MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-04-09 21:42:09+00:00
> But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns.

There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.

Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.

Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.

> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.

Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
by matt-p | 2025-04-09 21:42:17+00:00
I think it was a ban on European migrants from sending benefits and particularly child benefit (some money you get from the state if you have kids) back to thier home country or something like that.

I remember Poland stopped us from getting it (supposedly).

The french didn't want us to exempt from financial regulation that was primarily targeted at the euro even though we use the pound.

Various nonsense, that people at the time felt strongly about (keeping the pound, not giving benefits and a council house to people as soon as they arrived, or some such exaggeration)
by nobodyandproud | 2025-04-09 21:42:35+00:00
If your definition and mine doesn’t agree, for loss of livelihood or serious misconduct then would agree there’s no point in discussing further?

But three that comes to mind are Brendan Eich: Mozilla is far poorer for what happened.

Peter Vlaming is another https://adfmedialegalfiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/Vlami...

Finally, Katie Herzog https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/style/what-is-cancel-cult...
by idk1 | 2025-04-09 21:43:04+00:00
I’ve been using this for some time and I have to say it is fantastic. I’m intentionally not writing this with Aqua but by hand and it is taking so much longer. This to me feels like what Apple Intelligence could be, it is so much better than stuff all of the big tech is doing. For example, if you tell Siri voice dictation to go back and delete something what Siri will do is just write out “go back and delete something“ also if you tell Siri to go back and spell a name differently all Siri will do is write out the letters that you said to go back and type out. Honestly, for voice dictation software it feels like travelling to another planet in terms of improvement.
by robocat | 2025-04-09 21:43:35+00:00
A knowledge economy depends on information. TSMC will keep key knowledge within Taiwan as part of their Silicon Shield[1].

Look closely at a business you know well and notice how much the profits depend upon information in people's heads.

Everything runs on a combination of money (capitalist profits) and non-money gains (other gains that people really care about).

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tsmc+silicon+shield
by dekhn | 2025-04-09 21:44:47+00:00
As an aside, Google used CPU-based machine learning (using enormous numbers of CPUs) for a long time before custom ASICS or tensorflow even existed.

The big ones were SmartASS (ads serving) and Sibyl (everything else serving). There was an internal debate over the value of GPUs with a prominent engineer writing an influential doc that caused Google continue with fat CPU nodes when it was clear that accelerators were a good alternative. This was around the time ImageNet blew up, and some eng were stuffing multiple GPUs in their dev boxes to demonstrate training speeds on tasks like voice recognition.

Sibyl was a heavy user of embeddings before there was any real custom ASIC support for that and there was an add-on for TPUs called barnacore to give limited embedding support (embeddings are very useful for maximizing profit through ranking).
by codedokode | 2025-04-09 21:45:49+00:00
It seems to me that replacing foreign computer services is actually easy compared to physical goods: no need to build factories, no need to buy expensive machinery etc, just wrap some open source solution and sell it. For example, China has domestic computer services, from messengers to AI models. And by observation, once you ban foreign services, local competitors start appearing like mushrooms after rain.
by braebo | 2025-04-09 21:45:56+00:00
It’s scary to think that the reality is as simple as “Trump is just an idiot that is incapable of understanding even the fundamentals of global trade and has been obsessed with what he thinks tariffs are for 30+ years and is too stubborn to listen to non-stupid people”, while the rest is just hopeless attempts to rationalize his stupidity. But when you’re in a billionaire bubble isolated from reality, and a dumb grifter who rips off every party in every deal you’ve ever done, it makes sense to assume that global trade is just countries ripping each-other off.

The people around him with zipped mouths who know better could very well be treating it as a pump and dump however.
by kashunstva | 2025-04-09 21:46:39+00:00
Indeed. I'm a dual citizen - U.S. and that country to the north that Dear Leader keeps threatening. I have to cross the border relatively often and have noticed shift in tone in the last few months. Instead of asking me where I'm going, they have been asking me "where do you want to go." It's inconsequential, really; and they've never truly harassed me. It's just a subtle power flex that seems new, as if they would really prefer to deny me entry.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-09 21:46:39+00:00
You are perhaps unaware that since last week, Britain has required EU citizens to go through an e-visa process.

The offer from the EU for a youth exchange program was rejected by the UK.

The fish thing looks like anti-EU nonsense. The anonymous source "hinted", whereas the people speaking on the record denied it.

Starmer ruled out joining the customs union, so blame him for the tool import paperwork.

