MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matwood | 2025-05-24 13:57:01+00:00
The VAT is akin to a sales tax. It's paid regardless of where the item is manufactured or distributed from (and mostly regardless of the item). The US typically applies between 5-10% sales tax on most items. I have no idea why someone from System76 would think it's relevant to have an EU distribution center, but it wouldn't change the VAT.

BTW, it's not just the EU that wants you to pay the sales tax when bringing items across the border, but the US also. It just so happens that it's rarely if ever enforced.

EDIT I should add that the key difference of the VAT and tariff is that VAT is not made to advantage one product over another. It's simply a sales tax on nearly all products, just like the US sales taxes.
by layer8 | 2025-05-24 13:58:33+00:00
Usually these are predictions made by a model that has explanatory power for things that we can observe. The model might be wrong, or there might be a better model. That’s always the case in science. Observations that confirm a model also increase the credence for its predictions that we can’t directly observe. It means that given our best current understanding of X, it also implies Y. Yes, Y might be wrong, but then that implies that something is likely also wrong with our current understanding of X. The predictions (or retrodictions) aren’t black and white. They always have some associated level of credence, which depends on how well we think we understand the kind of system we are talking about.
by resters | 2025-05-24 13:59:18+00:00
The last thing Trump's tariffs could be described as is targeted industrial policy. They are intentionally a sledge-hammer. They are intentionally emotional. Intentionally full of jingoistic rhetoric and victimhood rhetoric.

Sadly there has been zero discussion of doing targeted industrial policy (like China's) in the US. The irony is that Trump's approach benefits China tremendously.
by philistine | 2025-05-24 13:59:46+00:00
> When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS.

Tell me you're only interested in talking about the gaming you care about without telling me directly.

In simple terms, iOS is the only growth market in gaming. Consoles and PCs are basically stagnant, with around 200 million people worldwide in that market and that number hasn't moved in decades. The only growth being made is by raising game prices and making ever more expensive Pro consoles.

iOS is the biggest game market in terms of revenue. You can disregard the games on there, but Apple is laser-focused on that gaming revenue they're making. Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-24 14:00:40+00:00
For those who might eyeroll at this example, I believe it and find it a good citation. Have you done the math on what it costs to get a US commercial aviation license?

Just remember, Jack Antonoff (musician turned music producer for acts like St. Vincent) benefitted from his Dad being a millionaire diet supplement multi-level marketing huckster, Taylor Swift’s Dad was (and still is) a Merrill Lynch high earning banker, Redfoo of LmFAO is the son of Barry Gordy…he’ll, even Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, is the niece of famous guitarist Tuck Andreas. Tell me with a straight face having those connections isn’t a thumb on the roulette wheel and I’ll politely go away for obvious reasons.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-24 14:00:45+00:00
> a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.

From personal experience I can tell you confidently you are wrong.

The part you are missing is you only need to work 10-20 hours a week MAX. That means you have an enormous Amount of leisure time to do what you want with your life. Trust me when I say plenty of young women love the idea of not working a lot and instead having wilderness adventures.

Want to see it for yourself? Go spend a summer in the Yukon. If you love it, stay the winter. It’s nothing short of epic.
by Maxious | 2025-05-24 14:01:23+00:00
We played this monday morning quarterbacking 10 years ago, the datasheet Raspberry Pi used said:

> Light-sensitive circuit protection, as claimed in literatures, is not a reality concern since silicon is only transparent to long wavelength light, which is rarely encountered in broad applications of WLCSP.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150210111428/https://www.fairc...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-24 14:01:59+00:00
> Photosensitivity in WLCSP parts is not something that was “discovered” by the community.

The article doesn’t make that claim. There’s an entire section titled “This Wasn’t Actually Unprecedented”. It links to another article containing stories about previous examples. It discusses the root cause of WLCSP photosensitivity.

> None of this is a “discovery”.

The discovery was that the Raspberry Pi 2 was photosensitive, not that WLCSP parts are photosensitive. Most PCBs aren’t distributed to consumers as bare PCBs, so this issue rarely appears to end users.

> If you put WLCSP parts on a PCB that will be unprotected, and photosensitivity is not an acceptable design feature, you are either a hack, or making mistakes like a NOOB and should be supervised by a senior engineer.

You’re exaggerating. WLCSP photosensitivity is an uncommon phenomenon that requires a very strong and specific light source (Xenon flash, in this case) and the combination of an exposed PCB. I know there’s something about the Raspberry Pi that makes armchair quarterbacks want to find ways to call their engineers “hacks” and “NOOBS” but this is really a rare edge case. I wouldn’t be surprised if the photosensitivity was not even mentioned in the part’s data sheet.
by fragmede | 2025-05-24 14:03:47+00:00
I think the contents of said blog post is material to the conversation at hand.

