MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anovikov | 2025-04-03 07:21:58+00:00
It's yes and no. Living without cars means housing poverty. There is no way for most families to afford a spacious residence unless they drive everywhere. In Paris, people live extremely dense and housing poverty is the norm of existence (even though people who can buy a place within blvd Peripherique are by definition very rich). Most live there simply because they inherited the place, or inherited a regulated rental contract. It's normal for a person that makes money within 0.1% of French income earners, to live in a Paris apartment that in America, will be most fit for an "immigrant or poor who can't afford a car". So it's a tradeoff. You get a liveable, walkable city where you are an investment banker and live in a 700 fq. ft. apartment with the roaches, or you get to live in a 3000 sq. ft. house but everything around you is just an endless parking lot. You can't have both.

You never could. Before suburban mass transit became a thing, enabling low ~80% of Paris workers to live outside and commute every day, they had to live in Paris. They all lived in communal apartments, several unrelated people per room, in most awful conditions imaginable just because of density (see "Down and Out in Paris and London").
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-03 07:22:00+00:00
> rooting out bad actors is most effectively done by proper education to keep them from becoming bad actors in the first place.

But that's not rooting out bad actors, it's preventing bad actors. The problem with betting the farm on education is that bad actors who already exist will sabotage your efforts in order to lock in their gains. There has to be some plan for actually neutralizing the people who have already become bad actors and can't be "fixed" with education.
by bux93 | 2025-04-03 07:22:46+00:00
It's not just price. The market for this expertise is also not very deep and liquid. If I have to get a laptop repaired, what are my choices? Send it off to the manufacturer/importer if it's still under warranty, and get it back in maybe two months. Drop it off at a shop that does also phone repairs and hope they don't wreck it?

Realistically I don't know anyone with my specific kind of problem who's used their services before, so I don't really know their reputation. It's not like walking into a supermarket, or even getting a car repaired where you have some sense of the likelihood it will take as long as they say, cost as much as they say and actually succeed. There's much greater information asymmetry.

Of course, given how unattractive it is to get something repaired, more people will be inclined to just buy something new, resulting in less demand for repairs, resulting in less supply, less attractive repair market, etc.

Repairability (at home, by relative morons) also means more repair shops, because less repairability means death of a repairs market.
by wazoox | 2025-04-03 07:23:00+00:00
I have a ~2009 MacBook. It has a swappable battery (replaced once, dead again), and it was overall easily upgradable : it received a 4GB RAM stick to replace its original 2GB (unfortunately it can't manage more than 3.5GB), an SSD to replace its hard drive, and a new DVD drive as its superdrive failed. However its core2 Duo is really too slow for the modern web (either running MacOS or Linux), it takes almost a full minute to open a youtube link. I should probably downgrade to 32 bits Linux to get back some speed, but it won't become exactly snappy anyway :)
by piva00 | 2025-04-03 07:23:04+00:00
> How can mankind have any future at all, when education is one of the tools used to indoctrinate children into not wanting children of their own someday? The first priority of any society/civilization must always be that of making the next generation of people... or else that society/civilization will soon cease to exist. And we no longer hold that as a priority. Whatever the solution might be, I do not think that it can use the education system, in whole or in part, without serious reform of the sort that would frighten those who most want to use it.

Education is in no way indoctrinating children into not wanting children.

You are conflating education with the current economical system, which uses education to have a trained workforce to generate value for companies. It's this system that is pushing people to not want kids, when kids are expensive in terms of time and money, where people work under a system that attempts to extract as much time as possible for production, it's just natural people won't be feeling any higher drive to have kids of their own.

You are blaming education while the issue is much more pervasive and systemic, we live in a world of abundant goods but precarious labour, we produce a lot but don't feel safe nor relaxed enough to tackle one of the most stressful events in someone's life.

Just look at workaholic societies like South Korea and Japan, societal pressures around earning money to support a family, showing status about your job, keeping a career as a mom, etc. eventually completely remove any desire to start families.
by piva00 | 2025-04-03 07:25:16+00:00
> Unless they are stopped from obtaining any document then they aren't barred from anything. Most Americans don't have a passport either but no one would argue that they are barred from travelling internationally, they just have to go and get a passport issued.

Making it difficult (as the article states, this 9% do not have ready access to documents proving their citizenship) is essentially barring with extra steps.

I hate this semantics/loophole game Americans like to play, seems to be quite common in your society to use the "akshually, technically" and going completely against the spirit of something. The spirit is: this makes it more difficult to vote, it will inevitably bar some people from voting, it's just salami-slicing...
by nottorp | 2025-04-03 07:25:21+00:00
I wasn't touching the first two categories anyway, tariffs or no tariffs.

