MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmicgadget | 2025-05-03 22:29:20+00:00
Wsj quote he cites:

> Imports subtract from the Commerce Department’s calculation of GDP

Government page he links:

> The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP

I don't get it. Aren't the journalists reporting and citing the official numbers/methods?
by Retric | 2025-05-03 22:29:51+00:00
We’re looking at hours of labor per lb of food.

The difference is so extreme vs historic methods you can skip pesticides, avoid harming soil health or biodiversity vs traditional methods etc without any issues here and still be talking 1,000x.

Though really growing crops for human consumption is something of a rounding error here. It’s livestock, biofuels, cotton, organic plastics, wood, flowers, etc that’s consuming the vast majority of output from farms.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-03 22:30:46+00:00
And many Christian churches prominently display art featuring Satan. It's always less about what is actually in the picture and more about the message the picture is supposed to send and how people actually interpret it.

Hitler and Nazis have been used as comic reliefs in Western popular culture. You can supposedly make anything more funny in an absurd way by adding some gratuitous Nazis. Communist leaders such as Stalin and Mao are often used ironically. Sometimes because people find the socialist realism art style aesthetically pleasing, and sometimes due to the irony of turning a communist leader into commercial art.
by maxxen | 2025-05-03 22:31:45+00:00
I replied to another comment, but I think a big part is that duckdbs spatial extension provides a SQL interface to a whole suite of standard foss gis packages by statically bundling everything (including inlining the default PROJ database of coordinate projection systems into the binary) and providing it for multiple platforms (including WASM). I.E there are no transitive dependencies except libc.

Yes, DuckDB does a whole lot more, vectorized larger-than-memory execution, columnar compressed storage and a ecosystem of other extensions that make it more than the sum of its parts. But while Ive been working hard on making the spatial extension more performant and more broadly useful (I designdd a new geometry engine this year, and spatial join optimization just got merged on the dev-branch), the fact that you can e.g. convert too and from a myriad of different geospatial formats by utilizing GDAL, transforming through SQL, or pulling down the latest overture dump without having the whole workflow break just cause you updated QGIS has probably been the main killer feature for a lot of the early adopters.

(Discmaimer, I work on duckdb-spatial @ duckdblabs)
by KronisLV | 2025-05-03 22:34:10+00:00
> JetBrains really needs to support alternatives fast.

They do support offline models: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai-assistant/switching-to-off...

I also used the Continue.dev plugin for a bit which worked nicely with Ollama but was buggy when it comes to the UI, their AI Assistant feels better in that regard: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22707-continue

Sadly seems like their Junie tool doesn't support that yet, would be pretty cool to have that convenience instead of needing something like Aider or other tools for more complex multi-step edits: https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
by const_cast | 2025-05-03 22:34:18+00:00
No, it’s footgunny and riddled with bugs. Most JS barely works and edge cases just aren’t addressed.

I’ve seen undefined make it all the way to the backend and get persisted in the DB. As a string.

JS as a language just isn’t robust enough and it requires a level of defensive programming that’s inconvenient at best and a productivity sink at worst. Much like C++, it’s doable, but things are bound to slip through the cracks. I would actually say overall C++ is much more reasonable.
by vaidhy | 2025-05-03 22:35:50+00:00
The 5 - 10 million Congolese who died under Belgian rule is probably much higher as a percentage of the population than the great leap forward.

Great leap forward killed 4% of Chinese population. Vietnam war killed 10% - 12% of people in Vietnam. I do not see condemnation of US here..Rather, I see the celebration that US has a democracy.
by hijp | 2025-05-03 22:35:57+00:00
Yeah but I wish in an alternate reality DHH chose a different route. If you go API only then you lose half of what makes rails great. It would be sick if you could render React/Vue/Svelte easily in your haml views and not have to have a js repo then figure out jwts and auth.

Dunno I loved rails, built monoliths, built api only, but when I tried sprinkling a bit of react in my views (say you only need a little bit of interaction, or want to use a react date picker) then theres all these sharp edges.

The reason I want it to be bigger is that user base helps the single dev, with help resources, up to date gems, and jobs.
by smackeyacky | 2025-05-03 22:36:16+00:00
Reliable? What a quaint idea for a modern car. Mercedes and BMW in particular have been designing cars that fail just after the initial lease period (think plastic water pumps, timing chains at the back of the engine, wet rubber timing belts, CVT transmissions).

Some crazy, unfixable magnetic suspension that lasts 3 years and requires $5000 a corner shocks is par for the course these days.
by pizzafeelsright | 2025-05-03 22:36:21+00:00
Tone policing? I'm fine with it although I too got an email from corporate about an event with the same type of fun energy. My impression changed of the event as it was no longer personal but mechanical.

