MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stackedinserter | 2025-04-09 20:46:47+00:00
I don't understand why you're downvoted. I grew up in a country that did exactly this, until collapsed. Strong social nets, free housing, free medicine for all, free education, no unemployment, sounds like heaven, right?

The only problem is that every person is a government-owned livestock unit. Their thoughts, knowledge, career paths, kids, even their private life, everything is controlled by government, that also obligates you to watch after your neighbours and co-workers. You can't even leave the country without government permission. You can expelled if you don't like the government though. You can't work where you want after getting your degree, government will send you where they think they need you to be. School is never ending propaganda. We literally had "political information" every Monday, since grade 1. Also, since grade 1 you're in one of the tiers of the only allowed political party of the country. There's tier for grade 1 to 3, then for 4 to 8, then from 8 to 10. Every 18yo is drafted for 2 years for armed forces (3 for navy). I can go on and on.

I remember it too well and would never trade messy and chaotic capitalist society to that labour camp with "free" rations.

It's frightening that so many people in 1st world want to live in a cage with 3-times-a-day meal.
by itishappy | 2025-04-09 20:46:52+00:00
1. This isn't at all obvious to me. Look at the number of people who continue working well into retirement or the people who volunteer their time. I tried sitting on my ass for three months after college and it drove me so crazy I picked up WebGL despite having zero intention of using it in my career.

2. Most UBI proposals I've seen involve replacing existing programs with UBI. My personal favorite proposal is a flat tax that's fully redistributed. There's no deficit possible here, if tax revenue goes down, so do payments.
by 9rx | 2025-04-09 20:47:33+00:00
> ...are mediocre programmers.

That depends on the beholder.

- A programmer who applies a laundry list of what they do to determine who makes for a "best" programmer, who doesn't guess themselves, is likely to exclude anyone who does.

- A business person is apt to consider someone who successfully delivers a product quickly by using someone else's code among the "best".

> You can't capture why in code.

Then you can't capture it in natural language either, making this whole thing moot. But I disagree with that idea.

> Your tests are a demonstration of the "what."

You have a point that some testing frameworks carve out a special declaration for "example" tests that are marked for inclusion in generated API docs. There might be a time and place for that kind of documentation, but that isn't the kind of testing I was thinking of. That isn't representative of the vast majority of the tests you will write. If it is, you're doing something wrong – or at very least aren't being fair to those who will consume your tests later.

In my laundry list, concern for the next guy is what separates the "best" programmers from the mediocre. But I understand why your laundry list differs.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-09 20:48:03+00:00
While the fact that the artist ended up selling a piece of art for $100k is absolutely reliant on the full totality of the social context .. what happens next is where wealth concentration does or does not happen. And that is (to a good approximation) almost entirely the realm of tax policy.

That is why I gave two different societies as examples - both have managed to construct a social context where this happens, but what happens next is different in each of them.

Put more crudely, wealth concentration is about not taxing high levels of income at high marginal rates. It is not about the specifics of how those high levels of income arise, who they happen to, etc. etc.
by qsort | 2025-04-09 20:48:03+00:00
My sentence there is a bit unclear -- I meant it as an implication.

Arithmetic on fixed-width registers in O(1) is equivalent to saying that bit operations are O(1), which intuitively makes the most sense, after all adding two uint64 is not the same as adding two arbitrary precision integers. But that's not always the model we pick, often we just assume that arithmetic is O(1) and sweep length considerations under the rug.

Also, what does fixed mean? Is it like the word size in an actual computer architecture, where registers are 64 bits and that's all you'll ever get, or it depends on the size of input? Because the latter is the transdichotomous model, yet another option. Unsurprisingly you can get different results with different computational models.

