MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-08 17:04:16+00:00
I struggle to comprehend this viewpoint, echoed by many, with respect to: what possible benefit of global trade is the United States (well, previous to tariffs anyway) already not receiving?

We can buy goods by printing money, which no other nation can lay claim to, because the U.S. Dollar is the default world currency. Everyone accepts USD, and wants USD. Every other nation on Earth in fact is always looking to buy dollars, because dollars are what everything is purchased in. Further, our standing in the globe and favorable geographic location means we can import anything from virtually anywhere, but most especially China, Korea, and Japan.

Yeah we don't "make things" here anymore, the pundits say, apart from dozens of product categories over hundreds of industries. "Everything comes from China!" Okay, and? I don't want a job in a factory and I suspect a shitload of other people here also don't, and my source for that is every factory and logistics center near me is constantly trying to hire people and seemingly being unable to.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-08 17:04:43+00:00
But think of the coal mining jobs...

In all seriousness though, China is also not some young slick economic powerhouse. It's largely propped up facade with serious structural issues that the US doesn't have.

Also keep in mind that while countries are annoyed with the US, that doesn't mean they are going to welcome Chinese ships into their waters.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 17:05:01+00:00
> The primary question is that who is deciding that what kind of information is curated and whether the arguments have been properly voted, and the process itself is transparent.

You already seem aware of the existence of the meta site - which contains reams of useful information and prior discussion and explanation of policy - so I assume you are simply complaining about others disagreeing with you, rather than genuinely wondering.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-08 17:05:02+00:00
The 48x48px touch target is estimated to be ~9mm. That's tiny for touching by finger, since you can't see through your finger to aim (styluses could do it).

For mobile, look for UX patterns that don't hinge on my big thumb hitting a tiny patch of screen. For example, gestures like swipe to either side to expose actions for item.

Most of the things talked about in this thread are not mobile UIs, and are not limited by such concerns.

And finally, information density can be separate from available action density.
by johnathandos | 2025-05-08 17:05:08+00:00
This really depends on where you first encountered the term. Anne Gentle wrote Docs Like Code, the first book I read on this topic 8 years ago. I always consider the terms "docs as code" and "docs like code" to be interchangeable, and usually use both when discussing the topic with an audience that includes a wide variety of different individuals. I think "docs as code" is probably used more in purely dev circles due to the proliferation of the "everything-as-code" construction seen in other dev-adjacent disciplines (infra-as-code, config-as-code, etc.)
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-08 17:05:27+00:00
> That said, I don't believe Trump is that stupid

Do you think he's acting when he does things like keep preventing an interviewer from moving on because he wants to make extra sure everyone knows he entirely believes that obviously-photoshopped, not-trying-to-look-like-anything-but-an-overlay letters and numbers on a picture of someone's hand were in fact real tattoos?
by compscidr | 2025-05-08 17:05:43+00:00
Have been following this project for a while, cool stuff!

I work a bunch with vpn-like networking on Android phones and it would be cool to have a bit of info on how I might get something like working on phones. I guess its probably not your typical usecase.

Currently since the project is a VPN client, I already intercept all of the packets, I have a pcap writer and can write to files or a tcp sockets and connect wireshark to it - but it needs a bunch of complication to setup the keys so that I can see through encryption, so anything that would make that process easier would be great.
by yorwba | 2025-05-08 17:05:45+00:00
There's two kinds of shortage here: the availability in principle of an antivenom for a specific snake venom and the availability in practice of a dose of antivenom to treat a specific snake bite.

Rich people paying whatever it takes to avoid dying provide a captive market for the first case (at least as far as snakes that rich people often get bitten by are concerned), and protein design tools also aim at this kind of shortage.

But as the article points out, most people getting bitten by snakes are affected by the second kind of shortage, because they're too poor to afford several hundred dollars. To address this, the newly-designed antivenom also needs to be cheap enough to manufacture that people actually buy it in large enough volumes that it justifies the initial R&D investment for the manufacturer.
We built an AI-powered voice tool to boost sales
by Artjoker | 2025-05-08 17:05:48+00:00
Sales teams often struggle with limited visibility into their calls, reviewing only 5-10% manually, which leads to missed opportunities. We built an AI-powered voice analytics tool that transcribes, indexes, and analyzes 100% of calls, turning them into actionable insights. In one case, this helped a SaaS client grow sales by 120% in 12 months.

