MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mystraline | 2025-08-26 20:13:59+00:00
> The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.

Yes, I've read that inspiration in the Mein Kamph. Hitler cited the US's hatred, slavery, and Jim Crow for how Germany responded to the Jewish problem.

If you were a WASP - white anglo-saxon protestant, you were fine. Elsewise, yeah, not so much.
by deepakg | 2025-08-26 20:14:13+00:00
Aluminum in beer cans has been subject to aluminum tariffs since April (was 25% initially and was upped to 50%).[^1]

Because they didn't use the right specificity in the announcement (used an 8 digit HTS vs 10 digit), there was some confusion for a few weeks if Beer in glass bottles was subject to it as well.

There is now an FAQ on CBP's website clarifying it is not [^2]. And they've updated to the right specificity in the new lists.

> Is HTS 2203.00.0030, Beer made from malt, In containers each holding not over 4 liters, In glass containers; subject to Section 232 duties? > No.

But yes, effective 18 August, they broadened the list a whole lot more and added things from condensed milk to deodorant to both steel and aluminum lists. An absolute nightmare for FMCG supply chain to have to figure this out.

You can agree or disagree with the current administration's trade policy but hopefully, even the staunchest proponents will admit that the execution has been sub-par. With u-turns (sometimes leaving partner countries fuming because the final published tariffs were not what were negotiated[^3]), lack of clarity and changes that land on Friday night after work hours and go into effect on Monday midnight.

[^1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-05884.pdf

[^2]: https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

[^3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/japan-tariffs-us...
by crote | 2025-08-26 20:14:35+00:00
Self-certification generally doesn't mean simply saying "trust us, we won't lie to you". They still expect you to be able to hand over a bunch of laboratory reports proving that you have actually tested your stuff.

The main difference is that with self-certification they will accept reports from your own in-house laboratory, rather than demanding reports from an independent pre-vetted testing lab.

Same with paperwork: you can make your own rather than having it made by an independent auditor - but you better still be able to back it up!
by braaileb | 2025-08-26 20:14:37+00:00
I got stuck in that rabbit hole you mention. Ended up ditching AI and just picked up a no/low-code web app builder cause I don’t handle large project contexts in my own head well enough to chunk design into tasks that AI can handle. But the builder I use can separate the backend from the front end which allows for a custom front end template source code to be consumed by an ai agent if you want. I’m hoping I can manage this context better but I still have to design and deploy a module to consume user submitted photos and process with an ai model for instant quote generation
by jackero | 2025-08-26 20:14:44+00:00
I know web developers who just put together WordPress sites and that’s how it’s been for decades.

Words matter but you need a thousand of them. Someone could say they’re “into rock climbing” but that could mean they climb once a month or they’re obsessed and do it everyday. That’s why we go through interviews or have dates because everything has a certain hard-to-put-into-words nuance.

And that’s why I don’t really care how you use “web developer” as long as you get the general idea.
by lossolo | 2025-08-26 20:15:03+00:00
> Lack of capital is not a good explanation when Meta and Google were started on investments of < $100K.

It is. As you said, Meta and Google started with small investments, but now they are multi trillion dollar behemoths. Any company, even with millions of dollars in funding, can’t compete with them because they have tens of thousands of developers and infrastructure worth tens or even hundreds of billions of USD. They have penetrated the entire EU market and have enough money to burn, allowing them to survive any competition that isn’t state funded. The risk for private capital is huge, and the EU simply doesn’t have the same amount of capital that the US does.

The only alternative would have been the Chinese route, building local equivalents of Google, AWS, Amazon, Meta etc. like they did in China but it seems that ship has already sailed for the EU, given the current state of things.
by stale2002 | 2025-08-26 20:15:30+00:00
> pandering to the Republican-light voter base

Its not that you have to appeal to them. Feel free to have policy positions and to stand on those. You might even get some people on the other side to agree with you on policy.

Instead, the losing strategy is doing what the OP is apparently doing, which is preemptively dismissing half the population, wholesale. Defining yourself as nothing, exempt as a hating half of the country is neither a real policy position, nor does it gain much.

> Zohran Mamdani is doing so well

He is doing well because he is standing on values. Not because he spends his time saying that he hates half of America. I'm sure he would be happy to get republican voters who move over to his side and agree with his policy positions.
by brooke2k | 2025-08-26 20:15:37+00:00
The DSM isn't about understanding how the brain works, it's about correlating sets of symptoms to treatments. If your issues are characterized by this broad set of symptoms, then likely you'll benefit from these sorts of treatments, and etc. We don't have a good understanding of how the brain works, but we're pretty confident that people with schizophrenia often benefit from antipsychotic medications.
by simonbw | 2025-08-26 20:15:57+00:00
The article mentions "partially treated wastewater", which I take to mean "water that we're ok with dumping into the ocean, but not ok with drinking". I think you can generally read this as a way of gaining some utility out of this partially-treated wastewater before you dump it into the ocean by mixing it with the extra-salty brine from the desalinization plant. The utility you get is: - a bit of energy that would have just been wasted - a more environmentally friendly product to dump in the ocean than just straight brine

I imagine someone out there does a cost-benefit analysis to compare this system to just fully treating and reusing the wastewater and thus needing to desalinate less saltwater.
by neonrider | 2025-08-26 20:16:08+00:00
The hallmarks of ghost job posting are so obvious that detecting them could probably be automated now.

