
In order to save its industry from the Nazis, the USSR moved over 1,500 large factories eastward in under six months in 1941. So the US in 2025 could certainly build at least a few factories in under a month. It would be a complete waste of government resources and certainly should be spent on something more worthwhile (like eradicating homelessness), but it's not impossible.
Ask HN: Does this estimate for GPT-4's 128k token window make sense?
by sschmitt | 2025-04-30 20:11:36+00:00
GPT-4 supports a 128,000-token context window (per OpenAI).

I'm trying to understand how much text that really is. Here's my rough estimate:

1 token ≈ ¾ word ≈ 4 characters

A single-spaced A4 page (12pt font) ≈ 500–600 words → ~700–800 tokens

128,000 ÷ 800 = ~160 pages

So: GPT-4 can handle ~150–190 A4 pages of standard English prose, depending on formatting.

Does that sound accurate?
by _bin_ | 2025-04-30 20:11:54+00:00
The data don't bear this out. Insurance companies do represent some level of inefficiency and are easy scapegoats, but saying this only prevents people from better identifying and fixing actual cost centers. Here's a good breakdown of contributions to total national health expenditures by type in 2023: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

You'll notice that hospitals are the largest component. Physicans and clinics are also substantial. Insurance costs fall under "Other health", which includes "spending on durable and non-durable products; residential and personal care; administration; net health insurance; and other state, private, and federal expenditures."

Drug costs, the other frequent alleged cause, are even smaller, representing less than a tenth of expenditures.
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 20:13:42+00:00
The word "dictatorial" doesn't apply here. What we're talking about is government funding being provided to private universities. And Congress hasn't appropriated specific amounts of money to specific universities. It has created a pool of funds and given the executive branch discretion to allocate those funds. The powers of the executive branch are invested in the president. See Article II, Section 1 ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").

Congress, moreover, has enacted laws that use those funds as a hook to influence the behavior of private universities. Specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows the executive branch to deny federal funds to universities that discriminate on the basis of race. Now, it just so happens that, in 2023, Harvard university, among others, was found by the Supreme Court to have flagrantly violated that law: https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...

There is nothing "dictatorial" about the President withholding taxpayer dollars from a university that is in violation of the law, where Congress has authorized the executive branch to do so. Indeed, I'm at a loss to understand who else you think has the power to do this, if not the President?
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-30 20:14:19+00:00
Training for a mission tends to mean pretending it's the real mission, as closely as possible. People fire off $100k missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhybKEzb-0) so they know what it'll be like to do it in combat for real.

Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.
by FlyingSnake | 2025-04-30 20:14:48+00:00
Interesting. This is the first time I’m hearing that Farsi is offensive to Iranians. None of my Irani friends have objected so I’m curious if I’m missing something.

Wikipedia says Farsi should be avoided in Western languages, but what about others? Persian is called Farsi in Indian subcontinent due to the deep historical connections we share. We have proverbs saying Farsi is the sign of a learned person etc.
by ants_a | 2025-04-30 20:14:56+00:00
That thread is indeed about the same issue. I don't think anyone has done a more concise writeup on it.

Core of the issue is that on the primary, commit inserts a WAL record, waits for durability, local and/or replicated, and then grabs a lock (ProcArrayLock) to mark itself as no longer running. Taking a snapshot takes that same lock and builds a list of running transactions. WAL insert and marking itself as visible can happen in different order. This causes an issue on the secondary where there is no idea of the apparent visibility order, so visibility order on secondary is strictly based on order of commit records in the WAL.

The obvious fix would be to make visibility happen in WAL order on the primary too. However there is one feature that makes that complicated. Clients can change the desired durability on a transaction-by-transaction basis. The settings range from confirm transaction immediately after it is inserted in WAL stream, through wait for local durability, all the way up to wait for it to be visible on synchronous replicas. If visibility happens in WAL order, then an async transaction either has to wait on every higher durability transaction that comes before it in the WAL stream, or give up on read-your-writes. That's basically where the discussion got stuck without achieving a consensus on which breakage to accept. This same problem is also the main blocker for adopting a logical (or physical) clock based snapshot mechanism.

By now I'm partial to the option of giving up on read-your-writes, with an opt-in option to see non-durable transactions as an escape hatch for backwards compatibility. Re-purposing SQL read uncommitted isolation level for this sounds appealing, but I haven't checked if there is some language in the standard that would make that a bad idea.

A somewhat elated idea is Eventual Durability, where write transactions become visible before they are durable, but read transactions wait for all observed transactions to be durable before committing.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-30 20:15:20+00:00
Well sure, I tend to agree with that. Government buildings can be an exception because they're public and we more carefully constraint the things the government can do, and because you can be forced to go there.

I too am a bit baffled by the idea that you need a law for that. But, as I said, we have a different common law tradition in America that changes things. The only two big legal influences which I've read on are common law and the justinian codex -> napoleonic code path; scandi law is alien to me.
by bredren | 2025-04-30 20:15:23+00:00
There is good reason why these posts don’t regularly make front page.

The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.

If you go look for it, you’ll find it.

HN readers achieving this success either don’t need or don’t want the attention that might come with this kind of content marketing.