What the tool does

We aimed to provide non-intrusive, automated QA at scale. So the key features include: - 100% call transcription: using ASR for accurate, fast transcriptions. - Searchable database: indexed transcripts for easy keyword and phrase tracking. - Customizable reports: automated manager reports, grouped by agent or team. - CRM integration: syncs data to tools like Salesforce and Zoho.

Limitations: currently lacks real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, and emotion scoring (planned for future updates).

Architecture overview - Audio capture: integrated VoIP or manual uploads. - ASR pipeline: transcribes calls via cloud-based speech-to-text. - Transcript indexing: elasticSearch stores and retrieves data efficiently. - Keyword matching: flags important terms like pricing or CTAs. - Reports: automated generation of weekly summaries.

Real-world impact. One SaaS client improved - 120% sales growth over 12 months. - 35% increase in close rate by identifying high-performing patterns. - 5-day reduction in sales cycle due to consistent messaging. - Churn dropped from 15% to 6% through better objection handling.

This was achieved without expanding the team — simply by leveraging the power of data.

Challenges & lessons learned - Keyword rules: over-flagging terms led to alert fatigue, so we customized per-client keyword sets. - ASR model issues: addressed by adding pre-filtering for noisy inputs and fallback models. - CRM integration: built middleware to adapt to varying CRM structures across clients. - Manager overload: simplified reports to highlight top deviations, avoiding information overload.

Next steps: what's coming

- Trend detection: analyzing keyword frequency over time. - Conversation templates: auto-tagging calls (intro, demo, pricing). - Call quality scoring: identifying poor audio or incomplete conversations.

Key takeaways - Focus on basics: transcription + search + simple flags bring massive value. - Human-in-the-loop: insights are most useful when actionable in real-time. - Scalability = simplicity: focused, simple solutions deliver better results. - Data ≠ insight: reports need to be curated and actionable for managers.

Conclusion AI is a powerful tool for sales teams, but success comes from turning raw data into actionable insights. By building scalable systems and avoiding complexity, we were able to achieve real business growth — and this approach is adaptable across industries.
Ask HN: How are you managing LLM inference at the edge?
by gray_amps | 2025-05-08 17:06:08+00:00
I’m building a system to run small LLMs on-device (mobile, IoT, on-prem servers) and would love to hear how others have tackled the challenges.

Context:

Use cases: offline chatbots, smart cameras, local data privacy

Models: 7–13B parameter quantized models (e.g. Llama 2, Vicuna)

Constraints: limited RAM/flash, CPU-only or tiny GPU, intermittent connectivity

Questions:

What runtimes or frameworks are you using (ONNX Runtime, TVM, custom C++)?

How do you handle model loading, eviction, and batching under tight memory?

Any clever tricks for quantization, pruning, or kernel fusions that boost perf?

How do you monitor and update models securely in the field?

Looking forward to your benchmarks, war stories, and code pointers!
by jacobyoder | 2025-05-08 17:06:29+00:00
And for things that can not be manufactured or grown here... we just suck it up and pay the extra 10-20-30% anyway?

If the 'intent' was to spur manufacturing, you'd enact laws with long term financial stability planned in. Few are going to commit to spending millions equipping factories when the 'tariff moat' that might make those factories sustainable will go away if Trump sees a movie in six weeks that says tariffs are bad.

The 'intent' seems to be to create financial instability and chaos, to allow Trump to position himself as the financial savior, and we are concentrating huge amounts of economic power in the hands of a single person.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-08 17:06:29+00:00
This thread perfectly demonstrates the issue.

People have already made up their minds and it's inherently politicized, so if the research is funded by Republicans then it will be a study designed to emphasize the risks and harms and if it's funded by Democrats the opposite. Which means it's a waste of money to study because the outcome is decided by the political inclinations of the party that initially funded it, whereas the purpose of actual research is to study a question whose answer isn't known from the outset.
by postalcoder | 2025-05-08 17:06:36+00:00
I haven't set up my about page yet but I was going to attribute much my design to their page. I've taken a ton of inspiration from hckernews.com because it's the front page I always frequented prior to making this. My primary issue with it was that I wanted more sorting capabilities (aggregate mode), and wanted to be able to see the highest engagement threads (by comments).
by mlyle | 2025-05-08 17:06:39+00:00
Sure, but even when you apply discount rates due to uncertainty of efficacy and distance of effects, the numbers can still be big.