- Recurrent and yearlong ad for the same position, with numerous applicants (sometimes in the hundreds, if not thousands). This is probably the poster child of the ghost job ad.

- Unrealistic compensation for required skills, guaranteed to weed out the junior (skill issue) and the senior (comp issue). This could also signal that the company is looking to hire from offshore markets.

- Plain unrealistic skill requirements. Even companies that hire "full-stack" know that there's a practical limit, beyond which it's probably better to spread out responsibilities, if we want any kind of productivity gain. Being unreasonably greedy about skills might be a sign that the poster wants a cop out when candidates actually turn up. "Yeah, he was capable of writing his own OS kernel as we asked, but his CSS was shit".

If endeavors like the present proposal prove inept, there are enough tools to supplement posted job ads with metrics meant to easily signal to job seekers and investors something useful about the companies posting them, with a nice and accessible UI.

The other day there was an article about streaming services driving viewers back to piracy due to their shenanigans and the resulting subpar user experience. If LinkedIn and friends continue to pretend that it's technologically beyond them to solve ghost job posting on their own network, eventually it will be addressed somewhere else.
by shashankpritam | 2025-08-26 20:16:11+00:00
Thank you for saying that. When I posted that GP comment - it got immediately downvoted and I couldn't even see my comment on the thread. I kind of expected to get it tagged 'meta/off-topic' and removed.

The way I see it - corporations would like to exploit prejudices for revenue. Of course, this is not something new. But it is a societal issue and the corporate world is playing a large role in it.

For context this was the original link - https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/image/
by yndoendo | 2025-08-26 20:16:21+00:00
(RedHat[Office Max] -> Yellow Dog -> Gentoo -> Arch).

Moved from Gentoo to Arch because I was tired of compiling system updates. Was fun compiling when tweaking the kernel and compiler settings trying to maximize Doom 3 on Linux. Enemy Territory didn't need any tweaking.

I don't mind new or more distros. Helps learn new ways of doing things to make Linux more presentable to others. Tools still needs to be presentable to the masses.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-08-26 20:16:35+00:00
I'm not sure what to tell you, I can't envision myself having a productive conversation with someone who, with sound mind, supports the person responsible for the Mar a Lago documents, January 6, and the Epstein cover up.

> Division is a core technique of erasing liberty

Seems like embracing a self-coup is also a core technique of erasing liberty? Maybe both of these statements are so broad that they are meaningless.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-26 20:16:40+00:00
I don't think you get my point because I don't think of anything you are saying as having anything to do with what I was saying.

If you have a purely instrumentalist view of reality, where, as I said, your so-called knowledge is actually just a model of an unknown thing which you employ to predict the measurements you read out against a ruler or on a meter or something, then yes, we've made progress exactly of the kind you describe.

But I was trying to make a point about epistemology and ontology. Physics has actually been pretty catastrophic for ontology. I don't think its wrong to say that from the point of view of physics we simply do not know what anything actually is.

> I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.

Yes. But this is a fairly radical position historically and philosophically. Most people would say that there is more to existence than measurement and I while I share your instrumentalist sympathies, like most physicists, I don't see the philosophical case that we can have a consistent worldview if we denounce all knowledge not related to measurement as a total non-starter.

Think about what instrumentalism really means. When you utter the sentence the earth is an oblate spheroid, you are actually making an incredibly complicated set of statements about the outcomes of experiments. If we take the instrumentalist view the measurement doesn't actually tell us the earth is an oblate spheroid - it just tells us that if we make a series of measurements then they come out in such a way as to be concordant with a model of the earth as an oblate spheroid. Are you really prepared to give up the idea that the earth is a thing you can know about?

I actually rather think physics strongly encourages us to adopt the instrumentalist view, primarily because it seems so clear that physics has a local character. In GR there simply is no state of affairs whatever about what is happening "right now" except at the point in spacetime where you make a measurement. Really think about what that means. If we are standing at the north pole and make a measurement of some kind, how can it pertain to the earth as a distributed object in space when we know GR says there is no state of affairs pertaining to that object at the moment of the measurement?