There's always been some innate ability to recognize effort and experience. I don't know the word for it but looking at a child's or experienced artist drawing you just know if they put in minimal or extra effort.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-03 22:36:44+00:00
> Note that the definitions each include some variant of "completely lacks value".

In the section "Sale, Distribution, Or Display Of Harmful Material To Minor" (originally all caps) is the prong "is utterly without redeeming social value for minors." Some parents in Iowa think that books with LGBTQ+ themes fit a law about `sex acts` [1]. I think the same parents would find such books with LGBTQ+ themes "without redeeming social value for minors", and a subset would sue bookstores for selling such books if a law would let them.

> In particular, the article's "look at these banned books" is an outright fraudulent claim.

You should be careful when using the word "fraudulent", because the bookstore owner in TFA mentioned The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, and Slaughterhouse Five, which are each banned from school libraries in at least one Texas district [2]. Broadly written and with a private right of action, the bill will inevitably result in frivolous lawsuits analogous to SLAPP suits [3]. Less centrally, the penal code you linked [4] has a safeguard:

> It is an affirmative defense to prosecution under this section that the sale, distribution, or exhibition was by a person having scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justification.

The new bill allowing civil lawsuits might conflict with the safeguard because of [5]:

> Sec. 98C.005. PROHIBITED DEFENSES. It is not a defense to liability under this chapter that the defendant:

> has been acquitted or has not been prosecuted or convicted under Subchapter B, Chapter 43, Penal Code;

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/04/iowas-new-book-ban-anti-...

[2] https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

[4] https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/docs/pe/htm/pe.43.htm

[5] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/html/HB01375I...
by omneity | 2025-05-03 22:38:29+00:00
Thanks for the tip and cool project! The model I trained is relatively large, as it's a single model that supports all language pairs (to leverage transfer learning).

With that said while running it client-side is indeed an option, openly distributing the model is not something I would like to do, at least at this stage. Unlike the bigger projects in the NMT space, including Marian and Bergamot, I don't have any funding, and my monetization plan is to offer inference via API[0].

0: https://api.sawalni.com/docs
by satanfirst | 2025-05-03 22:38:51+00:00
You skipped the next sentence where these are partially canceled out by investment, consumer spending, etc.

Not wrong, deceiving. Real GDP is down because of some factors that cancel out and because the President sucks. Is the correct way to read that executive approved message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Lutnick

https://www.bea.gov/

"These movements were partly offset by increases in investment, consumer spending, and exports."

You can't make someone understand what that investment and consumer spending is if their job depends on not understanding it.
by chrisco255 | 2025-05-03 22:40:32+00:00
You, a single actor, probably wouldn't be a significant factor. However, an international government or corporate entity owning hundreds of thousands of acres and exploiting resources on the land and routing them back to their home country can be problematic. It places additional strain on limited resources and the profits are not spent in the local economy...just sent overseas. Absentee ownership of non-productive real estate can also drive up the costs of housing for citizens, making homeownership more difficult and driving down wealth in the middle class.
by roenxi | 2025-05-03 22:40:55+00:00
There is a powerful technique for working out why an author thinks what they do: reading the entire article.

His basic thesis can be summarised with "The short version of the story is this: GDP is a measurement of everything produced within a country’s borders. Imports are produced outside a country’s borders. So imports don’t add to or subtract from GDP. Imports simply aren’t counted in GDP at all." and he justifies it using other words. It is quite a reasonable argument - the accounting formula for GDP (C + I + G + (X − M)) is misleading because the M isn't a subtraction but an adjustment to prevent something like double-counting.
by Daedren | 2025-05-03 22:41:00+00:00
> Unlike traditional hybrid frameworks with predefined APIs or plugin systems, enClose removes restrictions, giving developers complete freedom to build any app they envision.

> Unlike Cordova, which can be limiting and complex, enClose offers a refreshing alternative. It doesn't confine you to a predefined set of functions via an API; instead, it enables you to tap into the full potential of the iOS and MacOS platforms.

The fact that a GitHub repo's readme is full of vague terms, zero examples, use cases and technical details just feels awfully distressing to me. It's a marketing pitch, sure there's no harm in it but feels like the wrong place for it.
by ryandamm | 2025-05-03 22:41:36+00:00
You think that would be sufficient? Did you read the article?

I did, and I have previously read an article in (iirc) The Atlantic about the screwfly program when it was working. It was a monumental effort to push screwflies back to the Darien Gap, involving widespread coordination of cattle ranchers and government workers, constant flyovers of planes dropping huge numbers of sterile flies, and a massive breeding program.

