skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worse than a sales tax. Tariffs have a few market-distorting effects that a sales tax doesn't.

* Domestic consumers and companies are incentivized to potentially go for the 2nd best product. This over time can impact productivity as the tooling will decline over time as inferior solutions are bought.

* Reduced competition. We've seen this with the 25% "chicken tax" on pickup trucks. Arguably one culprit in US automakers falling behind is that they had a protected market around pickup trucks where it was hard to impossible for foreign competition to keep them on their toes. So US automakers retreated more and more into this safe haven.

* Destruction of economies of scale: If everyone wants the entire supply chain to be replicated in their country, we obviously loose economies of scale and thus efficiency. This sounds like it would be small but having multiple Shenzhen's is just not viable and we'll have to deal with higher prices and less product choice.

* Galapagos island syndrome: Over time separation of markets can lead to incompatible technologies which amplifies all other points.
Meta: wish more watches had a day (of the week) display/complication.

Date (of the month) is fine, but Tuesday to Friday often tend to blur together nowadays (especially post-COVID hybrid), and it'd be nice to have that option.

* https://teddybaldassarre.com/en-ca/blogs/watches/day-date-wa...
https://archive.ph/ZhY3y
Or use the n-1 phone you already have in that junk drawer.

I have old pixel phone that will work for simple stuff.
Oh, that's really nice. I'd also like to see what syntax the LLM uses to _trigger_ these calls, and what prompt is sent to the LLM to tell it how to do that.

I should probably just go read Goose's code…
Well since the phone is wiped just don't be logged into your real account and don't have any cloud backups to backup from?
Yeah this alone makes this a total non-starter. Do the math at 100k CCU
It's a great question, and the answer is that you're missing the change in demand.

Let's say Foot Locker tries to keep the same absolute profit $50 and retails the shoes for $125 instead of the previous $100.

Now demand goes down, because more people will skip a new pair of sneakers. So Foot Locker's absolute profit goes down.

But they still have the same fixed retail space, advertising, and labor as you said.

So to try to keep their profitability, they need to increase the price more, which reduces demand even more, but it settles somewhere higher. And the place it settles (where total absolute profit is maximized) tends to be around the same 100% markup as before.

It doesn't need to be exactly the same, but as a general rule of thumb, these things do tend to work in proportional terms rather than absolute terms. And we're fortunate they do, because when manufacturing costs fall, that means absolute profit per unit can fall as well (while percentage remains the same), because it's made up for by more people buying.
Morden software consists of separation of responsibilities between services and a higher plane orchestrating the data flow for business logic.

If you believe there is value in fuzzy tasks being done by LLMs then from that it follows that having separate "agent" services with a higher order orchestrator would be required. Each calling LLMs on their own inside.
U.S. says it is now monitoring immigrants' social media for antisemitism
> I find they demo nicely for other languages, but aren't very good at non-trivial C++

I haven't found they are terribly good at non-trivial anything

They will produce a 80-90% solution that then takes me longer to find and fix that 10-20% than it would have taken me to build it from scratch myself

My suspicion is that people get so wowed by the instant and effortless 90% correct solution that they wind up downplaying how much time and effort that remaining 10% winds up taking
I agree. I did writeups on order of magnitude of RAM and computers over history:

https://saul.pw/mag/memory

https://saul.pw/mag/computer

The IBM 360 is ^4 RAM and the iPhone is ^8 RAM. So the iPhone is ~10,000x more powerful.
Thanks! That app looks quite nice (especially the virtualization) but I already know how much I use my phone (too much :)) and that obtrusive feedback will only get me so far. So I do need an app that goes a bit further and allows me to track & block usage of applications.
we still have freedom of speech for now at least, actual citizens do, anyway
Do people really prefer Yes-Men models? It appears that you are right but I find it surprising.

I very much prefer more disagreeable, critical models. GPT 4o and o3-mini will sometimes not tell you that you, e.g., didn't attach a file you asked to be analyzed and will instead hallucinate its contents, presumably not to upset you. Of course, their hallucinations are way more annoying.
I think you underestimate them. They'll just buy shoes from another country, import them in secret, repackage them, and sell them as American made Nike. They could easily strong-arm Nike to make a deal to go along with this. They'll do a "tour" of the "factory" that makes nothing, and MAGA will eat it up. They'll show us doubters all how wrong we were to doubt the carnival-barking-clown savior of America. And then he'll get a third term out of it.
I used to travel to the US once a month for years and years (from Europe or Asia). It was either for business, or for vacation with the family. The larger the airport, the shittier the border but at least this was a moment to go through and that's all.