GR tells us all about what the outcome of various measurements will be, but it also calls into question what precisely those measurements might mean. The instrumentalist is committed to the idea that the only thing we can talk about is the results of measurements. What the measurements operate on is just not something we can know. I think that's weird. Physicists often conflate their mathematical models with reality and that lets them think an instrumentalist view is sufficient: the measurements coming out such and such a way is taken as evidence that the universe is filled with objects consistent with the model. But that association is non-trivial in modern physics.
by ch4s3 | 2025-08-26 20:16:44+00:00
Advertising is very expensive and political candidates have to pay retail rates. As the old adage goes, half of it is wasted but you don't know which half. However with political ads, all of the money spent on the losing candidate is wasted in a certain sense.

As media has fragmented, you really have to spend a lot to get in front of enough high propensity voters, and even more to turn out low propensity voters unless you're organically good at getting invited on to podcasts.
by wingworks | 2025-08-26 20:17:15+00:00
Vuescan is terrible. SilverFast has better defaults. But nothing beats the orig Nikon scan software when using ICE. It does a great job of removing dust, fingerprints etc Even when you zoom in. VS what iSRD does in SilverFast, which if you zoom in and compare the 2. iSRD kinda smooches/blurs the infrared defects whereas Nikon Scan clones the surrounding parts, which usually looks very good when zooming in.

Both Silverfast and Nikon Scan methods look great when zoomed out. I never tried Vuescan's infrared option. I just felt the positive colors it produced looks wrong/"dead".
by danaris | 2025-08-26 20:17:28+00:00
Yes, far right parties are very often more popular in areas that have seen more economic hardship.

East Germany was economically crippled for the latter half of the 20th century under Soviet rule. It's started to recover, a bit, but it's slow going. That makes the people there more willing to listen to anyone who will lie to them about a) who's responsible, and b) how easy it is to solve their problems.
by sib | 2025-08-26 20:17:40+00:00
>> if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue.

Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a negative.
by Stephen_0xFF | 2025-08-26 20:17:40+00:00
China wants to be number one and they have a good chance of doing it. Every nation’s leaders and people want that. It affords luxury and influence. The US understandably doesn’t want to lose their spot. It also helps making this an issue to give it a sense of urgency so things can get done — be it policy or innovation. There’s some game theory in there — e.g Prisoners Dilemma. Treating them as the enemy won’t lead to the optimal result, but if the US doesn’t and they do, it will lead to the worst result for the US. History is not filled with nations singing Kumbaya. I wish it was.
by robotnikman | 2025-08-26 20:17:43+00:00
I can provide some insight into this. Most stores will have a server which handles the barcodes, pricing, etc, locally. Then all transactions are usually sent in a batch everyday from the store server to a central server/servers somewhere for processing, usually around that time reports are also generated and stats made available for BI analysis.

Payments processed by the payment terminals handle the authorization of the payments separately from any store servers, usually through a service such as Connected Payments.
by tycho-newman | 2025-08-26 20:17:48+00:00
QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability distribution/wave function.

I’ve never quite understood what a quantum theory of gravity would be though. QM involves the observer but gravity engages spacetime - the place where you are observing things. A quantum field theory of gravity seems like a contradiction in terms to me. Unless quantum gravity is really about the Big Bang?
by danny_codes | 2025-08-26 20:17:56+00:00
“What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

protectionists tariffs are an interesting gun with which to shoot one’s own foot off. Good for China though. They get to take over as the central trading entity, and they didn’t have to do anything! We shot our own foot off.

Both stable and genius
by solardev | 2025-08-26 20:18:26+00:00
I spent many years typing on the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard (which is slightly different, with laptop-style keys), but it completely eliminated my typing pain. I can now type comfortably at about 120-140 wpm for hours on end with no discomfort.

Once they discontinued it, InCase picked it back up: https://www.incase.com/collections/productivity-accessories/...

Along with maybe what looks like a replacement for your old one? https://www.incase.com/collections/productivity-accessories/...

There are also copycats (of the Sculpt). Two that I've tried and liked:

HP 960: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-960-ergonomic-wireless-...

Matias Sculpted Ergonomic Rechargeable Keyboard: https://matias.store/products/fk413d (small Canadian company, but they make an amazingly tiny USB-C dongle compatible with many of their products)

I ended up using the HP more than the others, preferring its keyfeel over the Matias. But both are well-built.

---------

If you don't want the mass-market stuff, there are also many companies making more hardcore ergo keyboards (two-part splits, vertical orientations, customizable keycaps, more natural/curved arrangements, etc.). But those typically cost multiple hundreds of dollars, rather than the $100-$120 or so for the off-the-shelf kind I listed above. And they just feel a bit too extreme for my tastes...
by delichon | 2025-08-26 20:19:01+00:00
Charity is one enticing opposite. Caritas embodies benevolence, antithetical to the ruthless shouts of traders on an exchange floor. But even charity is bound to redistribution. The path toward becoming a philanthropist often starts with setting unprecedented records of financial success, charging the most for an hour of time, winning the Market itself.

