MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2025-04-03 14:35:19+00:00
A thought experiment. Imagine a small poor country far from the US, of 1 million people, where the average income is $3000 annually ($3 billion total household income). Imagine a factory in that country that produces shoes beloved in America.

Those shoes are so popular in America that Americans buy $1 billion of those shoes every year. In order to address the problem as stated, this hypothetical country would have to spend a third of its household income purchasing products produced in some of the highest-cost conditions in the world. To do so, they would have to shut out their local trading partners from whom they currently buy goods at prices they can afford. This would have the effect of making them even poorer.

Does this make any sense?
by parsimo2010 | 2025-04-03 14:35:25+00:00
I suspect that this $25/50 per item policy is to prevent people from claiming a lower value than the actual price of the item. I've received international packages marked "gift" with a value of $10 that I had paid much more for.

I doubt the US will even manufacture substitutes for most of the things I liked and ordered from AliExpress. People with hobbies primarily supplied by Chinese manufacturing (like mine- electronics, 3D printing, FPV drones) are just going to be paying more for the same thing. There's no way we'll get an American substitute for niche products- all the US chip fabs are going to be filled with orders for higher dollar parts.

Note that the fact sheet says per item, not per shipment. So there doesn't even seem to be a way to make one big purchase of several items to pay a single fee. They will hit you for every item in the shipment.

Quick edit: I also note that the fact sheet makes a distinction between things sent through international post vs. other means. If you send via UPS/FedEx/DHL there will be regular customs fees (34%?), and through post you will have the $25/50 per item fee. So I will definitely have to pay attention to the shipping method for anything bought from AliExpress from now on.

Quick edit 2: I literally have a PicoCalc from ClockworkPi coming in the mail in a few days- I guess we'll see if DHL charges me any extra fees.
by f33d5173 | 2025-04-03 14:35:34+00:00
>US tech companies are clearly the market leaders in the area the DMA is concerned with.

There's a good argument that this is targeted. Why didn't this regulation affect SAP? Their market position gives them leverage over a massive number of companies.

>it's just that US companies don't bother to comply with the regulations that apply in the EU, and thus get fined.

It's not that they "don't bother", it's that they understand complying with the regulation to cost them more than the fine. In other words, the regulation itself is a sort of fine, or tax imposed by the EU, with a magnitude of roughly equal proportion to the fines it imposes.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-03 14:35:41+00:00
Can you really? Maybe, but I don't think it's cost effective. It requires a flawless art and tech pipeline, alone side masterful game design. You see how Nintendo can spend 2 years alone perfecting Mario's Jump and you realize the budget for that level of polish is enormous.

Not as enoirmouus as paying a studio in California to make a failed GaaS shooter service. But still a large step past a AA budget.

I'd say at the bare minimum you need a very solid staff of 5 to pull it off though. Hollow knight did it with a rough core of 3 devs + composer (and other support, of course). The very ambitious Toweers of towers of aghasba was reportedly 6 devs IIRC, but that's TBD and might have scaled up.
by rayiner | 2025-04-03 14:35:42+00:00
> The two major political parties fundamentally realigned during the civil rights era of the 1960s.

This is an incorrect analysis looking at the wrong causal factor (civil rights rather than economics). Even in 1976, Carter did great in the deep south. The realignment happened in the 1980s, due to economic growth in the south. The south went from being poor and agrarian in the 1930s to being newly industrialized in the 1980s.

> Who were the "social conservatives"?

The 19th century GOP was a coalition of religious conservatives and protectionist industrialists. MAGA is a coalition of religious/cultural conservatives and protectionist industrialists.
Ask HN: What's the Point of MCP?
by tomelliot | 2025-04-03 14:35:47+00:00
I’ve been messing around with MCP servers to get a feel for the ecosystem. I’m seeing a real issue, and I’m not sure what solutions are possible with the architecture - am I missing something?

The LLM always sits in the middle of any pipeline. That means you’ll always have potentially messy and lossy translation in between every tool call (not to mention incredibly slow/wasteful compared to piping data between processes).

The example I was using: I wanted Claude to orchestrate some analysis on Stripe data for me. I asked it to get all transactions from last month and write them to disk (as a step one, before actually doing anything). Because the data coming out of Stripe goes back through the LLM before going to disk, it completely borked it and wrote only a small fraction of the data.

I'm trying to piece together the puzzle that lets a chatbot do useful things for me in my life. Is there a future-state where this issue isn’t an inherent problem? Some workarounds I've thought of:

- have a python interpreter and have the LLM write code. But then what’s the point of an MCP server when you’d just use the Stripe python library or APIs? - have some kind of inter-MCP-server communication protocol At this point we're writing an OS for the LLM to live inside.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-03 14:36:05+00:00
I can when he did so not through raising revenue, but by gutting social safety net programs.