> but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit,

So with such a failure of democracy, it's no wonder that the EU would require changes to the voting system (for example) before Britain can rejoin.

The EU doesn't want a half-in half-out Britain. It had that for decades.
by rtp4me | 2025-04-09 21:46:42+00:00
Thanks for this. Young people think UBI is great since they don't have much invested in the system. Instead they just have propaganda from media/social sites telling them how the world is falling apart, how they don't have a chance to succeed, etc. The answer: UBI! It is the "easy" answer since it literally requires no effort on their part to participate in society. They get up, eat free food, live in a free house, and enjoy the day without any worry.

Sounds great until they realize the human condition eventually kicks in. People will decide not to work - they will just take and not give back. In the end, we need a society where people are required to put forth the effort to participate.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-04-09 21:47:08+00:00
I find this specious - why would they do that when this is basically the composition of the MechE, AeroE, and ChemE (except no Intel for ChemE, we send our EEs to intel) at my public school undergrad?

Why would they work with people that they perceive to be beneath them and have worked far less hard than them?
by stevage | 2025-04-09 21:47:14+00:00
Interesting. I'm in Australia where I would also say that the number of second hand bookshops has greatly decreased in the last 20 years. New bookshops too for that matter. But I'm curious whether I'd also be wrong.

We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
by SvenL | 2025-04-09 21:47:30+00:00
One issue I had many time with workflow engines was updates. I have a workflow and it has already running instances. 2 scenarios:

Can I update the workflow while it has running instances without interfering the running instances?

Can I update a running instance with a new version of the workflow to patch some flaw? If no, can I replay an updated version of a workflow with the log of an old workflow version?
by tomasol | 2025-04-09 21:47:57+00:00
Thanks for the kind words. In an ideal world I would like to offer a cloud version that would be monetized. There are a few examples on how to do HTTP requests, I have a demo repository [1] with GraphQL and regular JSON-over-HTTP activities. I do agree that the ecosystem is not mature yet, but I was able to generate HTTP activities using LLM on a single shot.

1: https://github.com/obeli-sk/demo-stargazers
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-09 21:48:21+00:00
I wish he would publish plans for his machine, or someone would offer to build them. Wouldn't matter if it cost five times as much as retail, to be able to make fertilizer and prague salt with nothing but air and self-sufficient power would be a god-send.

Though, I gotta say that his fucking power supply gives me the heebie-jeebies just watching on Youtube. Electrical is one thing, but I know better than to look at high-voltage cross-eyed...
by sterlind | 2025-04-09 21:49:06+00:00
it really seems like there's a push to de-skill Americans. like Bessent's remark that the laid-off civil servants could become factory workers as we bring back domestic manufacturing, and the recent corporate push towards vibe coding and integrating AI everywhere, and the purge of seasonal and unskilled migrant workers while keeping the H1B program.

it almost seems like we're trying to clear immigrants out of the chicken plants to make room for laid-off graphic designers.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-09 21:49:17+00:00
There are very few politicians that are actually deficit hawks. The majority that claims that position are actually entitlement hawks. That is, they use fear of the deficit to talk about the need to reign in social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, and any other form of government assistance regardless the size or impact on the government budget.

Meanwhile the DoD, CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA, DHS, and ICE have never had a politician seriously consider reducing their funding.
by callamdelaney | 2025-04-09 21:49:33+00:00
Weird, the bill of rights act of 1689 is still in force.

It’s literally the policy of this country to sentence white men to harsher custodial sentences with more chance of a custodial sentence than any other group, simply for the crime of being a white man. Are these the sorts of people you think should decide our rights?

If the government would do what people have been voting for for decades and end mass immigration and take real action on this ridiculous and purposeful misuse of the human rights act, then nobody would want to redact it.

But they won’t.
by dekhn | 2025-04-09 21:51:01+00:00
A 3d torus is a tradeoff in terms of wiring complexity/cost and performance. When node counts get high you can't really have a pair of wires between all pairs of nodes, so if you don't use a torus you usually need a stack of switches/routers aggregating traffic. Those mid-level and top-level switch/routers get very expensive (high bandwidth cross-section) and the routing can get a bit painful. 3d torus has far fewer cables, and the routing can be really simple ("hop vertically until you reach your row, then hop horizontally to read your node"), and the wrap-around connections are nice.

That said, the torus approach was a gamble that most workloads would be nearest-neighbor, and allreduce needs extra work to optimize.

