MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soundwave106 | 2025-04-26 20:25:10+00:00
If you think of authoritarianism as more of a "spread" and not as a black-or-white thing, you can see where the problems with "Trumpism" are.

Using the terms of The Economist's "democracy index", I see the United States under Trump 2.0 as a denigrated "flawed democracy". There is even some danger of the United States backsliding towards a "hybrid regime". Hybrid regimes combine some aspects of electoral democracy with some aspects of authoritarianism. Prominent examples of hybrid regimes include Turkey and El Salvador.

Maybe we won't get that far -- strong federalism will help here. But while The Economist has ranked the United States as a borderline "flawed democracy" for the last several years, I suspect 2025's rankings will be considerably lower. My "gut feel" is that the United States could end up ranked close to present-day Hungary, or Poland under PiS. In both cases from what I remember, democracy still was present, but considerable damage was done via institutional attacks on the press and the universities. A US attorney general arresting judges for what seems like a minor dispute (but one involving migrants) seems like a pretty big flag that some degree of authoritarianism has taken hold. As is the erosion of due process involving immigrants.

Long run, I think this institutional damage being done by Trump is the most concerning aspect of Trump 2.0. Trump is actively damaging future engines of American growth (research science and universities). My guess, too, is that the anti-immigrant hostility might damage the previous paradigm where many of the brightest in the world came to America for both research and careers. There is a significant core of American voters that supports this stuff; the most vocal of this core in fact cheer on the arrest of judges and actively attack technologies where the conspiracies overwhelm the facts. (Witness the recent push of a few states to actually restrict mRNA vaccines for... reasons? Nothing solid that I can think of.) I do not think that this element will go away after Trump moves on.
by ajross | 2025-04-26 20:25:18+00:00
No? $20US/hour is higher than any national wage floor currently, wikipedia unsurprisingly has a great list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_w...

Even in PPP units (which subsumes both your points) California beats everyone in that list but Argentina (which has some kind of craziness in its PPP scaling I don't understand). The next closest is the Netherlands at ~$17.

I mean, it really shouldn't be surprising to point out that California is really fucking wealthy.
by fidotron | 2025-04-26 20:25:23+00:00
> The episode hints at a wider trend: global economic data have become alarmingly poor.

Isn't the cause of this obvious? There is so much political interference in the metrics. Inflation, unemployment, whether it is officially a recession or not - all of these have been manipulated out of all relationship with reality.

The article goes on to wonder about the decline in citizens participating in surveys. If the obvious is going to be ignored then why bother helping them fabricate the lie?

There has been a culture of way too much interventionism that has crept in to too many parts of the structures for economic governance. Now it's a miracle that what remains of the free market pricing mechanism works at all given how many fingers are trying to tip the scales all over the place.
by phillryu | 2025-04-26 20:25:25+00:00
I think this is a pretty common and growing sentiment that I've felt too. One thing that has grounded me is learning and reminding myself that capitalism has driven extreme poverty across the world to the lowest share in known human history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#:~:text=Extrem...

I'm not sure if this on its own is enough to make up for the negatives, but it did personally restore some perspective that there is some real good to it alongside the bad. So I've personally shifted from more doomer sentiments on peak capitalism to feeling a little more hopeful. (That despite the dysfunctions of it there could still be a functional good foundation worth keeping and iterating on rather than the only solution being throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
by globnomulous | 2025-04-26 20:26:40+00:00
Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star contains a wonderful variant of this thought experiment: in the future he describes, memories are editable; so it's possible to commit a crime, like murder, and then wipe all memory of it, so that you are, from your own perspective, innocent. The justice system, of course, says otherwise. The metaphysics (whether or not it's possible to step into the same river twice) don't matter. Technological advancement dictates the answer to the philosophical question about continuity of the self and guilt.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-26 20:26:45+00:00
As noted by the linked page those are minimum requirements. The relevant law regarding obstruction [0] is USC 18 §1505 [1]. It isn't immediately obvious to me that it was violated.

The first paragraph only appears to apply to physical evidence. The second paragraph appears to require more than merely assisting someone.

> Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication

The latter two obviously don't apply so that only leaves the former. Did the judge act "corruptly"?

The other law cited in the complaint is USC 18 §1071 [2] and the question would be if leading someone to an alternate pathway constitutes either harboring or concealing the individual. I don't feel like letting someone out my backdoor constitutes "concealing" a person as the term is commonly used. As an example, hiding someone in a closet and then telling the officers that he isn't in the building would obviously qualify.

[0] https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/3d022b74...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1505

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1071
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-26 20:27:02+00:00
Well obviously a study funded by the industry has zero value. They conclude what they are paid to.

The industry does price segmentation now, so it’s hard to measure the prices anyway. If you order two egg McMuffins and two coffees at the counter in my city, it’s $13. With the app… $8.