This is not to say that asymptotic analysis is wrong, obviously, but it's a bit of a mess and it's important to remember what computational model the analysis was performed under.
by notatoad | 2025-04-09 20:48:20+00:00
>So $100 was never the sale price, just some made up, hoped for number that only appears on the shoe box, and not on anyone's financial statements. Really this should be Footlocker makes $6 on selling a $66 sneaker, for a margin of ~9%.

yes. but any arguments you see in favour of onshoring manufacturing would use undiscounted list prices, so it makes sense to start from that place.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-09 20:49:57+00:00
I agree that historically such movements always ended up badly, e.g. Russia and China. I'd argue that Russia and China picked Socialism not because they had abundance of materials, but on the contrary, because they were too weak back then, so that Socialism gave them the tool of collectivism to fight against external threats and built up industries quickly.

We have never tried something like that (as you said UBP) in a rich country. I guess Norway and Sweden are closer? But I'm not sure.

Agree with your points on UBI.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-09 20:50:00+00:00
Uncertainty is a massive problem and may itself bring on a recession more than any tariffs. It's a huge factor in the oil market crash that's currently going on. I've seen one oil expert say that Obama was the best president for the oil industry because he did... nothing. There were no kneejerk policy changes on a weekly basis. And anything requiring large capital investments thrives on certainty.

As for Treasury yields spiking, that was no accident. As part of China's (justified) retaliation to the tariffs, they started selling off 10 year Treasuries intentaionlly to spike the rates because that's one thing the Trump administration seemed to care about.

I still don't know what the endgame is/was here. Some seem to think devaluing the dollar was the goal to boost exports but also to effectively devalue US soverieng debt. There's precedent for this eg FDR's sovereign devaluation of the dollar and Reagan's Plaza Accord.
Shopify Plus Referral Rejected After Approval – How Is This Fair?
by legalmatch | 2025-04-09 20:50:09+00:00
We did a complete Shopify CRO audit for a client, including deep recommendations on how to improve their checkout experience. As part of the findings, we suggested they upgrade to Shopify Plus, which they agreed to.

Here’s how it went down:

1. We submitted a Sales Assisted Plus Lead (no response from Shopify for 4 days). 2. To avoid delays, we submitted the lead again directly and made it crystal clear that the client was upgrading based on our recommendation. 3. The client immediately upgraded to Plus. 4. Shopify support confirmed our eligibility and even mentioned backpay for the lead. Great! 5. 30 minutes later, we received another message saying the referral was being denied because the client had previously engaged with Shopify.

Apparently, any prior interaction between a merchant and anyone at Shopify (even if not sales-related) voids the partner referral.

Never mind the full audit we performed. Never mind the email trail with the client. Never mind the fact that it was our recommendation that led to the Plus upgrade.

Even the client was surprised to hear that the referral was not approved.

This system doesn’t feel like a partnership. It feels like a gotcha clause waiting to happen. How are we supposed to promote Plus when the reward system is this fragile?

What’s worse is that initially we were told we were eligible. That message was reversed almost immediately. The lack of clarity is exhausting.

We’ve done similar work with other SaaS platforms where leads and partnerships are tracked more fairly. This kind of inconsistency is not what we expected.

Would love to know—has anyone else had a similar experience with Shopify Plus referrals?
by gagan2020 | 2025-04-09 20:51:11+00:00
I have 15 years of experience with Python however in this project, I didn't coded anything. Just Vibe coded. Putting errors from the console into chat.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking model used in this (using Github Copilot).

Documentation is also available at https://email-deliverability.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ which is also fully vibe coded.

Even the architecture diagram (https://email-deliverability.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overvi...) is also vibe-coded into mermaid diagrams.
by bluGill | 2025-04-09 20:51:20+00:00
I could work two different retail jobs in a day if the schedules work out. I cannot work 40 hours a week as an engineer, much less take on a second job (fortunately I can always find a few mindless meetings to make up my job). So long as I'm expected to work 40 hour weeks my company is justified in asking me not work a second job in my field as I couldn't anyway.

