MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doesnotexist | 2025-04-15 15:03:52+00:00
Well there are now many instances of enforced disappearances.[1] To what the administration likes to call jails in Ecuador, except for the fact jails and prisons are part of legitimate criminal justice systems with judicial review/due process. These can be more accurately described as concentration camps given that they lack the features that would make them legitimate jails or detention facilities.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/wg-disappearance...

" [Enforced disappearance] is characterized by three cumulative elements (defined in A/HRC/16/48/Add.3):

A) Deprivation of liberty against the will of the person;

B) Involvement of government officials, at least by acquiescence;

C) Refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. "

If you think about the administration's unwillingness to comply with the court's ruling to return the individual, who by their own admission, they mistakenly took away due to an "administrative error" there are many open questions. How do we know that the individual is still alive? For that matter, how do we know that all the other people who they say were removed from the country are still alive?

We have no independently verified information as to fates of these people. More likely than not, in the course of these actions by the government, the number of deaths is some number greater than zero. Even if they have not performed outright executions, some deaths as a result of the conditions and or their treatment in custody is almost certain. So is that state sanctioned man slaughter/murder? Does this make ICE a death squad?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad
by _verandaguy | 2025-04-15 15:04:03+00:00
This would depend on your riding and what you're writing about.

I've received replies from my MPP, MP, and a handful of cabinet ministers over the years writing about a few at-the-time hot topics. Doug Ford, for all his faults, is apparently quite responsive if you just text him (that's secondhand knowledge from a friend, I can't tell you if it's actually him on the other side of the line, but it's a thing that exists. Make of that what you will. )
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-15 15:04:06+00:00
Totally unproven expensive path, that places the ocean & climate at great risk (scraping the sea bed, emitting clouds of processes seabed that increase turbidity).

It would be remarkable to me to hear there's piles of neodymium or cobalt or bismuth just lying around. There's some metals yes, but this feels like it's not going to be a viable path to keeping us making jet engines, wind mills, and electric cars, not going to find all the needed elements. Its just pointless sound & fury, more sad destruction & anti-woke world burning.

This is so vile.
by kelafoja | 2025-04-15 15:04:12+00:00
I agree, there are only superficial similarities. Like they're all 3 C-based. And Go and Rust both compile to machine code. I believe once one of the creators of Go mentioned that it felt to some users "like a faster Python". But I have no clue how Python relates to Rust in any sense, I fail to see any similarities. In fact, I would almost be inclined to say that Python and Rust have more differences than similarities.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-15 15:04:16+00:00
We already have that, it's called prison labor. The current regime will certainly ramp that up and throw even more people into forced labor camps.[1]

BTW we don't talk enough about the gigantic loophole in the thirteenth amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]

1 https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/flyover-country
by runako | 2025-04-15 15:04:33+00:00
> say currently it costs $15 to make thing 1m units of X in China and $50 to make 10k of them in the USA. USA could be scaled to make 50k of them for $40 and 100k for $30. 1m could cost like $25.

So here we are assuming that we could get a 50% reduction in cost by scaling to 1m units of a thing. The problem with this logic is that many product categories currently made overseas were produced domestically at scale until relatively recently.

This assumption also appears to imply that the goods in question either have a very low labor input or are produced using automation that is not available to Chinese manufacturers.

Reframing my initial question, what advantages would a US manufacturer have today that they didn't have in e.g. 1990 that would allow them to manufacture for only 66% more than the same manufacturing in China?
by resters | 2025-04-15 15:04:53+00:00
Thanks to HN's naive and draconian policy prohibiting political discussion (which is itself a clear political statement) there is little point to discussing concerning issues like this as anyone expressing an opinion will be downvoted, shadow-banned, etc.

Let it also be noted that Garry Tan is overtly conservative (rails on X about many of the same social issues than animate Trump supporters) and PG holds strongly right wing (largely Burkean) views on many subjects.

edit: The discussion has already been flagged/suppressed. There is zero contemptuous discussion, only a few reasonable back and forth threads about various things.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-15 15:04:58+00:00
This is not an accurate account of the situation. While I don't agree with the actions the government is taking here, I also don't think we are entitled to our own private facts about it.