First one because I don't understand why i should risk a milk based product that has traveled for months across an ocean. Or even from another EU country, when I can buy stuff made in a 200 km radius around me.

Second one because afaik it's legal to call "chocolate" something that does not contain any actual cocoa in the US.
by bawolff | 2025-04-03 07:25:27+00:00
I think often trump's policies are rooted in some sort of idea that is perhaps controversial but at least not totally insane, and then implemented in the most boneheaded way possible.

E.g. one explanation given for these trade policies is that trump sees a war with china down the line and is worried that china has tons of factories that could be converted to make ammunition while usa does not.

If so, there is at least some logic to the base idea, but the implementation is crazy, probably not going to work that effectively, and going to piss off all amrrica's allies which would be bad if WW3 is really on the horizon.
by jore | 2025-04-03 07:25:45+00:00
there was a German startup (Sono Sion) some years ago that had a very similar idea and had even prototypes [0], but they filed for insolvency 2-3 years ago. Now I think they pivoted to something more boring and practical - putting solar panels on vehicles. I hope aptera gets to production though

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sono_Motors_Sion
by bkor | 2025-04-03 07:26:04+00:00
> Socketed RAM

CUDIMM is changeable and fast.

> The user being able to swap parts easily is _neat_ but it's just not an required feature

Mostly because people seem to have forgotten that it was possible. Often laptops are slow to due either a too full disk and/or not enough memory. It used to be more common to upgrade those. But apparently that knowledge/skill is forgotten and it's now more custom to buy a new device.

Being able to change those saves money IMO.
by junon | 2025-04-03 07:26:23+00:00
Perhaps giving a bit more information than throwing out random acronyms related to SSH would be a bit more fruitful in terms of responses.

What about TOFU and MITM would you like them to respond to? TOFU isn't inherently a bad thing. Neither is MITM. It depends on the threat model, the actors involved, etc.

Your comment (and the snarky followup) imply they're doing something wrong, but it's unclear what.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-03 07:26:30+00:00
I agree with everything you said here. Nothing you said disagrees with what I said. There's a fundamental difference from what you are saying, that there is a high risk, there's strong reasons to be concerned, and we need to stay on top of things and what OP said, which is that the government IS disappearing people, and the lack of evidence is actually evidence in favor of this. It's a ludicrous statement that if accepted undermines any attempt to know reality with any level of certainty. It is a fundamentally unhinged way of collecting information about the world.
by 0xy | 2025-04-03 07:26:40+00:00
It doesn't make sense because you didn't read the original board. It clearly states 'including trade barriers'. You're attacking a strawman.

Countries, including the EU, like to have 'low tariffs' and then have sneaky backdoor taxes or outright bans on US goods through things like milk quotas (Canada), 'biosecurity' (Australia) or EU courts issuing spurious fines on US companies (based on vague laws that only get enforced against US companies, like DMA).
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-03 07:27:50+00:00
That's one possible framing. But from their perspective, they are defending the lives of innocents from those who wish to do them harm. If one accepts their framing of the issue, that's a righteous cause indeed. Why is your framing accurate, and theirs inaccurate?

You're doing what so many people do in the abortion debate, and begging the question. You can't simply sidestep deep differences of opinion on moral issues by declaring your position to be right and theirs wrong. It's wilful ignorance of a whole lot of nuance that exists on this topic, nuance that must be engaged with if one wishes to be effective in having a discussion.
by olejorgenb | 2025-04-03 07:28:06+00:00
I'm not sure I follow. When I read the rules for Norway [1] it appear the importer (in Norway) pay the VAT on the imported goods (as opposed to the the seller for domestic a domestic business). But it's nothing that indicates that this amount payed does not enter the ordinary VAT accounting. Ie.: the amount payed will in effect simply be forwarded to the end-customer, just like domestic goods. I don't understand how a "VAT rebate" would come in play here?

> Export tax rebates involve the return of indirect taxes that have been levied on inputs used to manufacture goods that are eventually exported out of the country. These taxes can include VAT, ...

So this seems to be about imported goods being more expensive in US, not the other way around? Ie. if a US company import some product from Norway they have to pay VAT to Norway? And if they subsequently sell a derived product back to Norway they do not get refunded this VAT?

[1] https://www.toll.no/no/bedrift/import/importguide#merverdiav...
by teruakohatu | 2025-04-03 07:28:37+00:00
What will happen is the same as when my govt. added GST (sales tax) on all imports with no de minimus exception [1], the overseas retailers will agree to add it on at checkout so their packages will sail through customs.

From a practical perspective I can’t see any other way.

