MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kiitos | 2025-05-21 06:47:40+00:00
> the expense of hollowing out domestic industry

> Post WW2, US leadership [deliberately] traded the domestic manufacturing industry [capability] for national security, by making the US dollar the default international trade currency. [This] gave America benefits, but increased the value of the dollar astronomically, which made it impossible to manufacture anything locally ... the logic at the time was that Americans would up-skill en-masse, away from the menial manufacturing jobs [of history] -- but everyone is too much of a dumbass to stay in school [which is required for all of this to work] ... Let's Go Brandon!!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCUy3DrUZmw
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-21 06:47:43+00:00
I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy.

Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.

Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.

As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.

It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.

People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
by godelski | 2025-05-21 06:48:38+00:00
See? Mostly nerdy stuff. Like these complaints are weird to put side by side with how we'd critique all the big companies. Its not that we shouldn't critique them (we should) it is that it's weird when we are discussing big tech and act like companies like Signal, Mozilla, ffmpeg, or whatever aren't good models to look up to because they aren't perfect. Because right now the alternative is the status quo.

I mean the critiques are mostly valid but wanted to point out they're mostly technical.

I really wish the server was fully open. I feel like that could actually create a mixed federated ecosystem. At worst be optional, right? I can get where he's coming from (and now Meredith), but I think there's a lot of value in it and they've solved hard problems before. Even just the ideas of mesh nets in local areas could be a real win for privacy and security.

Being a Linux user and signal user for quite some time I'm confused at that critique. What's hostile? That it's electron? I mean that does suck but I've used various open source desktop versions and some TUIs. No real issues so far. What am I missing?

Generally the talk I hear about government money is implications of back doors. Just seems like they are more interested in getting encrypted communications into other people in other countries hands. At least that's my understanding of the mission of the organization that's funding them. They'd want that as secure as possible. Government isn't a single entity. If the complaint is morally taking money from the government, yeah it was a weird move. Kinda seems out of character. But not too crazy. Personally I'm okay if they aren't building weapons and there's no strings attached. My understanding is it's not enough money to justify that.
by yason | 2025-05-21 06:49:44+00:00
> [complexity...] Author seems to imply that this is something unique to computing.

The unique part of computing is that complexity can grow way higher and faster than complexity in physical based engineering because it does not suffer from physical limitations and all the NN relations between pieces of shared code and data grow out of hand quick.

Creating something complex in physical realm is hard, and it essentially means doing more work to make something complex rather than simple. The common challenges are rather often about fitting the achieved complexity either in a small physical space (like an engine bay) or building it all out into large installments that look complex (like a nuclear plant). Yet many things in physical based engineering aren't inherently* hard but it will be hard to make it all into something that both fits in a practical enclosure and actually works reliably in practice.

But creating something complex in the realm of compute is rather the default offering. If you just put things together into a program then, in the classic rookie intern fashion, very soon you have something that mostly actually works but is implicitly so intertwined that nobody can understand the resulting interactions and can no longer start depicking the mahjongg of corner cases. Senior-level software engineering could actually be said to be primarily about managing complexity and whatever remains left after that effort can be used to build products and develop the trade. The reason we love abstractions is that they reduce complexity and make things manageable at all. There would be no progress in software engineering without abstractions.

If you were building an analog circuit that is, complexity-wise, on par with writing software systems you'd basically have to write software to design the circuit in somewhat manageable way. That's how software itself is written.
by gcbill | 2025-05-21 06:49:58+00:00
Perhaps it is worth considering that this was Freestyle chess and not classical chess. Which means the traditional book moves with which chess engines are trained goes out of window. I am not saying Stockfish cant beat Magnus in Freestyle chess but it makes sense to believe that Chess engines are better at classical chess when compared to freestyle.

But then again, with 24 hour time to brute force every possible combination, I guess chess engines may be better at freestyle when compared to classical chess, due to the sheer amount of creativity and calculation involved.
by leovander | 2025-05-21 06:50:06+00:00
I feel like they overpaid maybe because they got direct to consumer rates for the gear. If you would have went through a full on solar installer that solar system would have come out to less than $15k, throw in having to get the subpanel and a reroof you would maybe be looking at $30k all in. (Not including the batteries, but by the time he got to the batteries I feel like his budget was way overboard even going the non-microinverter route).

Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.

To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
by erinaceousjones | 2025-05-21 06:51:29+00:00
I heard it's been a difficult project to justify spending the research/computer time on at scale, because the models use an equivalent amount of compute for training and inference, but more parallelizable. So 5 times more compute units can be required and they get the work done 5 times faster. On a Google scale, that meant the hard internal sell of justifying burning through $25 million worth of compute units over 1 day instead of $5 million each day for 5 days. Something like that.
by nishiohiroshi | 2025-05-21 06:52:04+00:00
GitAuto can autonomously resolve test failures. In real-world development, a single workflow run can encounter multiple errors. For example, even after fixing one error, another might appear later in the same workflow. In such cases, GitAuto retries automatically. If separate workflows fail with different errors, GitAuto generates individual fixes for each. However, if the same error persists in the same workflow even after a fix commit – meaning the fix didn’t work – GitAuto stops to avoid an infinite loop.
by librasteve | 2025-05-21 06:52:50+00:00
a very lyrical post, i will reread at my leisure and try to apply the lessons to https://harcstack.org

that’s HTMX, Air, Red & Cro btw

that said … I am a true believer in HTMX for the right amount of UX dynamism and I don’t initially get solves that piece
by starspangled | 2025-05-21 06:54:17+00:00
Many countries control their currency and can print money to pay debts, and can control their fiscal and monetary policies to best gain advantage for themselves. And they do.

US can do some things more, bigger, longer, etc., for various reasons. Just like Australia can do more, bigger, longer, etc., than Tonga. I don't really see anything profound being said here.

USA might be in some advantageous position now, and it might not always be in such a position, which is a pretty bland observation, but it also does not support the idea that they are living beyond their means today.
by beefnugs | 2025-05-21 06:54:46+00:00
I think the real problem is that is even an option. I am not a good businessman, but i have seen good ideas fail because the company depends upon the good graces of another company. If someone can decide to just fuck you over for any reason, it will happen sooner or later

Sending all your core IP through another company for them to judge your worthiness of existence, is a nightmare on so many levels , the biggest example being payment processors trying to impose their religious doctrine on entire populations
by fallingknife | 2025-05-21 06:55:14+00:00
How much bandwidth is there in Iceland? I suspect not much because the population is only 400K. You will need to lay new undersea fiber. And how are you going to build them? The construction alone would take a massive amount of resources and manpower not feasibly available there. And what about the power supply? In data center heavy areas like Virginia, data center power consumption is already 25% of the entire state power consumption, and VA has 22x more people than Iceland. So if you build even 1/5th the number of data centers in just Virginia, that will consume the entire power grid of Iceland. Therefore, in addition to the data centers themselves, you are also going to have to build an entirely new grid and distribution system.
by Arnavion | 2025-05-21 06:55:29+00:00
It does, though even for a small segment you end up needing a lot of boilerplate - a dependency on the cc crate, a build.rs that invokes the cc crate, extern declarations to tell the Rust caller about the C function, potentially some bindgen if your small segment is not so small ... and you still end up having to do some amount of thunking between & / * / MaybeUninit because of that anyway. So if there is a "pure Rust" way to do it with `unsafe`, writing that is often easier. The pure Rust impl also has the advantage that you can validate it with Miri, unlike the C impl case because Miri cannot emulate arbitrary C code.
by ammo1662 | 2025-05-21 06:56:19+00:00
> I don't see why anyone would be so virulently opposed to moving some industrial subsidy spend to expanding healthcare...

This is because many media outlets, whether intentionally or unintentionally, promote the 'China collapse theory,' making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions from curated information.

Take the FT article you cited earlier as an example. As someone living in China with parents who have chronic illnesses, let me describe what healthcare is actually like here:

My father and grandfather both have diabetes. They use NovoRapid insulin at about 40 RMB(6 USD) per pen, requiring 1-2 pens monthly (totaling 100 RMB, 14 USD). Domestic Chinese brands cost roughly half that price.