If you have a debt problem, you need to both raise income and cut unnecessary spending. Clinton - and every Democrat since Carter, really - only ever did the latter, and always targeting the working class for spending cuts as opposed to the corporate or wealthy classes. God forbid we curtail subsidies to fossil fuel companies or sugar producers or big box stores with a disproportionate amount of workers on government assistance programs, god forbid we stop bailing out failed banks or bankrupt private enterprise, let’s instead make sure poor people can’t have housing and children can’t have three meals a day.

Throwing large numbers around without examining how those numbers were achieved is what politicians and despots bank on the populace trusting, because once you know how those figures are reached, you’re confronted with how the system really works and suddenly have a distaste for it.
by macinjosh | 2025-04-03 14:36:08+00:00
This is expected and normal? Demand for locally sourced goods will skyrocket which means prices should as well. What you are leaving out is that the US is well capitalized and those sky high prices will be a strong incentive for more competitors to join the market. With competition in place prices will eventually fall. Prices will likely never go back as low but at least our fellow countrymen will be employed, housed and hopeful instead of on the streets doing fentanyl.
by rob | 2025-04-03 14:36:25+00:00
Not really sure how the author thinks anybody who tracks their calories/macros seriously is going to trust a website that literally just makes up values for the vitamins, minerals, etc:

> TL;DR: They are estimates from giving an LLM (generally o3 mini high due to cost, some o1 preview) a large corpus of grounding data to reason over and asking it to use its general world knowledge to return estimates it was confident in, which, when escalating to better LLMs like o1-pro and manual verification, proved to be good enough that I thought they warranted release.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-03 14:36:35+00:00
Sure you do. And if you don't consume all of the grease, then you have some overestimation error in your tracking which is evened out by (but usually dominated by) all of your underestimation errors, like every time you forget to log the squirts of oil in the pan or that handful of mixed nuts or every time you eat out.

Having to cook your food first, take it out, measure it, and put it back in the dish you're making before you can estimate content doesn't seem like a recipe (pun) for habit forming here. Nor is it viable for anything but the most basic dishes like individually pan frying large ingredients.
by jampekka | 2025-04-03 14:36:52+00:00
When visiting US I feel very weird about baggers. Bagging stuff is something I can easily do myself while the cashier scans the products. Now instead of doing something useful, I just stand there idle and awkward watching the staff working.

In general having service workers spend a good part of their lives doing things that I can trivially with minimal effort and no loss of time do myself feels actively degrading these people. Perhaps some do get sense of being useful out of it, but I'd guess a lot of them would rather be doing something else if given choice.
by qudat | 2025-04-03 14:37:16+00:00
Thank you for the feedback and we agree so we have changed the header nav link from "pico+" to "pricing".

In terms of the costs to run a saas, we are actively monitoring hardware utilization and resource allocation. Antonio and I have a lot of experience building and running saas (and paas) products so we feel confident we can manage whatever usage comes our way. We have also been strategic in terms of the services we provide in an effort to keep service support manageable.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-03 14:37:18+00:00
Just at a quick glance...

How can a large egg (50 g) contain 147 g choline?

https://www.opennutrition.app/search/eggs-eeG7JQCQipwf

Additionally, on https://www.opennutrition.app/search/brown-lentils-VwKWF7CQq... it says:

> Unlike larger legumes, they require no pre-soaking and cook in 20-30 minutes, making them ideal for soups, stews, and salads

That is not necessarily true. Based on my experience, it does require pre-soaking, otherwise you will have to cook it for a long time, as opposed to red lentils (which is done under 15 minutes, no pre-soaking needed), although red lentils taste more like yellow peas.

In any case, I think this could be really useful, once accurate enough. One could even implement other features on top, such as a calorie tracker and so forth, but that is a huge project on its own.

I wish you luck!
by somenameforme | 2025-04-03 14:37:34+00:00
It's useful when done in good faith. During COVID there were numerous decisions that even if not intended to inflate mortality figures, then they did so inadvertently. In particular the CDC gave extremely broad guidance on what to classify as a death "of" COVID, and the government was giving hospitals additional funding per COVID death. So for the most ridiculous example of what this led to, in Florida some guy died in a motorbike crash and ended up getting counted as a COVID death because he also had COVID at the time. [1] He was eventually removed from their death count, but only because that case went viral.

Even in more arguable cases, preexisting conditions and extreme senescence are ubiquitous in deaths "of" COVID, and at this point there's probably no real chance of ever untangling the mess we created and figuring out what happened. For instance Colin Powell died at 84 with terminal cancer, Parkinson's, and a whole host of other health issues. His eventual death was flagged as 'caused by complications of COVID.' I mean maybe it really was, but I think the asterisk you'd put there is quite important when looking at these stats.

