MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxglute | 2025-05-03 21:35:51+00:00
Mao was broadly successful. Trading 5% of abundant population for superstructure of modern Chinese state that subsequent leadership snowballed into what PRC is today is frankly a bargin. You don't get modern PRC state capacity without Mao speedrunning industrialization and cultural heterogeneity. Nation building on scale of PRC from the shit state post war China is hard. He didn't ace it, but vs developing peers post war that spluttered, or the other billion+ country with more favourable starting conditions, grading on a curve, Mao gets top marks, especially when PRC was playing on extra hard mode with US containment.
by briandear | 2025-05-03 21:36:10+00:00
Can we stop with the derisive “fanboy” nonsense? Most people don’t say “FOSS” fanboy or Linux “fanboy” — but plenty of people here are exactly that. It’s a bit insulting to people that like and appreciate Mac hardware; just because you might not like it doesn’t mean you have to be so dismissive. And that Mac Studio is a very impressive computer — but it’s usually the ones that have never used on that seem to have to most opinions about them.
by ash_091 | 2025-05-03 21:36:11+00:00
Last week I got an email from a manager about the number of free beverage taps in our office being reduced.

They'd clearly dumped the memo they got about the reduction into some AI with a prompt to write a "fun" announcement. The result was a mess of weird AI positivity and a fun "fact" which was so ludicrous that the manager can't have read it before sending.

I don't mind reading stuff that has been written with assistance from AI, but I definitely think it's concerning that people are apparently willing to send purely AI generated copy without at least reviewing for correctness and tone first.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-03 21:36:17+00:00
By upsert_all not invoking model callbacks, it's admitting that the ActiveRecord approach doesn't scale.

"It can be as simple as extracting your callback..." Isn't this the kind of repetitive thing a framework should be doing on your behalf?

To be fair, ActiveRecord isn't a fault Rails invented. Apparently it's from one of Martin Fowler's many writings where each model instance manages its own storage. Even Fowler seems to say that the DataMapper approach is better to separate concerns in complex scenarios.
by huijzer | 2025-05-03 21:36:41+00:00
> They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment

Merkel has severely underestimated Putin. She played a role in the continuous betting on Russian oil. Merkel has called the internet “neuland” and wasn’t her government also the one starting with hydrogen subsidies. I donno about you but to this day I only hear lots of talk about hydrogen but near zero results. So all the wrong bets.

Also I don’t know whether you noticed but Germany is expected to be in a recession for three years in a row now.

About equity and fairness okay I guess you are right. Everybody in Germany will be poor if things continue like this.
by wenc | 2025-05-03 21:37:01+00:00
I'm a big fan of DuckDB and I do geospatial analysis, mostly around partitioning geographies (into Uber H3 hexagons), calculating Haversine distances, calculating areas of geometries, figuring out which geometry a point falls in, etc. Many of these features have existed in some form or other in geopandas or postgis, so DuckDB's spatial extensions bring nothing new.

But what DuckDB as an engine does is it lets me work directly on parquet/geoparquet files at scale (vectorized and parallelized) on my local desktop. It beats geopandas in that respect. It's a quality of life improvement to say the least.

DuckDB also has an extension architecture that admits more exotic geospatial features like Hilbert curves, Uber H3 support.

https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/spatial/functions....

https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/h3.html
by hn_acker | 2025-05-03 21:38:59+00:00
> then simply age-restrict the content? like any porn site does.

Porn sites generally age restrict their content voluntarily in the United States. There are constitutional ways to enforce age restrictions on websites by law (such as requiring an RTA label as mentioned by Bender [1][2], with a private right of action in only limited cases), while age verification likely is unconstitutional [3]. Anyway, we're talking about bookstores that don't chiefly cater adult-only books.

> then simply age-restrict the content? like any porn site does. this is a nothingburger.

