MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by utbabya | 2026-01-20 03:42:05+00:00
We're mostly agreeing except I'm optimistic about current generation of tools being closer to assembly > C than C > VB.

There are good signs AI would eliminate whole classes of costly human errors, whether the new classes of machine only problems would cost more as models iterate is remain to be seen, which I think would be lower. I'm not super optimistic about the social economical future coming from this but from a pure tech standpoint I'm optimistic about building cost.

Edit: also to address reliability, I think a lot of things are net positive to this world without five 9s, heck even two 9s.

Edit 2: s/building cost/tco
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-20 03:43:00+00:00
>It does lend itself better to "tokenization" of a sort - if you want to construct operations from lots of smaller operations [...]

That's an educated assumption to make. But therein lies the issue with every LLM "optimized" language, including those recent ones posted here oriented toward minimizing tokens. Assumptions, that are unvalidatable and unfalsifiable, about the kind of output LLMs synthesize/emit when that output is code (or any output to be real).
by yoshuaw | 2026-01-20 03:44:53+00:00
If we're talking sanitation tech: I'm personally really excited by the further miniaturization of (far)-UVC light sources [1]. Far-UVC lamps deactivate airborne pathogens, but cannot penetrate the human eyes or skin making them generally safe to use.

Right now they do require rather bulky lamps (Krypton Chloride), but last I checked there had been promising advancements in producing far-UVC LEDs [2]. Which should make installation and deployment of far-UVC both more practical and economical in the future.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-UVC

[2]: https://ece.engin.umich.edu/stories/ece-spinout-company-ns-n...
by pixl97 | 2026-01-20 03:44:59+00:00
In the US for example, most of the US brands are already made in China. They will copy the tooling and put a different brand name on it and you'll have a tool of the same quality for way less cost.

Simply put China is an unrecognized superpower at this point with the investments they've already made. The amount of infrastructure they've built in a decade dwarfs what the West has done in decades.
by dudeinjapan | 2026-01-20 03:45:35+00:00
I run a successful SaaS biz in Japan. Its possible, but its waaay hard. The article is right in principle. Unless you are 110% all in on localizing and hiring lots of local staff, to the extent that you will give up priorities in other markets, its not worth trying. Otherwise a local player will eat your lunch.

A consultant like Nihonium or whatever wont be able to help you really. Like any good consultant, they will be there to tell you things you already know. The motivation to do it needs to come fundamentally from your own company.

And even after doing all that, VCs will still undervalue your company vs a similarly sized US company.
by walterbell | 2026-01-20 03:45:42+00:00
> hostile to LLCs

This editorial on Delaware corporations? https://a16z.com/were-leaving-delaware-and-we-think-you-shou...

Another view, https://handbooks.clerky.com/startup-incorporation/where

Delaware is widely regarded as having strong protections against personal liability for corporations. Some advisors say Nevada has better protection against personal liability. This is arguably true, but the differences are very unlikely to be relevant to founders trying to build a legitimate business. Some people have also observed that Nevada has an adverse selection problem in that their unusually strong protections attract bad actors. As a result, it's possible that if you incorporate in Nevada, you'll be inviting closer scrutiny.
by hnburnsy | 2026-01-20 03:46:19+00:00
> You really don't need ANY study to know the obvious thing that tariffs are taxes on imports. It is being paid by Americans from DAY 1. The only difference being American Companies were taking the brunt of it all and it is now obvious that they cannot keep swallowing it and will eventually pass it on to the American consumers.

I say they exact same thing to my liberal friends who endorse corporate tax increases, but they don't think it is obvious that companies will eventually pass it on to the American consumers.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-20 03:47:23+00:00
> OK can you share more?

No, I don't really care to. I feel like the two confounding factors I've given are sufficient to cast doubt in your attempted causal inference.

I'm also not interested in continuing with you since you don't actually seem interested in the truth, with things like "figuring out which side I'm on" and the absurd non-sequitur:

> but I'm assuming you are against the US intervention in Venezuela for the purposes of securing such resources for American interest.

like what the hell are you talking about.
by atmavatar | 2026-01-20 03:49:47+00:00
> The US constitution is working great. Democracy isn't necessarily good. If we had a national vote where 51% of the people voted to kill 49% of the people, that would be bad.

"Democracy is bad because majorities can vote for bad things" is hardly a meaningful argument on its own. How is the current system of minority rule via electors better? If we had an electoral vote where 22% of the people voted to kill 78% of the people[1], would that be better?

