The golden prize for America's enemies is to remove the US dollar as a global reserve currency.
Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD, which they do not then spend on goods we make.
If you no longer want the trade deficit that means payments of fealty by those who trade in dollars, which countries aren't likely to tolerate, or abandoning the USD as a global reserve currency, which would be disastrous, truly disastrous. Our debts would suddenly become existential because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy. I don't think many truly understand just how disastrous it will be.
This isn't America's liberation day. This is Russia's and China's liberation day. While America was once able to check their power, America is no longer in a position to do so, we will barely be in a position to satisfy our own military's logistics requirements.
This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies. It is not only a de facto soft blockade of American trade, but it is an attack on the mechanics of American hegemony. Politicians already ask for money instead of votes or actions. That means if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates. America's own government was a result of french support. We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.
One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
In similar news: my left hand acquired my right hand today in an all stock deal valuing the combined hands at $1T. Praising the announcement my arms noted on the deal: “With these two hands now together, there’s nothing our combined fist of might can’t do.” Competitors, my left and right feet, declined to comment on the merger but are said to be in their own separate talks about a deal.
He has done this move before with Tesla buying Solar City. When you do a deal with yourself you can assign any value you want to assets, it isn’t a competitive process. In the previous case Solar City was dying but its acquisition by Tesla was pitched as a great synergy.
So he just sold himself a company he already owns for a valuation that he himself assigned to that company but that was less than what he paid for it, and he paid entirely using “money” that has a made up value and which he issues himself?
Someone figured out that the new tariffs are just our trade deficit with that country divided by the country's exports. I think more and more we see lots of evidence they don't know what they're doing.
One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits the floor.
Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.
Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.
Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.
(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)
It's true that free trade is hugely beneficial to the US economy as a whole, particularly with the USD being the reserve currency.
The flow of goods is balanced by a flow of US dollars to other countries, which are ultimately cycled back into the US financial system - enabling budget deficits and an abundance of capital to invest in high growth industries.
The flip side of this is that it also drives inequality - the upside of this system is felt by the entrepreneurs, investors and high-skill employees in tech and finance, while the downside is concentrated with low-skill workers whose jobs are offshored to lower wage countries.
The obvious solution is not to hurt the economy as a whole, but rather for the government to lower the cost of high-quality education, build out social systems, and invest into onshoring select strategic industries by raising taxes at the high end.
As such, this administration's policies are foolish, but many on this very site would need to give up a little bit of their privilege to reduce the pain felt by many of their fellow citizens.
That is something that in the current American political climate seems a nearly impossible sell.
I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.
People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.
If you can bear with me while i attempt a synthesis here, I think this one line captures basically the entire dynamic, but the author seems to seriously underweight its explanatory value.
> The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this
It is a transaction. The number of students there because they want to learn a subject rounds to zero. A college degree (especially from good old State U) serves first and foremost as a white-collar job permit. The students (or their parents/lender/state) are purchasing the permit from the institution. They are the customer. Anything you, the employee, ask of them beyond the minimum to hold up the fig leaf is a waste of the students' time (from their perspective) and a violation of the implied terms of this transaction.
The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it "explain itself"?
CoT improves results, sure. And part of that is probably because you are telling the LLM to add more things to the context window, which increases the potential of resolving some syllogism in the training data: One inference cycle tells you that "man" has something to do with "mortal" and "Socrates" has something to do with "man", but two cycles will spit those both into the context window and lets you get statistically closer to "Socrates" having something to do with "mortal". But given that the training/RLHF for CoT revolves around generating long chains of human-readable "steps", it can't really be explanatory for a process which is essentially statistical.
I'm not sure what's supposed to be publication-worthy here. This is common knowledge for anyone who's ever interacted with sheep on a farm, in their natural, fermionic superfluid state. If you turn over a sheep and tickle its ticklish underbelly, you get a sheep-laugh (a hilarious sound) only about 50% of the time; the other 50%, you'll hear a sheep laughing from the opposite end of the meadow. Because, you cannot definitively say if it was *this* sheep you tickled, or *that* other, identical one. They are indistinguishable baa-tickles
As a student currently, I'll also throw in this perspective. The colleges themselves make it feel transactional and not about learning even if I'm interested in doing so.