Now I could go out and get a retail job for after my regular job.
by LWIRVoltage | 2025-04-09 20:51:22+00:00
This is something no on discusses but I've wondered heavily- GRUB can be made to not show a menu and then boot up Windows automatically, in like a second or two with no one the wiser. [There is an obnoxious welcome to grub message that pops up now but I see a public project out there that solves this very easily called GRUB shusher]

I don't know if other bootloaders outside GRUB have a silent/hidden start option, as well in a similar vein that would require you to hit a key in that first second to get the menu to appear, or else it just boots up normally

I wonder about the other approach, just going into the BIOS nad changing the order so Windows boots first, which should be doable in some setups. Lock the BIOS with a password, and you're in not bad shape. (Not sure if Secure Boot being enabled could also help here - probably couldn't hurt)
by mrangle | 2025-04-09 20:51:33+00:00
That's right. Community wide Universal Basic Income would cause price rises for shelf goods, negating the intended beneficial effect.

As the value of money is always relative to its scarcity. More money held by all individuals always leads to higher prices, because it leads to money being worth less. Life only becomes less expensive when making more money than others. This is a basic dynamic of how money works, at its most fundamental level.

Society would need price controls to stop shelf prices from rising, and to maintain the beneficial effect of UBI (being able to afford more goods). At that point shortages are incoming, and UBI income functionally transforms from money to credits for goods. Even if it is still called money. Credits implies a limit on how much goods people are allotted, even if given credits / money to redeem said allotment. The government needs to decide how much in goods each individual is allotted.

This is where it gets bad. Communist propaganda practice is to promise that the communist society will allot a maximum amount goods per person out of its GDP, implying an evenly distributed yet relatively well off populace. Visualize a pie that is cut in large slices and completely distributed.

The rub is that the government gets to keep any part of the pie that is not distributed, and so its incentive is to distribute the least amount of the pie and the smallest slices. Which is what we see in practice. People given the minimum of their collective production value to sustain their existence. With the government hoarding the rest. Slaves in all but name.

The government now has a taste of control over wealth distribution for part of its GDP, which it enacts via entitlement over some production value of work and private business. Whatever production value is left for the private sector economy is now tempting for the government to also take over and minimally distribute in the same manner, because again the government gets to keep much of the money. Private business and employment begin to become dirty words.

We live in a World that is dominated by the fundamental nature of money, some would call it a fallen world. Making a low amount of money feels like a slave's existence.

However, at least in a free market economy there is a type of escape hatch from that existence should someone figure out how to provide society with relatively more value than others. Whereas in a socialist society, that escape hatch tends to legally close as the years tick by and the personal allotment of goods declines.
by throwaway743 | 2025-04-09 20:51:44+00:00
While cash like UBI offers flexibility, criticizing targeted aid like food stamps misses the point. These programs are essential safety nets for the most vulnerable. While some misuse might occur – often signaling deeper needs requiring more services, not less food – focusing on that minority ignores the vast majority who rely on this aid to simply survive.

Suggesting it's "unfair" if you don't need specific help ignores the purpose of a safety net. How a society supports those facing hardship is a measure of its character. Worrying about potential misuse at the lowest rungs seems disproportionate when compared to massive government spending elsewhere. Ultimately, denying essential aid based on assumptions about how a few might misuse it is counterproductive and lacks compassion.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-09 20:52:38+00:00
I echo what the others say about the current interface.

I think there is an opportunity for "normal" and "hard mode" like Wordle. In normal you are given the names of the factors but have to enter the expressions for their value (no default values given). In hard you have to come up with your own factor names as well as the values (the name is purely aesthetic for the user to keep track of their ideas). The win condition is the same (be within an order of magnitude of the answer) but maybe there is a special "super" win for being within 10% (log scaled, so lower bound n^0.9 and upper bound n^1.1).
by metabagel | 2025-04-09 20:52:40+00:00
> 2. We obviously can't afford UBI. Most governments have severe deficits even without UBI. "Tax the rich! Then we'll be able to afford it!".. yes well that's orthogonal. Let me know when you figure out how to do that.