The opposite of a "success accelerator" hypeman would be someone that's constantly tearing you down, talking bar about you behind your back, and constantly and actively trying to get you to fail. If it's the contents of blog post that helps someone recognize such a person isn't really their friend, why is it even relevant what bit if media helped them come to that realization?
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-24 14:03:57+00:00
Look at all the great unsustainable AI applications we're never going to be able to use.

I think the big and juicy AI applications are just so that GPUs can go brrrr[1]. Just gimmicks.

Real and useful applications will come from SLM that can be run on SoC like phones or Raspberry PIs and LLMs optimized to run on consumer grade hardware like the 3060s, not with those models that require multimillion dollar setups to be able to run.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40337936
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-24 14:04:21+00:00
> The safer plan may be to pass the inference cost through to the user and let them pick premium or budget models according to their need almost per request, as Zed editor does now.

I'm working on a solution right now that is using a local/cheap model first, does some validation, and if this validation fails, use the expensive SOTA model. This is the most reasonable approach if you have a way to verify the results somehow (which might not be easy depending on the use case).
by diggan | 2025-05-24 14:04:35+00:00
> of these hype-chasing AI founders [...]

I mean, if you qualify that question like that, then probably closer to 100%.

What would be more interesting to know, is how many AI founders starts out as "not hype-chasing", but end up self-enriching/capitulate their startups regardless, basically turning into it rather than starting out like that.
by waonderer | 2025-05-24 14:05:15+00:00
Relationships are of various kinds that extend in various dimensions. What the Author has talked about definitely sounds more like a "work-friend" relationship, but is not entirely separate from a "friend-friend" that you define.

> It’s deeply believing that a rising tide lifts all boats.

This is true, but with context. "Growth" and "Comfort" are two different elements of a good friendship. We can replace "rising" with "happy", and the same quote works for comfort.

Are both necessary? Depends on how you define "friendship". If comfort is the only thing, you dog can be a comfortable companion. But for a human friendship to last longer, both must enjoy each other company for longer time horizon, and that needs growth in both. This growth needs not be only in career, but mental too.

With such growth, envy can't come in and corrode the bond.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-24 14:05:58+00:00
I do not see how I am ignoring the questionable return part. There is lots of data on which educational investments result in more stable cash flow vs less stable cash flow.

These same conversations were being had 20+ years ago when I was in college.

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

Technically, the term wasn't about money at the beginning, but I think by the 1990s and 2000s, when people started borrowing tens of thousands of dollars per year from federal taxpayers, it became more about the ROI.
by mathstuf | 2025-05-24 14:06:11+00:00
One big benefit of symlinks (really, "not storing it in the deployment") is that my Git repo doesn't have a bunch of hidden files in it because they can appear in the link's path rather than the repo's path. I can also split up files based on "why it exists" rather than "where it lives". For example, I can have the "enable Rust support" group of configurations:

- add Rust things to the list of packages to install - add any Rust-specific configurations for Neovim and `zsh` - bring in any Rust-oriented Neovim plugins

These files all then live next to each other rather than being scatter-shot between Neovim, zsh, and some giant list of packages. Additionally, if I later decide to disable "Rust support" on a machine, the broken symlinks in `$HOME` let me clean up easily without having to actually excise things from the repository.

That said, I have my own system that I built up years ago and it's never been abstracted out for anyone else to use so of course it's going to fit my needs better than anything else.
by trelane | 2025-05-24 14:08:36+00:00
> have no idea why someone from System76 would think it's relevant to have an EU distribution center, but it wouldn't change the VAT.

It seems to be the customers asking for one, not System76. They were planning to open one, though.

> VAT is not made to advantage one product over another.

Like sales tax, there are different (and often zero) rates depending on product (same link as before)
by AngryData | 2025-05-24 14:09:06+00:00
As someone who has been burning wood for heat for 35 years, those people are out of their damn mind if they think 1 acre will supply them their fire wood. 1 acre will absolutely not grow enough wood to heat your home unless you are cutting it all down and moving away in a few years. It takes a decade of growth just to get a tree to the point where it is growing at a reasonable rate, it needs a root system built up before it can grow efficiently, and that root system is destroyed when you cut the tree down and the next set of trees needs to regrow it.

And even with a well managed rotating stock of trees, you are going to at best get just over half a cord per acre. And in my area which is as close to the same weather as Northern New York as it gets, I would expect they would need atleast full 3 cords of wood to make it through a mild winter, more if it is a colder winter or if no snow builds up to help insulate or if you live on an open plot where wind can blow over your house.

