MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csmpltn | 2025-04-03 13:12:26+00:00
VAT complicates the business environment for US companies operating in the EU, and it takes a major chunk of their margins. US doesn't have VAT and has a significantly easier business environment for EU businesses to operate in - leading to an unbalanced playing field.

VAT is just one component though. Remember that US largely subsidizes and sponsors the defense of EU, Ukraine, Taiwan, Japan, etc - but those countries have been giving less and less back, over the past years.
by loudmax | 2025-04-03 13:12:54+00:00
MCP is Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol), which intends to be a standard method for AI models to communicate.

Amazon is a one of Anthropic's main backers, hosting their infrastructure, much as Microsoft is a big backer of OpenAI by hosting ChatGPT on Azure.
by vdupras | 2025-04-03 13:13:04+00:00
Of course, everything that was deemed 100% bonkers in that past will slowly be deemed as "duh, it was obvious that it was going to happen!"

I mean, don't you remember that not so long ago, economists were telling us "Business As Usual is going to cost us about 5-10% of GDP"? Now it's threatening civilization. Duh!

Muahahah, my bet on shorting civilization will finally pay off! Oh wait...
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-03 13:13:29+00:00
The crux of the argument is that voting is a right, and voter ID laws create a unnecessary burden to exercising that right given the extremely low levels of individual voter fraud. Do I need my driver's license to practice free speech? Do I need my passport to be allowed to be an atheist?

It would be different if we were solving a problem with voter ID laws because then you're balancing rights with real pragmatism. You can as hypothetical about it as you want, you can go down the slippery slope fallacy if you want, but the evidence shows us we do not have an issue here.

It would also be different if IDs were easier to come by, because then the burden is not disproportionate to the problem. But neither of these things are true.

Instead we're just enacting barriers to the use of our constitutional rights, barriers to participation in society, not to solve a problem but to enact a political end.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-03 13:13:39+00:00
In my circle of family and friends, no one strays too far from the center, so I don't find it particularly difficult to navigate disagreement. We've gotten more carried away arguing about completely banal happenings. However, I sense not everyone else feels the same way.

What tends to happen at dinners or whatever is that some outspoken person (socially conservative on a pet issue) monopolizes conversation, and a couple of others keep mum because they don't like confrontation/arguing. The others don't care.

I am guilty of this in one particular case. I have a friend who describes himself as a classical Liberal, and when the subject comes up about pit bulls or the like, will say that "the problem is with the owners not the breed". What am I going to do, take out my crap phone and try to use data like a blunt instrument? I don't care enough to start an argument over it.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-03 13:14:09+00:00
I hate to break it to you, but this also happens in the US - especially at huge companies.

The next step of my career progression at my current company is deciding whether I want to go into the continuing tech route as an architect or staff software engineer or if I want to go into the managerial / people leader route.

The later is quite more lucrative, but I would have to stop programming.
by sylens | 2025-04-03 13:14:26+00:00
> I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps.

I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
by brahma-dev | 2025-04-03 13:14:32+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-doge-false-claim-bill...

https://fortune.com/2025/03/13/doge-saved-federal-government...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/doge-website-now-saved-105-billion...

https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/doge-claimed-contract-savings...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con...
by jcfrei | 2025-04-03 13:14:52+00:00
In my opinion you are giving the US government far too much credit. Trump has through his usage of social media created a weapon that he can strike at anyone that stands in his way. With all branches under Republican control there's simply no one left who can stand up to him without having his political career destroyed. We've seen this story unfold so many times in countries around the world - Turkey would be one recent example where the misguided policies of Erdogan have left the country with record inflation rates for years.
by jannyfer | 2025-04-03 13:15:43+00:00
I just asked ChatGPT with a lazy prompt: "Come up with a formula to impose reciprocal tariffs that will reduce America's trade deficit to zero" and it came up with basically the same formula.

Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...

https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a6147d32...

(edit: fixed link)
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-03 13:15:46+00:00
1) Chicago-school interest groups successfully putting people on courts and in the legislature to all but completely eliminate anti-trust enforcement, starting in the '70s. TL;DR policy used to be that a company holding too much market share was per se bad for the country and that the government could act on it, the shift added more tests making it slower (so, also more expensive) and harder to successfully enforce anti-trust, so much so that we all but stopped doing it.

2) Failure to send Nixon to prison.

3) Loss of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan.

4) Failure to send a whole list of Reagan's folks (and maybe Reagan) to prison over Iran-Contra and other misdeeds. And those same names keep popping up, making things worse for the '90s and '00s. This was a huge mistake.

