MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mancerayder | 2025-04-06 18:21:58+00:00
You're playing with words, using a sort of ordinary-language-philosophical re-invention of the idea of free speech, and saying, why doesn't it apply to the blackballing someone from a job. In paragraph 1, you suggest that it's legitimate protest. In paragraph 2, I'm actually relabeling it (not sure what that means, but yes - it's a real world example).

Your paragraph 1, though, has the thoughtful query of exploring what is and isn't freedom of speech, and throwing out some scenarios to mull over. I agree that This principle you have of consequence free speech can only exist as a principle. Once it interacts with the complexities of the real world it becomes impossible to actually define, legislate, and enforce fairly.. How about, the spirit of the principle of freedom of speech could be that we don't strike fear in people who express opposing views.

Should it be illegal to make a personal decision not to buy a company's product? Reductio ad absurdum fail. No, because aside from being stupidly unenforceable, it has nothing to do with shutting down opposing views. Company listening to protesters and firing a company? Should it be illegal? It should be illegal on the basis of workers' rights, but I don't consider it freedom of speech to fire anyone or to keep them. It's another category of problem. Basically: it sounds like you're trying to defend shutting down speech by looking for ways to say that it's freedom of speech to do so.

Since you are fishing for 'first principles' (as a tech-centric board I can see how sexy it is to try to re-invent the concepts and throw them out as unworkable, as if law were mathematical), how about we think about the abstract 'spirit of the law' so-to-speak, and break out of the idea that since the idea of freedom of speech is imperfect, it should be thrown out. Because if you consider SUPPRESSING speech to be an 'expression' of speech, then it sounds like you're attacking the entire foundation of it, and we just don't align on values. We're in the realm of the social, the legal, cultural, not in the realm of absolute principles or foundational mathematical notions. I am not suggesting that, again, it should be ILLEGAL or LEGAL to do very specific things (we can spend forever mulling through scenarios), I'm suggesting - a few messages up in the thread - that if we don't CARE about freedom of expression, things like blackballing people from a job or deporting someone on a green card are perfectly OK. And I 'both sides-istically' purposely showed examples of the Right doing it, and the Left doing it, in order to provoke people to go back to thinking about the abstract principle of it.

The LEGAL matter is a different category, and super interesting to talk about. It's philosophy, it's Supreme Court precedent in the U.S., there are some fascinating speeches by ACLU figures like Ira Glasser, their arguments in the old 1st Amendment cases of the 20th century.
by lazyeye | 2025-04-06 18:22:32+00:00
It also loses value when the fact-checking suffers from the same biases it is supposedly trying to rectify.

One way a govt can circumvent the first amendment, for example, is to fund a grant for "misinformation" research unit at a prestigious university. Where the entire staff are political fellow travellers who, not surprisingly, find everything the govt disagrees with to be "misinformation" and then applies pressure to get it taken down.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-06 18:22:35+00:00
Are you regularly exposed to ads? I don’t understand this at all. Advertisement has next to nothing to do with “telling you about a product” which is why old ads are funny today. They hadn’t figured out a lot of the techniques we use to elevate advertising so far beyond that. An easy example, which some old ads even caught onto, would be associating the product with something else the consumer desires. Ever see an ad for a car with a happy family in it? Ever see an ad for a sportier car with a guy driving around an attractive lady? Is the happy family related to the function of the car? Of course not; the goal is to tie the thing the consumer wants (a happy family) to the thing they don’t yet (the car).
by YZF | 2025-04-06 18:22:38+00:00
Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement.

EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-04-06 18:22:40+00:00
> Or they want to extract the maximum work from you

I think that if this strategy works and salary is increased, then the job is burned anyway and I'd be looking for a new one no matter what they say, while pocketing the extra cash for a few months. If management starts to ask for documenting processes or training someone, that's a dead giveway and, ethics aside, the best course of action is (unfortunately) to do bare minimum and focus on job search.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-06 18:23:07+00:00
Sure, and I do too, when it makes sense and is simple enough. A marketing page with one form? Why not?

But a CRUD-heavy app with forms and modals and many moving parts? Forget it. It’s about as relevant as people using IE.

2 years ago, again on HN, someone asked if progressive enhancement “lost the war.” In reality, it never showed up for battle on its own merits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779408
by darksaints | 2025-04-06 18:23:37+00:00
Racism is probably true, but the vast majority of the world is strongly ethnically homogeneous within country borders, so their racism isn’t as politically charged as ours is, because it’s simply not a matter of domestic policy for them.