Im in California a few times a year. The prices if different are very marginally so.
by homefree | 2025-04-26 20:27:09+00:00
> “But I can’t see what it is “the economy” has given us in return.”

More wealth for more people faster than anything else in human history? Add in all the things that come along with that like reduced infant mortality, improved longevity, less violence, etc.

Compare that to what anti-economy marxists deliver: a lot of ideology followed by death of millions.

Markets are really good at solving problems and organizing resources efficiently - they’re not perfect and exist within political natsec concerns, can have bad incentives that lead to tragedy of the commons types of outcomes, but those can and often are mitigated when it’s in the interest of the parties to do so.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-26 20:27:11+00:00
For what it's worth, the ISP may not know the search terms entered, but it can see "google.com" followed by "itchybuttcream.net" when people click the first results. The data will grow more granular over time as users click the second or even third result on Google.

On WiFi you control this risk can be mitigated (force DNS to your own server that uses ODoH or similar) but for most people ISPs are still sitting on data gold mines obtained from passively observing DNS.
by em-bee | 2025-04-26 20:27:28+00:00
that's different. in my home i can disappear into my room and keep myself busy there. when at another place i have to behave, i can't go run around and explore (unless they have a garden and kids are allowed to go outside)

as a parent i would not drag my kids to a place unless there are other kids or i know there is something interesting for them.

but right on topic, the solution is to not live alone with your kids. we are in a multifamily compound where other families have children too, and there is no problem for some of the adults to go out while others stay back and make sure the kids are safe. (they are not providing entertainment but someone is always around should something happen).

this of course is only possible because i did connect to the neighbors. or rather, they connected to us. i always wanted to live in a place like that, but finding this one was pure serendipity. we weren't actually looking. it just happened that the neighbors turned out that way.
by tssva | 2025-04-26 20:27:43+00:00
My daughter will be starting in the fall at a private STEM focused university. They pride themselves on being a difficult school which throws you right into the deep end. They have no fancy gyms, the dorms are basic cinder block buildings without any fancy conveniences including no AC. The dining hall is very basic with limited food stations. It is very much inline with the amenities or lack of at my college when I was a freshmen in 1987. It has 1 D1 sport with the rest being D3. It is located in a mostly rural area.

The other finalist school she didn’t choose is also private but has every amenity under the sun. The newer dorms which she would have been in because of her major have state of the art gyms inside them and parking garages under them which she would have been assigned a spot in. Multiple dining facilities whith a wide range of high quality food. The school has a full array of D1 sports programs and new atheletic facilities built within the last 5-15 years. It is located in a large metropolitan area. It doesn’t have near the same quality of academics as her choice.

The estimated cost of attendance for 25-26 is with $500 of each other. Both being around $89k before any aid. She doesn’t qualify for federal financial aid. Luckily both offered very substantial merit aid. She did also consider one of our state schools. Although not as nice as the private she didn’t choose it is much closer to that than the school she did choose. They, along with all our state schools, are known for giving almost no aid beyond federal financial aid. The cost to attend would have been more than the two private schools after their merit aid awards.

I guess my point is they get you whether they give you amenities or not and whether they are private or public.
by ec109685 | 2025-04-26 20:27:46+00:00
Chick-fil-A raised their prices everywhere, so it can’t just be because of this law:

“That's right: A year ago, in January of 2023, Chick-fil-A implemented a 6% price increase on all menu items. The previous year, their signature sandwich increased in price by 15%. That means your favorite chicken sandwich is now significantly pricier than it was just two years ago”

https://www.shefinds.com/collections/chick-fil-a-inflation/
by wutwutwat | 2025-04-26 20:27:56+00:00
> Tell them it's not relevant

So, lie then, is what you should do instead of lying, in order to have a good faith negotiation.

Ps a lot of corporations commit crimes. They are professional liars, they don’t lose track and when they do get caught (hardly anyone is looking), they pay a fine and do it again.“Cost of doing business” if you will. Plus your common criminal usually isn’t able to get politicians elected by contributing hundred of millions to their campaigns, etc.
by rapjr9 | 2025-04-26 20:28:32+00:00
Dexterity is also hard because, at least in humans, it relies on knowing something of the nature of an object _before_ manipulating it. Is it light or heavy? Soft or rigid? Is it a bag of popcorn, popcorn kernels, a bag of powder, or a pillow? How tightly is it packed in the bag? Fabric or cardboard? Attached to other objects or not? Is the USB plug the right type and oriented correctly? (Even humans have trouble with this one.) Does it have a slippery surface or a grippy surface? To be immediately successful in manipulation, pre-knowledge based on sensing and identification is usually required. Possibly it would be ok if a robot took several tries to figure this out based on some general principles, but it will seem clumsy and be slower. It seems there is an ontology problem here, which requires understanding a lot about the world in order to be able to successfully manipulate it.