It's not a nothingburger if any parent claiming harm can sue and if people can turn questionable book bans on school libraries into book sale lawsuits on bookstores. So what is a concrete way for a bookstore to "simply age-restrict the content" in a way that will prevent lawsuits and allow the law to pass strict scrutiny (which has a "least restrictive means" prong [4])? When I said that a criminal law has "significantly less DDOSing potential", I meant that (even lone) frivolous lawsuits can impose a massive burden on legal speech, like in the case of SLAPP suits [5].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784936

[2] https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

[3] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/04/why-i-emphatic...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny#Applicability

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
by lm28469 | 2025-05-03 21:39:51+00:00
Americans basically live like energy is unlimited, free and has no side effects, the rest of the world doesn't have that chance, last time I checked the average US household used anywhere between 3x and 4x more electricity than the average EU household

They tend to prefer huge houses with relatively complex designs (less optimal in term of area/volume ratio) / poor insulation, they make up for it by relying on tech for heating/cooling pretty much year round.

Your tankless water heater is a good example of something that is completely inadequate for solar setups, they draw insane amount of energy over very quick period of time. But I think that's the core of the issue, if you want to keep all the nice things modern American houses have you're going to need a lot of money and a lot of sun. On the other hand if you're a bit more frugal, with so called "passive house", you can get by with a much smaller setup.

> I will note in passing that both our dishwasher and our microwave oven require 20A circuits

And a tankless heater will need 5 times that, unless you're using gas but I wouldn't count that in a "modern first world 21st century home".
by rufus_foreman | 2025-05-03 21:40:21+00:00
"The increase in consumption exactly cancels out the fall in net exports"

The increase in consumption does not happen at the same time as the fall in net exports.

Imports have increased in advance of tariffs. The imports are happening before the consumption. The imports that happen before the consumption of those imports subtract from GDP.

Yes that is a reason GDP might fall. In this quarter, if tariffs aren't revoked, we will consume the imports that happened to front run the tariffs. That will increase GDP in this quarter.

Noah Smith is not stupid. Noah Smith knows this. The questions for me are "Given that Noah Smith knows this, why does he write the article he does" and "Given that Noah Smith knows this, why would anyone rely on Noah Smith for their economic news". That's what I'm curious about.
by genter | 2025-05-03 21:40:39+00:00
> The original version replaced traditional dampers with linear electric motors that used sensor data to literally move the wheels up and down and cancel out bumps. ClearMotion adapted the control software and applied to active valve dampers with a magnetic fluid.

So, in other words, ClearMotion is producing a technology that other OEM's have been doing for years. Just off the top of my head, Cadillac has their magnetic suspension (which uses a fluid that changes viscosity in the presence of a magnetic field. I guess this is the same as what TFA claims is brand new.) The Ford Raptor with their live valve by Fox has a solenoid valve that regulates the shim pack. (Funny enough, I've spent all morning doing a FEA analysis of their valve.) The latest Mercedes Gelandewagen also has solenoid valves in their dampers to switch between soft and hard damping. Citroen has been doing it since the 50's with a purely mechanical system.

The basic idea is very simple: you want a computer to regulate the damper between soft and firm, as the road dictates. The implementation of this can become very complicated and there's a number of very different implementations. If I remember right, the Bose implementation required too much electricity to be practical. Most other implementations have some type of solenoid valve to control the pressure drop of the hydraulic fluid across an orifice. Again, the theory is simple, but mass producing a system that is cheap, reliable, yet can respond in milliseconds is difficult.
by et1337 | 2025-05-03 21:41:08+00:00
I DM’d someone a specific question recently and got back some generic, long-winded, impeccably formatted bullet points when previously this person had barely used any punctuation. I said something like, wow I like your formatting! Is that an extension or something? I always have a hard time with Slack formatting, etc. They replied that they were “trying something called structured communication.”

It probably made me angrier than it should have. Now I’m wondering if I’m the “old man yelling at cloud”.
by thih9 | 2025-05-03 21:41:28+00:00
> Over 20 years ago,

Why would we be interested in the technology from 1980s… oh.