LGBTQ matters have varying degrees of acceptance around the world and Europe and the collective west are in front of it all, but that downplays the fact that LGBTQ acceptance has been rising nearly everywhere in the world with the exception of fundamentalist religious states.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-06 18:23:48+00:00
It’s analogous to MOND [1].

Mathematically valid. Genuinely interesting. An active field of research. But heterodox, and thus coming with a stable of armchair physicists who are drawn to it because it feels rebellious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-06 18:23:51+00:00
I know some may will decry it for what it stands for, but I think this is great for edge case mitigation, imagine civilization games where you can use flexible strategies mimicking real life, versus following programmed decision trees. Gameplay that is responsive to environmental destruction, agent cores in the console that are constantly scheming against you. If done right, we can continue to do new and innovative things. One can get bogged down by the bad 3d animation out there, or marvel at what Pixar and before it, films like "Flight of the Navigator" and "Terminator" did.
by drcwpl | 2025-04-06 18:24:22+00:00
I can see how my exploration of the Mensa list might come across differently than intended. My aim wasn't necessarily to endorse this specific list or the 'IQ club,' but rather to explore the experience, the friction and challenge, that comes from engaging with demanding texts, wherever they are found. For me, it was less about surrendering judgment and more about using the list as a specific, challenging prompt to sharpen critical thinking against difficult material. Perhaps 'exercise regimen' isn't far off, but ideally one that builds perspective rather than just ticking boxes.

Thanks for the recommendation on Christopher Nguyen's "Value Capture".
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-06 18:24:23+00:00
It took many years before Einstein's ToR was confirmed by pictures of light bending around our sun during an eclipse.

Paul Dirac predicted antiparticles purely by mathematical intuition. It wasn't until later that the theory proved true, and he was recognized to be the genius that he was.

First comes the theory, then experiments are devised. Then physics gets updated.

I merely suggest these things, not because I have the math to understand how it would affect GR or QED, or even what experiments would be needed to verify them, but merely to plant the seeds of how things work to stimulate those who can do those things to think about what their ramifications might be.

That no one understands how these things can even be known, much less that they are true, is already known by me, but the truth is never beholden to the naysayers. I'm not a Boltzmann who was (sadly) bullied into suicide by the fools of his era. I don't really care if anyone believes what I say. I say these things because I love you all and maybe a few people will be stimulated to contemplate other avenues that may explain the as yet inexplicable.

And, really, y'all are out of ideas as to what or where dark matter or energy are anyway, so there is nothing for anyone to lose.

Put another way, Einstein knew what would happen to light that passed close to the sun (even though his calculations were off), but the naysayers were irrelevant, right? They, too, thought they already knew it all.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-06 18:24:38+00:00
Fair enough. One of the things that has influenced my thinking on this topic was living through the laws on smoking being enforced. But perhaps a better analogy is noise laws. For me, it's preferable to use the power of the state to _prevent_ someone from pushing something on you that you object to. Not to outlaw the objectionable thing, but rather to insure that people have a straight forward way to avoid the thing and can be assured that if they take those steps they won't have that thing imposed upon them. When we use state power to deny people agency, that's when it gets dicey for me and that was what I 'heard' when I read the original article. I dislike drug laws for that reason, I think it is reasonable to ban the use of drugs by people who are doing things where the effects of drug use can cause harm to innocent bystanders, but I think it unreasonable to ban their use by individuals in their own home where all the consequences are landing on their own head.

I too use ad blockers and privacy protectors, and people are constantly trying to get around them. THAT behavior should be outlawed I think. If I'm choosing to use blockers and you don't like that, then deny me your website. That's your choice. Deploying exploits so that my adblocker doesn't work? Or convincing the people who wrote browsers that adblockers are theft? THAT is bad behavior (again in my opinion of course).
by caseysoftware | 2025-04-06 18:24:44+00:00
> As another example, Good Mythical Morning and other YouTube shows frequently do product comparisons / tests. That clearly isn't advertising, unless the companies who make those product are sponsoring them.

Did the pay full retail price for the product or get a discount?

Did they get the product at release or in advance?

Did they get access to detailed specs or the people who built it?

Did they give feedback that went into the product?

Did they get a company/lab/event visit and some swag?

Did they get preferential access for the next product?

"Sponsoring" is just the most visible, clearly disclosed way to advertise in those. But fundamentally, getting and preserving access is immensely valuable and there may not be funds moving between the two groups.

None of us are completely unbiased. Getting those things disclosed would be a great improvement.
by cyberax | 2025-04-06 18:24:49+00:00
> There is clearly something there.