Two university students in a van can get about as much done as it sounds like. Some problems require coordination, government involvement, and yes, the organization — i.e., bureaucracy — that implies.

(Edit: it was The Atlantic, not The New Yorker. Comment further down has the link, but here it is: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...)
by cjpearson | 2025-05-03 22:42:39+00:00
The protestors were not a very vocal minority, but representative of the majority opinion. At the time well over 80% of Germans wanted an end to nuclear power. (Although now following the Ukraine invasion and rising energy costs the opposition has significantly softened.)

In a democratic system it is simply difficult to maintain such extremely unpopular positions. Governments which do so don't last long. Merkel flip-flopped and maintained her Chancellorship.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-03 22:43:30+00:00
>and have a real time web socketed sync layer that goes direct to the database

you might be able to drop a web router but pretending this is "completely drop[ping] the backend" is silly. Something is going to have to manage connections to the DB and you're not -- I seriously hope -- literally going to expose your DB socket to the wider Internet. Presumably you will have load balancing, DB replicas, and that sort of thing, as your scale increases.

This is setting aside just how complex managing a DB is. "completely drop the backend" except the most complicated part of it, sure. Minor details.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-03 22:43:54+00:00
It isn't plainly wrong as if they would allow much, then the share would be higher, as it is the case now for example Brazil (~9pc) or UK (>20pc).

If one think further, the share of export/import to/from non-eu countries is (rounded) 9pc of total EU's agriculture expenses. So, EU do not import much from US and others because they do not want certain techniques and methods and have their inner market and production anyway. Like it's the case with chlorine chickens and washed eggs. So, they don't allow such things to be sold to customers, which is infact not allowing import.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
by vaidhy | 2025-05-03 22:44:30+00:00
Is it surprising that the places with more conflicts has poor reporting ranking (according to this model)?

A media control does not need government to act openly. A mind-numbing patriotism can be as effective. Look at US reporting on the aftermath of 9/11. How many papers argued against Iraq or Afghanistan war? How many papers are talking about Gaza now? or even covering hands-off rallies?
by dmix | 2025-05-03 22:45:31+00:00
Watching the video I wonder how much of it is combining that plus a car that’s higher off the ground. Mercedes cars will be more performance minded so it’s lower to the ground. Maybe SUVs could have the greater suspension range so it can handle larger bumps but I wonder how much any Sedan could.

The most comfortable car I’ve ridden in suspension wise was a Mercedes SUV. So maybe they figured that out already.
by mr_toad | 2025-05-03 22:46:47+00:00
> I will never understand why it didn't take off.

I’ve used XSLT in anger - I used it to build Excel worksheets (in XML format) using libXSLT. I found it very verbose and hard to read. And Xpath is pretty torturous.

I wish I could have used Javascript. I wish Office objects were halfway as easy to compose as the DOM. I know a lot of people hate on Javascript and the DOM, but it’s way easier to work with than the alternatives.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-05-03 22:46:51+00:00
I understand where they came from here: the Scheme-like obsession with purity (the enshrined Endekalogue, now Dodekalogue) didn't mesh very well with traditional comment.

Yeah, Tcl has its design warts, but I don't think it has that many remaining that can't be fixed via metaprogramming. Even the popular Python manages to frustrate me with its idiotic statement/expression divide (they doubled down by making match() a statement...) and constant need to convert between generators/iterables and lists.

Thing is that R6RS Scheme (or R7RS-large if it comes out one day) is basically a better Tcl if you only consider scripting and don't need the event loop. If Tcl had played its cards right, it'd have competed with fish/rc/nushell/powershell instead, it was really ready to be a better shell well before any other.

------

To be honest, Common Lisp is the only language I've ever seen get this right without compromising on said purity by specifying the reader (parser): https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_.h...

Comments are then just the result of a readtable entry like any other, allowing this kind of voodoo:

; A comment (set-macro-character #\% (get-macro-character #\;)) % Also a comment
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-03 22:49:19+00:00
There are all kind of issues with HTML include as others have pointed out

If main.html includes child/include1.html and child/include1.html has a link src="include2.html" then when the user clicks the link where does it go? If it goes to "include2.html", which by the name was meant to be included, then that page is going to be missing everything else. If it goes to main.html, how does it specify this time, use include2.html, not include1.html?

You could do the opposite, you can have article1.html, article2.html, article3.html etc, each include header.html, footer.html, navi.html. Ok, that works, but now you've make it so making a global change to the structure of your articles requires editing all articles. In other words, if you want to add comments.html to every article you have to edit all articles and you're back to wanting to generate pages from articles based on some template at which point you don't need the browser to support include.