Also, this is Bose of active noise cancellation - very fitting, since this looks like anc for wheels. They did anc for car seats too and sold it to the same buyer:

> As part of the deal, ClearMotion also acquired the technology for Bose Ride, a special "active" car seat for truckers that improves ride quality and reduces occupant fatigue. Bose used what it had learned from developing the active car suspension system to create Bose Ride, but it remains a niche product.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bose-sells-its-futuristic...
by epolanski | 2025-05-03 21:42:00+00:00
I don't think the particular niche matters, eventually everything becomes being a mundane job.

I know few people that made it in shiny businesses (Serie A and Champions League players like Fabio Liverani and Simone Pepe, or Massimiliano Rosolino swimming gold metal at Olympics) and they all absolutely either hated or found 99.9% of their career an endless marathon of mundane boring activities.

I'm not saying there aren't plenty of exceptions of people that like their job, and jobs that may make it easier, but it looks to me that most of people find their job mundane and boring most of the time.
Ask HN: How to EFFICIENTLY book customer discovery calls?
by DegageBeret | 2025-05-03 21:42:50+00:00
I’m a solo founder working on a B2B SaaS / Fintech product (pre-launch). Booking customer discovery calls has been very slow.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

• Pulled ~200 leads from ZoomInfo • Sent cold emails explaining my background and potential benefits for early adopters, offering coffee/lunch to discuss pain points • ~2% reply rate → only 4 calls booked

I’d love to hear what’s worked for others:

1. What channels besides cold email have worked for you? 2. How do you incentivize people to talk to you (if at all)? 3. Any subject lines or messaging that consistently convert? 4. How many follow-ups do you typically send?

Any tips or playbooks would be hugely appreciated.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-03 21:43:00+00:00
> I strongly disagree with this. Children play. Most animals play.

I am not arguing against this. On the contrary, I agree with this completely.

Pairing the opportunity to learn and use highly general long term knowledge, toward progression in their own intrinsic interests (crafting, whatever) is the point I am making.

The alternative, a long line of math for math's sake, which neglects to harness and support each child's need and motivation to continually advance their own natural interests in all kinds of idiosyncratic directions.
by voidspark | 2025-05-03 21:43:07+00:00
> The discussion started about whether human needs math skills to write code.

Writing code IS a math skill. When writing code you are writing logic in a formal system. Logic is mathematics.

You may be thinking that mathematics is just like doing arithmetic or solving equations. It is way deeper and broader than that.

> I still think that's not code, but your favourite model of code

Code is not just modelled through mathematics, it is actually defined by mathematics. It is fundamentally a mathematical construct, grounded in formal semantics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_(computer_science)
by miragecraft | 2025-05-03 21:43:31+00:00
He’s politically naive. I agree with him on much, such as don’t make workplace political, and cancel culture and DEI have in many cases gone mad, but his tolerance, even gentle celebration of Trump in the name of free speech is a classic example of the paradox of tolerance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

However he is right in many cases, and I don’t expect anyone to be right all the time, myself included. It’s strange to look for political leadership from a programmer anyhow.
by jsemrau | 2025-05-03 21:45:47+00:00
I thought same about paying in cash vs. touchpay. It's just more human, I can take time to chat with the person. Fast forward to 2025, I prefer touch and go because its just more efficient.

I think most business email conversations will follow the same route. We don't need all of this bla bla. Just "here is the information you need" -> "update me if you (a) need more info or (b) if the task is done"

What is notable here is though that we continue to reduce human/human interactions and that will eventually lead to a de-sensitizing of human culture.
by jraph | 2025-05-03 21:46:09+00:00
> Maybe people will just stop caring about the human touch

I doubt it. We human beings seem intrinsically motivated and enthusiastic about human connections. I believe we are wired like this. I know things changesbut I would need some strong evidence before even playing with the idea that we'll stop caring about the human touch.