My mother and I have hyperlipidemia. Lipitor costs about 70 RMB(10 USD) monthly, while domestic alternatives cost around 10 RMB (2 USD).

China's healthcare system features centralized procurement policies where the government negotiates directly with pharmaceutical companies. To have your products included in the insurance formulary and reach more patients, manufacturers must reduce prices.

While this system has some issues (which we could discuss later), nearly all medications—including imported ones—are significantly cheaper in China than in the US.

Two years ago, my grandfather spent his final two weeks in ICU at a cost of 120,000 RMB (16700 USD). Insurance covered 100,000 RMB (14000 USD), leaving us with 20,000 RMB (2700 USD) out-of-pocket.

Regarding insurance coverage:

Rural and urban insurance have different reimbursement rates, but generally cover over 50%. My parents' retirement income is about 4,000 RMB (560 USD) monthly—relatively high for urban workers. In tier-3/4 cities, most retirees receive over 1,000 RMB (140 USD)monthly.

Now examining your cited article: Those two farmers never participated in any insurance programs. Having never contributed to:

- Pension funds (hence receiving only the minimum 150 RMB, 20USD monthly—standards vary by city, e.g., ~1,400 RMB,200USD in Shanghai)

- Medical insurance (400 RMB lowest level, 55USD annually, fixed.), making them ineligible for reimbursements. Rural insurance even allows retroactive payments-coverage begins three months after payment, regardless of preexisting conditions.

While such cases exist, they're exceptionally rare. In my entire life, I've only known two families who didn't enroll in insurance—both were wealthy enough to purchase private coverage.
by jmb99 | 2025-05-21 06:56:35+00:00
My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get way bigger.

If all he’s pulling is 1kW I’m jealous.
by epistasis | 2025-05-21 06:57:38+00:00
It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission.

Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.

So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.

This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-21 06:58:55+00:00
> Seems like that's the popular assertion but I don't see much solid reasoning behind it in this thread (not picking on you specifically), just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.

Prior to 1971 the Dollar was tied to Gold and exchange rates were fixed by agreement.
by ToAffinity | 2025-05-21 07:00:09+00:00
Sealos Cloud supports 87,000 users and thousands of concurrent app deployments on shared Kubernetes clusters. We hit hard limits with Nginx Ingress—reload instability, high resource usage, and poor long-connection handling. This post details why we moved to an Envoy-based gateway (Higress), what went wrong with other solutions (APISIX, Cilium, Envoy Gateway), and what it really takes to support massive multi-tenancy in public cloud environments.
by chronid | 2025-05-21 07:00:15+00:00
The last rewrite I've seen completed (which was justified to a point as the previous system had some massive issues) took 3 years and burned down practically an entire org (multiple people left, some were managed out including two leads, the director was ejected after 18ish months) which was healthy-ish and productive before the rewrite. It's still causing operational pain and does not fully cover all edge cases.

I'm seeing another now in $current_job and I'm seeing similar symptoms (though the system being rewritten is far less important) and customers of the old system essentially abandoned to themselves and marketing and sales are scrambling to try to retain them.

Anecdotal experience is not so good. Rewriting a tiny component? Ok. Full on rewrite of a big system? I feel it's a bad idea and the wisdom holds true.
by sqrt_1 | 2025-05-21 07:00:41+00:00
Related to unspecified vs undefined. I recall some C code was trying to be tricky and read from just allocated memory. Something like:

int* ptr = malloc(size); if(ptr[offset] == 0) { }

The code was assuming that the value in an allocated buffer did not change.

However, it was pointed out in review that it could change with these steps:

1) The malloc allocates from a new memory page. This page is often not mapped to a physical page until written to.

2) The reads just return the default (often 0 value) as the page is not mapped.

3) Another allocation is made that is written to the same page. This maps the page to physical memory which then changes the value of the original allocation.
by hayst4ck | 2025-05-21 07:00:48+00:00
That's one of my other favorite things on the internet. The discussion of it is very high quality, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo

Getting into a position of power requiring submission to the power hierarchy that grants power is a very keen insight. It means you are subject to all the corruptive forces everyone in those positions of power are also subject to. People will let you into positions of power if you wear their chains.