5) The Democrats totally surrendering economics policy to a newly farther-right [edit: more accurately, a set of policies championed by a certain set of pro-capital right wing interests—we recently saw this totally overthrown by right-populist policy, when Trump took over the party in 2016, which was the most remarkable development in US party politics since the '80s] Republican view, in the '80s, and adopting basically the same policy. This set the stage for the current backlash, because this all-in neoliberal shit was never popular, but persisted because both parties supported it.

6) Loosened media reach ownership rules in the early '00s.

7) CU

8) Nobody at any point finding a way to dismantle the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society (if you're wondering "how", it seems the NRA had been doing all sorts of illegal shenanigans for a loooong time—I'd be absolutely floored if these two don't have some big ol' skeletons hanging around)

9) We all watch a coup attempt live on TV (re-watch some of the news footage if your memory is fading, it remains shocking) and then the Biden administration dicked around during the six months or so when it might have been possible to go after the leaders of it.

10) The Internet putting intense pressure on the news media, leading to even more profit-focus than before (and see also the loss of various controls above) with nothing done to try to mitigate that.

11) Extreme centralization of control of the narrative online under a handful of platforms (and the narrative is "whatever gets us more eyeballs", see again #11) and nothing done to fix that.
by weeeee2 | 2025-04-03 13:15:47+00:00
<<It was a lot of bang paths, where you'd list your e-mail address from a pretty well known location, like "hpfcla!hpilsb!linsomniac" and the sender would have to know or use trial and error to say "I bet ihnp4 can reach hpfcla.>>

I remember that my brother at Bell Labs had an address with bangs. He was working on System V stream drivers. For me, actual "email" started when we had DNS routing ad could email --or talk to-- user@shost.university.edu ... before I don't actually recall how I exchanged emails with my brother at Bell Labs. It's that period of time that I'm trying to reconstruct, around 1987 early 1988, when I immigrated to the U.S. (from UK... now back in UK as of last year)
by roxolotl | 2025-04-03 13:16:33+00:00
You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.

There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
by piva00 | 2025-04-03 13:16:40+00:00
> The fact that contemporary art circles handwave away that relevance while arrogantly mumbling "you're just miopic, ignorant and misguided, learn more" doesn't really change that fact.

> From the outside, it just shows that you too have been co-opted into the cult. You're free to subscribe to that view, but you don't get to gatekeep the meaning of art, no matter how many members that cult may have.

Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder though? I do see beauty in a lot of art deemed "part of the cult", how do you even attempt to objectively judge aesthetic beauty in a vacuum? Beauty exists in contexts, there is stuff that without the context just looks weird, with context it becomes beautiful, how do you assess the objective aesthetic beauty of such without delving into philosophical discussions?

You are all free to create an art movement that aspires to do what you believe art should be: aesthetically beautiful, devoid of philosophical meaning as pursuit of beauty, beauty for its own sake, etc., it will be included, admired, rejected, judged as misguided, so on and so forth, just like you are doing with contemporary art that you do not agree with.

Isn't that all art anyway?
by lolinder | 2025-04-03 13:16:50+00:00
> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of

They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).

The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
by bluGill | 2025-04-03 13:17:06+00:00
Nuclear is a bragging tool, but only useful in real war if things are going bad enough that you decide to end the world.

What will take Europe most of a decade is the combination of all the things you really want during war so you are not forced to end the world. Air defense - they have some but not near enough without the US. 5th generation fighter jets. Bombers. A navy - they have some great things but are missing many useful ships. They seem to have enough tanks, but are missing many other parts a modern army needs. And all of the above needs ammunition - they cannot provide Ukraine what is needed 3 years into that war - means they can't scale up to their owns needs if a war were to break out.

Fortunately war with Europe seems unlikely right now, but that can change fast and you need to be ready. Never has a battleship started during a war seen battle in that same war. (I don't know how to verify that claim, but it seems reasonable anyway)
Show HN: Tapotron – An iOS game where you just tap buttons
by dafeld | 2025-04-03 13:17:10+00:00
I made a game for iOS called TAPOTRON. It's a game where you tap buttons. That's all. But wait – there's more!

It's actually 16(!) buttons in a grid! You can tap them as fast as you can, slow and zen-like or in sequence. Three exciting game modes! In addition there are some secondary buttons to tap too. Like switching themes, view stats and leaderboards and even a settings-button!