For example, I'm taking a physics course right now (electricity and magnetism). The concepts are difficult for me and I was hoping that the homework would help. So, I go to do the homework, but the homework is online. With the online homework I get five chances to get the problem correct, but there is zero partial credit, zero feedback, and every time I get the answer wrong, it negatively impacts my grade.
I have no chance to make mistakes and learn. At least with homework that was handed out back in the day, there was at least the possibility of partial credit being handed out. So my options are going to office hours (which I try to do), go to tutoring hours (which conflicts with my job's work schedule), or go to ChatGPT and/or Chegg.
Additionally, since students have been cheating, I think it gives professors a skewed perspective on how much time is actually needed to get work done, so the deadlines get moved up. This means I get even more pressure put on me when I'm just trying to learn and be a good student.
I see a lot of people angry at "Nue" in various ways, and I can't help but think these are people heavily relying on React and missing the overall issue. The issue is that these huge frameworks have made the web a horrible slow mess. I deal as DevOps/SRE daily with these services, and finding one that will do a first load under 10s is close to impossible. When a simple home page dashboard or a notes page takes more than 10s to load on a 10G connection peered within 5ms of the host, and 95% of this is spent in JS, that's when you know the typical current webapp has reached a massive state of bloat only supported by fast browser engine, and people not having expectations.
I'm not hopefully Nue would revolutionize this since there are plethora of Web SaaS companies just wanting to use "common" frameworks... but I can at least root for them.
Actually Apple were fined because they don't apply the same standard to their own pop-ups that allow users to reject tracking. On Apple popups you seem to need one click, while on 3rd party popups you need to confirm twice.
So the fine seems to be for treating 3rd parties differently from their own stuff.
They could make their own popups require double confirmation instead...
We have no evidence that Wang "was" disappeared. We know that he's nowhere to be found, that the university put him on leave weeks ago [0], and that the FBI recently searched his home. Notably, the university put him on leave weeks before the FBI searched his home.
That sequence is better explained by the hypothesis that Wang vanished himself suddenly and the university called in the FBI to investigate things that they found in the aftermath. (Note that that's still pure speculation, but it's speculation that better accounts for all known facts.)
> Someone figured out that the new tariffs are just our trade deficit with that country divided by the country's exports.
Note that the White House has both (1) officially denied this, (2) provided the formula they assert was used as support for that denial; but the formula is exactly what they are denying but with two additional globally-constant elasticity factors in the divisor, however, those elasticity factors are 4 and 0.25, so...
This also lets all of his co-investors in X, who were likely pissed that their shares tanked, exchange their shares at an inflated value (but one that still sees them losing 25% of their original investment) for shares in a trendy yet likely overvalued AI company that they consider to have more upside.
The other part of this is that if TSLA stock drops to $100-ish he'll be at risk of being margin called on the loans he took against his holdings to buy X. I wouldn't be surprised if this deal involves some X shares being sold for cash (that was raised from VCs) to pay down those loans, and/or the lenders agreeing to take xAI stock in lieu of cash.
This whole thing seems like a big pyramid scheme. I don't think this is the last time we've seen this type of move: he'll keep starting companies that are at the forefront of whatever the current hype cycle is, then leverage the extremely inflated valuations to benefit himself.
I think a lot of people assume the economic consequences like these have not been understood by the WH. Although I don't like this administration I beg to differ: they know what's going to happen, and they expect the coming storm because they seek what follows.
They want to repudiate foreign held debt, or devalue it, by revaluation of the USD and they will wear what they think of as a one time economic shock to get their reset in a belief they can make it less like the Smoot-Hawley great depression because so many other economic levers exist now, including floating currency, MMT, and massive fintech.