[1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-motorcyclist-covid...
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-03 14:37:52+00:00
New debt is only more expensive if you have to exchange something of value to obtain the USD to pay down the debt. But since the Fed can expand the money supply at will, it's essentially creating new USD out of thin air which can be used.

(This is how the US has been able to sustain such a large debt without any real consequences.)

What will happen though is that interest rates on T bills will rise, so yes, in that sense, it does eventually become "more expensive" to service new debt. But again it's in nominal dollar terms and so it's just a matter of issuing more dollars. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't devalue the dollar thus triggering an inflationary cycle.
by M95D | 2025-04-03 14:37:54+00:00
As I said, I never saw the FW16 except in pictures and everything I know about it was from the net. I might be wrong about some of the things I wrote.

So, does it really have a headphones jack or not?

My X60T headphones jack only recently started to cause troubles after many many years of use, but it was an easy fix: drill 3 tiny holes in the connector casing and push a needle through each one to bend the contacts tighter.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-04-03 14:38:02+00:00
Manufacturing as a share of GDP is bound to fall. It is inevitably going the way of agriculture.

The US is in the envyable position of having developed a globally dominant service sector. Putting that at risk of retaliation by imposing tariffs on all imports, including the lowest margin stuff like screws and bolts is utter insanity.

https://www.ft.com/content/aee57e7f-62f1-4a57-a780-341475cd8...
by Rooster61 | 2025-04-03 14:38:04+00:00
Does this have an API? Reason I ask, I would kill to have a dynamic recipe scanner that could plug into recipe databases (namely ones that can accurately scrape recipes from the web) and instantly give you a nutritional rundown of the ingredients, as well as any changes to the nutrition that could occur due to the cooking process. It would make tracking what I eat a breeze, and really give solid insight into the macros and micros I'm consuming.

Also, why the app focus? Having the main functionality exist in the Apple/Android store space rather than as a SaaS option seems like an interesting choice.
by specialist | 2025-04-03 14:38:09+00:00
#1 Per our Constitution, USA has minoritarian rule baked in.

There's many anti-democratic choke points: Electoral College for POTUS, Supreme Court, US Senate, gerrymandering effect on US House, long history of systemic disenfranchisement, etc. aka Vetocracy per Francis Fukuyama.

#2 ~6m Biden voters stayed home in 2024.

There's a sizeable cohort of infrequent voters and a huge cohort of non-voters who self disenfranchise. Due to nihilism (voting doesn't matter), both parties are the same, low motivation, whatever.

#3 Like most everywhere else, our information ecology is broken, fragmented.

The audience for "traditional" media's news is tiny, compared to social media. The Dems focus on "traditional" whereas GOP have successfully embraced "social". So for all the billions spent every presidential election (political advertising), most voters don't ever hear from Democrats.

Therefore, US voters are mostly unable to correlate policy positions with politic parties. So mass politics really comes down to marketing and vibes.

#4 Addressing these "legitamacy" issues (government by consent of the governed) is wicked hard when one of our two political parties has been utterly opposed to democracy and effective governance for decades.
by chimpanzee | 2025-04-03 14:38:22+00:00
Anarchism is not just “no government”, but rather “no rulers”.

Leftist anarchists are acutely aware that power and capital accumulation go hand-in-hand.

Extreme libertarians are perfectly fine with the unfettered accumulation of capital and seemingly ignore that that results in unchecked power. Or they have faith that a “truly” free economy would somehow check itself before becoming effectively neo-feudalistic or dictatorial. As if the lion would fear the zebra.

Leftist-anarchists want to keep power to an absolute minimum. Usually relying on a combination of culture and group action to wield just enough power to prevent the growth of unchecked power in the hands of a few.

In my mind, culture is the key element. The capital-worshipping, me-versus-all culture we live in would fit quite well into extreme-libertarianism and then it would devolve into defacto rule by a few. (As seems to be happening anyways. Because, again, capital accumulates, protects itself and takes power where it can when no one is willing to or allowed to work together to stop it.)

Leftist-anarchism requires a more mature, selfless, introspective, cooperative culture. Anathema to the “United” States of America.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-03 14:38:25+00:00
> It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.

The university educated are the top. Politics is not about the top few percent, it's about the masses. At this the US education system is really bad, especially in poorer areas.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-03 14:38:29+00:00
To point 1, how does receiving, say, $1,000 a month remove hope and prevent bettering oneself? Anyone receiving UBI can still get a job to get additional money. Anyone already working is still receiving their salary. I would not stop trying to promote and make more money, let alone quit my job because I was receiving an extra grand a month. Just like suddenly not having to pay for healthcare and having that extra money in my pocket wouldn’t disincentivize me.

