MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acdha | 2025-05-29 01:25:53+00:00
> I mean sure -- but right now there's no such thing as "realistic money anonymity for the average person."

I know HN skews hard for electronic payments but cash is still heavily used. One nice trait is that its weaknesses are highly intuitive: there’s no retroactive de-anonymization or tracking across unrelated transactions, and people are familiar with how physical objects are stolen.
by try_the_bass | 2025-05-29 01:27:05+00:00
Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.

I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.

Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.

I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-29 01:27:22+00:00
I had occasion to study the Whiskey Rebellion a few years ago, and I discovered the flipside of alcohol distribution.

Farmers love distilling grain alcohol. Because it can take their crops and make the product easy to transport. If you're trying to ship lots of corn, barley, rye, or potatoes, etc., overland, you're looking at a large volume and mass. It is cumbersome to load and unload. It spoils easily, and pests can make lots of problems in storage.

So [historically,] if you're a farmer in Kentucky or Western Pennsylvania and you grow plenty grain to feed your townspeople and livestock, and there's anything left over, it's only logical to distill it and ship it out to an urban market.

But on the market side, it's feeding into vices, so what's an honest farmer to do? Contract for torpedo juice?
by maxgashkov | 2025-05-29 01:29:18+00:00
It solves an issue of Japanese addressing system being a total mess. There is basically a wild wild west when it comes to the address part on most of the ecommerce sites in Japan: some offer address auto-complete via zip code, some don't; some require a building name, some don't; and the address itself may be written down in different ways. Having a source of truth in a form of a provider which has vested interest in keeping the address uniformly correct on entry is god sent here.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-05-29 01:29:34+00:00
Aside, as a SQL data analyst working with undocumented or poorly documented dbs and business processes .. notes are a lifesaver. Important / obscure details are easily forgotten. I used to use paper but confess to now using OneNote (hate it and hate MS, but it works).

The other place where typed up notes are extremely useful is with business users and meetings that go back and forth ending in confusion. A shared screen with minimal notes that the requester sees (and agrees) works wonders in bringing focus.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-29 01:29:49+00:00
Well, our entire body works as a swamp cooler via sweat evaporation, yes. The issue with us is wet bulb temps and dehydration. It can already brain damage us pretty quickly and makes some parts of the world already dangerous to exist in outside.

Adding to this cooling load would require further changes such as large ears or skin flaps to provide more surface area unless you're going with the straight technological integration path.
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-29 01:30:51+00:00
We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.

This is the key point in the article. Normalcy bias is a killer.
by aaronharnly | 2025-05-29 01:31:36+00:00
I’m also none of those things, but that section of Smoot-Hawley appears to apply when a foreign country imposes such burdens on the United States * which is not equally enforced upon the like articles of every foreign country.” So not just that it treats the US differently than itself, but that it treats the US differently than any other country.
by maxgashkov | 2025-05-29 01:33:16+00:00
Japan Post represents only a portion of shipping providers in Japan, for our idea to work others will need the same privileged access to the system: Yamato, Sagawa etc.

This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.
by lolinder | 2025-05-29 01:33:19+00:00
"Aforesaid" is a very specific word that means that the "unequal impositions or discriminations" refers back to specific concepts previously referenced in the law. He can't (legally) just invent his own interpretations for what "unequal impositions" and "discriminations" entails, he has to convince a court that the specific actions he's retaliating against are covered by the "aforesaid" definitions.

Here's the complete text [0]. The act authorizes imposition of tariffs on any country that:

> Imposes, directly or indirectly, upon the disposition in or transportation in transit through or reexportation from such country of any article wholly or in part the growth or product of the United States any unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation which is not equally enforced upon the like articles of every foreign country; or

> Discriminates in fact against the commerce of the United States, directly or indirectly, by law or administrative regulation or practice, by or in respect to any customs, tonnage, or port duty, fee, charge, exaction, classification, regulation, condition, restriction, or prohibition, in such manner as to place the commerce of the United States at a disadvantage compared with the commerce of any foreign country.