It’s much more interesting to learn about detailed technical solutions engineering and the SOTA.
by ben_w | 2025-04-30 20:15:45+00:00
> At the end of the day they lose millions of jobs, factories shut down, and people suffer there too regardless of the CCP marketing about being "tough" and "prepared".

I have the feeling, not only from this comment but also those about Foxconn suicide nets, that people have a hard time judging quite how big things in China are.

Losing a million jobs would change China's unemployment rate by… 0.14% of the workforce.
by drjasonharrison | 2025-04-30 20:15:52+00:00
Antedote:

When I was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Computer Science research grant proposals included budgets for overhead. This was often, if I recall correctly, 10% of the overall equipment and salary budget. This was deemed a tax collected by the department and used to:

- pay IT staff salaries - pay IT hardware and service costs (storage, communication) - etc

Other costs on the research grant would include:

- hardware purchases: personal computers, specialized equipment, compute and storage servers - graduate student and postdoctoral student salaries - travel costs to conferences for students - consumables (if any)

Again, in Canada, there are various types of research grants. For example, the "Research Tools and Instruments grants program" will pay the entire cost of the equipment. This includes: shipping, customs fees, warranty/service contracts, software licensing, on-site training.

https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ResearchPortal-PortailDeRecher...

Note that travel, salary and benefits, consumables, renovations, lab infrastructure are not allowed.

For other types of grants the institution's "tax rate" is usually specified by the Department of Research, and can be as high as 25%. UBC hides it's rates behind a portal, but Simon Fraser University has a description of them: https://www.sfu.ca/research/researcher-resources/fund-my-res...

I won't speak to the amount of "administrative bloat" that universities have experienced during my two decades post graduation. While it exists, a tax rate of 25% seems quite reasonable when you consider the overall costs of research at a university compared to equivalent commercial office/lab space.
by p_j_w | 2025-04-30 20:16:08+00:00
> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them. The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.

> Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them. The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.

Asserted without evidence, dismissed without evidence.
by Arnavion | 2025-04-30 20:16:13+00:00
Doesn't seem to work for any of the ~50 URLs I tried with. Eg:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...

... works but:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...

... is 404.

I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-30 20:16:23+00:00
I went from a 6S+ to a 15 because I was in the same boat where the end of support/updates made it impossible to use. Also, the battery is shot so it lives on a cable full time. Hoping I can get as many years out of the new one. I have very few apps because I don't trust any of you app builders to respect my privacy. If there was something in between a smart phone and a feature phone, I'd be interested.
by n00bs | 2025-04-30 20:16:28+00:00
It sure would be nice if they fixed the YouTube Apple TV app so you didn’t have to select which YouTube account you want to use every single time you launch the app on Apple TV. I guess someone thought it was better than the blank screen that used to greet greet folks when they loaded the Apple TV app after 24 hours. But this is just comically lame for folks who don’t ever switch accounts nor want to.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-30 20:17:24+00:00
Hmmm. Is there a statement of HN policy somewhere about that? Or is this just a thing you decided to do on your own accord?

No judgment, just curious. I presume you've reflected on the idea that one person's flame war is another person's gentle exchange of opinion.

I can see what you're saying though, and I have seen discussions where I've thought "oook, don't really understand what these people think they're achieving", but I wouldn't say I've seen anything horrendous. I mean, individual horrific comments get quickly flagged to death. Why bother flagging the whole topic? Why not simply not investigate those threads?
by jkrems | 2025-04-30 20:18:01+00:00
> Why the South? What about the North? Symmetric globe?

The globe isn't symmetric when it comes to these terms. They don't refer to the actual two hemispheres, split at the equator. The "south" contains the equator and the "north" ends way before the equator.

> And why is the shrinking considered a misrepresentation, but the enlargement of high latitudes apparently not?

Because being overrepresented (looking bigger) is typically an advantage. Both are misrepresentations but the direction matters. Some of this is only a real problem if geographical area and population are correlated. Which, at least in broad strokes, is true here.
by noqc | 2025-04-30 20:18:11+00:00
>China knows all the economic levers to cause lots of pain to the US (eg selling t-bills)

China has been divesting itself of treasuries for a long time: a) because they create coupling between the two economies, and b) they know that the US will simply freeze them if China invades Taiwan. If China dumped all of its treasuries at once, it would hurt a little, but not that much.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-30 20:18:11+00:00
I once worked at a company that'd acquired a virtual-office company. I wasn't around for the acquisition, but it really smelled like one rich person bailing out another's failed investment (or someone on the board had a bunch of money in the acquisition target, or something along those lines).

To justify owning the useless damn thing, they insisted everyone use it, basically like Slack if it ate 3-4x the resources (really saying something, given Electron already eating 5-10x the resources it ought to need for any given task), monopolized a screen when in use, and added all the awkward elements of physical environments to virtual ones for no reason ("is it weird if 'I' 'sit' in this chair 'next to' this other 'person' when there are other chairs available in the room?", or "oh shit where's that meeting room 'physically' located, again? I think I'm lost...") while removing none of the awkwardness of virtual interactions.