Now, as a French, I seriously consider being detained for something trivial and getting into a net of bureaucracy which would certainly extend my stay in the US. And I will not do that.

My grown-up children are suggesting vacation in New York and some other places, we will go to Asia instead where I was lucky enough to have only good experiences (especially in some countries). Nobody will care in the US but this is one less person to visit.

I would love the Americans to continue visiting us as nothing changed for them but I can totally understand that they will slow down as well, expecting unpleasantries.
that’s exactly how investments work. you build out something or fund the building out of something and then some of the returns are repatriated to the investor.

in this case, you invest in building out a compliant and easy money transfer service. in other cases, you invest in a toll road, etc. etc.

the whole point of investment is it is a win-win
Earlier this year, I decided to set up a couple of software based systems to reduce my screentime. They have been largely been successful. I have reduced my average daily phone screen time from 5-6 hrs to 2-3 hrs, around 1.5 hrs of which is 'wasteful' (reddit, HN, instagram) and the remaining 1.5 hrs is actual communication time (email, calls, chat). On my computer, my screen time is nearly all productive time by my standards. Some of the things I did are:

For my phone:

- Deleted all apps for social media, all browsing has to be via browser.

- Used SocialFocus (https://socialfocus.app/) to remove feeds and recommendations from all apps, any post access happens via shares or search

- Also turned on a timer for social media (45 minutes each for reddit/insta).

- Turned social media black/white instead of color.

- Used dumbify launcher (https://dumbifyapp.com/) to turn my menu bar into a text based one instead of icons.

For my computer:

- Used Cold Turkey (https://getcoldturkey.com/) to set up blocks for various websites, subreddits etc.

- Locked up my Cold Turkey block with a long random text string, which increases friction if I want to unlock and as a result reduces my inclination to do so.

- Use News Feed Eradicator (https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator/) to remove feeds from websites which have some utility for me (e.g. LinkedIn) but can be a time sink.

Honestly, these steps have worked quite well for me thus far. I have managed to get back into reading (both fiction, non-fiction as well as academic textbooks), freed up time to spend with family and friends, and also gotten into watching TV shows - something I had not really done in the last 2-3 years due to being hooked on short form media
It is not that expensive to run double-blind fluoride experiments. There are hundreds that have been run over decades. There is a Scotland that the found an 81.4% reduction in cavities. A double-blind study from New Zealand found no benefit to osteoporosis is postmenopausal women. Etc. Etc.

If these neurocognitive effects were actually measurable, they wouldn't need to cherry-picking population-level correlation studies to find effects that are within the margin of error of the tests.
Too technical and nerve-racking for my loved ones traveling across the border. The solution most people I know (who are not born in the u.s.) have landed on is don't post or share any political articles, memes or reels, especially in DMs. If someone sends you political content, delete the message afterwards. The silver lining is that eschewing that content has some mental health benefits.

I would imagine that stories, snapchat, and disappearing message features are probably safe, but I tell my loved-ones that it's not exactly clear what type of meta-data might remain on the device even using those features.
Awesome, I greatly appreciate the input!!
Show HN: I vibe-coded LLM perf-testing toolkit – K6, Grafana and InfluxDB
Yeah, I got that from reading the Ghidra MCP (very instructive, strong recommend), but I'm curious what the LLM needs to output to call it. I should go read Goose's code or instrument it or something…
Hopefully not, Canada likes to peak into US records for stuff like a DUI from years ago from some guy who slept in his car at the bar so he would not drive home drunk, resulting in a policeman arresting him and then him being barred from the usual process of entering Canada.

Canada ending their intelligence sharing with the US would be a big win for citizens in the US and Canada. They basically rely on sharing records with a government with a very hostile and notoriously flawed justice system (that in practice results in quite racist results) and then using it to judge US citizens, which favors other immigrants from countries with weak or less flawed criminal systems or ones that do not share information with Canada.
Really suggested to watch the talk / video that this is for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozI4V_29fj4
I think it was exists, but if its not in a 'awesome-schemas' you might just find it in a subfolder of a pentesting repo
Cybersecurity AI (CAI), an Open Bug Bounty-Ready Artificial Intelligence
I've been doing a lot of mindfulness meditation lately, and also learning about self soothing, emotional processing etc.

I found that now that I can access blissful and peaceful states at will, and deal with difficult emotions without getting overwhelmed, my "need" for compulsive behaviors has dropped massively. There's no longer so much pain to medicate.