1. The current apportionment of electors is such that you can achieve 270 electoral votes with states accounting for roughly 43% of the population. Since nearly all states grant all electors to the candidate winning the popular vote within themselves, you only need roughly 22% of the overall US population to elect a president.
by listenallyall | 2026-01-20 03:50:01+00:00
a) my initial comment was a response to someone who called the essay "brutal." Indeed, there are some tender passages, but it feels like on balance, Alexander was more interested in getting his attacks in than the nicer stuff. In my opinion.

b) yes he tries to make an excuse for "curing his misgivings" and ignoring his initial doubt but it's an awful one. Can you succinctly describe what it is about the quoted paragraphs that would indicate "after his death is the best time to disagree"?
by avidiax | 2026-01-20 03:50:08+00:00
I haven't bought German ever, but everything I hear seems pretty negative.

Some of the recent models have plastic timing chain guides and have turned the engine around so that the timing chains are in the back. The only innocent explanation is that the car is only meant to last 10 years at most, so saving the money on plastic instead of metal and screwing whoever owns the car when the timing chains need to be redone (or ruining the engine when the chain fails) is out of scope for their quality team.

There were many older models of BMW that had an electric water pump. If that sounds silly, well, it is. And it failed frequently and was again, very difficult to replace.

I just don't have any respect for German automotive engineering. Reliability is job #1. And the company's themselves, well, "collusive" is a pretty good term. I saw an estimate that German auto industry collusion resulted in about $10k of additional cost per vehicle to U.S. buyers. The cases have somehow been kept quiet, but they've at least been caught holding back innovations until the other automakers have a competitive response, and gaslighting regulators into allowing higher emissions from diesels in the name of reducing the size and filling frequency of the AdBlue tank. I've also heard that there's another layer of this in the parts suppliers. Explains how a wiper motor or wiper body module is somehow hundreds of dollars.
by jcims | 2026-01-20 03:50:34+00:00
I grew up by the assembly plants in Ohio and worked there on various temp jobs in the late 80s/early 90s. There was (maybe still is) a lot of local pride in the product that comes out of those plants, the amount of energy that was put into quality control was boggling to my young mind. This included the motorcycle plant, where I had a few jobs correcting supplier parts that were just a smidge out of spec before bolting them on to the ATVs they were cranking out at the time.

Made me realize quality is a process that requires investment and commitment, and not some magic quality imbued upon the product by the locale in which it's made.
by triceratops | 2026-01-20 03:50:40+00:00
> BEVs require you to add a plug to your garage to get a rapid refuel

You hardly ever need a rapid refuel in your garage though. That's where your car spends most of its hours.

And most of the world has 220/240v mains supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country. Regular wall outlets can charge a car fast enough.
by rtpg | 2026-01-20 03:50:48+00:00
I think a big difference between Japan and many smaller markets is you are going to have local competitors in almost every sector that have some sort of buy in.

Even if you win on a feature matrix in theory (and is your feature matrix actually tailored to a local market!), the general sort of "well, local companies will be more responsive to our needs" is going to be very present.

Obviously people use Microsoft products for example but Microsoft has a _huge_ presence in Japan to support that. I have been on the receiving end of SaaS's trying to roll out their Japan sales strategy, and all the ones that got a nice and strong footing basically hired loads of local sales talent to do it.

Obviously Europe has a lot of fragmented business process things, but I think that many smaller European companies will be pretty habituated to buying services from outside the country because... well, there's no Salesforce Dot Com alternative based in Italy for example

(There are several SFDC alternatives in Japan)

Anyways the short thing is "buying services from abroad" is a perceived risk for Japanese enterprises because they will often not have to confront that issue, because the local market is "healthy"[0].

[0]: People will whine about the Japanese options being worse, but the options are at least there.
by sublinear | 2026-01-20 03:52:29+00:00
My experience with marketing pages is that they usually have a ton of inconsistent design requirements and change frequently.

Most "frameworks" are the wrong tool because they assume that the markup and design (HTML/CSS) won't change as much as the functionality (JS) when it's exactly the opposite situation.

All the consistency needs to be concentrated in the JS without the baggage of any particular HTML/CSS in mind.

The only aspects of a framework you should want are a flexible way to register event listeners onto the elements, and organizing the styles and callbacks.

In practice, this ends up looking like a static HTML file that is not up to the developers how to organize apart from the usage of CSS classes because it will be audited by many non-devs, a Sass build derived from design guidelines with some alt classes to contain the mess when people change their minds, and some very robust JS that you're gonna have to write almost entirely from scratch.

I still don't get why this scares some people off though. You won't ever need to (re)write that much JS. Every new page design is just remapping existing functionality to the new HTML IDs, and maybe every now and then adding new functionality. Most of your time will be spent in CSS which just plain makes sense!
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-20 03:52:57+00:00
It's challenging to decide where to draw the line. Is it OK that wikipedia begs for donations? Sites that use affiliate links can be full of crap too, although technically ad free.