This is pretty specific. The tariffs/customs/dues/whatever don't even have to be unfair relative to what the US charges on that country's imports into the US, it's specifically targeting cases where a foreign country discriminates against US trade over and beyond the dues it charges on other countries' trade.

It'd be very difficult to prove that discriminatory treatment for each and every one of the 180+ countries caught up in Trump's tariffs.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1338
by ninkendo | 2025-05-29 01:34:14+00:00
Kinda related, I’ve had a hunch for a while that we’re going to eventually learn that “the singularity” (AI’s improving themselves ad infinitum) is impossible for similar reasons the halting problem is impossible. I can’t really articulate why though. It just seems similarly naive to think “if the AI becomes smarter than us, surely it can thus make a better AI than we could” as it is to think “if a computer can compute anything, surely it can compute whether this program is will halt.”

My bet is there is some level of “incompleteness” to what an intelligence (ours or a machine’s) can do, and we can’t just assume that making one means it can become a singularity. More likely we’re just going to max out around human levels of intelligence, and we may never find a higher level than that.
by thowaway7564902 | 2025-05-29 01:35:21+00:00
Here's the official source

> Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
by hxtk | 2025-05-29 01:36:44+00:00
> I use to just lose my notes.

I used to do this very intentionally. In the past, I've found that taking notes is very valuable for me, but having notes seldom is.

When I was in school, I would write all my notes on a dry erase board and simply erase it when I had filled up the page. That was when I was studying things that were already known, though, so it was viable to, for reference material, just become skilled at referencing pre-existing reference material.

Now that I'm a professional and often working on something new or combining things in a new way, it's more often useful to me to generate new reference content for myself and especially for a different person who picks up the task on my day off.
by try_the_bass | 2025-05-29 01:37:07+00:00
At the end of the day, most people are employed in part because they want to (or need to) make money.

Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.

This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-29 01:37:22+00:00
Been putting together a "mining rig" [1] (or rather I was before the tariffs, ha ha.) Going to try to add a 2nd GPU soon. (And I should try these quantized versions.)

Mobo was some kind of mining rig from AliExpress for less than $100. GPU is an inexpensive NVIDIA TESLA card that I 3D printed a shroud for (added fans). Power supply a cheap 2000 Watt Dell server PS off eBay....

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3lmg4kiz4...
by acdha | 2025-05-29 01:37:22+00:00
They’ve already mentioned that in the EOs - it’s what Trump’s first administration used - but it’s more limited and slower than he wants. That requires them to follow a process where they identify a trade barrier and first attempt to negotiate it, and it’s limited to trade barriers. That’s a lot of work to use to demand concessions individually from each country world – these are not people who like to do their homework – and it doesn’t cover non-trade pretexts like fentanyl or failing to confiscate some Vietnamese farmers’ land so his family can build a golf course and resort. Once they concede that it has to follow the usual legal process, they’re going to have to give up the most appealing ways to monetize his office.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-29 01:37:52+00:00
>It seems like an “easier” planet would require less intelligence and a “harder” planet would require more.

I'm not sure that would be the case if the Red Queen hypothesis is true. To bring up gaming nomenclature you're talking about player versus environment (PVE). In an environment that is easy you would expect everything to turn to biomass rather quickly, if there was some amount of different lifeforms so you didn't immediately end up with a monoculture the game would change from PVE to PVP. You don't have to worry about the environment, you have to worry about every other lifeform there. We see this a lot on Earth. Spines, poison, venom, camouflage, teeth, claws, they for both attack and protection in the other players of the life game.

In my eyes it would require far more intelligence on the easy planet in this case.
by tpmoney | 2025-05-29 01:37:53+00:00
It doesn't take much for that to become "TIL Waffle House's owners are so greedy they force their employees to work even during a natural disaster when other businesses are closed". No it's pretty obvious why Waffle House would want to stay far away from this sort of publicity and have very tight control on anything said about it, especially if that publicity looks like it comes from them or is in any way endorsed by them.
by wlesieutre | 2025-05-29 01:40:22+00:00
Why does the law list specific conditions in which the president can apply the law if the president can apply it for any reason he wants?