Mr Garcia does not have a criminal record, but he was ordered to be deported years ago. He was able to get a temporary reprieve from this by hiring lawyers and working through the legal process, but he did this by almost certainly committing perjury by claiming there were criminal gangs who would kill him if he returned to El Salvador. If you believe the filings in immigration appeals you would have to believe that 99% of the people in the world are being personally pursued by criminal gangs. Perhaps you believe this but I don't find it to be credible. Regardless, whether the legal process is effective doesn't matter here, it IS the legal process and must be followed. My point is the fact Mr Garcia was deported is not itself the issue, it's that it was done in a way that ignores the rule of law (even though it did respect due process). Legally Mr Garcia should be deported eventually, he was only allowed to stay temporarily until he is not "at risk for his life" if he were deported, but the legal process must be respected.

SCOTUS did not command anyone be brought back. They declined to issue an emergency decision blocking an order to 'facilitate' his return, but specifically sent back to the lower court and took issue with the order to 'effectuate' his return. So they are not commanding the government to bring him back, rather they are commanding the government to not prevent his return. Yes this is tedious but reality is often tedious.

> They can now disappear and deport anyone they want

I think you have not made any case that it is valid to assume that we would go from "one person who has already been ordered for deportation by a federal court" who was very publicly deported to "anyone they want" and "disappear".

I basically agree with your sentiment inaccuracy and hyperbole doesn't benefit anyone.
by danso | 2025-04-15 15:06:00+00:00
> Mr. Musk’s group has deleted some of its original errors, like entries that triple-counted the same savings, a claim that confused “billion” with “million,” and items that claimed credit for canceling contracts that ended when George W. Bush was president.

I thought the purported benefit of having skilled programmers/coders running DOGE would be that at least whatever they did would be done in a...programmatic way? But these sound like errors when doing manual data entry.
by Sonnigeszeug | 2025-04-15 15:06:06+00:00
I fixed it for you: "Whistleblower details how a temporary group of very young people, who would never get access to sensitive data, are disabling/hiding what they are doing with highliy sensitive data of an executive, potentially circumventing safety mechanism in place to protect the data of all americans".

Btw. there is NO reason why they couldn't do all of that in a sincere way. Trump was voted in for 4 years.
by axegon_ | 2025-04-15 15:06:20+00:00
The true and sad truth is that manufacturing can be moved anywhere but the people that keep parroting about it's importance are in complete denial about the primary issue: costs. These costs have very little to do with infrastructure and building factories or logistics. Those are a contributor, sure, but that only scratches the surface. While China has seen insane growth in the last 20 years, that growth is at the expense of workers. No doubt they have a lot of value in terms of skills(which take a long time to acquire) but you also need to remember that there is a difference between the significance of working in Asia and Europe/north America. To us Europeans (and North Americans) work brings stability and security. In Asia, work is the difference between life and death, regardless of how skilled you are-you are legally expandable. Does anyone seriously believe that iPhones will be made in the US? The basic salary at foxconn is just under 320$/month or $1.81/hour. That is around 10x less than the US. This is ignoring the atrocious working conditions and far above the 40 hour work week. If we do factor in that as well, the difference is likely in the 25-30x range. I come from a country with a minimum hourly wage of around $3.6, let me tell you, as soon as the clock hits 18:00, people will drop everything where they stand and go home. The only way to compete with China is to automate everything and let machines do all the work, which is not a terrible idea but also nearly impossible to achieve. And even if you spend two decades doing all that, there are costs to all the R&D to get there. No one is going to buy a $15k iPhone, nor will they buy a $20K laptop. A logo that says "Made in X" won't justify the price. This comes from someone that uses a dual-xeon workstation as a personal computer.

Here's another example: a market that has been completely dominated by China: consumer drones. Believe me when I say this, I hate DJI and while I have one, I refuse to use it because of all the security implications. How many European and US companies are competing with them? Quite a few actually but the big names off the top of my head are Parrot and Skydio. I own both a Parrot and a Skydio and the quality of both is amazing. Yet they are still barely keeping up with DJI and at 5x the cost despite the demand - DJI still holds 90% of the market share. I can justify the price because of my privacy concerns but that's 1/1000 people. For most people it's always going to be a trade-off between price and quality+privacy.

If you want to enforce all that through tariffs, just put 5000% tariffs so that the local manufacturing cost will be the same as the cheap import and you solved the problem. How many people will be willing to spend 100 bucks for a pair of socks? That's a different story. The soviet union attempted something similar for several decades while trying to copy western technology. Anyone that knows a bit of history can tell you how that ended. Spoilers: not a success story.
by corimaith | 2025-04-15 15:06:22+00:00
Under normal circumstances, when a country is running a massive surplus, their currency should appreciate, weakening their exports and thus recalibrating trade balance back to zero. That isn't happening right now, because China (and other surplus nations like Germany and Japan) relies on buying massive amounts of US treasuries to weaken the Yuan. That's one of the reasons why the US dollar is the reserve currency. It has to be, because only the US has an economy large enough to provide high-yield, low-risk treasuries and is willing to do so.