I wouldn't even consider trying to survive on my own tree wood unless I had at least 10 acres to harvest off of, and it would still depend on the type of trees growing there and is still kind of straddling the edge of sustainable long term.

Maybe if you went full 16th century and started coppicing the woods and maintaining bare minimum heating you could do better, but coppiced woods also takes a decade to initial establish and maintain and nobody has coppiced woods just sitting around waiting to be utilized.
by chongli | 2025-05-24 14:09:53+00:00
Your invocation of Strong AI (in the linked paper) seems like a restatement of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler [1] fallacy that’s been around forever in programming language debates. It’s hypothetical, not practical, so it doesn’t represent a solution to anything. Do you have any evidence to suggest that Strong AI is imminent?

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler
by nikcub | 2025-05-24 14:10:04+00:00
Following the public reporting timeline of builder.ai lays out a fascinating story akin to Theranos or Wework. I'm sure we'll get an exhaustive account of exactly what happen in due course, and there will likely be other such cases that come out of the most recent AI investing boom.

Aug 2019 - WSJ report that for builder.ai the "AI" means "Actually people in India"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-question...

FT pick up the trail over a year ago with a series of reports:

Mar 2024 - Men behind builder.ai named in criminal probe

https://www.ft.com/content/7ff3c5fc-e390-4ca8-9c7d-11fd56ab7...

Mar 2024 - The wild ride of a Microsoft-backed tech unicorn

This is a full detailed profile of the CEO and the company detailing their wild spending and fundraising details:

https://www.ft.com/content/11afc46c-b435-489d-a9f1-134ad0c00...

It all falls apart after that report:

May 2024 - CEO steps down

https://www.ft.com/content/f8882c90-ef69-4a62-aecf-9d3725aca...

May 2024 - builder.ai finds auditor had links to previous CEO:

https://www.ft.com/content/26c98590-e8f9-4cd9-83d6-db0d25ad2...

Apr 2025 - builder.ai restates revenues and hires outside auditors to investigate inflated sales

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-31/microsoft...

and this week they folded. The website was up 48 hours ago last I checked, but has now been taken down.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 14:11:45+00:00
Say I want to buy "The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction", published by Oxford University Press. What are my options if I want a DRM-free copy, legally? Amazon no longer lets me download the books themselves so I can strip the DRM locally, so that's no longer an option. Apparently Oxford University Press also don't offer DRM-free reading. So what really can I do here if I want to buy it in digital form?

I guess it's easy to say "Don't buy X from Y", but if it's the only option, what can one individual really do about it, besides just not purchasing it at all or pirating it?
by K0balt | 2025-05-24 14:12:11+00:00
This one was actually pretty cool, since the effect of alternative environmental gasses had not been extensively documented by MEMS device manufacturers at that time.

It was interesting and remarkable because many engineers, despite solid diligence, might have missed the possibility unless they were well versed in MEMS manufacturing processes which were not very widely known before publication.

Still, it wasn’t at all surprising to the manufacturers of the parts, since using a calibrated gas mixture for initial adjustment is a standard design step.
by stickfigure | 2025-05-24 14:13:46+00:00
On one hand I agree with the general premise of the article, which is that you can live a lot cheaper than you choose to. Homes in the passably-cute downtown of Massena are under $100k; you could live on $40k/yr comfortably and if you're here on HN you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job. Cutting it to $5k/yr is just trying to prove something.

The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper". It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it.

"Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-24 14:14:16+00:00
> our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans

As others pointed out these claims are often skewed by high childhood mortality rates.

Beyond that, though, I'm curious why you consider the number of years lived to be a primary concern?

I'd rather live 50 good years than 80 miserable ones. I'd also rather live to 65 than make it to 80 with the last 30-40 years spent increasingly propped up with medications, doctors appointments, and invasive treatments.
by threecheese | 2025-05-24 14:14:21+00:00
Interesting; these methods seem to follow the same pattern. They both track specific files in a controlled bare git repo, and both transparently link a $HOME file into that repo. Differences are the git method “links” - within the work tree - while ‘lnk’ creates a filesystem link. They both require a special command - a shell alias, vs an installed binary, and both indirectly leverage git subcommands (via the shell alias or the binary).

An advantage of the git method is it doesn’t touch $HOME, and so if the git repo gets wiped out there’s no harm. Am I missing anything?
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-24 14:14:31+00:00
The term is too overloaded.

I'll add one more: a LLM small enough that it can be trained from scratch on one A100 in 24 hours. Is it really small if it takes $10,000 to train? Or leave that term for $200 models?

Back to your definitions, there are sub-1B models people are using. I think I saw one in the 400-600M range for audio. Another person posted here a 100M-200M model for extracting data from web pages. We told them to just use a rules-based approach where possible but they believed the SLM worked better.