Personally I think it's a mistake but hot takes "they have no idea what's coming" are I believe naive. They know. They just don't care. Some amount of foreign trade will absorb the cost. Not all, not most. Not all prices in the US will rise and some substitution will happen although spinning up cheap labor factories again isn't going to happen in 2025. Maybe by 2027? Rust belt sewing shops and Walmart grade cheap goods production lines?
What amazes me is the timing: the midterms will hit while the bottom is still chugging along. I would think it unlikely they can secure an updraft from this to keep the house. What's the plan for that?
This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college.
The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade.
The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in a DIP-8 package, which was provided to us. If you blew it up, you got a slap on the wrist. That DIP-8 was otherwise yours for the class.
I could _never_ get anything resembling linear output out of my transistor. The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.
Eight (!) weeks into that ten week class, I found the problem: the DIP was not, in fact, just a transistor. It was a 555 timer that had somehow been mixed in with the transistors.
I went and showed the lab technician. He gave me another one. At this point, I had two weeks to complete eight weeks of lab work, which was borderline impossible. So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date.
I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.
I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.
That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.
> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.
> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.
From what I understand, de minimis exemption has also been removed.
That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border / customs.
Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee/fees for the work done.
This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
(That's just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)
So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!
Aside from everything else one thing what strikes me as particularly insane is how it’s not even defensible as a protective measure. My favorite everyday olive oil comes from Tunisia. They now have a 38% tariff on them. There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
The orange man wanted tariffs, the orange man is going to get tariffs. Now we have to hope the American people aren’t so dumb as to still be convinced only he can solve their issues. I don’t hold out hope for that.
Most importantly, the use of novel antibiotics must be strictly prohibited in the animal food industry.
This is crucial because the misuse of antibiotics in livestock farming has been a major driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global health crisis. When antibiotics are overused or improperly applied in animals, bacteria can evolve to become resistant, rendering these life-saving drugs ineffective for treating infections in humans and animals alike.
It has always been a perversity that life-saving reserve antibiotics were ever permitted to prop up the grotesque machinery of the modern food industry—a system built on global-scale animal cruelty.
I apologize for my erratic behavior which has tarnished our brand and created unnecessary turmoil within our organization. Regrettably, we will need to implement a 16% reduction in headcount to address the financial challenges we now face. I have decided to step aside and hand over control to my deputy, who I believe will provide the steady leadership needed to rebuild trust and restore our company's vision.
I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
Since trade is conducted largely in USD, that means other governments must purchase USD to trade. This is the core of trade deficits. Foreign countries buy US dollars so they can trade with other people. That guarantees the deficit since they give us something in exchange for USD, which they do not then spend on goods we make.
If you no longer want the trade deficit that means payments of fealty by those who trade in dollars, which countries aren't likely to tolerate, or abandoning the USD as a global reserve currency, which would be disastrous, truly disastrous. Our debts would suddenly become existential because inflating our currency to pay for them could result in functionally not being able to import goods required to run our economy. I don't think many truly understand just how disastrous it will be.
This isn't America's liberation day. This is Russia's and China's liberation day. While America was once able to check their power, America is no longer in a position to do so, we will barely be in a position to satisfy our own military's logistics requirements.
This is a decapitation strike (Timothy Snyder: Decapitation Strike -- https://archive.is/1xkxK) on America by our enemies. It is not only a de facto soft blockade of American trade, but it is an attack on the mechanics of American hegemony. Politicians already ask for money instead of votes or actions. That means if foreign governments spend money, they can elect their preferred candidates. America's own government was a result of french support. We institute regime change in other counties, and I see no reason to believe we are immune.
If trade stops occurring in US Dollar, which is a consequence of the stated goal of our current ruling regime, that would be the coup de grace on this country's hegemony. It is the definitive end to it, and the birth of Chinese hegemony.
Ray Dalio's Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order feels prescient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8