All jokes aside. The concept is stupid simple, that's why I've tried to do the UI as fun as possible with inspiration from favorite retro electronics and implement haptics and satisfying sound and music. I've included a mascot called TAPTRONBOT that will encourage you with messages. You can also engage "Bad Robot Mode" and TAPOTRONBOT will be slightly disappointed and bored with you.

So you tap buttons and it will store your taps, best times, tap streak e t c. You choose a faction to join (I'm "HARD G. GIF" for life!) and your taps will contribute to your faction. You can also watch the global community's taps count upwards live as other tappers tap.

Your taps will earn you achievements and you'll unlock more visual themes as you tap along. If you tap every day your score multiplier will increase. The score multiplier is also based on you TPM (taps per minute).

And since it's such a silly concept (tap a button!) I've doubled down on comparing it to Tetris, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Minecraft, Fortnite e t c. TAPOTRON has ambitions of a AAA title but on a AA battery budget.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/6738282470

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZb_vG3nXao

Website: https://tapotron.com

It's only for iOS at the moment since it started out as a silly side project, but quickly snowballed to what it is now. Would be fun to port it to Android later on.

Also note: It's completely free to play and you can unlock stuff via progression. If you're lazy (or just want to support TAPOTRON) you can also purchase an unlock.

But, idea is to have it completely free. No third party trackers and completely ad-free.

If you have any feedback or questions just shoot! Stack is SwiftUI, Firebase Realtime database, Firestore database, Telemetry Deck for analytics.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-03 13:17:14+00:00
>I could still use the T430, it was just starting to feel sluggish

A cleaning and re-paste will bring it back. If on windows maybe time for a windows re-install.

Typed on a T430 via BSD that was just re-pasted and cleaned, not sluggish anymore :) If you are interested *BSD, I can confirm both NetBSD and OpenBSD works great on the T430 I have.
by gruez | 2025-04-03 13:17:32+00:00
>and working against US interests.

>We are in treason territory.

Are we just going to start throwing "treason" accusations whenever a political opponent does the wrong thing? Being anti-free trade? Hurts US hegemony and makes US consumers pay more. Treason. Being pro-free trade? Sells out hard working americans while enriching corporations. Treason.
by franktankbank | 2025-04-03 13:17:39+00:00
The only question is how to get them employed where our economy needs them. Honestly I've worked in Manufacturing and it is fucking gnarly. Clean factories don't exist. Many of the men I worked with had some sort of mild mental disorder tending towards aggression. Constantly short serviced machines and price gouging by any contractors involved. There is a lot to figure out and before you end up with a hospitable work environment. I'm doubtful tubby mcgamesalot is going to hold down a job stamping metal parts all day getting his lunch eaten or pissed in.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-03 13:17:48+00:00
The euro isn't a contender for two main reasons:

1. Europe is still dependent upon the US military and, as a consequence, is beholden to US foreign policy; and

2. No unified fiscal policy.

As for the unsuitability of the yuan, there are several reasons:

1. The yuan was once pegged to the US dollar. It's now pegged to a basket of currencies instead. This, by definition, makes China a currency manipulator because you wouldn't need to peg the currency otherwise;

2. The yuan is undervalued by this manipulation. It should really be more expensive, making China's exports more expensive. China does this to maintain their export competitiveness. If anything, increased demand for the yuan would be unwelcome as it would increase the pressure to appreciate the yuan;

3. China runs a trade surplus. It's basically inevitable that the country with the reserve currency will run a deficit;

4. The US running a government deficit is actually kind of a good thing for maintaining a reserve currency. China, for example, holds trillions in US government bonds. Do you really think they want to upset that apple cart?
by fullshark | 2025-04-03 13:18:15+00:00
Why is it a binary choice? This is just reductive. The idea that we couldn't maintain American hegemony and return more of the benefits of it to the middle/lower classes seems silly.

This is about tearing down a system / world order that a lot of people are angry about, with little thought to how to replace it and make it work for the citizens. The global economy has changed, manufacturing capabilities in the west will never be competitive again for a wide variety of products, and those jobs are not ones that regular Americans want anyway. Just like they don't want the farming jobs that illegal immigrants are doing.

This vision to essentially return America to a idealized view of 1900 is in for a rude awakening.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-03 13:18:29+00:00
> There is more than one project to rewrite the GNU utils in Rust?

coreutils != posixutils

That is, GNU coreutils is POSIX + their own extensions. So there’s only one project (that I’m aware of) that’s trying to rewrite the GNU coreutils, and that’s the uutils project.