At this point, I spend substantially my entire life in local service (I am a schoolteacher and I give away 6 figures locally annually). I still don't think it would maximize my effective impact to ignore the rest of my country or the rest of the world.
by CodeMage | 2025-05-08 17:06:53+00:00
> We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.

One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.

Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.

Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.

Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 17:07:02+00:00
For unit testing to pay off, it requires having modular units to test.

Programmers coming up through frameworks or functional programming often don't have those, and so the techniques OO unit testers use don't translate well at all. If the first "unit" you build is a microservice, the first possible "unit" test is the isolation test for that service.

I have watched junior engineers crawl over glass to write tests for something because they didn't know how to write testable code yet, and then the tests they write often make refactoring a-la-Martin-Fowler's-book impossible.

(And that is leaving aside the consultancies that want to be able to advertise "100% test coverage!" but don't actually care if the tests make software harder to maintain in the long run because they aren't going to be there.)

Eventually we'll be able to acknowledge that there are a lot of different skills in our profession, and that writing good code isn't about being "smart": it's about knowing how to write code well. But until then people will keep blaming the tools they don't know how to use.
by nickff | 2025-05-08 17:07:49+00:00
I have no idea what the administration’s plan or thoughts might be, but I suspect that one part of it is that they’ve seen how many governments (including their own, as well as allies like the EU) delay and defer as negotiation strategies. The EU even used delays and uncertainty against its very closest ally (the UK) in trade negotiations. As a result, sudden and ‘violent’ shifts are the only way to get things done in the current environment.
by phi0 | 2025-05-08 17:07:53+00:00
One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking.

The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once.

[1]: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
by malone | 2025-05-08 17:08:03+00:00
> The data in the article proves Gary's point. Not only is income tax brought in less now, but more taxes are VAT

Does the article data show that? Looking at the tax % graph the ratio between Income+NI and VAT+Stamp duties has been pretty constant (apart from a brief time in the 70s)

https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image-1....

> In other words, the poorer people in society are taking on a bigger share of taxes.

Seems unlikely. The article shows that high earners are paying are far greater share of income tax. Poorer people would need to be buying a crazy amount more stuff to offset that with VAT.

The UK is in a fairly unique position where its GDP per capita has been stagnant for decades. Which means it's slowly sinking under inflation. It's been going on for so long that the people at the bottom of the boat are now drowning (which I agree is deeply unfair). But no amount of redistributing people between the decks is going to actually fix the problem.
by zsoltkacsandi | 2025-05-08 17:08:14+00:00
> The largest benefit of microservices has always been lifecycle management, and "clear interfaces" in "modular monoliths" does not in fact solve that.

What lifecycle are we really talking about? There are massive monoliths - like the Linux kernel or PostgreSQL - with long lifespans, clear modularity, and thousands of contributors, all without microservices. Lifecycle management is achievable with good architecture, not necessarily with service boundaries.

> If you update the logging library in a monolith, everyone takes that updates even if it breaks half the teams.

This is a vague argument. In a microservice architecture, if multiple systems rely on the structure or semantics of logs — or any shared behavior or state - updating one service without coordination can just as easily break integrations. It’s not the architecture that protects you from this, but communication, discipline, and tests.

> It also means on critical systems separating high risk and low risk changes are not possible.

Risk can be isolated within a monolith through careful modular design, feature flags, interface boundaries, and staged rollouts. Microservices don’t eliminate risk - they often just move it across a network boundary, where failures can be harder to trace and debug.

I’m not against microservices. But the examples given in the comment I responded to reflect the wrong reasons (at least based on what I’ve seen in 15+ years across various workplaces) for choosing or avoiding a microservice architecture.

Microservices don’t solve coupling or modularity issues — they just move communication from in-process calls to network calls. If a system is poorly structured as a monolith, it will likely be a mess as microservices too — just a slower, harder-to-debug one.
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-08 17:08:20+00:00
It's a cycle that can't sustain, and will lead to the destruction of the US, if not as a country via civil war, then with it losing it's place on the world stage rapidly and extensively.

The only solution is somehow to force or trick red state populations into learning what they need to so they can vote with information rather than beliefs, or getting rid of the electoral college so they can be disregarded entirely.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 17:08:27+00:00
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions ...

It is problematic even with good intentions.