Trump's tariffs would theoretically rebalance trade on the long term, albeit in a highly destructive manner. But the more diplomatic solutions as proposed by other commentators like Catherine Tai, Yanis Varoufakis or Michael Pettis would be the introduction of capital controls to stem the demand for US treasuries, or better, the reintroduction of Keynes' proposal of the International Clearing Union back in 1945. The ICU's role would be to actively balance global trade surpluses via the international currency bancor, of which would have fixed control of FX rates rather than relying on FX markets to punish surplus nations and help deficit nations respectively. As for nations outside the Union, they would just get treated similar to the USSR.
by nandomrumber | 2025-04-15 15:06:47+00:00
Doesn't happen.

That situation always auto-corrects as resource availability shifts.

What does happen is humans find things like mice / locust / kangaroo plagues inconvenient, so we decide to intervene.

It's not like lions get tired of all those pesky gazelle getting up in their grillz and find the need to get about in helicopters thinning the herd.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-15 15:07:05+00:00
Nobody ever changes their opinion on things with anything remotely like a high degree of frequency, and that's not a particularly bad thing. The "real" point of an argument is not to persuade the other side (though that is what you aspire to nonetheless) but to exchange views, and often to indirectly explore your own views more deeply, at least in the scenario where your 'partner' can bring up something you weren't aware of.

Our views actually shifting is something that only happens over many years and often for reasons we aren't really in control of. Me of 10 years ago would vehemently disagree with me of today on many things, and there's probably pretty much no argument I could have engaged with him to persuade him of what I obviously think are 'more correct' views. It required, most of all, life experience that isn't going to be able to be communicated with words. If it were we'd all have the wisdom of a man who'd lived for millennia. And if not all of us, then at least somebody - but that somebody doesn't exist.

One who wants to debate while rejecting the real state of mankind is oft going to just find themselves in an echo chamber.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-04-15 15:07:06+00:00
How? Money.

There is one problem with the current US system: it overproduces talent. When the US system was growing rapidly, the people could build a long-term career in the US. But nothing can grow forever at an exponential pace. The US continues to pour plenty of money into STEM, but it can't keep up with the pace of grad student production.

People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
by coryfklein | 2025-04-15 15:07:06+00:00
Near the top he shows two photos of the Cartwheel galaxy, one from 2014 and one from 2021 with the caption:

> Can you spot Supernova 2021 axdf?

Are you supposed to be able to spot the supernova?

All I've noticed is a couple of small stars that disappear in the latter photo, but this mostly seems to be because it's more blurry.
by acyou | 2025-04-15 15:07:25+00:00
This article seems to be full of propaganda and downright lies. For instance, there are plenty of tool and die makers left in the USA, plenty of injection molding machines. I have personally seen them and met the tool and die makers as well as the machines making the molds.

It's difficult to address the giant article full of misrepresentations point by point. It's tough to see it up at the top of HN. Wish that I could do something to correct the misinformation that is being disseminated.

This person has a vested interest. They manufacture cheap crap in China (or Vietnam, I don't care) for American kids to suck on. What more do you need to know?
by lasermatts | 2025-04-15 15:07:27+00:00
mold making is also pretty complicated -- anything in the 1,000-1M parts produced will _probably_ be an aluminum mold (cheaper than steel) but they're still heavy and large to keep around.

I haven't met any injection molding shops in the US that do a huge amount of specialty parts like toys. The industry tries to get as many medical device jobs as possible.
by nfw2 | 2025-04-15 15:07:34+00:00
To call something “virtue-signaling” implies the primary motivation of the behavior is to associate characteristics with oneself. There is a problem with virtue signaling in a discussion if the purpose of the discussion is to evaluate ideas in an abstract space —- the discussion then ceases to be in good faith.

Moreover, if all statements made in such a context needed to be acted out in someway, that would negate the whole purpose of the abstract space.

The purpose of my rhetoric in this thread has been to illustrate the issues with your definition rather than to say something about myself.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-15 15:07:52+00:00
> It's already diluted, you've already lost the battle

It’s not. The only place you see it being used this way is in a section of social media that blows everything out of proportion.

