MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-21 12:13:13+00:00
I think it's natural for press to avoid hyping EU startups: they perform bad.

Is the press responsible for the bad performance? I don't think so. (source: I worked in startups in EU, UK and US, I started two companies in EU and UK, one failed).

I think the underlying problem is the anti-work attitude of people. Most people don't want to work hard, they don't have any ambition. And this attitude is normal in Soviet Union 2.0, a society where you get beaten down by taxes if you try to climb up the ladder and regulations make sure your company gets stopped before it's too large. The US is objectively better in this regard, but it's getting worse every year. Luckily there is a lot more capital from the past keeping the startup scene afloat. Will it survive another 20-40 years or will the next Silicon Valley be in China?

Anyway the general lack of ambition in EU means that the composition in an EU startup is completely different between US and UE. While you can find real gems in US startups, in EU you find your typical average corporate employee - but less skilled or more junior.

People in EU startups are just people who couldn't grab a job anywhere else. They're not hoping to make it big because there is no capital to have life changing exits and the government will get most of the profits anyway.

Leaders and managers in US are also considerably better than in the EU. Many countries in EU never had a decent entrepreneurial class. Building those skills will take decades.
Ask HN: Given the progress in AI, should we decrease the world population?
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-05-21 12:13:34+00:00
I’m looking specifically at how Google is getting really good with its gen AI models.

More and more of what knowledge workers and creative professionals are paid to do will be far quicker and cheaper to have done with AI. There will be less jobs to work, so clearly, we need less people in the world, but I don’t think anyone talks about controlling birth rates even among those who are ideologically opposed to AI.

Does anyone else worry that this is a problem that will catch us by surprise? I find the alternate scenario rather optimistic—that AI will create even more jobs, just different—because growth in demand for consumption is what drives the creation of jobs. Yet, I feel as if consumer markets are mostly if not completely saturated.
by HelloNurse | 2025-05-21 12:14:03+00:00
You need a clear vision for what you have written the first version of.

Covering the foreseeable needs of your own typical projects, with enough configurability to handle the variations you expect, is quite the opposite of offering general purpose abstractions and models like Make or CMake: not only designing for yourself vs. designing for the public, but prioritizing completeness (an opinionated solution to build your own projects with minimal manual effort) or generality (a tool that can be used for many different projects, ideally handling any C or C++ compilation job at the cost of specifying what to do explicitly).

In the first case, hardcoded GCC options are good enough until you need something more sophisticated; in the second case, hardcoded GCC options severely limit the potential users.
by kragen | 2025-05-21 12:14:23+00:00
If the objective is to reduce the number of hours you're not self-sufficient for a given battery size, or reduce the size of your expensive batteries, even a couple hundred watts could make sense.

https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300, presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to someone who recently bought something similar for US$60. I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's cloudy.

50¢ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture, it's pretty affordable.
by kragen | 2025-05-21 12:15:10+00:00
The swept area of the blades scales quadratically with the blade length, not exponentially. Exponential scaling is f(x) = knˣ, not f(x) = kxⁿ.

The difference between quadratic scaling and exponential scaling is earth-shatteringly enormous; this is not some minor detail.

With quadratic scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 100.

With exponential scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 262144, a 2600× difference. And the difference gets bigger from there on out.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-21 12:15:23+00:00
> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing.

That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and tend to learn pretty quickly so I don't have to keep repeating myself.

LLMs are decent code assistants when used with care, and can do a lot of heavy lifting, they certainly speed me up when I have a clear picture of what I want to do, and they are good to bounce off ideas when I am planning for something. That said, I really don't see how it could meaningfully replace an intern however, much less an actual developer.
by diggan | 2025-05-21 12:15:26+00:00
> What this tells me is that software enterprises are so hellbent in firing their programmers and reducing their salary costs they they are willing to combust their existing businesses and reputation into the dumpster fire they are making. I expected this blatant disregard for human society to come ten or twenty years into the future

Have you been sleeping under a rock for the last decade? This has been going on for a long long time. Outsourcing been the name of the game for so long people seem to forgot it's happening it all.
by shubhamjain | 2025-05-21 12:15:40+00:00
This is a pretty bad take, imo and confuses cause and effect. Why does US press hype their startups? Because they do have track record of creating revolutionary companies, something that can be traced back to 70s (Atari, Apple, Microsoft).