On point 2, the idea that UBI is parasitism and corporate handouts are not is ridiculous. UBI is basically the same as a stock dividend paid to shareholders, where everyone owns one “share” of the country, with all of its natural resources, infrastructure, trade, etc (something literally done in Alaska already with oil revenue). Taxes already go to things an individual will not personally use or directly benefit from, but the aggregate is a benefit to all. The highway system for example, where any individual strip of road may or may not “make more” than it costs, but the system of transit benefits everyone. Eliminating (relative) extreme poverty, and all of its criminal, health, productivity loss ills that come with it, while also reducing the massive cost to manage, check, and enforce means tested assistance is a net benefit.
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-03 14:38:30+00:00
LLMs produce deterministic results? Now, that's a big [citation needed]. Where can I find the specs?

Edit: This is assuming by "deterministic," you mean the same thing I said about programming language implementations being "controllable, reproducible, and well-defined." If you mean it produces random but same results for the same inputs, then you haven't made any meaningful points.
by niemandhier | 2025-04-03 14:38:31+00:00
Germany. The country was designed to be incredibly hard to takeover from the inside.

Central government is weak, even if AFD would takeover the chancellorship there are few measures that would immediately allow them to intervene in the federal states or „Länder“, much much less than in the US e.g. unless there is war there is no way to use the military to force compliance.

You would have to take over the country 17 times, and since the elections are not synchronised you would have to convince everybody all the time that this is good idea.

Individual German federal states could be taken over much easier, Thuringia probably will be the first in 2028.

The biggest weakness than is that the legal prosecution on German federal state level is under control of the executive and could be used to prosecute political adversaries. But if this goes to far the remaining parts of the country could vote to takeover the executive if there was a breach of the constitution.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-03 14:38:47+00:00
Is this what you're moving on to now? That it can't be a nazi salute because he needs to salute someone, even though it is identical to hitler doing it on stage?

You didn't even back up your other points. You said it was propaganda and "persecution"!, but after a comparison video that anyone can see you back off those claims and gish gallop on to something else. Are you admitting that those are ridiculous?

You didn't give any evidence that they are true and just moved on to something more ridiculous and tried to combine it with an insult. It's amazing that you would bring up 'critical thinking' while never giving a shred of evidence to back up your claims.
by iteria | 2025-04-03 14:39:40+00:00
I will not deny that. I'm not say that all companies are like this, but I am saying that it is not mandatory to live like this. I never have worked a crazy amount of hours even working for a WITCH and it was not an issue. The US does not give you balance by default, but I am saying that it is perfectly viable to avoid those kinds of companies. No one has to work 60 hours all the time. It won't cost you your career. It might cost you money. I will be the first to admit that I'm not a super high earner, but I have never struggled to pay my bills.
by necovek | 2025-04-03 14:39:44+00:00
It's great when you make a general statement about somebody you are conversing with without really knowing their background.

As Dan notes himself, even scenarios which are simpler than this (moving a bridge, moving a building) are done much more rarely compared to similar requests in software. I did not accidentally use "modify something in a dimension that's really hard to modify in civil engineering" as an example — perhaps your response was a cocktail party response of someone not understanding either civil or software engineering?

IMHO, it is all about costs (which I start off with being small in software — comparatively): traditional engineering doing changes like these is extremely expensive and thus they don't (it's usually cheaper to demolish and rebuild).
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-03 14:39:53+00:00
Our diversity is not fragility. It makes things harder to arrange but it also keeps them fair. There is no chance of some president/party getting voted into office and making unilateral decisions that screw everybody. Like you know, the US. Or the UK with Brexit. In Europe the diversity keeps that from happening.

It also combats exceptionalism, that "Our nation is the greatest ever!" kinda stuff. Because in Europe we know we're not a nation but an alliance. That we need others to survive.

And remember that Finland didn't even bother joining NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine, if they thought it was so important to be together as a big bloc, this would have been the first step.

Ps: if the other countries in Europe didn't agree with Finland's smart decisions, how do you think these decisions would come to pass if Europe was one big country? Because the people wanting those would be in the minority. You would have very little input to the whole. And no chance to decide them yourself as you currently do.
by throw10920 | 2025-04-03 14:39:54+00:00
> fascism and fascist ideologies

This is political dog-whistling. As Orwell pointed out almost eight decades ago: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."[1] and is now obviously only a dog-whistle for fellow ideologues. This does not belong on HN.

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
by papercrane | 2025-04-03 14:40:03+00:00
A plan like that could backfire, as one of the primary things that the Fed looks at when setting interest rates is inflation. Increasing the costs of imports across the board will likely increase inflation, which would make a rate cut less likely.

But in general, I think this is too complicated. The simpler explanation for all this is the Executive branch is currently held by isolationist.