MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-04-27 15:31:46+00:00
That isn't the powerful criticism that a lot of people think it is. You can keep saying this until you're blue in the face. It doesn't stop China's growth in power and scale. It doesn't impact their citizens at all. It's cheerleading with hot air and ignores the real work that the West needs to put in to effectively compete or counter.

In fact, we should be worried about what the success of such a large non-democratic institution means to developing nations seeking their own model. Or what it means to those in power back at home. Your manner of argument doesn't successfully address the incredible success China has achieved, and if anything, it risks calling the basis of your argument -- the importance of democratic institutions -- into question.

The things the West can do to compete are to work harder on education, become an attractive destination for immigration, foster productive innovation, and focus on key industries and supply chains. Right now the US in particular is doing the opposite, and it's damaging America's standing and ability to compete with China. It comes at a time where it's critical to perform.

By all means, China should be the north star incentive to work harder. During the Cold War we used the threat of the Soviets being better than us to do some of the best engineering and science we've ever done. If our response to China is to call them names and hope that their growth stalls, then I think I can predict a very different and very mediocre outcome for the West in the coming century.

This is our opportunity to rise to the occasion again and be better than we were. Let's not be arrogant and dismissive. Let's not fumble.
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-04-27 15:31:52+00:00
I would like companies to start aggressively pushing back against AI scrapers using things like Anubis[0]. If you can't be a good steward of the internet or respectful to other peoples' resources, then people have the right to deny them to you.

[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
by audunw | 2025-04-27 15:32:18+00:00
How is that relevant? Countries don’t hold reserves in e-wallets. You don’t get a business loan in an e-wallet.

What you pay with as a consumer has nothing to do with the dollars reserve currency status.

One of the most important aspects of the dollars role is the “Eurodollar”, and how debt can be issued by international banks. There is no alternative to the dollar in that regard.
Show HN: Software Engineering Handbook – How to Survive Tech
by yusufaytas | 2025-04-27 15:32:23+00:00
Hey HN,

We wrote the Software Engineering Handbook because most engineering advice is about technical background. Ours is about surviving everything else.

It covers:

- Surviving bad managers, layoffs, toxic teams

- Navigating promotions, negotiations, career changes

- Handling burnout, immigration, parenting, even death

- Setting boundaries, managing time, staying sane

- Building a life while growing in your a tech career.

No tutorials. No buzzwords. Just real-world survival and growth, written by engineers who’ve been through Amazon, Meta, Workday, TripAdvisor, and startups.
by gruez | 2025-04-27 15:32:25+00:00
>distinction without a difference

There's a pretty big difference between "I think the west has too much empathy" and "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", even if both are directionally anti-empathy. It's not any different than "I think the US's free speech regulations are too lax" and "The fundamental weakness of the US is free speech". Even though both are directionally anti-free speech, and a free speech opponent would object both premises, it would be wholly irresponsible to paint someone who wants hate speech laws passed as the latter, when their position is more accurately portrayed as the former.
by alganet | 2025-04-27 15:32:51+00:00
> legacy systems from the United States

LOL, cargo cult plane thinks is a real plane, it even has two wings, how cute.

Yes, beat yourselves up again in fruitless war. The Indians will save you again, that's how the system works. There there.

USA democracy was founded upon a system they do not comprehend, whose pieces don't exist anymore because they continuously erased it. Even the story of how the Iroquois confederacy seeded their founding fathers was messed up and cannot be fully relied upon.

So, stop fixing the classical portrait. It will look like blurry Jesus messed up by crazy old lady in the end[0].

[0]: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/34388/memory-of-botc...
by justanotheratom | 2025-04-27 15:33:05+00:00
I feel like these issues can be countered by a reasoning AI that runs locally and I can configure to operate in my best interest.

e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.

I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
by quicheshore | 2025-04-27 15:33:41+00:00
I feel this. I do think though, he mentions that this is the exact trap that is laid down for you when you enter society. You’re led to believe resources/genius is what separates do’ers, but I think he wants us to believe in the blind faith doing = progress. The other is option is doing nothing at all and succumbing to obscurity like you’re saying.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-27 15:34:43+00:00
> Honestly, if you're shying away from customising an 1-2kloc piece of code, you probably shouldn't be using a custom printf().