An AI data center tends to have enormous power consumption and cooling capabilities, with less disk, and slightly different networking setups. But really it just means "this part of the warehouse has more ML chips than disks"
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-09 21:51:03+00:00
>so you are telling me that hallucinations (that by definition happen at the model layer) are an engineering problem ?

Yes.

Hallucinations were a big problem with single shot prompting. No one is seriously doing that anymore. You have an agentic refinement process with an evaluator in the loop that takes in the initial output, quality checks it, and returns a pass/fail to close the loop or try again, using tool calls the whole time to inject verified/real time data into the context for decision making. Allows you to start actually building reliable/reasonable systems on top of LLMs with deterministic outputs.
by stevage | 2025-04-09 21:52:02+00:00
> With a basic income, the participants receiving a basic income saved an average of €450 more per month than the control group.

So where did the other 1050 euros go? It says their consumption habits went up slightly then back down. And they donated a tiny amount more and gave a bit to their community. There still seems to be 500 euros or so missing?
by normalaccess | 2025-04-09 21:52:11+00:00
For anyone who is familiar with the Security Now podcast there is an excellent write-up from Steve Gibson on the topic for nerds as we all work in man made caves and don't get sun. Highly recommended.

I would also recommend Dr. John Campbell's videos on the topic as he is quite thorough when reviewing the medical research.

One interesting point John makes is that if you are already sick Vit D is to slow as it needs to metabolize and calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D3, the active form) is what patents need after infection.

Links:

https://www.grc.com/health/vitamin-d.htm

https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching/search?query=vitam...
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 21:52:31+00:00
> Let's just be clear here - it was never about deporting "illegal immigrants" or "criminals". It was about creating fear and submission.

Honestly though, isn't "creating fear and submission" required to enforce laws, because it's impossible to get sufficient compliance without those things? They'll never be enough ICE agents to deport all illegal immigrants, so probably the only way to make a serious dent in the numbers is create enough "fear and submission" that illegal immigrants "self-deport" on their own.
by teamonkey | 2025-04-09 21:52:36+00:00
All sorts of benefits get scrutiny along the lines of “what if they spend it in ways I disapprove of?” Inherent in UBI is the notion of increased personal freedom.

The study showed that people used the money in unusual ways, spreading it around and sharing it, usually in ways that benefited the economy, but would not be allowed by a more heavily-regulated system like food stamps.
by bsder | 2025-04-09 21:53:38+00:00
> immutability is still seen as exotic, and I don’t think it should be.

Two big problems:

1) Because Linux filesystems still suck. You need efficient copy-on-write overlays (and the ability to handle lots of them!) with some level of deduplication to make immutable operating systems not suck.

2) Because the Linux linker sucks. Take a look at the reasons why Nix has to patch binaries and prepare to feel sick in your stomach.

The "UNIX Architecture" is increasingly creaky for the things we want to do on modern machines (see: io_uring because the old select/poll stuff doesn't cut it, for example). We're going to have to sweep a bunch of that underbrush away.
by redcanvas | 2025-04-09 21:53:45+00:00
Hey, love the what you are building in this category. I've been using a competing product which you know very well about. They advertised about how you can improve your work per minute by dictation, which was the main draw for me because I do a founder. There's a lot of managerial work that I'm doing.

It has been a godsend in terms of increasing my productivity because I no longer have to type. I think your product's accuracy and latency shortening just make this even better. I often use it and then find out, "Hey, I need to make some changes," and I need to re-edit some of the stuff, which reduces the WPM productivity amount. So I think accuracy is definitely key here. Key metric to differentiate a product.

I am pushing this to other colleagues to get them to adopt. One challenge people are saying is that. One is that some people may not be as organized (you know, they might be a lot more organizationally structured in their mind). So for them, they're having trouble - they'd like to write things out, and by the time if things go out of their mouth, you know it's already formulated logical thought. Whereas you know people like me are a lot more verbal vomit type of person. For me it's huge because I say a lot of um like in all the other things I just dump stuff out and then organize it later.

Whereas other people organize stuff in their brain and then dump the information out. So people who do a lot of coordination and just you know so I feel like this could be two different segments to take into account.

Another one that's been fantastic is that we have multilingual colleagues who are speaking in Mandarin or something else and then they speak it and then ask Flow to be sent to translate it to a different language. That part I think has been fantastic.

I think the ability to edit what you wrote with AI is going to be the next key feature. Providing the context in the window is all wiithin the conversation right? For example, you just ask after because what you write out is not the final and you need to do a lot of editing and formatting. Sometimes when you say too much stuff, it's just like a huge jumble paragraph with a lot of fluff words. Make it clear, concise, trim non-effective words. I think those are a key feature because it's not about your productivity, it's about other people being able to ingest your information efficiently. At least that's what I look at from a managerial perspective.

