MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by forgotoldacc | 2025-04-04 09:52:28+00:00
A long time ago, Britain was the dominant economic power in the world.

Britain had a massive trade deficit with India. It imported far more from India than it exported to India.

But what Britain did was import massive amounts from India and made high value goods at home and provided high value services that couldn't be provided elsewhere.

Should it have flipped the other way? In 1800, should Britain have suddenly shifted gears and started massively exporting to India in order to balance the trade?

Sure, India was a colony and not a mere trading partner, so no need to argue about that. But the US is also an empire that has bases around the world and has many countries in an economic chokehold. The situation is similar in a modern context since official colonization is kind of gone. The US takes in lower value products from around the world and sells them back to the original country at a higher price due to some sort of added value.

Should America do the opposite? Should we drop all of our high value scientific and medical research, drop our engineering, and go all in on making t-shirts to balance the trade deficit? Because we very well could do this. We could steal away the fine industry of Cambodia and Bangladesh and have them buy all our t-shirts and balance the deficit pretty quickly. But is that a long term benefit?

Cambodia and Bangladesh are countries that can't really afford to buy massive amounts of American high tech exports or foods. But they're essentially colonies that export goods to other countries, and through accumulating wealth through that development, more people can afford to buy American high tech products. But we're demanding that these countries buy lots of American products now with money that they don't have. The only way to balance that is to make things they can afford. Which means low value items.
Show HN: Vibe Coded a Credit Assessment Tool for Distributors and Manufacturers
by bibinmohan | 2025-04-04 09:52:29+00:00
Hello HN Community,

I built a simple credit assessment tool (Vibe coded using Chatgpt & edited) for wholesale distributors in India, where informal credit is commonly used to supply retail shops. This tool helps distributors decide how much credit to extend based on a shop’s profile.

Note: The amounts are displayed in Indian Rupees.

We’d love your feedback, criticisms, and questions!

P.S. We're working on building the Faire for India—an instant inventory platform that lets small stores stock only what they need, reducing both overstocking and stockouts while improving cash flow.
by greener_grass | 2025-04-04 09:53:07+00:00
This could be achieved with a hierarchical namespacing scheme for functions, no?

universe.mega_corp.finance_dept.team_alpha.foo

But to use `universe.mega_corp.finance_dept.team_alpha.foo` in your application, you don't import a module, just the function `foo`.

Who controls what goes into the namespace `universe.mega_corp.finance_dept.team_alpha`? That would be Team Alpha in the Finance Department of Mega Corp.

I guess this is like tree-shaking by default.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-04 09:53:50+00:00
So who’s to blame for the trade deficit? I’ll tell you who. It’s all the companies he invested in and made billions of dollars off of.

Because they all wanted to maximize their profit, so they ship their production overseas and now we have no choice but to buy “foreign goods“ from corporations that say they’re from the United States.

Corporations don’t care about countries, they care about profit. Countries are prisonsfor the workers.
by borlox | 2025-04-04 09:54:15+00:00
So, you don't want to have "the world" own shares of american companies?

Okay, let europe just sell all their stocks and ETF. But also, let them build alternatives to all american products. Let them keep the money they are spending for their Windows and Office licenses, their Netflix and Disney plans. Let them no longer create ad revenues on youtube. Let them buy korean Samsung phones instead of american iPhones.

Would that be a good deal for the american people?
by rsynnott | 2025-04-04 09:54:17+00:00
> There's just no way California will be able to become independent. Not sure about the US laws though, but in Europe there isn't even a legal framework for achieving something like this.

Even without a legal framework, it happens sometimes, through various means. Ireland used to be an integral part of the UK, say, Finland used to be part of (imperial) Russia, and the Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union.
by torginus | 2025-04-04 09:54:34+00:00
This would be true for any other country, but the dollar is the world's reserve currency. The US can simply go 'money printer go BRR' and create money out of thin air, without devaluing the dollar too much, which it can exchange for physical goods.

The US creates a 'trade deficit' by swapping things that have imaginary value for things that do not. Under these circumstances they'd be foolish on not running a trade deficit.

But if Trump gets his way, that world will be soon over, and people will trade in whatever they have so will no longer be compelled to hold USD.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-04 09:55:13+00:00
> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux.

This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
by supermatt | 2025-04-04 09:55:34+00:00
It seems like the way to "fix" a trade deficit is to create products the rest of the world actually wants to buy. The application of any reciprocal arrangement, whether tariffs or these ICs as proposed in the article only achieves "balance" through punishing others.

Aside from the obvious consumer technology and software I am hard pushed to think of any USA produce I would buy that would meet the standards we have in the EU.