I also suspect there would be other issues, like the header wants to know the title, or the footer wants a next/prev link, which now require some way to communicate this info between includes and you're basically back to generate the pages and include not being a solution

I think if you work though the issues you'll find an HTML include would be practically useless for most use cases.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-03 22:53:01+00:00
I'm genuinely curious now.

If you have 440 squirrels to kill, in an airport, that are legally not allowed to leave the airport... how the heck would you do it humanely?

It feels extremely non-obvious to me. Are there extra-large portable CO2 chambers the size of a whole room or something you can rent? And whose budget is that coming out of? I'm assuming nobody's going to try to inject them all individually with something.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-03 22:53:14+00:00
The actual transaction is framed in terms of generating more shares in the company, such that existing shares represent an ever smaller piece of the total pool. What you're suggesting would be the founders selling a fraction of their shares to the new investors, while keeping total shares the same. Institutional investors are highly opposed to that, for a variety of reasons, including because they want founders to remain bought in to the company. (Some institutional investors will allow founders to "take some money off the table" to a small extent, but that's the exception and not the norm, and it's viewed as a favor to the founders. More cynically, institutional investors don't want founders to have financial independence before the company fully succeeds.)
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-03 22:53:16+00:00
It would be great if actually needed, demanding government jobs could pay a market rate. And even better, we could somehow pay better people more. And even even better - fire poor performers. The more-less lockstep pay scales across the US government are bizarre, as well as government unions, negotiating with politicians. As FDR said:

> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.

> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

- FDR, 1937 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...
by Clamchop | 2025-05-03 22:53:52+00:00
They take up a lot of space and they can be inconvenient and potentially unsafe to pedestrians. Unsafe for the same reason that right turns on red are unsafe: drivers are looking to their left for traffic and not to their right.

They were rare in the US before, I want to say, 15 or 20 years ago but I see them all the time now and new ones are always being installed. Good traffic devices, with the above tradeoffs in mind.
Show HN: Playhidoku.com – A logic puzzle web app
by alvivanco | 2025-05-03 22:54:10+00:00
I'd like to share the Hidoku web app I've been developing for the past 2 months

What is Hidoku?

Hidoku (also known as Hidato) is a logic puzzle invented by Dr. Gyora Benedek, an Israeli mathematician. The goal is to fill a grid with consecutive numbers that connect horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. You're given a few numbers as starting points, and you need to figure out the rest through deduction.

Why I built this?

I discovered Hidoku while browsing puzzle books at a bookstore, bought one, and I've been hooked ever since.

I'm also learning coding, so this is the perfect project for me to further my skills. I wanted to create a clean, intuitive interface that would make this puzzle game accessible to all.

Technical details:

Built with Vue and Tailwind CSS.

I'd love to hear your feedback - particularly on the difficulty or any UI/UX improvements that would make the experience better.
by hx8 | 2025-05-03 22:56:28+00:00
I'm not sure it's rare to live about 45°N, where we start to see >9 hours of sunlight in the winter. The intersection of places that are both above 45°N and very cloudy (Portland, Seattle, London, Detroit, Copenhagen, Dublin, Vancouver) or in high altitude probably includes a good chunk of HN readers. Northern Europe gets down to about 6 hours of daylight in the winter. If you're in one of these regions, and you plan to use a generator to augment your energy needs, I don't think that's considered an emergency as much as a secondary power source. If one of your goals is decreasing carbon emissions then a diesel generator is going to set that back.

Other regions will have their own considerations, but the primary concern is balancing harvesting sunlight with heating/cooling requirements. I'm just encouraging people to do their own homework for their own situation when considering off grid. I've seen a lot of people under build and end up spending way too much to heat their homes in winter.
by barathr | 2025-05-03 22:57:50+00:00
Tom Murphy shows in his excellent book on energy that over-tilting your solar panels by 15 degrees is a good idea (Table 13.2):

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m#section.13.4

Basically take your latitude and add 15 degrees and that'll get you good annual coverage.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-03 22:57:59+00:00
Wire-guided drones and missiles seem to be increasingly common, probably due to the cost of instantaneous radio jamming being so low - that's a short-lived signal that is going to a vehicle near your adversary. Torpedoes make a lot of sense for other reasons because radio has a very hard time getting through water (and things like sonar have too low bandwidth as well as giving away your position).

However, it's very easy to cut a fiber in a way that is hard to repair. Fishing trawlers do this all the time. In that sense, fiber can be "jammed" (sabotaged) much more easily than radio/satellite.