What is there? The retardant is made from phosphate rocks. The same ones that are used for fertilizer. Lettuce that you eat has cadmium and arsenic from the phosphate (or potassium) fertilizer. It's simply unavoidable.

And of course the manufacturer is cagey. They all know about no-science-allowed wasteland of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with no-brain juries gladly awarding damages based on junk data on "chemicals".
by 1000100_1000101 | 2025-04-06 18:26:16+00:00
I got stuck on Catan for a while too, as I assumed it was like most games and didn't use names.

At some point I just moved on, and solved the next word, Chess, in like 2 seconds. The results claimed I spent a whole pile of time on Chess, since it has no idea which result I'm thinking of solving (though all the wrong guesses for Catan should have been a clue that the time should have gone towards Catan.)

I'm not sure the per-word time values are useful if they can't be trusted to be accurate.
by kevinsync | 2025-04-06 18:26:21+00:00
I actually kind of enjoy advertising -- most ads are shit, but some are very clever. Low budget ones make me laugh, or admire the (complete lack of) execution. I like to see the graphic design trends, the typography, the strange brand collaborations and IP tie-ins, the vogue cycles of looks, feels, musical choices, the trends that get beaten to death with a hammer. It's all very interesting, not to mention the glut of weird products, insane sales pitches, the general grift on display. Simply fascinating shit.

Intellectually I know most people wouldn't mind living in a world without Slap Chop and those old Quizno's ads and Kylie Jenner solving racism with a Pepsi and Arnold riding a pennyfarthing inside of a Japanese energy drink bottle, but IMO that stuff really brings color to our often-monochrome human existence.
by idoubtit | 2025-04-06 18:27:01+00:00
I respect this choice of modernization, and I suppose some readers enjoy it, but it makes the publisher's whole work useless to me. When a text has been altered, I can't trust it respects the intent of the author, and any style inconsistency I find may be a by-product of the publisher's mangling.

So, when I care about a book, I never read Standard Ebooks' edition.

By the way, the modernization is more than joining a few words. Sometimes, Standard Ebooks replaces the word used at the time the book was written. For instance:

This time, however, the mountain was going to [-Mahomet;-]{+Muhammad;+}

The previous quote is from Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". The author used many French words and French spellings – like "Tchekov" for the Russian playwriter that was living in Paris. These subtleties are lost with the modernization.

I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:

if she wanted a good book she should read [-“Job”-]{+Job+}; his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
by pstuart | 2025-04-06 18:27:18+00:00
I do agree that saving face would help but his people are still ready revere him while still being angry at Musk or any fallout from a Trump decree.

His cult sees him as he was presented on The Apprentice -- rich, powerful, rich, and wise, and rich. Rich is good and if he's rich he's double plus good.

I think the only end to his cult is his shuffling off this mortal coil.
by Symbiote | 2025-04-06 18:27:56+00:00
Cable TV (from cables under the road) is much more common in Denmark than in the UK.

Digital, broadcast TV in the UK is mostly received by radio broadcast or satellite broadcast, so the house would only have the appropriate cables from certain rooms up to the roof. Thinking of the houses I lived in, it wouldn't have been practical to put a router of any kind up there.

From recent UK statistics:

- 95% of households have at least one television

- 30% receive TV over satellite

- 13% by cable

- 80% by IPTV

- 48% by terrestrial radio broadcast

- 96% have broadband internet

That's 13% of houses using their cables for a TV subscription, so more than that number have the cables available, but some big chunk probably had it installed to a single room in the 1980s and have never expanded it — the kitchen and the kids' room use terrestrial broadcast.
by chrsw | 2025-04-06 18:28:10+00:00
This is an extremely mild version of what it feels like to be a minority. Web developers are the most common type of developer. It is simply natural for them to equate "developers" and "software developers". Out of sight, out of mind. It's not a hostile thing, it's not something people necessarily want to do. But it still happens. It's a human thing.
by dionidium | 2025-04-06 18:28:25+00:00
> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
by chongli | 2025-04-06 18:28:39+00:00
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place)

Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.

Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
by vbezhenar | 2025-04-06 18:28:41+00:00
That's one of my issues with most Linux distros.

1. They add huge configuration files where 99% are commented out.

2. Sometimes they invent whole new systems of configuration management. For example debian with apache httpd does that.

I don't need all of that. I just need simple 5-line configuration file.

My wish: ship absolutely minimal (yet secure) configuration. Do not comment out anything. Ask user to read manuals instead. Ship your configuration management systems as a separate packages for those who need it. Keep it simple by default.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-06 18:29:27+00:00
Computer "programs" being big hairy balls of "intent" derived from some corpus of inputs and a prompt is horrifying.