The simple reality is that the USA consumes more than it produces.
by mpweiher | 2025-04-04 09:55:41+00:00
> it's largely outside of your control on the web.

On the web or in the JS ecosystem?

While I agree that even just the browsers are monster applications, usually duplicating (at least) the entire OS they are running on, just usually worse.

However, most browsers are perfectly capable of extremely snappy rendering and interactions, even on low-powered devices.

Let's remember that WWW.app was developed on a NeXT Cube, 25 MHz 68040, probably in the 16-64 MB RAM range (min was 8, but I am assuming it was more than the min), and that was plenty snappy.
by bhouston | 2025-04-04 09:56:47+00:00
I think we should expect the US to lose its reserve currency status if these tariffs continue and we should also expect its tax revenue to drop. The combination may make it more likely to see a US default on its debt as there will be less demand for its bonds around the world and less ability to pay high interest rates.

Seems unthinkable I know but we are in weird times.

If Trump doesn’t back down we may see a very interesting time in the US economy. I should point out that many oligarchs in Russia established themselves by making bold moves in the turbulent post Soviet times. This may be similar time period for the US where a new generation of winners emerge.
by vidarh | 2025-04-04 09:57:10+00:00
It's presumably because a lot of people think what people verbalise - whether in internal or external monologue - actually fully reflects our internal thought processes.

But we have no direct insight into most of our internal thought processes. And we have direct experimental data showing our brain will readily make up bullshit about our internal thought processes (split brain experiments, where one brain half is asked to justify a decision made that it didn't make; it will readily make claims about why it made the decision it didn't make)
by iNic | 2025-04-04 09:57:11+00:00
Interesting, and worrying at the time, but he clearly turned out to be wrong. The trend never stopped [1] and is not obviously responsible for any negative economic trend. The trend has continued [2]. The thing to worry about is probably not that it is happening, but who is holding these investments.

[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international...

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1HrHY
by Yoric | 2025-04-04 09:57:54+00:00
Note two limitations to the maths (I'll admit that I haven't read the OP in detail).

1. That's assuming that shipping, warehousing, transport, etc. do not rely upon foreign imports, including services. Chances are that more than one link in the supply chain will be hit either by the US tariffs or by the actual reciprocal tariffs from the other end [1].

2. That's also assuming that the tariffs will not have an impact on the sales of the company, which might adapt either by decreasing its margin (to increase sales) or by increasing it (either to try and compensate for lost sales or because it feels like the right time to hike prices).

[1] We shouldn't let ourselves be fooled by the word "reciprocal tariffs" used by Donald Trump. All these numbers are bogus. In January, EU tariffs on US goods were about 2-3%, not 39%, just as US tariffs on most EU goods.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-04 09:57:59+00:00
But it doesn't 'carry context' ; it's just vague and impossible to implement what you have in mind. And that's the problem; You assume people live in your reality, I assume mine, LLMs have some kind of mix between us and we will get 3 very different apps, none of which will be useful from that line alone. I like that line to be expanded with enough context to have an idea what you actually need to have built and I am quite sure pseudocode (or actual code) will be much shorter than a rambling english description you can come up with; most of which (unless it's logic language) will have enough unambiguous context to implement.

So sure, natural language is great for spitballing ideas, but after that it's just guessing what you actually want to get done.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-04 09:58:01+00:00
The Amazon rainforest has evolved for at least 55 million years. It is likely home to millions of compounds of potential medicinal value. In just 50 years 100 million hectares, 390 billion individual trees 16,000 visible species and (estimated unknown) >100,000 types of non-visible fungi, bacterium, microbes etc, have been destroyed. It's why I found this wide-eyed statement in TFA particularly cringe:

The discovery shows that "there is terrifically interesting stuff hiding in plain sight".
by pastage | 2025-04-04 09:58:14+00:00
I have seldomly seen insightful comments from LLMs. It is usually better than "comment what the line does" usefull for getting a hint about undocumented code, but not by much. My experience is limited, but what I have I do agree with. As long as you keep on the beaten path it is ok. Comments are not such a thing.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-04 09:59:00+00:00
> When they talk about trade deficits do they take into account tourism and other services?

If the USA wants tourists, they better ensure not to annoy tourists by their visa policy, or even by detaining tourists:

> Germany Issues Travel Warning for US

> https://www.newsweek.com/germany-issues-travel-warning-us-20...
Show HN: React router v7 developer tools
by alle00 | 2025-04-04 09:59:17+00:00
Hey HN!