It's like you say, we use this stuff because we don't know a better way.

As for social media, there's also the systemic issue of atomization in modern society. People spend so much time alone now, so that's another great pain to cope with.

I wonder why that is. How did we get here?
> Sure, but aren't we past rational debate on this point?

There is no point debating the administration or supporters. Peter Navarro hatched this idea, and he is nearly alone in his logic.

However, a broader debate is useful. A professor in Europe recently pointed out that Nixon did the same thing in the 1971. The intent was to destabilize and reset the dollar value compared to other currencies. He basically set off a grenade in the office. He proposed "New Federalism", and "Nixon's decision to end the gold standard in the United States led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. According to Thomas Oatley, "the Bretton Woods system collapsed so that Nixon might win the 1972 presidential election.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Economy

By the way. Bretton Woods and Treasury monetary policy after WW2 was crafted by Lauchlan Currie. Currie was a renowned economist and worked at US Treasury from 1934. In WW2, Currie was Franklin Roosevelt's chief economic adviser. Currie was also a Russian agent. His US passport and US citizenship was revoked in ~1954 and he lived the remainder of his life in Colombia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauchlin_Currie
I’m about to graduate from a top business school with my MBA and it’s been wild seeing AI evolve over the last 2 years.

GPT3 was pretty ass - yet some students would look you dead in the eyes with that slop and claim it as their own. Fast forward to last year when I complimented a student on his writing and he had to stop me - “bro this is all just AI.”

I’ve used AI to help build out frameworks for essays and suggest possible topics and it’s been quite helpful. I prefer to do the writing myself because the AIs tend to take very bland positions. The AIs are also great at helping me flesh out my writing. I ask “does this make sense” and it tells me patiently where my writing falls off the wagon.

AI is a game changer in a big way. Total paradigm shift. It can now take you 90% of the way with 10% of the effort. Whether this is good or bad is beyond my pay grade. What I can say is that if you are not leveraging AI, you will fall behind those that are.
Italy is considering implementing the mechanism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/brazil-ta...
Well if flouride would be efficient enough, there wouldn't be so many dentists around. What source do you need for that?
What's interesting to me is how many of these advancements are just obvious next steps for these tools. Chain of thought, tree of thought, mixture of experts etc. are things you'd come up with in the first 10 minutes of thinking about improving LLMs.

Of course the devil's always in the details and there have been real non-obvious advancements at the same time.
I wish in the US we could somehow disentangle some of the old concepts that "Business guy in government is good for business" and "Republicans good for business" and the always absurd insinuation that big business and small business share anything in common / similar incentives / policies.
"self-employment" seems like a bit of a joke, like `self-flagellation

money to survive, purpose to thrive

you don't need a 'job', and particularly a 'job' who's only purpose is to make profit for someone else

we really need to rethink society
Ask HN: Why is uptalk intonation so prevalent in ChatGPT voices?
I’ve tried asking it to set voice with an even tone and less of the annoying uptalk but lately it just continues in this way. It hurts to listen to.
> Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

But Stallman is a kook.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
The problem is that children aren't allowed to choose for themselves. Their parents are able to set their kids up for a life of pain and dental bills the parents don't have to experience or pay for.
I would venture that very few open source projects are "SQLite-grade". Very high bar.
Oh, that's really nice. Did you capture the responses from the LLM. Presumably it has some kind of special syntax in it to initiate a tool call, described in the prompt? Like TOOL_CALL<mcp=github,command=list> or something…
These thoughts are all really valuable. I ought to probably pick between general estimation and pure order-of-magnitude stuff. Thanks!
Smart clothing logs posture, exercises
> as long as we’re not collectivising the cost of dental caries

We certainly do, through ER visits and illnesses and medical events that can develop as a result of poor oral hygiene -- stroke and heart disease being among them.
You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.

I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.
I need to check that out, thank you!
How can I, as a student, avoid hindering my learning with language models?

I use Claude, a lot. I’ll upload the slides and ask questions. I’ve talked to Claude for hours trying to break down a problem. I think I’m learning more. But what I think might not be what’s happening.

In one of my machine learning classes, cheating is a huge issue. People are using LMs to answer multiple choice questions on quizzes that are on the computer. The professors somehow found out students would close their laptops without submitting, go out into the hallway, and use a LM on their phone to answer the questions. I’ve been doing worse in the class and chalked it up to it being grad level, but now I think it’s the cheating.