It’s much easier for an established player to replicate the success elsewhere, despite of over-regulation. Just see how successful are US firms in India, but it will be mistake to not fault Indian bureaucracy and regulation for the lack of its own set of high-tech companies. So I would take Airbnb's success in EU with a grain of salt.

In US, you can start a LLC, get a bank account, a tax ID, all within a few days. The process is completely online. Taxes? A single form for the whole year when you’re starting out. Hiring and laying off employees is relatively easy. How many European countries can claim the same?
by vbezhenar | 2025-05-21 12:17:02+00:00
The general issue, as I see it:

One function is too general and handles all inputs. Some inputs are wrong and code returns error. Some languages forces you to handle that error.

Another code snippet uses that function with very specific inputs which must not cause errors, but was forced to handle error, because of language rules. This error handling is essentially useless.

I saw this issue with Java. There's constructor `new URI(String) throws URISyntaxException`. URISyntaxException is checked exception which must be handled at invocation site or propagated to the caller. But you might need to write code like `var uri = new URI("https://example.com/")` and any error handling code will only be to please the compiler, essentially wasted work. Java solved it using `public static URI create(String str)` which does not throw checked exceptions and you're supposed to choose either constructor or factory method, depending in the circumstances.

Using Rust analogy, may be it would be useful for Java to write something like `var uri = unchecked new URI("https://example.com/");`, so with minimal syntax overhead you would signal that checked exceptions are not supposed to occur here (and if they did occur, then some unchecked UnexpectedCheckedException would throw here). It's actually possible to implement method `static T unchecked(CheckedSupplier<T, E> supplier)`, though syntax would be ugly: `var uri = unchecked(() -> new URI("https://example.com/"))`.

I think that this is general issue for programming languages. There's only one way to validate input parameters and report error. But whether those input parameters are trusted or not - only the caller knows. So nothing wrong about using `unwrap()` to signify the fact, that caller already made sure that error does not happen. The only important nuance is that error must not be swallowed if it happened.
by simonjgreen | 2025-05-21 12:17:18+00:00
That’s a clever aphorism, but it’s overly simplistic and misunderstands both contexts. America’s foundational ethos - individualism, market primacy, and suspicion of state power - is deeply libertarian, not liberal in the European sense. Meanwhile, much of Europe has embedded egalitarianism and social solidarity into its institutions - not superficial liberalism, but deeply held post-war consensus. The “deep conservatism” in Europe is often just a reflection of cultural continuity, not ideological rigidity. It’s more accurate to say both continents contain layers of contradiction, but projecting neat labels misses the complexities of their political DNA.

As a European that has spent a significant amount of time over the last 5 years in America this has been a cultural learning for me.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-21 12:17:33+00:00
It's not that. It's that once you know the best move you start to see why. And then it becomes hard to get it out of your mind. It's the reason I don't recommend computer assisted game analysis, unless you just want a quick blunder check.

A very non-zero chunk of people also probably would not have even understood that that's cheating if it wasn't really clearly laid out in the interface somewhere. For instance computer assistance in the largest correspondence chess league is legal.
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-21 12:17:45+00:00
Big difference is in the following examples

Startup in the garage or attic:

US:American dream. EU: My cousin create a website in his attic for €20

When still starting, using a university email address:

US: credibility. EU: doesn’t even have a domain! How can it be anything

Limited liability company vs sole proprietor:

US: Not so smart. EU: company means credibility so let’s not risk working with him, eventhough in terms of claimsof, it’s unlimited without an LLC

People often say that Americans are all show and no content. The opposite is true. They look for value and story. The “show” is in the polished quality of consumer (and small business) products.
by infecto | 2025-05-21 12:18:46+00:00
Saying “AI has no economic impact” ignores reality. The financials of major players clearly show otherwise—both B2C and B2B applications are already profitable and proven. While APIs are still more experimental, and it’s unclear how much value businesses can ultimately extract from them, to claim there’s no economic impact is willful blindness. AGI may be far off, but companies are already figuring out value from both the consumer side and slowly API.
by shmeeed | 2025-05-21 12:19:18+00:00
While that's a valid point of view, as long as the human is the bottleneck, it's not going to scale to infinity and beyond.