Surely there's a mechanism through the courts for someone to challenge illegal tariffs on their imports if the president declares "There's a 50% tariff on everything because I woke up in a bad mood today and it's unfair of other countries to be doing that."
by quotemstr | 2025-05-29 01:40:57+00:00
It's both. It is a trace viewer, but they instrument native code to emit logs of its operation, e.g. calls and returns, similar to what the recent non-performance-counter rr branch does. Except for some reason it's coupled to a specific GUI and a specific language instead of being a general purpose tool like RR is.

The tech industry is getting stupider and hype-ier as it implodes.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-29 01:42:03+00:00
Nice. The mathematical connection to some of these is pretty thin.

I'd add:

Jeffrey Kegler, The God Proof (novel about a lost manuscript of Kurt Gödel)

Norbert Wiener, The Tempter (novel about a patent troll math professor)

Martin Gardner, The Magic Numbers of Dr Matrix (other Martin Gardner books are there)

George Gamow, Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (didactic about special relativity, there is other physics stuff on the list so why not)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle -- I haven't read this but I think it had a mathematician character

P. J. Plauger, Wet Blanket -- part of "Fighting Madness" series, about a physicst making universe-changing discoveries. The author is also a noted software developer who co-wrote at least two books with Brian Kernighan.

Maybe a bit out there, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, not mathematical per se but has mathematical asides, and is informed by statistics and game theory.

Others I'm not remembering, I'm sure.
by duxup | 2025-05-29 01:43:38+00:00
Obamacare still has stood the test of time. Even in the face of the first Trump administration and both houses of congress being run by the GOP.

Despite promises to "repeal Obamacare" they never did repeal it... or even change it much at all. It was just too popular / the consequences too much to consider.

The joke at the time being that the Republicans would repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Affordable Care Act ;)
by laborcontract | 2025-05-29 01:43:44+00:00
I don't think so. It could possibly hint at a reduction in cadence for releases. There has been an open line of reporting about Apple that yearly releases were important to Apple but that the yearly release schedule also made it hard for them to divert engineering resources into more experimental projects like LLM-related development.

Linking version numbers to years could be seen in effect to make each one seem less monumentally important.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-29 01:45:33+00:00
Another AP copy[0], with the typo, it's called ASKAP J1832-0911 (not 091) the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16606

Better story source: https://chandra.si.edu/press/25_releases/press_052825.html

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121337
by tomschlick | 2025-05-29 01:45:56+00:00
Then change it through amendments.

However you likely wont be able to because not enough people agree with you to do so. Our constitution was made to be specifically hard to change unless a vast majority agreed. That's a feature, not a bug. If a change can't be agreed upon at the national level it should stay at the state / local level.

> It should, however, cause people who voted for this (hypothetically dead or disabled or otherwise incapacitated) politician to see themselves as the piles of shit they are.

Case in point, it protects us from reactionary changes based on vitriol like this instead of substance.
by growlNark | 2025-05-29 01:46:22+00:00
Well, sure. a trade court is a symptom of trade. You don't have a trade court without trade, just like you wouldn't have a family court without family or a traffic court without traffic.

But the entire premise of the private market is competition, or else it's just a blight on humanity. So the idea of a trade court seems a little silly at best, or actively enabling the worst hypothetical behavior of capitalism at the worst. If the court were really that necessary, the fundamental tenets of the alleged benefits of capitalism seem in question, and we should probably renegotiate at all costs with those who own the means of production.
by curt15 | 2025-05-29 01:46:45+00:00
>Our constitution is something to feel shame for—this obviously no longer represents us or our values in any way. Why would we look to 18th century aristocrats that share basically no values with us to see ourselves? We have real rights we care about—shelter, healthcare, education, and food.

There's an Amendment process for updating the Constitution. It's been used many times, most recently in 1992.
by kapitar | 2025-05-29 01:49:21+00:00
This is why (apart from being Irish) I drink a fair bit of tea throughout the day.

Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.

Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.

Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.
by sophyphreak | 2025-05-29 01:49:44+00:00
So, I'm living in a Buddhist Monastery. This article basically details why.

In Buddhism, we talk sometimes talk about how apathy is the "near enemy" of equanimity. That is, equanimity is good and apathy is bad, but sometimes apathy looks like equanimity.