I've been building developer tools for react-router v7 for a while now, it all started with remix-development-tools and then I rebranded the Repository to react-router-devtools.

I wanted to share the project with you, it's fully open source and helps you build applications with react-router v7.

Some of the features include: - Detailed server logs including caching information, cookies, server timings and others per loader - Enhanced console logs telling you where it was logged and allowing you to click to open the file - Client UI with detailed overview of your routes, current loader data, and a lot of other things. - Open in VS code button for routes - Open in VS code for any component on the screen (currently only available on React 18, working on 19 support) - many many more..

I would love for you to check it out, and if the docs page is not your flavor, here is the github repo: https://github.com/forge-42/react-router-devtools
by xmodem | 2025-04-04 10:00:57+00:00
The US is not the only government with sway over US tech companies, and the OS market is now substantially more diverse than when secure boot on x86 was first introduced ~15 years ago.

Never say never, but I just don't see how the option for one to boot an alternative OS on the vast majority of commodity hardware is going to be rolled back any time in the foreseeable future.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-04-04 10:01:08+00:00
I started believing that all these, are just side effects of Americans and their leadership not accepting the loss of their global leadership to China. They know they can’t pull a Plaza Accord like they did with Japan in the 80s to slow they down. Now hoping for some hail marys. In the worst case, a good chunk of people will be poorer, less women with jobs, which should result in a bump in birth rates.

No data points, but I like to entertain this.
by drob518 | 2025-04-04 10:01:14+00:00
To expand on what you wrote, the challenge with phages is that they’re highly specific to certain bacteria, in the same way that some viruses target gorillas and some target humans. We have yet to find broad spectrum phages. While humans have been saved from bacteria by phages, it requires identifying the bacteria strain, looking up appropriate phage that can target that bacteria, cultivating a dose of the phage, etc. So, yea, phages are highly effective, but there are practical challenges. As you say, antibiotics are lazy.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-04 10:01:23+00:00
Arthur Whitney writes compact code in C (and in k of course); most things fit on one A4 which is actually very nice to me as an older person. I cannot remember as much as I could (although i'm still ok) and just seeing everything I need to know for a full program on 1 page is very nice vs searching through a billion files, jump to them, read, jump back and actually mostly forgotten the 1000 steps between (I know, this refers to a typical overarchitected codebase I have to work on, but I see many of those unfortunately).
by teleforce | 2025-04-04 10:02:37+00:00
Fun facts, according to Jobs for some unknown reasons Wozniak refused to add floating point support to Apple Basic thus they had to license BASIC with floating point numbers from Microsoft [1].

[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-04 10:03:53+00:00
Technically you can revoke the default root of trust and install your own.

Then manually sign your bootloader.

This feature is available at least in my Gigabyte mainboard, but is not particularly easy to use, which is why bootloaders come pre-signed with a known root of trust. There's nothing stopping the installer from generating the root of trust on the fly, except for the default settings in many machines.

Can also preload measurements for hardware while at it so that nobody swaps a PCIe device for an evil twin.
Show HN: Built a visual UI editor that exports to code
by alexstyl | 2025-04-04 10:04:11+00:00
I've been specializing in UI for over a decade. Using code for UI is great but I always wished there was a more visual code to build apps and sites. So I went ahead and built it.

Decided to build it with Compose Multiplatform since I work a lot with Kotlin. Currently exports to CMP as it was simpler due to the context switch.

You can try it for free and export some apps
by belter | 2025-04-04 10:04:29+00:00
> It is the enforcement mechanisms which turn those ideas represented on paper into something that interacts and molds physical reality.

There’s a speech from Reagan, where he reflects on the constitutions of Soviet republics. He notes that, on paper, they all affirm human rights and the dignity of the individual. But in the end, it’s not the words that matter, it’s the people, and whether they choose to uphold or ignore those principles.

“I've read a number of constitutions of other countries, including that of the Soviet Union, and was astonished to find guarantee of freedom of expression and assembly and so forth in all of those. And you find yourself thinking, well, then, what makes ours so different? Why does ours work the way it does? And the answer is so simple that it almost escapes you. And yet it is so great that it explains the whole difference: three words -- 'We the People'.”

- Ronald Reagan - September 10, 1987 - Remarks to the Winners of the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition
by kerkeslager | 2025-04-04 10:04:45+00:00
Trump appointed judges who said abortion is a state's rights issue, and leaders in states such as Texas and Florida openly declared that they would ban all abortion, without exceptions for rape, incest, or medical necessity. And many states delivered on this promise, resulting in a litany of easily-avoidable suffering[1]. None of this was a secret: this was Republicans doing exactly what they promised to do.