Human's got to exist and needs to work to eat. They don't really, necessarily, existentially need to be 10x productive with the help of AI.

But I'll be honest, that's not really a solid argument, because it could rapidly lead to the question of why they do this exact job in the first place, instead of e.g. farming or whatever else there might be that can be called a net positive for humanity without reservations.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-21 12:20:14+00:00
This was an interesting read and being called a copycat while being the first-mover must have been infuriating. But I have to call into question other parts of this post due to this:

> Contrary to popular belief, they don't do it in a stupid way by just banning competition. Those cases are actually very rare and only occur if the companies in question violate Chinese law in pretty egregious ways.

> Most of the time it's the exact contrary: they welcome foreign companies and competition, but create conditions where local alternatives can thrive alongside them, giving Chinese users and businesses legitimate options to choose domestic champions.

They are correct, that is contrary to popular belief, to the point I question if this author is wrong. Living in a country for 8 years does not an expert make. My understanding is foreign companies are “welcomed” in, so long as they give heavy ownership to Chinese citizens/companies, are ok with stolen IP, and are fine doing whatever the government tells them to do (like giving them full access to the data centers, which are required to be in China).
by gf000 | 2025-05-21 12:21:29+00:00
A junior dev is (most often) a bright human being, with not much coding experience yet. They can certainly execute instructions and solve novel problems on their own, and they most certainly don't need 100k PRs to pick up new skills.

Equating LLMs to humans is pretty damn.. stupid. It's not even close (otherwise how come all the litany of office jobs that require far less reasoning than software development are not replaced?).
by hansvm | 2025-05-21 12:21:33+00:00
A typical city bus has something like 2500 cubic inches of tread that it burns through, compared to 650 for a Model Y. Tires typically last 500k miles, vs 50k, generously, for a Model Y. I'd said "comparable," but that was just to avoid argument. From a tire wear perspective, you're better driving a bus even if you're the only person on it.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-21 12:21:45+00:00
We should make extraction expensive enough to capture the externalities.

The problem with fossil fuels isn’t that they pollute, but that most of the negative impact of that pollution is borne by others. This results in an artificially low price which distorts the market and results in economically inefficient overuse.

Capture that cost by making producers pay a tax of the corresponding amount, and market forces will use the “right” amount of fossil fuels in ways that are a net benefit.
by kalleboo | 2025-05-21 12:21:55+00:00
40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny)

My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-21 12:21:58+00:00
Some European nations were also successful when ruled by higher powers, see the colonial empires of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, etc. but so many wanna-be world powers occupying a small space led to constant conflicts, limited freedoms, bloody regime changes, and the famous self-immolations of WW1 and WW2 which finally introduced modern democracy to Europe and a end(on paper) to their focus on world domination.

My point is, it can be easy to become economically successful like China when you're a large country with massive human capital and don't give a fuck about democracy, slavery, human abuse and welfare, regulations, etc. and prioritize money at all cost. It's how most empires became empires.
by xyst | 2025-05-21 12:22:45+00:00
llms are already very expensive to run on a per query basis. Now it’s being asked to run on massive codebases and attempt to fix issues.

Spending massive amounts of:

- energy to process these queries

- wasting time of mid-level and senior engineers to vibe code with copilot to ensure train and get it right

We are facing a climate change crisis and we continue to burn energy at useless initiatives so executives at big corporation can announce in quarterly shareholder meetings: "wE uSe Ai, wE aRe tHe FuTuRe, lAbOr fOrCe rEdUceD"
by terom | 2025-05-21 12:22:49+00:00
Based on [1] it seems like one `management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*` is enough to expose everything including the heapdump endpoint on the public HTTP API without authentication. It's even there in the docs as an example.

Looks like there is a change [2] coming to the `management.endpoint.heapdump.access` default value that would make this harder to expose by accident.

Let's look for `env` next...

[1] https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/reference/actuator/endpoi...

[2] https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/pull/45624
by linker3000 | 2025-05-21 12:23:05+00:00
Would you buy a car that's been thrown together by a immature production and testing system with demonstrable and significant flaws, and just keep bringing it back to the dealership for refinements and the fixing of defects when you discover them? Assuming it doesn't kill you first?