I think its worth exploring.

BTW, HN has ads. They post job openings at their start ups, these appear like posts but you can't vote on them. Launch HN is another way this site is monetized, although that seems quite reasonable and you can vote/flag those posts like any other.
by tw1212893178 | 2026-01-20 03:54:05+00:00
That generation is the worst across Europe. They sold out entire industries, bought up all the land, let in millions of immigrants. Then they demanded to be kept alive during COVID, leading to massive overspending and health care premiums rising.

In return, they raised rents and health care premiums are still rising. And they are the last generation with massive egos (early boomer and before).
by adventured | 2026-01-20 03:54:11+00:00
The US didn't privatize everything: it was largely private to begin with. The US had a near laissez-faire economy until the WW1-WW2 era. The 1850 to 1910 era is incredibly devoid of government regulations on the economy, which was of course undergoing a gigantic industrial expansion. European states were not formed in any manner similar to the US. The modern European nation was largely constructed in the post WW1 and post WW2 environment, they were heavily remade by the wars and what came after, including their social welfare structures and their various private/public ownership models. If you go back and look at the governing structures of most any of the European powers prior to WW2, they were nearly all: kingdoms or fascist. The US is floating on centuries of continually accumulating cruft, whereas most of the European nations have had hard break points where they reset the board and started fresh.
by listenallyall | 2026-01-20 03:54:47+00:00
As a reader, can you summarize what Alexander is referencing in the two quoted paragraphs that overcomes his initial doubt and decides "after his death is the best time to disagree"?

The only thing I can possibly see is Adams writing "the reader is supposed to be looking for flaws" but it's also clear that Adams is very interested in hearing people's reactions and responses to his work.
by lovich | 2026-01-20 03:55:25+00:00
No there isn’t a reason to do that, but I want to call out that you asked about “critical” industries and this is a thread about tariffs which the admin put on all products, including inputs to industries.

Don’t compare apples to tennis balls.

And in regards to the trade deficit, everytime I look at it the numbers it only includes physical products and not services. We’re a heavily service based economy since producing a Facebook is several steps down the tech tree from producing screws.

So again I will ask why a trade deficit on products is bad. We’re just buying shit from less complex economies or ones where the comparative advantage of trade works out. We’re not getting ripped off.
by melenaboija | 2026-01-20 03:55:38+00:00
> Then I think you see an early indication not just of electric car dominance, but of the (very potential) rise of China as the premier automotive super power.

It’s done man. Americans are stuck in ICE engines because they’ve been told they’re “car enthusiasts” while the Chinese have been developing EV technology for years. Meanwhile, European makers are stuck not knowing what to do, make Americans happy or compete with the Chinese. The result: nothing has been done properly. And let’s be real, “car enthusiasts” are going to disappear in one or two generations. Practicality beats enthusiasm for 95% of car use.
by compounding_it | 2026-01-20 03:55:46+00:00
We are in the transition phase from ICE to an Electric motor. It's too early to call who can nail it. Currently the Chinese cars are cheap and have long range. But in India Tatas and Mahindra makes cheap EVs that may not be as reliable but people are still buying them a lot. In US gas is still cheap compared to income, so hybrids like Camry are always going to be preferred over a low end EV like the model 3.

It all depends on service network and value for money. And now charging network and range. People who find a way to give you value for money will probably nail it.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 03:56:21+00:00
Again, please read the news. The US already bombed a sovereign country and kidnapped its leader this year. And "this year" isn't even 20 days old yet.

I don't know how you can dismiss this as drama when we actively have another country's leader detained. I really hope this is just drama, but this isn't something to just dismiss at this point.

>but these days they've been conditioned to drink from the liberal Koolaid.

Tell us how you really feel about Trump, please. I genuinely want to know your mindset here.
by dietr1ch | 2026-01-20 03:57:03+00:00
My main goal with buying an EV is to give the middle finger to the oil industry as they have meddled with the world too much.

They screwed public transit and entire nations just for profits. I love my Subbie and I'll keep that until it breaks apart and replace it with an EV. Maybe today there's many downsides to an EV, but I hope it evens up and maybe becomes even better to get one.
by jeremyjh | 2026-01-20 03:57:37+00:00
Yes let's talk about all the billionaire CEOs that get sent to prison.

Anyway, the entire structure and premise of this business is that they cannot do that. A court cannot put a CEO in jail just because partner businesses do not follow his orders. Do you think it is maybe remotely possible, that Amazons lawyers and architects understand this a little bit better than you do?

I'm thinking they checked it out, they checked it out a couple of times.

There are some details in this comment from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641592
by mark-r | 2026-01-20 03:57:40+00:00
I didn't need it that same day - if I had, I would have driven 5 miles to the nearest retailer that carried it and Amazon wouldn't have even been considered.