That's not at all obvious. I'm not rich, but I recall when I made far less money and was taxed at a marginal rate which was 4% higher than the one which applies to me now. In the U.S., we've made a conscious decision to keep cutting taxes and running large deficits. We could decide to raise taxes and pay for UBI. Yes, that's a political problem, but it's not at all the problem that we can't afford UBI.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-09 20:52:42+00:00
> Been on a 50,000 pill once a week since.

FYI, spiking Vitamin D levels in the blood weekly might not be the best idea, though it's not exactly proven. There's a theory that spiking Vitamin D like that can promote blood vessel calcification. There's some more theory that Vitamin K administered at the same time might help.

It could be safer to do 5,000 IU seven days a week than spikes of 50K once a week.

Watch out, though. I was on a similar daily dose and ended up with Vitamin D levels touching the upper limit. Too much Vitamin D is not good for you.

> and drank fortified almond milk daily.

Can't say without seeing the labels, but I wouldn't expect a cup of almond milk to have more than 10-20% of your daily value.
by jdasdf | 2025-04-09 20:52:53+00:00
>Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues.

None of those are state capacity issues.

Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues.

Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening.

All of these issues are 100% self inflicted by the state getting in the way.

All that needs to happen for them to fix themselves is to stop actively preventing private individuals from fixing them.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-09 20:52:55+00:00
A ten pound bag of russet potatoes costs $2-3 here (high CoL SoCal), and that's >3,000 kcal. A four pound bag of pinto beans is $4, that's >5,000 kcal. That's four days of 2,000 kcal per day for $7. Likewise 32,000 kCal of rice at Costco is $24 so it gets even cheaper when you buy those 20-40 pound bags. That goes for quinoa, lentils, and all kinds of other staples. Base caloric requirements are really cheap to cover with the basics, and should cost $50-60/mo. The rest can be spent on fresh meat, veggies, and fruit.

Under $200/mo is relatively easy to achieve as long as you know how to cook or can tolerate a repetitive diet. Stretching it to $250-300/mo takes it up a notch and makes it a very balanced and varied diet with whatever fruit and vegetables you want. I only run it up to $300/mo when I buy higher quality meats at Costco and eat an avocado a day.
by solfox | 2025-04-09 20:52:59+00:00
No. This isn't an economic policy.

It’s time to stop bending over backwards pretending that Trump’s tariff threats are part of a coherent economic strategy. They’re not.

When you drop the economic lens and view tariffs as a political tool for consolidating power, everything suddenly makes sense.

Here’s how it works: - Tariffs hurt corporations. They jack up costs, raise costs. Executives know this. The markets know this. - But there’s a loophole: carve-outs. Trump has the power to exempt individual companies or industries from these tariffs. That means if you’re a CEO and your business is on the line, your only option is to go to Trump and ask for mercy. - That’s not policy. It’s leverage. It creates a system where corporate leaders must show loyalty to get relief. Not because it’s good for the economy, but because it’s good for Trump. Maybe it's public support for his initiatives, attacks on his enemies. Whatever it is, it gives him political power.

This mirrors the playbook used by authoritarian leaders throughout history. Look at Putin. His use of tariffs wasn’t about growing Russia’s economy—it was about punishing enemies, rewarding loyalty, and projecting control. Tariffs became a way to rewire power dynamics.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-09 20:53:07+00:00
Hey Tyler; looking back I think maybe a better language than "reducers" etc would have been to just something analogous to the ECS term "systems", which I understand to be "processes that operate on entities / components" and always seemed overly general and non-specific to me but at least is familiar to game programmers operating in data driven design.