Well, it was good enough for the arduino SDK to adopt: https://github.com/embeddedartistry/arduino-printf

> * function pointers are either costly or even plain unsupported on GPU architectures.*

When you printf() from a GPU kernel, your performance is shot anyway, so performance is not a consideration. And - function pointers work, as long as they all get resolved before runtime, and you don't try to cross CPU <-> GPU boundaries.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-27 15:34:44+00:00
I can't help but suspect that the McNamara fallacy is the far more pressing issue than the quality of the data available. Wouldn't it be lovely though for tech-types and mainstream-economics-types to imagine that all we need is "better data", or "more data".

In the words of Roger Hallam, the problem, in reality, is that "it's all f*ked".

Our realities are warped. We're trapped in economic and social systems invented 400 years ago when we thought resources were infinite. We're "educated" (belittled and cajoled and propagandised) into believing that it'd be madness to try anything too different, as what we have is "less bad" than the alternatives.

We collectively refuse to take the risks involved in seriously and creatively experimenting with other ways of organising human societies, and instead pass the time indulging ourselves with the fantasy that our tech overlords will save us.

We need to update our economic theories to match reality, urgently, as a first step. Rags like the economist are the opposite of helpful when it comes to this.
by the_snooze | 2025-04-27 15:37:12+00:00
I see this talking point a lot, and I feel it requires a bit more nuance.

Those bombs were Ukraine's in the same sense that the bombs in Minot AFB are North Dakota's. If the US were to suddenly fall apart (as the USSR did), North Dakota wouldn't suddenly become a nuclear power just because the bombs are physically stationed there. They could use them to jump-start a nuclear program, but those are otherwise orphaned bombs with no one having immediate means to control them.
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-27 15:38:38+00:00
I had a combination uh-oh/wow! moment back in those days when the hacked up NFS server I built on a Dell with Linux and XFS absolutely torched the Solaris and UFS system we'd been using for development. Yeah, it wasnt apples to apples. Yes, maybe ZFS would have helped. But XFS was proven at SGI and it was obvious that the business would save thousands overnight by moving to Linux on Dell instead of sticking with Sun E450s. That was the death knell for my time as a Solaris sysadmin, to be honest.
by gambiting | 2025-04-27 15:38:39+00:00
>>Taxes also aren’t included in the menu price

That's insane as well. Why aren't they?

>>If they say up front on every menu that the tip is included and the servers/bartenders are up front and you can actually remove it (I guess you can put less on the bottom line), what’s the issue?

Nothing. Some restaurants in London started doing this now, the menu says a service charge of 10% will apply unless you ask to remove it and very few people have any issue with it.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-27 15:38:51+00:00
Wikipedia has its share of issues, and anything political/controversial is never going to be perfectly balanced and there will always be a tug of war over content and complaints from all sides. I tend to stay away from articles on highly politicized people/topics.

But having an independent (not ad-driven therefore not subject to corporations), transparent (you can see edit history and authors), and funded by its users, is an amazing accomplishment and a great boon to mankind. One of the best sites on the internet.

Independent sources of information are a threat to autocrats and dictators, so it's no surprise that the Trump admin would attempt to kill Wikipedia or reduce its influence (and no better way than to hit its tax status and therefore reduce donations to it).
by chriskanan | 2025-04-27 15:38:55+00:00
I've been thinking deeply about a lot of the same topics via teaching a course on AGI this semester (defining it, conflicting definitions, socioeconomic impact, etc. That said, I disagree with him vehemently regarding some of his opinions such as that open weight models should be banned. He equates the weights of models as equivalent to fissile material for building nuclear bombs.

On some topics, I 100% agree with him, e.g., on the issues with value alignment (humans disagree). I devoted an entire lecture to that in my course.

I also think he doesn't understand the romance of space exploration and why, in the very long term, that is critical (learning cosmology is one of my hobbies).
by ptero | 2025-04-27 15:39:24+00:00
Many of such "do the right thing and change the world" pieces assume that most people mostly agree on what "the right thing" is. They do not.

Pick people from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds and they will have very different views on what would make things better. Not in the end state of "people should be healthy, happy and free to pursue their passions; and we should explore the stars, too", but in "what would be a worthy goal for me to work on, today and for the next few years". And acceptance of such differences is, to me, a good thing: anytime countries are remoralized into pursuing a common moral goal, gulags for those who did not drink the kool-aid are not far away.