However, there is also this project, which is trying to implement the various POSIX utils, and the POSIX parts only.
by wideserg | 2025-04-03 13:18:31+00:00
I’ve been frustrated for years with Chrome’s full-screen mode hiding my tabs. As a developer constantly toggling between docs, code, and Stack Overflow, losing tab access killed my flow. So I built Full Screen Tabs – a lightweight extension that brings Chrome’s tab bar into full-screen mode.

How it works: Adds a draggable, auto-hiding navigation bar Preserves all native Chrome functionality (tab groups, keyboard shortcuts) Zero permissions required (no telemetry, works offline)

Tech challenges: Reverse-engineered Chrome’s tab strip behavior (surprisingly undocumented) Implemented performant drag-and-drop that works across multi-monitor setups Solved z-index battles with video players and PDF viewers
by TexanFeller | 2025-04-03 13:18:36+00:00
I don’t talk politics much when I’m first getting to know someone because our country is so polarized that they automatically assume you are one of two extreme groups. Most people’s political beliefs are similar to religious beliefs, they have them because their parents/community had those beliefs or they attend a certain church(MSNBC, Fox News, etc.) that consistently reinforces their beliefs instead of encouraging critical thought about their positions. This also leads to overly moralizing political affiliation, you’re “one of them” and “a bad person”, not a thinking person whose beliefs can be changed with facts/discussion.

I think the solution is tolerance. Whatever your politics are they don’t typically affect me personally. I have a few friends that are far further right than Ben Shapiro and a couple that are far more left than Bernie Sanders and want literal Communism. They range from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian or various flavors of anarchist. Some want to ban guns entirely and some want personal ownership of bazookas. Diversity! I often enjoy hearing their thoughts and we have all been able to change each others’ minds on a few issues. People’s minds do change, but it’s a slow process.

That said, politics is a burden to me in some relationships. It’s hard to have a calm rational discussion when my family member says “The muslims are walking across the Gulf of Mexico and setting up terror cells in Texas”. They actually believe we’re experiencing terrorist attacks and its just not being reported. I guess my limit for a comfortable discussion is some level of contact with reality.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-03 13:18:39+00:00
Quiet? Trump has been bellowing about his tariffs for months. China, South Korea and Japan -- long absolute adversaries -- even had a meeting about how to respond. The actual tariff plan is 0% based upon reciprocity, and instead is based upon "we're a rich country that buys lots of stuff, so let's punish the citizens who buy stuff" (as the largest tax hike in history). There are tariffs for unoccupied island chains.

And these apply immediately. This is an administrative impossibility. CBP is going to have a disastrous couple of weeks about this rag tag collection of barely defined nonsense.

This is 100% disaster, top to bottom.
by api | 2025-04-03 13:18:57+00:00
It's because the far left and the far right are both made of up of people deeply disaffected by the status quo, and when those people talk they often find that at the very least many of their grievances overlap.

In terms of today's landscape there is a list of things like LGBTQ issues, race, gender equality, abortion, religion, etc., and if you avoid things on that list you'll find a huge overlap between the views of the far left and the far right. Both are broadly opposed to what's popularly called neoliberalism, the post-Reagan/Clinton post-cold-war order, and the reasons for this opposition overlap quite a bit if you again avoid the topics that I listed. From that perspective, blowing up the system is the goal. When they see trade policies like these crash the present system, they view that as a success because they think the current system is such a mistake that it must be smashed.

(I am not making a judgment in this post, just explaining the landscape.)
by grey-area | 2025-04-03 13:19:27+00:00
> Vietnam does manipulate its currency.

So does every country in the world, this is neither surprising nor reason to slap tariffs on imports (which will hurt US consumers).

> I have no idea if the tariffs will work

We have lots of examples from history of tariffs not working, so there is that. They lead to trade wars, and then sometimes to real wars, never to prosperity.

The unparalleled prosperity the US enjoyed in the last few decades before 2008 was driven by open global trade and being the currency of last resort and the centre of world markets. I think there is a lot of complacency in the US about that position, and we're seeing the beginning of the end.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-03 13:19:33+00:00
People are remarkably cheap and versatile especially if you happen to don’t give a fuck about them. I find it hard to imagine a high-tech incredibly unreliable complex robot to be of any value in the battlefield. Even my phone is remarkably unreliable, have to keep it charged, bugs, etc. I noticed this during COVID and its QR-scanning phase at restaurants.

A simple pipe bomb or two will make short work of any incoming monstrosity.

What they need is simple, simple tech, cheap and lots and lots of it. Basic drones and RC cars rigged with stupid bombs will accomplish 90% of what fancy robodogs can do at a fraction of the cost.