You may recall I was partial to the term "verb" :-)
by jmye | 2025-04-09 20:53:56+00:00
That’s a pretty dishonest reading of this topic. Do you think DG “cares” about poor people? Do you think people might worry about poor people being exploited and ending up worse off?

Or is this just a “Label X is my whole entire personality so anything that isn’t Label X must be horrible and the only people in favor of it are actually evil” terminally online thing?
by LWIRVoltage | 2025-04-09 20:54:22+00:00
Veracrypt. It's successor, keeps this feature - of allowing for a truly hidden OS- but there's a HUGE flaw everyone missed- it requires your laptop to be setup as MBR-= which only allows for 4 partitions, and you can't have more than like 2 TB of filespace on it total.

We need a similar solution for UEFI- that allows for truly hidden, foolproof hidden OS installs.
by sva_ | 2025-04-09 20:54:24+00:00
I just subscribed to the free trial yesterday, and I've been hooked tbh. I haven't subscribed to any of the other LLM companies so far. I hope something else comes out within a month because I really don't want to spend 22 Euro per month for it.

The 1M context window (2M?) really sets it apart.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-09 20:55:10+00:00
Vitamin D has a very long half-life in the body once stored. On the order of a month or two.

This leads a lot of people into slowly overdosing over several years. They start with low levels, get up to mid-range on their next blood test, and think they're on the right track. Continuing the same dose for years can easily put you over the top if you're not careful.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-09 20:55:12+00:00
Nice summary!

Indeed, we regard software engineering as being primarily decision making. This is a stark departure from the typical perception of software engineering as a construction activity.

Once you take this path, the tools are going to be different. So different that they will appear odd to most people used to the other point of view.

For example, a typical development environment will start with an editor. But editing should come after reading. So, that design is really not that ideal. Having the editing come at the end is perhaps more appropriate. And there are several other such consequences that stem from that original difference in points of view.
by chiph | 2025-04-09 20:55:26+00:00
Rolex has an animation on their site (scroll about 1/3 down): https://www.rolex.com/en-us/watches/land-dweller

They will really have to have good tolerances, because now there are two wheels connected via a gear instead of just the one in a Lever escapement. The wheels themselves interlock because of their shape, but there's going to be additional backlash.

I'm wondering if the hollow areas in the wheels provide some impact shock resilience with the sides flexing a tiny bit.
by pkdpic | 2025-04-09 20:55:41+00:00
Seems like one of the primary themes in responses here is inflation, which seems like it makes sense.

But is the point of this study to provide a basis / justification for larger tests? And if so would the next step be to test a UBI for the full population of a small city or state?

The discussion around inflation though is making me wonder if any non-global plan for a UBI would be enough. Is it something that would have to be adopted universally / globally before the real effects on inflation / economies could be determined? If so is this just a doomed concept?
by matt-p | 2025-04-09 20:55:41+00:00
So would we be able to get the exact same deal we had? We are under the impression the answer is no, as whenever we try and negotiate away stuff that's in neither of our interests it gets rejected.

Take this Eitas Visa for example, this is literally just sowing resentment towards the EU in the UK. It benefits nobody and is totally insane, it's just making people hate the EU. Same with not being able to use the digital passport machines at airports.. why?? We're a pretty secure country, we have digital passports. Brexit happens and now every time I go to Europe, which is a lot I've got a 50/50 chance of waiting 3 hours at the border for someone to stamp my passport while the digital gates have no queue. That means I now have to arrive 3 hours early every time just in case. If I bring a tool for work I need to spend weeks of paperwork on something called a carnet so I end up buying there and throwing out.

At the moment we're trying to give security backing for Ukraine and you're asking us to give up our fishing rights for the honour of helping secure Europe.

I get it, actions have consequences, but the thing is that only a minority voted for Brexit, most of us didn't. Each year you're disenfranchising a new generation of would be Europeans with this path. To me it's all dreadfully regrettable, the whole things a mess.

It's impossible for us to 'come to our senses' while we get treated like this in my view.