More generally, continuous learning in real-time is something current models don't do well. Retraining an entire LLM every time something new is encountered is not scalable. Temporary learning does not easily transfer to long term knowledge. Continuous learning still seems in its infancy.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-04-26 20:28:47+00:00
> it's a relatively small but extremely loud contingent of people that have meltdowns over AI-generated images and video.

That's not my experience at all. Hacker News is indeed an echo chamber, but sometimes things escape, and discussion of how much people hate AI "art" is becoming increasingly common among my non-tech friends. The earliest example most people point to is the Christmas Coca-Cola commercial.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-26 20:28:55+00:00
This. My boss had the nerve to tell me inflation is not a valid reason for a discussion of raises all the while company ( and its upper management ) had a rather good year and did not hesitate to reward themselves accordingly. Surely, previous year's bonuses would have sufficed. Honestly, it is a public company. Do they think we don't read quarterly results that they themselves publish?

I am effectively being paid less and the expectation is that I somehow work more. In fact, and this is genuinely the part that gets me more than anything else, when I mentioned it to my extended family during a social function, the response was: "can't you work on a train?".

I don't get it man. Is it some sort of weird generational gap? What gives?
by knorker | 2025-04-26 20:29:36+00:00
My experience with cmake, though dated, is that it's simpler because it simply cannot do what autotools can do.

It really smelled of "oh I can do this better", and you rewrite it, and as part of rewriting it you realise oh, this is why the previous solution was complicated. It's because the problem is actually more complex than I though.

And then of course there's the problem where you need to install on an old release. But the thing you want to install requires a newer cmake (autotools doesn't have this problem because it's self contained). But this is an old system that you cannot upgrade, because the vendor support contract for what the server runs would be invalidated. So now you're down a rabbit hole of trying to get a new version of cmake to build on an unsupported system. Sigh. It's less work to just try to construct `gcc` commands yourself, even for a medium sized project. Either way, this is now your whole day, or whole week.

If only the project had used autotools.
by conover | 2025-04-26 20:29:37+00:00
Uh, it’s given you a lot in return. It abstracts away a lot of the human condition for a lot of people. Personally, I don’t want to go back to growing food to feed myself and bartering. Most people are aligned with that point of view.

Edit: In fact, it works so well, you can ask what it does for you.
by dheera | 2025-04-26 20:29:49+00:00
Currency as a way to trade value and skills is a beautiful invention, and that is to be credited for a lot of modern quality of life.

But everything else in the economy (extreme taxation, medical care, housing) has become increasingly predatory over the decades.

> how to diagnose and treat diabetes

Take this as an example. The "economy", as a machine, has learned to subsidize corn syrup, infiltrate every food with forms of sugar including what children eat at school (fuck chocolate milk, PB&J sandwiches, canned fruit in sugar syrup, none are healthy), then profit off of them when they get diabetes later in life. Insurance-scam them by making them pay premiums per month but still not cover their medical costs in full, make them pay for any preventative care they want to have because a doctor didn't "prescribe" it and it wouldn't be profitable to prevent disease. Make healthy food expensive, so that you can get as many people to get diabetes as possible. Lobby against having kitchens in schools so that they are forced to serve even more unhealthy shit. This is what capitalism as a machine has learned.

Diabetes shouldn't even be such a pervasive thing. It's highly preventable. It is in fact of the most preventable of common diseases. The economy machine, however, has realized that diabetes is profitable for the people who own and control the machine (Wall Street, insurance companies, banks).

This is just one example, but the entire system has become predatory.
by delichon | 2025-04-26 20:29:56+00:00
I met JPB briefly once, after he spoke at a San Francisco tech conference in the mid '90s. He was a particularly charismatic man.

We were so hyped up about the internet in those days. He predicted that we were witnesses of the extinction of the authoritarian state at the hands of the people armed with this new tool. But were also locked in the closet with a dying dinosaur, and that's not a safe place to be.

Thirty years later the dinosaur still looks uncomfortably healthy to me, but the closet is still shrinking.
by im3w1l | 2025-04-26 20:30:05+00:00
> The second issue is people’s relationship with the state. The average response rate to a crucial population survey produced by the BLS has fallen from 88% to 69% in the past decade. Canadians are 15% less likely to respond to a labour-force survey than pre-covid. Over the past decade the response rate to Britain’s labour-force survey has gone from 48% to 20%.

I think this is under-discussed in this thread. I do think people like their states less and it's an important trend.
by marcodiego | 2025-04-26 20:30:24+00:00
In Brazil the entity "the economy" is called "os mercados" meaning "the markets". It is handled by the press as a personality who has humor, wishes, preferences and power. It is actually somewhat funny or curious when you read things like "the markets didn't liked what was said and shares fell".