I would never do cheat like that, but when I’m stuck and use Claude for a hint on the HW am I loosing neurons? The other day I used Claude to check my work on a graded HW question (breaking down a binary packet) and it caught an error. I did it on my own before and developed some intuition but would I have learned more if I submitted that and felt the pain of losing points?
Oh, that's very nice. Thanks!
Presuming that theft rates will increase also if the item is more costly and affordable to less[edit*] people. Also if inventory is damaged in the warehouse or on the sales floor, lost or unsold then those cost scale with the cost of the item.
So now every trend that spawns a subtrend is the new real web 3.0
Travel to the USSR was different, at least towards the end. Partly because they didn't have the surveillance technology we are used to. Partly because of widespread corruption. And partly because they didn't want to scare away visitors bringing in hard currency.

As far as I understand, the key point was visa processing. If they considered you suspicious (maybe because you were a reporter or a religious worker), they might flag you for surveillance. Otherwise they didn't really care. The expectation was that you would exchange currency in the black market, because the official rates were terrible. And that you might make some money by selling western goods. If you were part of a tour group, the chances are your official Intourist guide was involved in this.
I'm talking about compatibility for web content, not for browser extensions which are a more volatile environment.
Building AI Agents with Mastra and Deno
Pretty simple to understand. Creating new things is the single hardest thing to do. But destruction (in all forms) is the easiest thing in the world to do that shows tangible "results". And when the reality of your "results" don't matter at all to the people who support you, they simply need to exist as a framework to build collectively agreed upon lies around.
I tried "The Wise Man's Fear" and the results were not so great[1]. It got a good number of the characters, but only showed them being related to Kvothe. Harry potter worked better'ish, but still not great[2].

My primary interest would be using these relational graphs to generate better structured summaries of stories in a structured JSON object for improved search/recommendations.

- [1]https://austen.pages.dev/ecbc2d49-c10d-4e49-ac68-0d37a819b52...

- [2]https://austen.pages.dev/ace16c1d-c74e-4737-a98d-5401047a1cd...
ah yeah, sorry wasn't thinking clearly.
Yeah they're an expression of an "evolutionary clock" that ticks faster for species with shorter generations. But then there's also evolutionary pressure from surroundings, niches left empty after disasters, etc, so trying to measure any of that is just not very objective. And you have to remember there is no "goal", no one direction, it's a brownian walk so mutations happening faster doesn't really change anything unless there's enough advantage in them.
Pretty simple: ask these remote hires to come to the office for the first two weeks for onboarding. That will solve a lot of problems.
that is just not how microecon works.

raising the marginal cost of labor lessens the amount of labor hired. there is no scenario in which it leads to more people working the job. unionized labor did not make it harder to offshore - in fact it accelerated offshoring, automation, and a shift to manufacturing in the South of the country.

having lower costs of goods usually benefits the economy more than more prosperous labor (not necessarily the local economy), although the net welfare increasing thing is context dependent. in competitive markets, vast majority of labor cost decreases are captured by the consumer.
After reading the whole article I still came away with the suspicion that this is a PR piece that is designed to head-off strict controls on LLM usage in education. There is a fundamental problem here beyond cheating (which is mentioned, to their credit, albeit little discussed). Some academic topics are only learned through sustained, even painful, sessions where attention has to be fully devoted, where the feeling of being "stuck" has to be endured, and where the brain is given space and time to do the real work of synthesizing, abstracting, and learning, or, in short, thinking. The prompt-chains where students are asking "show your work" and "explain" can be interpreted as the kind of back-and-forth that you'd hear between a student and a teacher, but they could also just be evidence of higher forms of "cheating". If students are not really working through the exercises at the end of each chapter, but instead offloading the task to an LLM, then we're going to have a serious competency issue. Nobody ever actually learns anything.

Even in self-study, where the solutions are at the back of the text, we've probably all had the temptation to give up and just flip to the answer. Anthropic would be more responsible to admit that the solution manual to every text ever made is now instantly and freely available. This has to fundamentally change pedagogy. No discipline is safe, not even those like music where you might think the end performance is the main thing (imagine a promising, even great, performer who cheats themselves in the education process by offloading any difficult work in their music theory class to an AI, coming away learning essentially nothing).

P.S. There is also the issue of grading on a curve in the current "interim" period where this is all new. Assume a lazy professor, or one refusing to adopt any new kind of teaching/grading method: the "honest" students have no incentive to do it the hard way when half the class is going to cheat.
I think there are some items which look better in real life rather than renders, and watches (esp. higher end ones) are one of them.