Then, there's projects like BabyLM that can be useful at 10M:

https://babylm.github.io/
by susam | 2025-05-24 14:14:41+00:00
I use fzf as well, but I don't think it's quite comparable to the kind of ad hoc browsing we can do in a GUI desktop environment or in Emacs. Yes, 'fzf --multi' lets us select multiple files, but it's not really the same as casually browsing through a directory. For example, we might find an image file and preview it, or open a PDF just to skim it, and then mark that file and move on, and continue browsing files in this manner until we've gathered everything we need. That sort of exploratory, flexible interaction feels quite different.

Shell tools, Unix utilities, and 'fzf --multi' are definitely very powerful. But at least to me, they don't seem to offer the same kind of spontaneous browsing and editing experience, I'm referring to.

To be clear, this isn't some sort of competition! I'm not claiming one approach is superior to the other. Every tool has its strengths. My comments highlighting the features of Emacs do not imply that other tools are inferior. Quite the contrary!

I'm very fond of computing and I enjoy having a broad set of excellent tools at my disposal. The only point I disagree with is the claim that "all your examples are easily done in a shell". In my experience, the kind of random, ad hoc browsing, previewing, editing, marking and unmarking files, I'm talking about isn't quite as straightforward in the shell. It's certainly possible, but it doesn't feel as seamless or fluid as it does in Emacs. But again, this is not a competition. This is just an acknowledgement that different tools do different things!

I regularly rely on commands like 'find ... -exec', 'xargs', 'fzf', etc. But I also use Dired (and Emacs, in general) extensively. I find familiarity with both styles of tools very useful and the knowledge of both types of tools are transferable across a wide range of systems and environments.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-24 14:15:59+00:00
Not ideal, but you could either scrape the browser pages to reproduce the pages without DRM, or even get hold of a physical copy (e.g. from a library) and scan the pages yourself. If you manage to produce a good enough version, don't forget to make a torrent available.

(There's a bunch of physical copies available on eBay)
Show HN: I made a site that lets you collect and rank features your users want
by jakemanger | 2025-05-24 14:16:06+00:00
Hey HN!

In my last project launch, I found people loved when I took on their feature requests.

It helped me focus on making features my users actually wanted, rather than what I assumed they wanted. My posts and product did better because of it.

I launched this site to make it easier to manage these requests and keep users in the loop with a project’s timeline. Let me know if you have any suggestions!
by perrygeo | 2025-05-24 14:16:50+00:00
Measuring tree "depth" (ie canopy height) is a critical tool for conservation biology to monitor the world's forests. We already do this using remotely sensed data correlated against ground truth, which relies on specific optical reflectance characteristics associated with plant biology. But this technique is more general and works only on the spatial structure of the image itself, meaning this could potentially lead to more ubiquitous forest monitoring.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-24 14:17:47+00:00
>be specific

Again, again, again ...

I don't have to! Because I didn't bring the argument into the conversation.

Burden of proof [1] should be a required reading before posting on this site.

Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas you mention, which are indeed the closest thing to this idea, come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.

It is a fantasy, whether you all like it or not. Life is not a James Bond movie.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
by thephyber | 2025-05-24 14:17:56+00:00
The screenshot mentions a 14 day return policy. If that doesn’t work, your credit card company is likely willing to help you force a refund (unless you agreed to a contract during checkout).

The dead tree version is about a dollar more than the silly lease-under-onerous-terms-pretending-to-be-purchase version. Do the world a favor and opt for the physical book so you don’t contribute to the anti-consumer digital distribution company.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-24 14:18:08+00:00
I am not saying it is bizarre, I am saying people try to avoid it because it reduces their power (obviously). It is the "natural" state when people don't have power, i.e. they don't have a choice. The change seen in the last 10 to 20 decades is what happens when people do have the power, i.e. they have the choice.

What is natural or bizarre is merely a function of circumstance.
by ddtaylor | 2025-05-24 14:18:39+00:00
> Random side note: while looking at existing ACME clients, I found that at least one of them screws up their encoding of the publicExponent and ends up interpreting it as hex instead of decimal. That is, instead of 65537, aka 0x10001, it reads it as 0x65537, aka 415031! > > Somehow, this anomaly exists and apparently doesn't break anything? I haven't actually run the client in question, but I imagine people are using it since it's in apt.
by pona-a | 2025-05-24 14:18:57+00:00
It's an interesting observation that "vibe coders" — accusing everyone from artists to programmers of elitism because they suggest you pick up a pencil or a book — seem to make up entire pseudo-religions out of prompt-whispering, complete with unique rituals, theological treatises, and an isolated community warning you of the evil of worldly folk.