Closing the “GST loophole” as they called it didn’t help New Zealand retailers, but did increase tax revenue and raise prices for consumers.

[1] There is an exception if the retailer does less than a certain dollar figure of exports in total to New Zealand.
by ohgr | 2025-04-03 07:28:46+00:00
They are bendy as hell - I have a couple of colleagues with them.

Also on that I think they should do away with the modular port things anyway. They're a suboptimial use of space and limit the total number of ports you can have. The real problem is that the ports on most laptops are soldered directly to the motherboard which results in extreme expense if you kill one. Just give us some replaceable ones like the current MacBook line. They're on an easy to remove daughterboard and purchaseable online.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-03 07:28:52+00:00
Got a 2005 Asus EEPC netbook hanging around that is still part of the family and does useful work. Battery still good (replaced twice) and a few scratches on the screen and a broken key. Took it on the train with me recently as I just needed to read some PDF files and so scpd them to it and threw it in a bag.

Looking after electronics, repairing stuff and treating it with respect is just part of my way. That one has an old Puppy Linux on it. Works fine.

The original sense of the word "materialism" is a respect for material things - it's a very positive word. But it changed in the 80s (probably after Madonna's "Material Girl" :) to mean something negative and shallow.)
by Terr_ | 2025-04-03 07:29:03+00:00
> What's amazing me is the lack of consistent thinking by the commenters here.

I feel your "consistency" is based on a facile model where big percentages correspond to badness and that's everything.

An analogy:

1. Roommate Trump who falsely claims you're in a common-law marriage: "You're running a trade-deficit with your grocery store, so every time you buy groceries from them I'm going to punish you by taking 25% of the cost. If you don't like it, you should work there part-time to reduce the deficit. You're about equal in paying friends for food versus them paying you for food, but they need you more than you need them, so to make you hustle I'm still taking 15% from any money that goes out. Finally, you have an extreme trade-surplus with your regular employer because they just send you checks, hurray!... That'll be 10%, because reasons."

2. Critics: "That idiot is insane. That's not how any of this works. Find a divorce lawyer ASAP."

3. You: "You guys aren't consistent thinkers! I mean, why aren't you complaining about how Mrs. Johnson adds a 100% cost onto Mr. Johnson's purchases of cigarettes, as a way to get him to quit? 100% is a much bigger number, so obviously Mrs. Johnson's the real villain here, and you don't seem to care!"

____________

If you're so certain Trump has a coherent and non-dumb strategy, please describe how it's supposed to work and why you expect the results to be good things.
by arlort | 2025-04-03 07:29:20+00:00
> Effectively VAT is only paid by consumers.

Yes, absolutely, in 99% of cases that is true. But conceptually there is a difference.

> NB: in you example if the company has paid more VAT than it has collected in the period then it gets and actual refund.

Yes, which is what I said as well. But the refund in itself is an additional step on top of the tax system and the money does get paid by the company in the first place. There is indeed a difference in how the cash flow of a company looks like.

That's the entire point of VAT, to make tax evasion harder by making everyone pay at every step and figuring out later the refunds

This is not a criticism of VAT or anything else by the way, as I said, in 99% of cases the company will get the VAT fully refunded and not pay anything on net over the fiscal year
by n4r9 | 2025-04-03 07:30:04+00:00
I think you're talking about a subtly different thing. OP was simply saying "it's very possible to be a rational independent thinker and yet be non-centrist". What you're saying is "a lot of people I've met who are more left than me are impractical".

Relating to your point, I would add something based on my experience in the UK. In the last 30 years we've twice had a Labour leader elected. Both times campaigning as a hard-nosed centre-left pragmatist, and with some on the left echoing similar sentiments about compromise and pushing the needle.

Blair admittedly did some good stuff - Lords reform and minimum wage. But he also introduced and then tripled university fees, greatly expanded private initiatives in the public sector, and engaged in an activist interventionist foreign policy culminating in the invasion of Iraq. These are changes whose ill effects we're still reeling from as a country.

Starmer is looking to shape up very similarly, from his U-turns on private school charitable status, tuition fees and the two-child cap, to his reluctance to condemn the Gazan genocide and cuts to disability allowance.

Was it better to have these as prime minister Vs the conservative candidate? Yes, probably. Can they really be said to be pushing the needle? I doubt it.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-03 07:30:19+00:00
I heard a great story from a colleague that worked in fashion development in the UK. There's a big push for "Made in the UK" clothing and consumers associate it with quality, but the items are lower quality, because the UK lost its garment manufacturing skills 50+ years ago. Meanwhile Asia has gained those skills, so if you buy clothes from China they are likely higher quality than you'd get here and cheaper.