Now, as much as I hate AI, that doesn't necessarily mean AI-free. Or even handwritten. It just needs to be some human touch. I would enjoy a handwritten letter but wouldn't mind an email at all. But maybe someone else would find it lazy and tasteless, just as I would find an ai generated text lazy and tasteless.

Maybe the prompt you can guess the person who sent you some ai-generated text used can already be perceived as some human touch. Maybe there is a threshold though.

Now, could it be that your child wanted to impress you with a perfectly written letter, or even with their ai prompt mastering?

Anyway, good anecdote, good perspective, good for you to have had the conversation and let them proceed anyway. Thanks for sharing.
by orangecat | 2025-05-03 21:47:05+00:00
He addresses this scenario:

Let’s take another example, which is more like what actually happened in Q1. Suppose an American company, Best Buy, decides to buy a Chinese TV and put it in a warehouse, because it knows that tariffs are coming soon. That purchase counts as inventory investment. So investment goes up by $1000. And just like in the previous example, net exports go down by $1000. The two cancel out, and the total contribution of the imported TV to U.S. GDP is zero.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-05-03 21:47:13+00:00
> Most

I see this error on HN a lot, but the overwhelming majority of people will not do that, because the overwhelming majority of people take the path of least resistance and neither have the domain knowledge nor the drive to figure out how to do things outside the easily packaged path. Your example class of peptide-using bodybuilders are probably in the top 1% of both drive and domain knowledge to have gotten there (probably higher, even - less than 1 in 100 people on the street are that jacked).

A lot of HN users are extremely high-agency people with a significantly-above-average ability to understand how systems work and how to take advantage of that. A lot of said users make the understandable mistake that most people are like them. This is not the case.

It is extremely important if you are in charge of designing a system (as many of us are) that you understand and internalize that any claim of "people will just" that requires more than a few steps will only bear out for a very small minority (which are important edge cases, but should not be your expectation of the average user)
by npteljes | 2025-05-03 21:47:37+00:00
Dug around a little, found this map:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1hbmivg/which_count...

So at least in 2023, no bans were in place in Romania for this practice.

I'm not entirely sure why it makes sense to distinguish between nations, with regards to questionable practices. A nation is large, with many different people in it. So, there will be many on each "degree of madness" as you call it. Over the course of a long history and a numerous population, you will every bad practice that you can think of, and then some.

This has nothing to do with nation - people themselves are like this, everywhere. In fact, I think that it's very dangerous to put it like that, to distance oneself so much from the horrific acts. I believe that the capability to turn on the chick shredding machine exists between you and me just as much as they do in the people who currently operate these machines. Bad acts are way easier than they seem, and, depending on circumstances of course, it takes a lot of resolution and work to build a kind and wholesome life.
by rorylaitila | 2025-05-03 21:47:47+00:00
Hmm, I kind of want this but for products - "made for humans". I use AI in my development work, but I'm not adding any AI to my app, humancrm.io. I think it is okay for individuals to use AI (I consider it another tool). But when it comes to human-to-human interaction, I want to deal with people.
by Devasta | 2025-05-03 21:48:29+00:00
Honest answer: because any serious efforts to improve HTML died 20 years ago, and the web as it's envisaged today is not an infinite library of the worlds knowledge but instead a JavaScript based and platform.

Asking for things that the W3C had specced out in 2006 for XML tech is just not reasonable if it doesn't facilitate clicks.
by lmm | 2025-05-03 21:48:42+00:00
> Every line of client JS brings build tooling, npm audit noise, and another supply chain risk.

IME this is backwards. All that stuff is a one-off fixed cost, it's the same whether you have 10 lines of JS or 10,000. And sooner or later you're going to need those 10 lines of JS, and then you'll be better off if you'd written the whole thing in JS to start with rather than whatever other pieces of technology you're using in addition.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-03 21:49:22+00:00
I come from Mennonites. Plenty of animals on the farm are allowed to live full lives. Anything doing any kind of work can be, which all animals on the farm are capable of. Milk and eggs don't require culling. Even layers past their prime will still eat pests and scratch manure into the soil and teach the young to do same.