Of course, it is clear that politics has impact on investors but, other than being able to vote, there should be no other way to influence politics in a democracy.
by atrettel | 2025-04-26 20:30:30+00:00
This is somewhat interesting, but I should note that the company Geospy [1] already has an AI tool to locate where a photo is taken, though it is now limited to law enforcement and intelligence agencies only. See this article [2] by 404 Media for more information.

[1] https://geospy.ai/

[2] https://www.404media.co/the-powerful-ai-tool-that-cops-or-st...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-26 20:30:37+00:00
> c) deport the entire family, including the US minors. Since they have US citizenship, they can always return to the US

I mean sure. But let's let the next Democrat who's in charge determine that kidnapping or maybe even voting wrong are crimes that merit summary deportation. After all, if they're good citizens, they can always return.

The history of suspending habeas corpus is strikingly one way. Maybe we'll be the first society to defy that trend. But the end game we're heading to is mass political violence.
by ec109685 | 2025-04-26 20:30:43+00:00
The first studies that came out failed to adjust for seasonality.

“Here’s the problem with that figure: It’s derived from a government statistic that is not seasonally adjusted. That’s crucial when tracking jobs in seasonal industries, such as restaurants, because their business and consequently employment fluctuate in predictable patterns through the year. For this reason, economists vastly prefer seasonally adjusted figures when plotting out employment trend lines in those industries.”

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-12/the-fast-f...
by closewith | 2025-04-26 20:31:27+00:00
> Is the idea that friendship might be transactional too scary a thought to consider head on?

Rather than be defensive, it was designed to shock you out of your current thought patterns on friendship, because they are almost delusional. Neither movie idealised friends nor real-life friendships have any of the characteristics you describe, and that is distorting your view of the world.

Pretending real friendship is a Hollywood myth is self-selecting yourself out of one of the most rewarding aspects of life. Don't do it to yourself.

> The study authors gave a survey to 84 college students in the same class,

Come on, time to get offline and go make some friends.
by snackbroken | 2025-04-26 20:32:01+00:00
Popularity contests don't do a great job of surfacing quality. They do OK at pruning away the dullest 25℅, but tend to also throw away the top 5‰ most interesting stuff, because that stuff is invariably niche. They also don't do great in the meh middle, favoring loudness and approachability over thoughtfulness and competence.
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-26 20:32:59+00:00
I understand GP's post in a different way - While I consider economic indicators to be very important, I think they fail to measure properly "quality of life" while ate the same time being used as surrogate for it.

For example, a public park may be a great asset to the people that live around it. But it generates little to none in terms of GDP. Privatizing it and turning it into a parking lot has more economic activity, while making the lives of people meaningfully worse.

That we don't have good measurements to reconcile that contradiction is what turns us into "slaves of the economy"
by jdiff | 2025-04-26 20:33:04+00:00
My guess is that those questions are very typical and follow very normal patterns and use well established processes. Give it something weird and it'll continuously trip over itself.

My current project is nothing too bizarre, it's a 3D renderer. Well-trodden ground. But my project breaks a lot of core assumptions and common conventions, and so any LLM I try to introduce—Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Thinking, o3—they all tangle themselves up between what's actually in the codebase and the strong pull of what's in the training data.

I tried layering on reminders and guidance in the prompting, but ultimately I just end up narrowing its view, limiting its insight, and removing even the context that this is a 3D renderer and not just pure geometry.
by nout | 2025-04-26 20:33:04+00:00
The economy is us. The economy is how we express our needs and "haves" at scale. In smaller settings - family, friends - you can often just communicate the needs/haves directly, but anything beyond that needs some efficient tool. Now the current system how we do banking, money, who decides, etc... that's indeed broken at the very foundation.

On the flip side I can wholeheartedly recommend the Margaritaville episode of South Park! Such a beautiful satire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaritaville_(South_Park)
Show HN: GitMCP adds an in-browser chat for any GitHub repo docs
by adusal | 2025-04-26 20:33:09+00:00
GitMCP is a free, open-source, zero-setup remote MCP server that enables AI agents, such as Cursor and Windsurf, to access up-to-date documentation and code for any GitHub repository.

We've just introduced a new quick-start feature that allows you to give GitMCP a spin by chatting with any GitHub repo documentation instantly in your browser. Replace github.com with gitmcp.io in the URL to use GitMCP just as AI agents do.

Add GitMCP as a remote MCP server to your favorite IDE to empower your AI agent while you code, drastically improving its capabilities with live, accurate context!

Example: https://gitmcp.io/mrdoob/three.js

See the project here: https://github.com/idosal/git-mcp

Feedback and contributions are welcome!