This is not always the case, Italy still makes high quality leather goods, Portugal is still making good shirts and trousers etc, but for the most part as economies have moved away from manufacturing into services they have lost the skills and to force manufacturing to happen there means accepting higher priced, lower quality products.
by MatekCopatek | 2025-04-03 07:30:33+00:00
I can agree with parts of this article, but I believe it's missing a large part of the puzzle.

The author implicitly assumes that the constraints of our society are fixed and that it's therefore possible to determine which political systems are objectively better or worse. We should be doing that research (like astronomers trying to determine how the universe works) instead of religiously supporting ideological positions.

I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. I think we behave the way we do in large part due to the ideological principles we were raised with. This can be confirmed by observing various closed-off societies sometimes operating on principles that seem completely bonkers to most of us.

If you teach people capitalism/socialism, you build a capitalistic/socialistic system. It's impossible to live inside that system and objectively determine whether it's good or bad, let alone better or worse than other systems.

So in that context, I believe following an ideology is _not_ the opposite of thinking for yourself, as the author puts it. It is a conscious decision based on morality. You decide what your values are and you find a political option that aligns with them.

To be clear, that's still a very imperfect decision to make, many things can go wrong from that point on and I believe this is where the author is correct in many ways. We should reason about it constantly to make sure we're actually doing what we want to be doing and not just blindly repeating things.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-03 07:31:01+00:00
Well, why only consider just goods and not consider services? US is mostly exporting services while other countries are exporting goods.

Why not consider US prints dollars which are used for global trade? That means other countries are subsidizing US inflation and US economy.

Why not consider the massive investments other countries have made in the US economy when buying shares, bonds, securities?

What if they impose tarrifs on US financial and IT services? What if Amazon cloud and Netflix start costing 30% more?

What if they quit using dollars for trade?

What if they start selling US stock and securities? What if they start selling US dollars?
by xnorswap | 2025-04-03 07:31:05+00:00
> Security patches and critical bug fixes will continue for a transition period.

They're not explicit for how long this "transition period" will be, it sounds like a year.

We've seen this before with IdentityServer, and many other examples where maintainers switched to a commercial license, leaving behind a wake of businesses who aren't willing to tie themselves to a commercial license and would rather turn a blind eye to dwindling support.

IdendityServer4 was promised security updates until Nov 2022. Here we are over 2 years later and it's still a popular package.

And that's a security-critical part of the application! Some people even still go back to the pre-AGPL version of iTextSharp for PDF writing, and that switch was 15+ years ago.
by f1shy | 2025-04-03 07:31:39+00:00
> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break.

Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!

To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges, probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times, and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.
by a2128 | 2025-04-03 07:31:55+00:00
You can have the most secure encryption and obfuscation, and it will be useless once they trick or intimidate you into giving up your passwords. The only way is to just not bring anything of importance. Get a separate phone or wipe your existing one of any sensitive things (password manager, personal/sensitive chats, chats or social media that may go against current administration's ideology[0], etc), you can restore things later

[0] https://newrepublic.com/post/192946/french-scientist-denied-...
by femto | 2025-04-03 07:32:01+00:00
Heard Island and McDonald Islands, two Australian territories inhabited only by penguins, get singled out for a 10% tariff.

Norfolk Island, an Australian community of 3000 with no exports to the US, gets its own 29% tariff. They're expecting a tourism boost from the publicity.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...
by darawk | 2025-04-03 07:32:23+00:00
This is a good take, but I think I can answer your question about the midterms. This is timed specifically for them. The drop we're seeing in markets right now isn't a pricing in of the tariffs, per se (at least, not yet), it's a pricing in of policy uncertainty that is going to lead to a near-term drop in investment.

However, because they are doing it so early, they will have time to recalibrate and bake in exemptions until the market / inflation is happy. Up to and including backing off of the policy entirely, if that ends up being necessary. As a political strategy, it is perfectly timed to allow Trump to "save the economy" from his own policies. This is true imo independently of what you may think about the policy as policy.

When it comes to the policy as such, recipirocal tariffs, conceptually, are designed to incentivize the overall global reduction in tariffs. So, as a headline, implementing "reciprocal tariffs" is actually favorable to free trade. However, there are some important details that they have fucked up, such as identifying tariffs with trade deficits in general, and in particular identifying them with trade deficits in goods only. That is really the component of the policy that doesn't make sense, and it is important.

Most likely, they will recalibrate and/or provide a lot of exemptions, particularly as the midterms approach. As a political tactic, I think it will work out fairly well, if they respond to the feedback appropriately - that's the big question though, and that uncertainty is the most significant reason for the market drop.