MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cs702 | 2025-04-15 18:39:34+00:00
Genuine question:

Should a government be able to revoke the tax-exempt status of a university because the university will not agree to give the government, first, the right to "audit" the viewpoints of students, professors, and administrators, and second, the right to "reduce the power" of certain students, professors, and administrators, targeted because of those viewpoints?

The right to "audit" and "reduce the power" of students, professors, and administrators are only two of the government's demands. I must confess that it's not entirely clear to me what the government means by "audit" and "reduce the power." Here is the full list of government demands: https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...

Here is the university's response: https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-a...

Judge for yourself.
by nickpadge | 2025-04-15 18:39:45+00:00
Some of the sibling comments had questions around purposefully releasing defenses which don’t work. I think Carlini’s (one of the paper authors) post can add some important context: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/why-i-attack.html.

TLDR: Once these defenses are broken, all previously protected work is perpetually unprotected, so they are flawed at a foundational level.

Ignoring these arguments and pretending they don’t exist is pretty unethical.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-15 18:39:57+00:00
"Viewpoint diversity" looks like it means something other than a literal interpretation. Without a definition of that phrase, it would appear that "abandoning DEI" would conflict with "viewpoint diversity".

Give what "freedom of speech absolutism" meant in practice, I'm guessing that "viewpoint diversity" is a demand for primacy of far-right views, but I could certainly be wrong
by iLemming | 2025-04-15 18:40:18+00:00
> Clojure was such a brilliant name

IIRC Rich wanted a name that has CLR and J in it - Clojure initially was officially to be supported on both .Net and Java stacks. Later he realized that keeping it completely compatible on both platforms is an uphill battle. CLR Clojure still exists, but it's not "an officially supported" runtime.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-15 18:40:39+00:00
They put on a good show. Real racist people post videos of the f&#$ed up things they do to others that I won't even describe here. They know better than to use a clear-web site especially one using a CDN to show off their behavior. Those forums are on Tor.

4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.
by freejazz | 2025-04-15 18:41:00+00:00
>If I address any of those points, would I be nitpicking and picking on minor details?

If you only did that while ignoring my main point, yeah. Not sure why this is a difficult concept for you to grasp.

>The user brought up groping and injecting bleach. I refuted the bleach argument, leaving the groping argument alone. It's also not technically right, it's completely incorrect and absolutely disingenous framing.

Disagree there, which can be fine and reasonable. But don't pretend you addressed the poster's point, which wasn't the bleach thing. This is basic reading comprehension, again.

>I addressed ONE of the TWO reasons the user provided. What other reason am I supposed to have addressed? Should I start making some up?

He provided more than two and you didn't address his point at all. You just repeatedly bickered about small details about one of the points and said he had bad intentions.

>Rest of your post isn't worth addressing it's just the same junk.

Look who is talking. I wish I could report posters like you, you're the worst.
by jdthedisciple | 2025-04-15 18:41:10+00:00
If you genuinely cannot distinguish the two then that's about equally as bad as cognitive dissonance:

Phenotype diversity != Viewpoint diversity

The former is what current academia and DEI focus on, the latter is what the administration demands.

Does this simple logic need to be expressed in Rust for HN folks to wrap their mind around it?
by plorg | 2025-04-15 18:41:26+00:00
I'm going to genuinely miss the bicycle headlight I have bought under like 4 different brand names. I won't miss the 36 other grotesqueries sold as alternatives and produced by the same business and manufacturing environment, but I'm also not excited about having to choose between 6 $50 lights of similar quality that are locked to a GPS company's equipment. It would be great if in 10 years I could get a similar light for 25% more than the current price adjusted for future inflation. But there's no reason to believe that tariffs are going to make American products better, just that it makes the cheap products American. And there's nothing else about Trump's (or for that matter his Democratic counterparts'-) industrial policy to encourage that either.
by neilv | 2025-04-15 18:42:26+00:00
> She said that since she didn’t go through training, Edward’s father said she couldn’t officially be a repair tech. But through the years, she honed her skills.

> Before he passed away, she said he was incredibly impressed with her growth.

> “Last year, (Michael King) informed me, ‘I can’t give you the title because you didn’t go to college, but you do a heck of a good job repairing things and fixing it and taking care of people,’” Henning said.