Every American who voted Republican voted for that. If you voted for them, you don't get to distance yourself from the abhorrent things Republicans said they were going to do and then did. If you voted for them, take responsibility for what you voted for.

If you knew that, you're pretending ignorance, and if you didn't know that, you shouldn't be spreading ignorance or voting. Either way, stop spreading misinformation.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-year-without-roe-here-are-...
by megasquid | 2025-04-04 10:05:03+00:00
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by movpasd | 2025-04-04 10:05:51+00:00
It reminds me of this rather classic post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Science is not ideas: new conceptual schemes must be invented, confounding variables must be controlled, dead-ends explored. This process takes years.

Engineering is not science: kinks must be worked out, confounding variables incorporated. This process also takes years.

Technology is not engineering: the purely technical implementation must spread, become widespread and beat social inertia and its competition, network effects must be established. Investors and consumers must be convinced in the long term. It must survive social and political repercussions. This process takes yet more years.
by energy123 | 2025-04-04 10:06:28+00:00
The way he views net investment and net foreign ownership seem wrong.

He uses the analogy of a farm owner selling bits of their farm to fund their trade deficit.

But in the real world, it's not zero sum like this. The pie isn't fixed to the size of the farm. New companies serving new needs can be created.

If you're a poor country wanting to escape poverty, you want FDI to be high because you realize it's not zero sum.

Yeah, foreigners now own 20% of your stock market due to negative net investment, but it's now 1.5x as big so your slice increased in size to 0.8*1.5 > 1 and everyone is happy.

Given this, I struggle to understand if his argument still has merit.

He has a point about national debt but it's not a new one.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-04-04 10:06:30+00:00
> create products the rest of the world actually wants to bu

Exactly. Esp when you have the leader(s) of the US complaining that Europe doesn't buy US cars. Well in the UK smaller cars dominate the market where in the US larger cars do. On avg US cars are longer, wider, taller, and heavier.

A lot of our roads (Cities and urban areas) were not designed for larger cars, even a Tesla smallest car, the Model 3 feels big on the road, well it feels big on the road to me.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-04 10:06:32+00:00
Quoting from wikipedia:

> Prior to 20th-century monetarist theory, the 19th-century economist and philosopher Frédéric Bastiat expressed the idea that trade deficits actually were a manifestation of profit, rather than a loss. He proposed as an example to suppose that he, a Frenchman, exported French wine and imported British coal, turning a profit.

> He supposed he was in France and sent a cask of wine which was worth 50 francs to England. The customhouse would record an export of 50 francs.

> If in England, the wine sold for 70 francs (or the pound equivalent), which he then used to buy coal, which he imported into France (the customhouse would record an import of 70 francs), and was found to be worth 90 francs in France, he would have made a profit of 40 francs.

> But the customhouse would say that the value of imports exceeded that of exports and was trade deficit of 20 against the ledger of France. This is not true for the current account[, which] would be in surplus.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade#Monetarist_th... )

A major fundamental flaw in the concept is the assumption that goods have a fixed value. In reality, their value changes according to where they are, which is the only reason it's possible to make a profit by moving them around.

Note that in the same example, if the French wine is bought by a wizard instead of a merchant, and he transmutes the wine into 50-francs-of-wine's worth of coal for export to England (the ways of wizards are mysterious), the customs house will record the value of the coal as 90 francs. It's only worth 50 francs when it's going the other way.

And if he does the same thing, transmuting the wine into coal within France, and then sells it in France, the econometric body will be happy that French GDP has increased by 90 francs, making the people of France richer.
by hellotheretoday | 2025-04-04 10:06:44+00:00
Well for brevity I did trivialize it but I will expand:

The left side got people fired. This is objectively not as bad as getting people disappeared. You can get a new fucking job. You can’t get freedom from detention and you cannot easily return to the country (if at all)

Additionally there is the motivational factor behind both sides:

The lefts argument in policing language was to reduce harm to marginalized groups. You may not agree with it, but that is the rational.

The rights argument is to erase those marginalized groups.

These are extremely different in motivation. Asking you to respect a persons gender identity in professional contexts is far different than forcing someone to not be able to express it on federal documentation.

One side of this was “we want to create inclusive spaces that make people comfortable and if you don’t want to participate in that there is the door”. The other side is “we did not want to participate in that so go fuck yourself and we will do whatever we can to deny your right to express your identity”

“Any attempt to control speech” is an absolutist statement that is absurd in its fallacy. So I can say I can murder you? I can say you’re planning a terrorist attack? I can say you want to kill the president? Of course not. Speech is limited contextually and by law