Truly, bizarrely pointless. It was like some shit out of the Silicon Valley TV show, so absurd it was hard to believe it was real. I swear to god, I'm not making this up, they even had in-world presentations, so you could add all the fun of having a bad angle on a screen or being too far away to comfortably read the text to the joy of a Zoom screen-share. Totally nuts. Luckily you could also maximize whatever was being presented, but... hooray, your best feature is that I can ignore all the things that make your dumb crap distinctive? What a win.

This is what I think of every time I see anyone trying to promote Zuckerberg's weird, bad idea. I assure you, being in VR goggles would not have made the experience either more productive or more pleasant. Nobody who's ever tried to work like this even for one week could possibly think it's a good idea to invest in it.
by okanat | 2025-04-30 20:18:15+00:00
They can. They need nonpolitical institutions with actual power. Yes it adds bureaucracy but it is more resilient. It doesn't take away from democracy, on contrary it strengthens it. The juridical power is one of those. Just like we don't vote on every single law, we should empower people who spend their entire career on specific areas of expertise to make long-term decisions. EU has this to a point. The US doesn't. Almost all of US institutions are political.
by nsingh2 | 2025-04-30 20:18:17+00:00
My workflow is to keep the notebook as thin as possible, and concise enough to fit in my brain. I explore the problem space and write some functions and data structures directly in the notebook, but as soon as I can, I refactor them into separate modules that I then import.

If I don’t, the notebook quickly becomes bloated, I start getting paranoid about stale cells and lose track of what I'm actually trying to do.

Ideally the notebook’s sole purpose is interactivity, as kind of a quick-and-dirty frontend when it's not worth it to write an actual frontend, everything infrastructural gets moved out.
by ericmay | 2025-04-30 20:18:50+00:00
> Those can be ironed out.

Depends on the specific trade issue. There's a limit to what can be ironed out, and the large bulk of the problem is that both the EU and China are rather protectionist even compared to the United States and so for either to iron out these trade issues they'll have to both open their markets. So far that hasn't worked out for the United States, even prior to the ideological battles, and I'm not sure I see a path forward for the EU that's significantly different than the status quo.

Also China is happily helping Russia fight a war in Europe so I wouldn't be so quick to assume the EU only has a trade issue with China - that's rather naive.

> I think you really downplay the kind of generational damage the US is doing to the relationship with former allies.

I was just in France for two weeks, nobody I spoke to in my broken French really gives a shit outside of "man that guys sucks right?" The internet isn't day-to-day life. For some reason people think that political grandstanding and harsh rhetoric is only an American phenomenon and that European leaders don't do the same. The issue with Canada I would argue is much more as you are describing, and is rather unfortunate to say the least.

> You forget that China is only in a trade war against the US. The US is in a trade war with everyone else.

Sure ok - feel free to buy all the Chinese products that are made and shipped to your country from China. Best of luck! Let us know how that turns out for you.
by jll29 | 2025-04-30 20:19:15+00:00
It seems like to Google, "customers" will only ever be anonymous data points in an A/B test.

They would have gone down quickly if they hadn't "borrowed" Overture's business model of paid ads.

They have no culture of valuing the customers, or (like Amazon) obsessing about what they need.

Apple is at least slightly different: hardware customers and high-value employees are treated okay from what I hear, but devs are left alone.

Indie developers bring both Apple and Google a lot of revenue indirectly, but they don't really have much of a lobby (maybe they should unionize/hire a lobby firm together).
by Animats | 2025-04-30 20:19:31+00:00
The way it worked for a real US high security job (TS/SCI) was that the clearance process was totally separate from the employer. The fingerprints and polygraph exams were done off premises. The famous SF-86 form[1], all 130 pages, had to be filled out, but nobody at the employer ever saw it. The checking and processing were done by the FBI or a unit in DoD.

(The current SF-86 only wants your residence addresses for the last 10 years. Used to be "List all residences from birth".)

[1] https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-30 20:20:26+00:00
Heh, I sort of noticed this - I was working through a problem I knew the domain pretty well and was just trying to speed things up, and got a super snarky/arrogant response from 4o "correcting" me with something that I knew was 100% wrong. When I corrected it and mocked its overly arrogant tone, it seemed to react to that too. In the last little while corrections like that would elicit an overly profuse apology and praise, this seemed like it was kind of like "oh, well, ok"
by Funes- | 2025-04-30 20:20:27+00:00
E-ink technology is a godsend. Until refresh rate and image quality improve, though, it's great for many things other than a general-purpose monitor. For instance, I just ordered the Mudita Kompakt: I love how it's low-power and extremely minimal by default, but you can sideload apps if you so desire. With a regular smartphone, I have to traverse the opposite path, which is vastly more cumbersome and inefficient: root the phone, install GrapheneOS, take care of all the wasteful and unneeded "features" or functionalities, install and set up a minimalist launcher, install tools to get around bloat and other nuisances, etc. And there's no guarantee you'll end up with a satisfying result. I very much prefer starting from the ground up than trying to regain control over my phone and remove all the corporate and retarded shit. I'd even love the Kompakt more if it didn't come with a camera--I have dedicated cameras I use for pictures and video.