Maybe the writers ended the piece like they did because they wanted the "good job repairing things and fixing it and taking care of people" note.

But I also heard echoes of systemic sexism or classism.

And also, really, someone being snubbed by Radio Shack, of all things?

Radio Shack was where kids, and anyone else without credentials, could go and get the Forrest Mims electronics book, and some tools and parts, and... just do things.

Classist gatekeeping by affluent Stanford bros at Google is one thing, because they've always been in an echo chamber. But a Radio Shack franchise should've known better.
by mgkimsal | 2025-04-15 18:42:31+00:00
I'm not flippant about it, and do not take the suggestion of using some endowment money for 'non-specified purposes' lightly. I don't think it should be completely off the table. The Trump administration has relied on people and companies responding to their aggression and violation of norms within the bounds of normalcy. None of this is normal. We are being gish galloped with attacks on all fronts of societal norms at once - threatening law firms, universities, students, immigrants. Attack the powerless and those with some power to protect those powerless at the same time.
by wredcoll | 2025-04-15 18:42:36+00:00
The topic of the conversation is the government requiring right-wing ideas be taught in schools. It has nothing to do with your anecdotes about educators valuing their own wellbeing over their students or whatever.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are schools and their professors perfect? Obviously not. Should they be improved? Sure. Is this trump driven ideological attack related to improving schools? Again, obviously not.
by justin_oaks | 2025-04-15 18:43:00+00:00
Your comment could have been simplified to: "I don't like the syntax"

And that could be optimized further by leaving no comment.

All syntax is learned. None of it is "intuitive". Anything unfamiliar to you will seem unpleasant. Some syntaxes can be better than others, but to make that distinction you'd have to at least cite reasons why one syntax is better than another.
by daedrdev | 2025-04-15 18:43:12+00:00
No its literally just a statistics issue. Say you screen someone for a 1 in a million disease with a 0.001% false positive rate. If you find something and have to do a biopsy to figure out if its a real issue or not, you will have 99.9% of them be for nothing. Biopsies are actually risky procedures that can have dangerous complications that can and do harm people. Say your biopsy has a 99% accuracy. This means even after all that someone with a confirmed biopsy only has a 10% chance of having the disease, and may get dangerous and life changing treatment for nothing.
by erlend_sh | 2025-04-15 18:43:26+00:00
Weird is very cheap to host so we’ve already covered hosting costs with our first batch of early adopters: https://blog.muni.town/selling-dreams/

The extended version of Weird that we’re building now however will include community hosting ranging between $10/$100 per month as part of a B2B play as opposed to the B2C model of Weird as-is, so that.
by hnburnsy | 2025-04-15 18:43:50+00:00
>If I was to donate 9 (or 10) figures to an institution, I would want to make sure it is used to support what I want it to support (cancer research, scholarships, libraries, etc), rather than be used as a general slush fund.

You can make that restricted donation outside of the endowment. I thought endowments were for the support of students, not research.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-15 18:44:59+00:00
I mean, no not exactly.

Amazon is just one of the nails in the coffin, and if it didn't exist there are still 50 others holding it shut.

We've seen most retail stores fail to convert from a physical to mixed physical+online format.

The number of items a successful electronics store needs is huge. The small mall format wasn't going to work.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-15 18:45:08+00:00
Filtering the crap is now orthogonal to the concern that, historically, information dissemination has been tied to physical scarcity. Those concerns ran together because it cost money to publish something. It doesn't now.

We can come up with new models that compensate creators more directly. We can also come up with models that don't involve effectively killing any ability to build upon existing culture in the time-scale of a human life.

What came before isn't how it has to be, except that the interest that profit from the current system want it to remain so.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-04-15 18:45:24+00:00
As a European the main cons is that most places to be are big cities which are:

- Expensive

- Crime ridden

- Full of homeless and drug addicts

I don't care who is your supreme leader of the day, they're all useless.

I regret not having had the chance to visit the states in the 80s. I think I'll hit Japan and South Korea, while there's still people.
by jumploops | 2025-04-15 18:45:26+00:00
One of the surprising benefits of raising a toddler is gaining the ability to instantly tell when another adult has fallen into a "toddler-like" state (myself included!).