Where I agree is that the battle may be lost. In the same way “defund the police” (versus better regulate) kneecapped the criminal-justice reform movement, and bee-lining to “genocide” (versus the horrors of war and alleged genocide) hurt the Palestinian cause in America, premature extrapolation makes this look unserious. Because if the person who is calling what’s clearly not one a disappearance or concentration camp, why bother with habeus corpus?

> If someone got black bagged and flown to a CIA black site in Yemen, would you "Well, actually" me if I said they'd been disappeared just because we know they're in a Yemen black site?

No. That’s disappearance. The CIA doesn’t comment on its renditions, much less argue them in an open court.

> same courts whose authority is either being actively challenged AND actively ignored by the Executive branch, including so far in this exact case?

Challenged, not ignored. From what I can tell the administration is begrudgingly complying with the letter of the judges’ (and justices’) orders [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego...
by palmotea | 2025-04-15 15:08:10+00:00
> Edit: apologies but I must leave the desk for a few hours - I will not be able to try and help moderate the submission for a while. As always, I recommend being cold headed, rational and productive.

Do you mean voting on comments like a regular user? You're not one of the official moderators (dang and tomhow), but your phrasing seems like you're putting on airs like you are one.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-15 15:08:17+00:00
Countries change policies all the time based on the whishes of industry lobby groups or voters, not just the US. People focusing exclusively on what Trump is doing are myopic or arguing in bad faith.

And the global approach to net zero is not global, nor is it binding, it's more of a gentlemen's agreement bet which is basically worthless. Ideologically it sounds good, the issues are always when the tires hit the road, and then some spanners get thrown in on top: wars, pandemics, revolutions, natural disasters, political feuds, etc.

So yeah, outside of bubbles of privileged mid-upper class people in safe rich countries, nobody gives a crap about what's gonna happen in 2050 when they can't pay next month's rent/mortgage or their car doesn't start and their bank balance is red.

Capitalism got us chasing next quarter returns at the expense of what's gonna happen in 2050, so we'll be kicking the can down the road until everything falls apart, first very slowly, and then very suddenly.
by lowercased | 2025-04-15 15:08:19+00:00
From the article...

“They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings,” said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. “What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them.”

To your point, people have taken musk/doge at face value, with 'efficiency' being the goal. That's not been the goal. But... pointing that out seems to make you some sort of conspiracy theorist.

"Just give them time! It takes time!"

We did have some meaningful government cutbacks in the 90s. It took months of bipartisan collaboration and dealmaking, and we ended up with a balanced budget and a bit of a surplus. The process was a lot more open, experts were consulted, hearings and studies were done, and we did make some short-lived progress there.

None of that process was even entertained. We had a charlatan foisted on us in the role of "chief slasher of anything woke", and a third of our country cheered it on, until they got cut. Those not cut/affected still seem to support this circus.
by Teever | 2025-04-15 15:08:56+00:00
The UK continues to exist because it was replaced by a democratic American hegemony.

If an authoritarian country like China achieves hegemony the continued existence of democracy is at risk.

I want to live in a democratic world, not an authoritarian one.

America's democracy is a flawed one but of the two choices -- American hegemony or Chinese hegemony it is the best path to a flourishing global liberal democracy.

Can you foresee Chinese hegemony leading to increased democracy, individual property rights, due process, and rule of law?
by diggan | 2025-04-15 15:09:23+00:00
I feel like we're part of a dying generation or something. I keep seeing people who want to post content to the public internet, but they still want to own the data somehow, and control who see it, but still on the public internet.

I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, as I see the public internet as just that, a public square. What goes there can be picked up by anyone, for any purpose. If I want something to be secret, I don't put it on the public internet.

Gonna be interesting to see how that "public but in my control" movement continues to evolve, because it feels like they're climbing an impossible wall.
by leereeves | 2025-04-15 15:09:29+00:00
Honestly, this isn't about that. People not getting credit for their discoveries is so common it has a "law":

"Stigler's law of eponymy",[1] states that "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

This is really about the search for role models for women in science. And in that regard, Franklin is worth mentioning.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-15 15:09:30+00:00
It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that. Disrespecting rule of law is bad but an aggressive deportation policy after years of ignoring it, given that we don't have the infrastructure to support eleven million cases, is at least understandable in motivation. It's the only practical way to deport all of them, not a few thousand like most admins end up doing, though I disagree with these means of addressing the issue as opposed to forcing self-deports.