I keep running into this meme, that charity is somehow antithetical to capitalism, rather than another category of goods that capitalists buy, often as a luxury. With fewer successful capitalists there would be less spent on both charity and yachts, for the same status seeking reasons.

Economists have a term for the antonym of a market economy: a command economy.
by dang | 2025-08-26 20:19:23+00:00
Recent and related. Others?

Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45016517 - Aug 2025 (351 comments)

Australia Post halts transit shipping to US as 'chaotic' tariff deadline looms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970269 - Aug 2025 (173 comments)
by Lalabadie | 2025-08-26 20:19:41+00:00
Eliminate all viruses: Population issues in other organisms down to bacteria is my guess. We break a link in a significant food chain, basically.

Eliminate human-tropic viruses: We have to monitor for outbreaks when new viruses mutate and jump species to successfully infect humans. If there's zero mass immunity across the population at every outbreak, we're still in a high-risk situation.
by sapphicsnail | 2025-08-26 20:19:42+00:00
I think it depends on what kind of Republican someone is. I was raised in a conservative Christian community and later came out as a transgender woman. I've been surprised at how many people have been supportive of me since they got over the initial shock. I think knowing someone who's personally affected by this administration has an effect on people's opinions. There are plenty of people who are reactionary assholes that aren't worth talking to but there are people who still have an open heart. It's tiring, and I couldn't do it if I didn't have a supportive community to retreat to, but I have been able to sway some people. I don't judge anyone that doesn't want to put in the effort though.
by kens | 2025-08-26 20:20:23+00:00
Your comment reminds me of a couple things. On the topic of RAM, I was recently researching the vintage IBM 650 computer (1953). You could get it with Random Access Memory (RAM), but this RAM was actually a hard disk. I guess IBM considered the disk to be more random access than the rotating drum that provided the 650's main storage. One strange thing is that the disk had three independent read/write arms. Unlike modern disks, the arm could only access one platter at a time and had to physically retract to move to a different platter. Having three independent arms let you overlap reads and seeks.

As far as "fuzzy logic", there's a whole lot of history behind how that ended up in your rice cooker. In the 1990s, fuzzy logic was a big academic research area that was supposed to revolutionize control systems. The basic idea was to extend Boolean logic to support in-between values, and there was a lot of mathematics behind this, with books, journals, conferences, and everything. Fuzzy logic didn't live up to the hype, and mostly disappeared. But fuzzy logic did end up being used in rice cookers, adjusting the temperature based on how cooked the rice was, instead of just being on or off.

[1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/650/22-6270-1_RAM.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
by defen | 2025-08-26 20:20:34+00:00
I've done consulting work for a company with an open job req (it's been open for over 6 months) for a senior embedded engineer in a high cost of living area, offering 140k and no equity. In the meantime they've been paying me $240/hour to do the same work that person would do. It truly makes no sense to me, why they wouldn't just raise their offer to 200k or whatever. But it does happen.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-26 20:20:45+00:00
Tbf, there haven't even been a single concept that would conceivably enable any kind of meaningful security to LLMs. So as of today, it really is an unmovable limiting factor.

There have been attempts to reduce the attack vector via tool use permissions and similar, and while that might've made it marginally more secure, that was only in the context of non-hostile injections. Because you're gonna let the LLM use some tools, and a smart person could likely figure out a way to use that to extract data
Show HN: DumbDetector.ai – Report a model acting dumb
by pupppet | 2025-08-26 20:20:47+00:00
Have you ever worked with a specific AI model and wondered why it's suddenly responding with much dumber answers?

These AI providers are continuously turning their little knobs and dials in an attempt to save themselves a few bucks and sometimes they go too far. When they do, I would like there to be a place where everyone can report these issues so these AI providers know we're watching them.

https://dumbdetector.ai/
by andai | 2025-08-26 20:21:02+00:00
I tried bedrock cause I heard it was written in C++, but it somehow ended up running worse than the Java version. Weird lag spikes and constant glitches. (Also the UI is written in JavaScript?)

Then when I ran a Windows 10 debloater, it deleted Bedrock because it was a PWA, and it turns out Bedrock stores the world files inside the application folder, so the world got deleted too.

So yeah I switched back to regular Minecraft.
by TeeMassive | 2025-08-26 20:21:12+00:00
This reminds me of Microsoft's Project Palladium, 20 years ago. This was the ancestor of TPMs and trusted computing in general embedded in the CPU.

It used to be a huge scandal because people (rightly) feared that it would enable Microsoft to have a say on what can be executed or not, or only allow DRM protected content to play.