"Then you must become powerful and choose to use that power for good" is almost directly from CGP Grey's own analysis/those two videos.

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy is another way of looking at it: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

The man in the Arena speech tickles these topics and is unfortunately now more relevant than ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic
by roenxi | 2025-05-21 07:01:00+00:00
Were those panics ultimately bad for growth? The US in the 1800s was one of the fastest growing economies we've ever seen in all of human history; growing from ~0% to ~20% of the world economy. It isn't often someone outpaces that. The gold standard clearly didn't limit growth in any concerning way if you are associating it with one of the top 10 all time growing economies. In fact, dropping the gold standard has been associated with the economic weakness that characterises the modern US as they mean regress and the Asian powers regain economic ascendancy.

Panics and crisises aren't automatically a bad thing. If people are doing something wildly stupid they need to stop and undertake alternative activities. Something has to make them do that; if it is a panic then that is better than persisting with stupidity. Besides, the US still has regular crisises. There is one every 10 years or so. They just don't see as much upside between them as they used to.

> The shortages powered William Jennings Bryan to the Democratic presidential nomination after his "Cross of Gold" speech.

If Trump says something does that automatically make it true in 100 years? No. Politicians aren't automatically right and neither are voters. People get stuff wrong in policy all the time. Popularity and truth are different.

And Wikipedia suggests that most people disagreed with him regardless, he lost the election and the US proceeded to adopt a gold standard. Which still doesn't tell us much about its policy merits I might add.
Show HN: JSON Tapose – A Simple, Client-Side JSON Diff Viewer
by handsupmin | 2025-05-21 07:01:01+00:00
Hi HN!

I built a simple JSON diff viewer that runs entirely in your browser.

I needed a tool to compare JSONs that was both visually appealing and easy to use, so I made one.

Key features:

- Side-by-side JSON comparison with syntax highlighting

- Works with differently ordered fields (unlike most text editors)

- Client-side only - your data never leaves your browser

- JSON beautify/formatting

- Dark/light themes

- No signup required

Tech stack:

- React + TypeScript

- DaisyUI for styling

- Vite for build

Try it out: https://www.jsontapose.com

Source: https://github.com/handsupmin/json-tapose

I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvement!
by spinningarrow | 2025-05-21 07:01:34+00:00
I think regex gets some of its hate from people writing painfully complex matchers. 99% of my day to day regex use is simpler string searches on the command line or in my editor. I’m really happy I took the time to learn the syntax (spent about a week on it around 15 years ago) because now it doesn’t get in my way.
by atoav | 2025-05-21 07:02:56+00:00
As a guitar player (20+ years) and a audio engineer/electrical engineer/dsp programmer one thing that really keeps baffling me about the field of guitar playing is how much myths about what affects the sound in which way exists. With people trying to get the sounds of their stars by buying products that were made in the 60s and somehow assuming the wild quality fluctuations and effects of the recording chain during that time don't matter all that much. Meanwhile you can get extremely good (studio quality) sounds with a 200 Euro guitar and a 250 Euro amplifier and the rest you can do with 2 or three effects pedals and (crucially!) the correct strings, instrument setup and above all playing.

In each hobby you will find people that are in it for the gear more than anything. I play the same guitar since the past 15 years and I know exactly how to play to make it sound a certain way. I wonder how the people who buy a new guitar each month even manage to get to know theirs..

There is a German youtube channel by a former university professor of acoustics that picks many of the myths surounding electrical guitars (especially those repeated in the press) apart scientifically (website: https://www.gitarrenphysik.de/). I am not aware of any english resource on that topic that goes into the topic even at a fraction of the depth. He made laser measurements of various parts of the electrical guitar to measure power dissipation and model it, influence of the whole electronic chain, etc. If there is an aspect to the guitar, he probably measured it.

Like did you know that strings don't just vibrate up/down, but also left/right and how this directional change plays out when you pluck a string differs depending on the guitar? Yeah me neither. Did you know wood has next to no influence on the sound of an electrical guitar, despite being called "tonewood" by the press?