In my book people should not work on things they find immoral. But I am totally fine if my neighbors or my friends are competing against me at work, in technological or in moral space. If they do not consider their work immoral, it is all good. I like hearing their arguments, too, either to steelman my views or to find cracks in them. This likely puts me into the "spineless amoebas, useless species" bucket of the author's classification.

Going on a moral crusade to change the world? No, thank you. They do not end well; not for the world, which likely will not even notice, but for the crusader who will likely become disillusioned, radicalized or bitter when the world does not budge. My 2c.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 15:39:52+00:00
Isnt that what scoping is for? So you name you conponent and use selectors for styling sub components.

My issue with most styling is that they want to use composition when it does not make any sense. Like spliting styles and using the pieces on things that has no relation to each other. If two things are not likely to change together, you shouldn’t use the same class for them, unless you consider the class as primitive.

Tailwind is an extreme case of this, and like all extreme things, it’s a path to ruin.
by audunw | 2025-04-27 15:40:21+00:00
No, it’s not. It’s just a different perspective. In some aspects it does reveals real economic power, but in other ways it can vastly exaggerate a country’s economic power.

Having hundreds of millions of poor near-subsistence farmers will add quite a lot to a country’s GDP (PPP), but does not make that country more powerful on the international stage.

I’d argue that PPP is more misleading than meaningful.you

Like, you can get an apartment built really cheaply in China. Yes, your money goes further there. But there’s also a much higher risk that the building is very low quality and will fall apart in a short time. And what’s more, you’re not actually buying and fully owning it. The land is leased from the government
by JdeBP | 2025-04-27 15:40:49+00:00
> […] process for auditing or evaluating the actions, activities, and voting patterns of editors, admins, and committees, […]

Voting patterns, note. Edward Robert Martin Jr expresses the totalitarian position of a secret ballot, something that was fought for long and hard in centuries past, being a bad thing.

> […] through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia […]

An encyclopaedia is not a corporation, of course, and this is just plain ignorant nonsense.
by yanko | 2025-04-27 15:41:02+00:00
Auto content moderation might fail when people using Aesop language So when someone says "Ezop language", it usually means:

Talking in hints, allegories, or indirect ways — not saying things directly, but "hiding" the meaning inside a story or parable.

Using fables or stories to express a deeper or hidden meaning.

Example: Instead of saying "Don't trust flatterers," someone using Ezop language might tell a story about a fox flattering a crow to steal its cheese — just like Aesop did.
by spicyusername | 2025-04-27 15:41:18+00:00
It's discussions like these that make romanticizing our non-agrarian ancestors so easy.

Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions and our correct system of highly specialized labor, it feels as though everyone just hung out together, having a good time, and doing what was needed to feed the tribe. Minus the disease and war, of course.

There wasn't this need for an existential discussion about this job or that job, or whether you're lifestyle was morally justified.

There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.
by bradleyy | 2025-04-27 15:41:43+00:00
It's really convenient for being able to quickly whip up diagrams to share for discussion. Like when you have a small group of folks that need to iterate on a DB design, it's super simple to change things.

I've used this a bunch early in projects where the team needs to agree on DB structure:

1. whip something up as a discussion piece 2. usually a quick meeting to iterate on it, spot problems, correct. 3. you're close enough to build the DB bits, ship it. :)
by dreghgh | 2025-04-27 15:42:14+00:00
You're talking about avoiding harmful work, whereas the article is discussing finding work mainly based on it being beneficial to the things you care about. These are two quite different things.

If you both have to cover a cost of living, and care about improving the world, there is some most efficient strategy which allows you maximise the latter, given the former as a constraint. (This obviously varies by individual, depending on your abilities, available work, etc.) How can one be sure that working at an 'altruistic' job is optimal, as opposed to for example working at a very highly paid job in some pointless but not harmful field, and contributing either some of your money, or some of your increased spare time?

The example of someone who doesn't care at all about altruism and who has maximised wealth while causing significant harm does not establish the right strategy for people who do care somewhat about both things.
by rovr138 | 2025-04-27 15:42:46+00:00
Have you looked at the geonames database?, https://www.geonames.org/

Info and schema is here, https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt

Could be a good source. Not sure how good it is worldwide, but the countries I’ve used it for, it’s been useful and pretty good.