People don't have time, expertise or usually even the motive to systematically examine ROI. They or someone they know has a 'good cause' and they support it. For example, endowments at their alma mater - likely a school for wealthy kids, new buildings for the hospital (that serves wealthy people), new research in diseases that are problems for the wealthy, etc.

They can't know without talking to people who have experience with poverty, for example, and those aren't the people coming to dinner tonight.
by jacobyoder | 2025-05-08 17:08:32+00:00
More to the point, if high tariffs are GOOD, we should be embracing them and the WH should be working to promote 'pride in tariffs!' messaging. Show how much you love your country and leader by how much in tariffs you pay! It'll be great, because you won't have to pay $3k income tax, just... an extra $5k in cost of living every year. Forever. Even when you stop working.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-05-08 17:08:35+00:00
I get what you are saying, but the U.S. BUYS goods, because we are "too rich" to make them. We SELL services, because other countries are "too poor" to offer them.

When this administration focuses solely on one side of that (Goods vs Services), they miss the forest for the trees. I'm not saying we shouldn't bring back manufacturing, because we should, but we can't pretend that we get the short end of the stick in this trade partnership.

China makes the cheap shit that isn't economical here, and the only way to make it economical here is to pay a tax on the cheap shit we want if it isn't made here, but the crazy thing is we could do a 400% tariff on Chinese imports, and it is still too expensive to buy American for most goods. Not even getting to the point that we don't have the infrastructure here because that also costs money, which would rise the price for American goods even higher.

Does Bill Gates mow his own lawn? No!

Does Donald Trump grill his own Big Mac? No!

Because when you hit a certain "wealth bracket" you stop doing things that are below that and hire them out. We hired China because we were too rich.
by duped | 2025-05-08 17:08:46+00:00
I feel like there was a desire from GH to avoid needing a "build" step for actions so you could use `use: someones/work` or whatever, `git push` and see the action run.

But if you think about it, the entire design is flawed. There should be a `gh lock` command you can run to lock your actions to the checksum of the action(s) your importing, and have it apply transitively, and verify those checksums when your action runs every time it pulls in remote dependencies.

That's how every modern package manager works - because the alternative are gaping security holes.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-05-08 17:08:51+00:00
There is also the group of paranoid partially-technical people who consider a phone to be e-waste if it no longer receives software updates. I suggest to those people that they read the CVE list to see what they're _actually_ vulnerable to. Keep the browser updated, stop installing crapware, that thwarts the overwhelming majority of vulnerabilities. Zero-days can happen to absolutely any version; live in practicality, not fear.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-08 17:08:58+00:00
So 4x300 MWe for 20.9B CAD or 1.2 GWe for 15.9B USD or 13.2 B/GWe.

Vogtle 3 and 4 are 2x 1117 MWe for 36.8B USD, or 16.5 B/GWe.

So the price, if everything goes according to plan, is only 20% lower than the Vogle boondogle's actual price.

And given's nuclear track record, it's basically guaranteed that the 20.9B is a floor that will be easily surpassed. To say nothing of the extra cost overruns associated with a first of its kind build.

How is this remotely a good idea?
by sillyfluke | 2025-05-08 17:09:34+00:00
Not sure what you mean for parliaments. Coalition governments are possible and sometimes almost the default in a lot of countries in recent history. If an opposition party in the coaltion withdraws its support, the government can collapse.

Strongmen in (initially) parlimentary systems did the same thing Trump is doing. Expand executive power, reduce the legislative branch to a rubberstamping function and stack the courts with yesmen.
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-08 17:09:49+00:00
Wow, I apologize, and very interesting! This is some sort of tech version of mansplaining, I guess, lesson learned!

I was certain on the PB github or something there was something saying not to use it with uBlock, and likewise on gorhills github, but maybe it was a mandella effect or something.

In any case, thanks for the clarification and humbling.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-08 17:09:55+00:00
I'm fine with types in shared libs, just not in the app layer code, where the cost outweighs the benefit. I think you can do the in-between you describe with Typescript, but every time I've been on a team that says "oh you can use `any`," one day they disallow it. Especially in a big corp where someone turns it into a metric and a promo target.
by 4star3star | 2025-05-08 17:10:21+00:00
It would make a lot more sense to boil the frog over a long period of time with steady, scheduled increases in tariffs instead of pouring scalding water on everyone's heads all at once. Even with plenty of capital and willpower and know how, it takes plenty of time for industry to be built out. Under ideal conditions, even, these tariffs are harmful (and we don't have ideal conditions).