To give you an example, everything I laid out above came from dictation. You can see how this is inefficient. There's a lot of inefficiencies here.
by ks6g10 | 2025-04-09 21:53:54+00:00
I think you have the wrong understanding, VAT is applied irrespective of origin, so the same reduction would apply to domestic products.

To simplify,

US product for sale for £100, then VAT would be £20 ( assuming 20% rate)

UK product for sale for £100, then VAT would be £20 ( assuming 20% rate)
by rurp | 2025-04-09 21:54:00+00:00
We've all been learning just how much of the US system runs on assumption of there being some baseline level of competence and good faith. It hasn't been a pretty lesson.

I'm honestly not sure there is another way since laws can't cover all possible future edge cases with effective enforcement mechanisms. The simpler fix is to not elect blatantly corrupt and incompetent leaders, but voters failed that task and now the country is paying the price.
by chimeracoder | 2025-04-09 21:54:18+00:00
> I think their Epic Health computer system that needs me to confirm my date of birth every 6 weeks can find some time to suggest the HPV vaccine if it is so damn medically necessary.

You're assuming that the purpose of the EHR (Epic) is to implement public health recommendations or to establish minimum standards of care. That's a reasonable assumption for someone who doesn't work in the field, but unfortunately it's incorrect: neither of those are top-level goals for EHRs.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-09 21:54:29+00:00
Correct. It seems to me the increased bond yields payments will significantly exceed revenue raised from tariffs. This is imho a bad long-term signal. I very much doubt the markets will just return to normal after the extreme volatility of the last few days - the huge tariffs on China will cause a lot of economic pain within weeks, and the administration's bellicosity toward Canada and NATO do not project stability and rational decision-making.

Besides the financial uncertainty, I doubt businesses want to make huge capital investments within the US to re/build factories in such a febrile environment. Will they be 'encouraged' to make 'donations' or purchase Trump golf club memberships? Will their foreign management staff be abruptly deported if someone in the administration sours on their country of origin? Will they wake up one day to find they've been denounced by conservative influencers?
by tomasol | 2025-04-09 21:54:52+00:00
Yeah, looks like Golem went similar route - using WASM Component Model and wasmtime.

There is always this chicken and egg problem on a new platform, but I am hoping that LLMs can solve it partially - the activities are just HTTP clients with no complex logic.

Regarding the restrictions required for determinism, they only apply to workflows, not activities. Workflows should be describing just the business logic. All the complexities of retries, failure recovery, replay after server crash etc. are handled by the runtime. The WASM sandbox makes it impossible to introduce non-determinism - it would cause a compile error so no need for runtime checks.
by yodsanklai | 2025-04-09 21:55:11+00:00
> We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but four times bigger.

Is it even possible in terms of resources? there are limits to growth and it may not be feasible for 1.5 billions people to consume and pollute as much as an average American.

Also are the US willing to lose their supremacy peacefully?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-09 21:55:14+00:00
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
by piva00 | 2025-04-09 21:55:40+00:00
What's a better system that allows patching loopholes of the letter without requiring extensive bureaucracy and potential gridlock in legislature?

There's no mind reading, most of EU's fines only happen after a pattern of non-compliance, complain as much as you want about EU's bureaucracy but it's quite cooperative if you want to figure out a solution. I prefer this system than one where the written laws are worth nothing since well paid corporate lawyers can figure a way out, or hell, they might even be paid to write the laws themselves as it happens in the US.
by j45 | 2025-04-09 21:55:49+00:00
A solo developer trying to find a way to offer something for free and eat shouldn't be mutuals exclusive.

Selling out is relative to having one's living costs somehow subsidized.

Not everyone has the same financial safety nets, and likely most have to create a safety net for themselves.

Maintaining a clear line between the free size and paid should be easier here compared to other tools should the developer decide to go that way.
by palmotea | 2025-04-09 21:56:17+00:00
> Unsure why you're getting downvoted, perhaps because you used the fear-inducing d-word. While I'm not at the point of calling him that, I do think we're certainly living with the illusion of a democracy at the moment.

I think you have it a little wrong. We aren't living "with the illusion of a democracy at the moment," as Trump and the Republicans were all elected democratically (because the Democrats couldn't be bothered to take the threats they were screaming about seriously, and actually change their tactics and strategy).

What you describe seems to be more the "illusion of the rule of law."