I was seriously impressed that they made that promise, thought I had nothing to lose. And I re-learned a lesson, if something's too good to be true then it probably isn't. I certainly won't be putting any faith in same-day service in the future. They proved their "superior delivery service" is just an illusion.
by bluGill | 2026-01-20 03:57:51+00:00
You need to pay better attention. I hate what Trump is doing to US foriegn policy - but it is still better than China, and there is hope that things will change in the future as elections continue. China doesn't even have that hope.

China is clearly supporting Russia in Ukraine. China is clearly making plans to invade Tiawas (that alone makes them just as bad as the US, even if it hasn't happened yet).
by powersjcb | 2026-01-20 03:57:55+00:00
I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.

Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.

It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.

I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.
by charles_f | 2026-01-20 03:58:06+00:00
> They can't even build their own infotainment systems anymore. [...] I can't overstate how catastrophically stupid this is

Car manufacturers have for a very long time acted mostly as integrators and outsourced a vast amount of components, from braking systems to windows, lights, gearboxes alternators starters and other engine parts, electronic harnesses, suspension systems, seats, buttons and others. Lots of conglomerates nowadays even use common frames and engines ("platforms") across brands, developing engines is so expensive that they're sometimes shared across brands that aren't even part of the same groups. Infotainment and electronics are practically never built in-house, but instead purchased from Bosch, Samsung and the likes.

This makes sense, this isn't their specialty, the core market of vehicle buyers buy it for the car, not the infotainment system. Especially when talking about German cars, what they specialize into is the actual power train and quality of assembly. Not the radio.
by briHass | 2026-01-20 03:58:37+00:00
If you want a laugh, ask the LLM to draw the schematic of a basic circuit (like towards the end of a Forrest Mims III book.)

I've been 50/50 with vibe circuits recently. Gemini 2.5 gave me some really wrong designs of an advanced crowbar circuit I was playing with, but recently 3.0 Fast gave me excellent advice on an adjustable load with a hodgepodge of parts.
by rockwotj | 2026-01-20 03:58:40+00:00
With the new GC I really love the trend of understanding memory bandwidth is the bottleneck for many things and the combination of locality and SIMD is a big performance unlock.

Reminds me of the WAND vs MAXSCORE discussion by turbopuffer: https://turbopuffer.com/blog/fts-v2-maxscore
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-20 03:59:56+00:00
None of your opinion on the power of government requires the people to be cut out of the equation.

One could have a "small" federal government while having a popular vote for president and a reduced/discarded Senate.

And no, not everyone likes it when the federal government is "too big". Personally, I support social welfare and research programs at the federal level, as well as food safety and many other administrative functions there too.

I'm less supportive of "big government" when the executive declares itself the arbiter of the Constitution and all foreign wars and treaties.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-20 04:03:39+00:00
By controlling Greenland it won't need permission for anything it does

So the US would destroy all of its diplomatic relations specifically to avoid asking Canada for permission? And these new missile defense systems would presumably be integrated under NORAD, where Canada would have a say anyway. I don't find this a particularly convincing argument.

Owning Greenland gets the US massive territory 3,000 KM closer to Moscow.

Moscow has been in range of US ICBMs since the cold war. The US also has an agreement with Canada allowing use of their airspace for nuclear weapons as well.
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-20 04:04:34+00:00
The Constitution is not fine. You are correct that it is not being enforced properly, and IMO we have a coup being staged in real time.

We should have rolling term limits for SCOTUS.

We should have ranked-choice/multiple-choice mechanisms for all elections to facilitate a true multiparty system.

We should further regulate money and transparency in spending vis-a-vis political advertising.

We should ban gerrymandering.

The Senate should be weakened or entirely removed. I am aware that is theoretically the only thing that is not amendable, but it's a flaw that we have it in any case.

The Electoral College should be discarded.

And clearly, impeachment should be easier than it is - or else maybe we just have the dictatorship we deserve? Thanks, GOP.

That's just off the top of my head.
by ryan_lane | 2026-01-20 04:04:44+00:00
> Is HN really a place to criticize administration?

Articles critical of economics policies aren't criticizing the administration, but the policies. Yes, economic policies are of interest to technology, and articles related to it are of interest to us.

Even ignoring the fact that an article critical of a policy isn't specifically critical of the administration, yes, HN is really a place to criticize any administration.

> I don't want competition with the Chinese either.

You also only want to be able to sell your goods in the US? Because the outcome of tariffs is retaliatory tariffs, which will considerably reduce your available market. No matter what you're going to have competition from China, and tariffs ensure markets outside of the US will be more dominated by them.

If your product can so easily be duplicated, and for cheaper, it's probably not a great product.