Try the search too, https://www.geonames.org/search.html?q=R%C3%ADo+grande&count...

Not just roads, but there’s rivers, and other things too
by ryao | 2025-04-27 15:43:17+00:00
The ZFS driver will release memory if the kernel requests it. The only integration level issue is that the free command does not show ARC as a buffer/cache, so it misrepresents reality, but as far as I know, this is an issue with caches used by various filesystems (e.g. extent caches). It is only obvious in the case of ZFS because the ARC can be so large. That is a feature, not a bug, since unused memory is wasted memory.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-04-27 15:43:27+00:00
you will like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.

but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-04-27 15:43:51+00:00
I suspect "politically neutral" is a meaningless phrase. It's just a way for people to tar their political opponents by inference.

The problem is: even if you report only facts, there is an editorial function in choosing which facts to report, because it is physically impossible to report all facts. So someone can always point to some sort of bias on choosing which facts to report.
by whartung | 2025-04-27 15:43:57+00:00
As a desktop user, I am content with APFS. The only feature from ZFS that I would like, is the corruption detection. I honestly don't know how robust the image and video formats are to bit corruption. On the one hand, potentially, "very" robust. But on the other, I would think that there are some very special bits that if toggled can potentially "ruin" the entire file. But I don't know.

However, I can say, every time I've tried ZFS on my iMac, it was simply a disaster.

Just trying to set it up on a single USB drive, or setting it up to mirror a pair. The net effect was that it CRUSHED the performance on my machine. It became unusable. We're talking "move the mouse, watch the pointer crawl behind" unusable. "Let's type at 300 baud" unusable. Interactive performance was shot.

After I remove it, all is right again.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-04-27 15:44:16+00:00
Exactly this.

The business case for providing a robust desktop filesystem simply doesn’t exist anymore.

20 years ago, (regular) people stored their data on computers and those needed to be dependable. Phones existed, but not to the extent they do today.

Fast forward 20 years, and many people don’t even own a computer (in the traditional sense, many have consoles). People now have their entire life on their phones, backed up and/or stored in the cloud.

SSDs also became “large enough” that HDDs are mostly a thing of the past in consumer computers.

Instead you today have high reliability hardware and software in the cloud, which arguably is much more resilient than anything you could reasonably cook up at home. Besides the hardware (power, internet, fire suppression, physical security, etc), you’re also typically looking at multi geographical redundancy across multiple data centers using reed-Solomon erasure coding, but that’s nothing the ordinary user needs to know about.

Most cloud services also offer some kind of snapshot functionality as malware protection (ie OneDrive offers unlimited snapshots for 30 days rolling).

Truth is that most people are way better off just storing their data in the cloud and making a backup at home, though many people seem to ignore the latter, and Apple makes it exceptionally hard to automate.
by latexr | 2025-04-27 15:44:18+00:00
> but they trigger the action with care and selectively, so as not to get caught (eg to low tech people

That would be an awful plan. Low tech people are the ones who most frequently complain of this because they have no basis to think it wouldn’t happen.

> I am astonished that nobody had ever done a reverse engineering research yet.

They have. It’s described in the article.
by apexalpha | 2025-04-27 15:44:21+00:00
The Netherlands grew by 1 million people between 2015 and 2025, roughly 6,5% increase in population.

And (almost) everyone has a house.

Except we don't build flats and suburban one-house-fits-all massive construction projects. We mostly do smallscale development times a 1000, in stead of one big one.

We think it results in better cities.

Though, it is true we should build even more.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-27 15:44:47+00:00
Meanwhile extreme poverty levels have been steadily diminishing and quality-of-life broadly improving. But you're concerned with some people having more money. That is to say, equality of outcome. No safety net would ever be enough for communist ideologues, because results and well-being don't matter. Only ideology, and punishment.

There's a reason would-be socialist states have back-tracked from central control of economy and allowed competition (Lenin did this so quickly in spite of his zeal it would make your head spin). They kept the authoritarianism though. Once those tendrils get in, they're tough to get out. Only a few countries shed that in the 20th century, one of them being South Korea; places that embraced Liberalism, because they had the good fortune to have leaders with sense.

Liberty qua Liberalism is good, and the checks-and-balances are meant to evolve over time. The alternatives are abject failures, and you'll propose nothing that hasn't been one.