These tools should be locked away in an R&D environment until sufficiently perfected.

MVP means 'ship with solid, tested basic features', not 'Ship with bugs and fix in production'.
by ParetoOptimal | 2025-05-21 12:23:06+00:00
There are a myraid of challenges with outsourcing and offshoring and it's not possible currently for 100% of employees to be outsourced.

If AI can change... well more likely can convince gullible c levels that AI can do those jobs... many jobs will be lost.

See Klarna "https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-..."

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/klarnas-ai-replaced-...

Just the attempt to use AI and fail then degraded the previous jobs to a gig economy style job.
by zaphar | 2025-05-21 12:23:17+00:00
as long as we keep inflation in check

That's the trick though isn't it? MMT discourse tends to gloss over or ignore the dangers of runaway inflation and act as if you can borrow all you want with no consequence. But that part that you put in parentheses above is precisely why you can't do that. What you borrow for your budget has to be payed back later. If you just print money to do it because you borrowed more than you could afford then you inflate your currency. If inflation happens too quickly you have serious problems. It's not free money.
by xcanchal | 2025-05-21 12:23:38+00:00
You know printers exist right? You can create a physical book in which he'll be the main character of the story in whatever scenario he likes the most. I remember receiving one of those as a child and I remembered it for life. Try asking for a famous author to create that one for you.

There's not just a single way of doing emotionally valuable things and/or a single way of doing "right" things.
by beardyw | 2025-05-21 12:24:30+00:00
Ideally you should have thought about paying customers up front. That way you can set limits on your free tier.

As it is you have happy customers paying nothing. You don't say if 280 is sign ups or active users (you do need to measure that). You might expect to convert a small percentage, maybe in single figures, but only with something they need (see 1st paragraph).
by chii | 2025-05-21 12:24:32+00:00
The gold reserves wasnt stolen - it is the US's gold that was acquired as a result of WW2. The revocation of the convertability of the US dollar to gold was suspended because it became impossible to honor it due to the increase in the amount of circulating dollars (what people generally call printing - it isn't "printed", it is debt created that produced more currency). And imho, while it seemed like other countries complained, i think this system allowed the world to move off the gold standard - a system which does not allow for flexibility.

And the idea that the US somehow enforces their dollar as being the reserve is moot - it is simply not true. Countries use the US dollar for trade because both sides of the trade believes that the other side cannot "cheat" using this currency, and implicitly believes that the US gov't won't "cheat" on behalf of one side either.

Unfortunately, this trust is being undermined from various sides, including the current US administration (and i have a hard time believing that the trump administration doesnt know this - it seems deliberate).
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-21 12:25:06+00:00
Interlibrary loans are one of the things that the Trump cuts will kill.

Typically, a public library is legally prevented from spending tax dollars to provide services outside the taxing area. This is a pretty reasonable limitation, but it does prevent the actual mechanics of operating interlibrary loans. It doesn’t really cost a lot of money - a van and a few part-time drivers can cover a pretty wide geographic area. But that money has to come from somewhere else. That’s where those federal grants came into play.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-05-21 12:25:24+00:00
at the very least, a junior shouldn't be adding new tests that fail. Will an LLM be able learn the social shame associated with that sort of lazy attitude? I imagine its fidelity isn't detailed enough to differentiate such a social failure from a request to improve a comment. Rather, it will propagate based on some coarse grained measures of success with high volume instead.
by rxtexit | 2025-05-21 12:25:24+00:00
Its worse than this. It doesn't matter if a human understands recency bias, the availability heuristic or the halo effect.

It will still change the decision. It doesn't matter if you "understand" these concepts or not. Or you use some other bias or heuristic to over correct the previous bias or heuristic you think you understand.

This topic people I think tend to confuse outright discrimination with the much more subtle bias and heuristics a human uses for judgement under uncertainty.

The interview process really shows how much closer we are to medieval people than what we believe ourselves to be.

Picking a candidate based on the patterns of chicken guts wouldn't be much less random and might even be more fair.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-05-21 12:25:24+00:00
I feel like we've made barely any progress. It's still good at the things Chat GPT was originally good at, and bad at the things it was bad at. There's some small incremental refinement but it doesn't really represent a qualitative jump like Chat GPT was originally. I don't see AI replacing actual humans without another step jump like that.