I kind of wish hardware hadn't gotten fast enough to enable this future. Humans being lazy, as they are, and the output of this kind of horror show eventually being "good enough", this is going to get normalized.

Anybody working to enable this future is, to me, acting unethically. This is the "AI" apocalypse I'm worried about, not the AGI singularity fever dreams that garner headlines.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-06 18:29:48+00:00
"Heterodox" is a term of art in economics, it doesn't mean what "heterodox" means in English.

And the justifications given for most social policies come from MMT. Policy makers love MMT, especially progressive ones and ones who want to give out helicopter money. Economists seem cooler on the idea, but it's a mainstream theory among people making economic decisions.

MMT is mostly just Keynseanism taken to a sort of unintuitive but logical conclusion. It's not nearly as heterodox (using the English word) as something like Austrian economics.
by cj | 2025-04-06 18:30:02+00:00
And I don’t blame those people. That was his modus operandi for 5+ years. My theory is many people who voted for him, didn’t think he would actually do everything he said he was going to do, since he has a reputation for not following through with his promises.

This time is way different. He actually appears to be doing what he says he’s going to do. That’s a major change from his behavior last term.
by kristopolous | 2025-04-06 18:30:02+00:00
Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits?

No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation...

Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things.

The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politics and the Republicans are the right wing party.

They did things like protect against junk fees and go after phone scammers but pursuing financial criminals is hardly leftism just because the right wing doesn't do it. Bush and Reagan would have done that.

Reagan and Bush did a bunch of prosecutions during S&L...

It's a conservative party and a right wing party.

There is no center, there is no liberal, there is no left.

There was no right until Trump. There was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan but they didn't go anywhere.

I can fully acknowledge this and not just look at things I don't like and say "bah! Right wing"

Once you can look at things that you don't like and not say "bah! Far left!" Then we can to have a meaningful conversation.

Until then you are acting in bad faith
by westurner | 2025-04-06 18:30:11+00:00
Python pickles have the same issue but it is a design decision per the docs.

Python docs > library > pickle: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html

Re: a hypothetical pickle parser protocol that doesn't eval code at parse time; "skipcode pickle protocol 6: "AI Supply Chain Attack: How Malicious Pickle Files Backdoor Models" .. "Insecurity and Python Pickles" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43426963
by adolph | 2025-04-06 18:30:11+00:00
Can someone speak to the below statement from the article? I thought Objective-C did not have a runtime like memory managed languages like C#.

> avoid the runtime overhead of Objective-C in the kernel

From Apple docs[0]:

You typically don’t need to use the Objective-C runtime library directly when programming in Objective-C. This API is useful primarily for developing bridge layers between Objective-C and other languages, or for low-level debugging.

0. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/objecti...
by hx8 | 2025-04-06 18:30:12+00:00
I was eight years old, and wanted to make a Pokemon fan site, so I purchased a book to learn HTML, and used "view source" on every website I could find. I ended up copying and pasting some Javascript that I wouldn't be able to understand for another 6 years.

At fourteen I became interested in "serious" programming and bought a copy of Visual Studio along with a C++ book. I was mostly interested because I read online that C++ was challenging.

At seventeen I took an interest in Linux, and started using that full time realizing I could have saved myself from spending literally all my money by using an open source C++ compiler.

At 21 I finally found myself in a Computer Science undergraduate department.

Somewhere along the way I started building PCs, but my interest was always more on the software side than the hardware side.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-06 18:30:13+00:00
I imagine that being a poor Dad with a gigantic ego is pretty common amongst CEO's. Sure there were troubling signs but there were also signs of Musk working for the better good, like pulling out of Trump's advisory council in 2017 to protest pulling out of the Paris accord. It was obvious the guy was weird and a little unhinged, but many of my interesting friends are weird and a little unhinged. Buying a Tesla before 2024 was an unequivocally "left" statement.
Ask HN: When will AI be able to write efficient code to solve this puzzle?
by amichail | 2025-04-06 18:30:55+00:00
You are given an array of n x n integers. The goal is to end up with an array in which all entries are equal.

Four kinds of moves are allowed:

(1) rotate a row

(2) rotate a column

(3) add 1 to all entries in a row

(4) add 1 to all entries in a column

A "rotation" means you shift the items one position in the row/column (in either direction) with wrap around.

First, show the goal is achievable if and only if the sum of the numbers in the initial configuration is congruent to 0 mod n.

Then, write an efficient python program to solve the puzzle whenever it is possible to do so.