Before having kids, I would try and explain someone's behavior in a logical sense.

Toddlers, however, are mostly driven by their current physical needs (hungry/sleepy) and whatever they're currently doing (autonomy).

We've found the most success in avoiding all boolean questions. Do you want to read a book? (when playing with trains before bedtime) Obvious no!

Do you want to read this book or that book? Oh... a decision!

It's striking how well tactics like these work outside the realm of toddlers.
by monity_ai | 2025-04-15 18:45:41+00:00
Yesterday was a surreal day for us at monity.ai.

We got accepted into the Google Cloud Startups program. Then we hit #1 on Fazier.com. And to top it off, we landed on the Indie Hackers homepage — all in under 24 hours.

Monity is an AI-powered tool that monitors websites for changes — visual, text, or structure. But what makes it unique is the AI agent system we've been building. You can define what the agent should track, how often, and even prompt it on how to interpret or respond to certain types of changes.

For example, you can say “Tell me if a competitor changes their pricing plan layout” or “Track if legal disclaimers are updated on this page,” and the agent figures out what to look for.

It’s like having a smart assistant watching any web page for you 24/7.

We’re still early, but seeing this kind of traction yesterday was incredibly motivating. Sharing here because HN has helped us from the beginning.

Happy to answer any questions about the product, traction, tech stack, or how we’re approaching things from a tiny team perspective.
by hosh | 2025-04-15 18:46:00+00:00
I remember a story I heard about Microcenter. It was started in my hometown (Columbus, OH) by a Radio Shack store manager. When PCs were coming out, the store manager kept putting those PCs up at the front of the store. The district manager would come back and make him put it in the back. This went on for a bit until the store manager quit, took his best sales guy, and opened up Microcenter at the mall next door, selling PCs. They eventually took over the entire mall, before moving to another part of town, and then expanding to other towns. By the time Radio Shack figured out where things were going, things were too late.

I didn't know this years later, watching Young Sheldon ... that Incredible Universe was Tandy's attempt to get into the consumer electronics when Radio Shack's profit started falling, and that Tandy has a whole (very profitable) leather company. My SCA friends tend to know a lot more about Tandy Leather than they do about Radio Shack.

Fry's Electronics closed here in the west part of Phoenix, several years ago. Their shelves were starting to get bare and were selling things from consignment. It took a while for them to die, and I finally found out why: they were having trouble getting credit to buy inventory.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-15 18:46:04+00:00
By default, Anubis will not block Lynx and some other browsers that do not implement JavaScripts, but will block scrapers that claim to be Mozilla-based browsers, and many of the badly behaving ones do claim to be Mozilla based browsers, so this helps. (I do not have a browser compatible with the Anubis software, and Anubis does not bother me.)

If necessary, it would also be possible to do what powxy does which is displaying an explanation of how the proof of work is working in case you want to implement your own.

Having alternative access of some files using other protocols, might also help, too.
by bb88 | 2025-04-15 18:46:32+00:00
Meshtastic's routing system (up until this last version), wasn't great. I haven't tried the latest version, because it's gonna need to take a while for people to update their firmwares.

Also, a lot of nodes tend to flood their battery state for the entire network, which uses up the airtime for something that could be more important like routing information, and also wastes their battery.

Even though things like AlohaNet have been around for years, Meshtastic chose to reinvent the wheel. The primary difference is that Meshcore started with "routing" first, and then save the airtime and therefore battery for routing messages.

geerlingguy did a video on it, and it's highly worth while checking it out. I think he was kind enough to use the term "Beta".

Supposedly the new firmware from Meshtastic fixes a lot of this, but it's gonna be a while for people to upgrade, and I'm not too keen on wasting time again on something if it's not fit to work for it's stated purpose originally.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-15 18:47:10+00:00
Yeah, I probably should have put firing in quotes since there are a zillion ways to get someone to leave. Being "Laid off" is a form of firing, telling someone all of their multipliers are being zeroed out so that they "quit" is a form of firing. Putting someone on a "performance improvement plan" where the requirements to get off that plan is to do really unpleasant work is a form of "firing." Lots of ways to get someone to walk out the door without having to escort them out. And if you went to the managing within the law class they gave it was clearly explained it was so much better if the employee "chose" to quit than Google "firing" them because involuntary termination carried with it the risks of being sued.

Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.

The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.

When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?

It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-04-15 18:47:18+00:00
I agree that it's very important not to lose control of your email account. Someone taking it over would be very bad indeed.

On the other hand, I don't have very high expectations when it comes to the security of the actual email messages. I don't control the other end at all. Email infrastructure, software and protocols are old and varied. Keeping those messages secure seems a bit hopeless.
by andrei_says_ | 2025-04-15 18:47:18+00:00
Because the screen medium is different from paper (emitting light vs reflecting light) pure black on white is a bit intense to the eye.

General recommendation is to reduce contrast a bit.

A good starting point would be #444 for the text and #eee for the background. #eeeee6 would warm the background a tiny bit.

Recommended line size is 65-85 characters, line-spacing at 1.3-1.5.
by abalone | 2025-04-15 18:47:31+00:00
“Those guys” are California YIMBY. The Stripe brothers for example are major funders.[1]

One of the “California Forever” billionaires, Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, looms large in Abundance world. Along with Open Philanthropy, he donated to fund a $120 million “Abundance” grant tied to Klein’s book release. Collison is a key backer and inspiration for the Institute for Progress (IFP), a think tank which works closely with others in the Abundance network, including at the Abundance 2024 conference. Collison co-founded “Progress Studies” with economist Tyler Cowen, born from their Atlantic article, “We Need a New Science of Progress.” While IFP isn’t officially a “Progress Studies” think tank, its mission aligns closely, and it has received funding from both Collison and Emergent Ventures, Cowen’s Mercatus Center grant program established with funding from Thiel. Klein and Thompson were interviewed by Collison on their book tour.

Cowen has his own interest in Network State style projects. Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency billionaire and Próspera funder, defines a Network State as “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world.” In this alternative governance structure, tech elites would create private, blockchain based enclaves—Srinivasan calls this “tech zionism.” Network States are founded on empty land, or by taking over an existing city—as Network State evangelists have attempted in San Francisco. Srinivasan even called for “ethnically cleansing” San Francisco of non-tech people.

Cowen is an early backer of Praxis, alongside Srinivasan and Thiel. Praxis describes itself as “a grassroots movement of modern pioneers,” aiming to build an autonomous, cryptocurrency city. Initial plans proposed a Mediterranean location, but last fall, the Praxis CEO tweeted “I went to Greenland to try to buy it.” Greenland, however, reiterated that the country is not for sale.

Cowen has been a protégé and friend of Thiel’s, citing him as a major influence. He advocates a form of government called “State Capacity Libertarianism” which, unlike anarcho-capitalism, includes a strong state apparatus. In Cowen’s words: “a good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty.” He explicitly credits Thiel for inspiring this idea: “You will note the influence of Peter Thiel on State Capacity Libertarianism,” Cowen writes, “though I have never heard him frame the issues in this way.”

[1] https://www.housingisahumanright.org/why-is-california-yimby...
by Rebelgecko | 2025-04-15 18:47:38+00:00
The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-15 18:48:27+00:00
I am not arguing that ideas should be free from criticism. Not at all. Not sure how you got that idea.

I'm arguing that we shouldn't censor bad ideas, or exclude them entirely from the relevant discussions. And more to the point, when we educate the next generation we should be doing so in a holistic way so that they understand why and when bad ideas are bad, and why those ideas were ever popular in the first place.

I'm arguing against ideological censorship, not justified and well constructed criticism.
by pphysch | 2025-04-15 18:48:35+00:00
Hence the "defensive" qualifier. Defensive bureaucrats hide behind the "just doing my job / following orders" excuse. This is problematic when it is at odds with ethics, especially in civil service organizations.

Following protocol is critical to the function of large human organizations, but it's not everything. People who blindly follow protocol without heed to societal values and ethics are no different than killer robots.

Adolf Eichmann was a defensive bureaucrat.
by stale2002 | 2025-04-15 18:48:44+00:00
> You will find no judge willing to entertain your

Yes they will. Judges have already ruled that you can't just ban people from using your IP, like by standing on your head.

It is only publishing someone else's IP that is disallowed.

This is copyright law 101.

You can it seriously be arguing that an IP owner could ban someone from listening to their music while standing on one's head, for example.