Joel Salatin practices the sort of farming I'm familiar with: https://www.youtube.com/@farmlikealunatic

This is what happy chickens look like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VHvDEzpD5es

and happy pigs: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B6qk0IbCC5U

The figures you quote are not for heritage breeds. They are for breeds which have been selected for extremely rapid growth, often to the detriment of the health of the animal (and presumably the person consuming them).

> the meat of a relatively old animal taste far from what people are used to eat and is (way) more expensive to produce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq_au_vin has been the definition of a peasant dish for a century or two at least.

> but as some people point our frequently: we can't know for sure how another animal feels so it's only guess.

Anyone who's spent time with animals knows. As surely as you know if your dog is happy. People are the ones who hide their feelings.
by philjohnson | 2025-05-03 21:50:05+00:00
I developed another tool pdfredactoronline.com that does this. Full redaction/removal of content, not just blacking out text. I didn't include it in this tool for now due to the APGL license of the library that enables the redaction, but since something fully in the browser is kinda open source already, I'll see if I can comply with the license while including it in BreezePDF
by grafmax | 2025-05-03 21:50:07+00:00
Those are all examples taken from actual cultures not fetishes.

Unibrow: Tajikistan Crossed eyes: ancient Mayan culture Teeth blackening: Ohaguro etc

Our modern globalized culture only gives us a tiny taste of what cultural diversity really is. That is because cultural diversity is actually erased by globalization - a process really begun by colonization, really the earliest form of globalization.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-03 21:50:25+00:00
Oddly, this is the weirdest thing about all the 'its llms all the say down'. The problem starts with user trusting the provider to be dumb pipes. The moment they become smart pipes ( and one could argue we are there already ), all bets are off, because you have no comfort that even if you sent the message, it was not altered by an overzealous company bot.

Edit:

Us tomorrow: Your honor, my device clearly shows timestamps and allegedly offending message, but you will note the discrepancy in style, time and message that suggests that is not the case.

LLM judge: Guilty.

Edit2:

Amusingly, the problem has been a human problem all along.
by jajko | 2025-05-03 21:50:33+00:00
I guess you mean Jr who consumed a lot of coke when young, not his late CIA father who was shielding Jr from jail numerous times.

Middle east is as it is currently largely to his fuckups and made up invasions for reasons barely better than russian invasion of Ukraine, and Afghanistan failure is proper second Vietnam for US to the last details, just less movies about it so far so its largely ignored and people act like it didn't happen.

Republicans still uncritically celebrate him, when I dared to criticize him even here I got downvoted to hell pretty quickly. Yet he is directly responsible for death of millions of innocent civilians and indirectly caused ie Isis, not on Mao or Stalin level but still.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-03 21:51:02+00:00
Oh, wow. I didn't realize that. Very cool. I used the heck out of it.

At one point I learned about the QWK format and wrote some code to build a QWK packet out of text files. My idea was to distribute an e-zine as a QWK packet. I successfully made QWK packets but never had any actual content to release.
by simultsop | 2025-05-03 21:51:08+00:00
It's a pity, of all web resources advancements, js, css, runtimes, web engines. HTML was the most stagnant aspect of it, despite the "HTML5" effing hype. My guess is they did not want to empower HTML and threaten SSR's, or solutions. I believe the bigest concern of not making a step is the damned backward compatibility. Some just wont budge to move.
by helixfelix | 2025-05-03 21:51:44+00:00
Your comment made me realize what a bubble of privilege I live in.

I raised my eyebrow at "everyone takes" standard deduction. How is that possible with home prices and interest rates? Even a modest 300-400k house at 5-6% interest, property taxes, local sales tax deductions and minimum charity would exceed the standard deduction. Where I live good luck finding anything more than a condo for less than a million.

Turns out 90% take standard deduction. This is another way to track the extreme "wealth" gap emerging. Only the wealthy itemize.