I was a software engineer for several years, and what was hardest for me was this exact "who cares" attitude. I wanted to do good work, but that was not the culture.

Now I seek the extinguishment of suffering. No one here says "who cares" here about this work. It's deeply refreshing. I feel very lucky to be here.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-29 01:50:22+00:00
I mean this is a huge potential issue with high intelligence AI systems (HIAI maybe we'll call it one day). We already see AI develop biases and go into odd spiritual states when talking with other AI. They inherit the behaviors in human data.

I've seen people say "oh this will just go away when they get smart enough", but I have to say I'm a doubter.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-29 01:50:26+00:00
It's a small improvement since the previous big post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43685122 (17 points | 44 days ago | 14 comments) Is there any interesting takeaway from the improvement?

I agree with some of the comments in the previous post and it would be nice to compare to easy methods, like just the one with more wins (in the last 5 years?)

Also, a few repost are fine, but with too many repost people will get angry and flag your post and write angry emails to dang/tomhow and they will ban youe user and your site.
by buffer1337 | 2025-05-29 01:51:24+00:00
I am looking for collaborators on exploring whether geometric principles might provide a foundation for understanding how aspects of the Standard Model could emerge from simpler underlying structures. This is obviously an incredibly challenging area that many brilliant physicists have worked on, so approaching it as a learning exercise - happy to share details if anyone's interested in diving into theoretical physics rabbit holes. bufferoverflow (at) gmail.com
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-29 01:51:49+00:00
Congressional Research Service: The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA): A Legal Overview - https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45732.pdf - April 17th, 2023

Wikipedia: Sovereign immunity in the United States - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
by craigmccaskill | 2025-05-29 01:53:49+00:00
That’s not really fair. I mean, I definitely use AI all over the place, but I think that the writing aspect is an important part of thinking too [1]. I still try to write things out myself when it matters. There’s something about wordsmithing that sharpens your thinking and that gets lost when you just drop something into an LLM and pull it out without much thought. Sure, I’ll use AI to help refine or explore ideas, but the core work often starts in my own head.

I do write a lot myself, especially when I need to think something through clearly. I use AI tools like anyone else, but I still do the work.

[1] https://craigmccaskill.com/writing-is-still-thinking
by jarbaugh | 2025-05-29 01:54:11+00:00
I'm skeptical of this. The cost of maintaining the "disaggregated data stack" can be immense at scale. A database that can handle replication from a row-based transactional store to, for example, a columnar one that can support aggregations could really reduce the load on engineering teams.

My work involves a "disaggregated data stack" and a ton of work goes into orchestrating all the streaming, handling drift, etc between the transactional stores (hbase) and the various indexes like ES. For low-latency OLAP queries, the data lakes can't always meet the need either. I haven't gotten the chance to see an HTAP database in action at scale, but it sounds very promising.
Lost in AI-translation
by anonimildo | 2025-05-29 01:55:12+00:00
With AI-translation becoming widespread, some apps are choosing to translate everything to the language they think the user prefers.

This may seem a good idea, but when you don't consider that people can understand multiple languages, it sucks very bad.

I have lost count on how many times YouTube title translations were plain wrong due to slangs or missing context. AI-translated audio tracks are a nightmare if you understand the original language and are used to the creator's voice.

If you are developing a multi-language app, please:

- Let users completely disable translations;

- Let users specify which languages it never wants to be translated;

- Make it clear which content was translated, and from which language;

- For audio tracks, I'd go as far as not playing the translation unless the user chooses it for each video.

Every effort to make content more available is great, just remember to give the user some options.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-05-29 01:55:29+00:00
I think the problem is that so many AI prognosticators talk about the impact of AI, without really talking about the impact of AI.

It’s easy to say “job xyz will be disrupted by AI”. Too few go the next level and say “that means that there will be almost no entry level positions for xyz, which means your kids, who are in school now, will face a very uncertain future. Here’s how you might prepare them for that future.”

Breathless pronouncements, not enough empathy, and not enough reckoning with the potential consequences. I’m not at all surprised people are turned off.