MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-04-03 12:15:34+00:00
> > there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.

> unfortunately they're not in any kind of formal language either

Most formulas made of fancy LaTeX symbols you find in math papers aren't a formal language either. They usually can't be mechanically translated via some parser to an actual formal language like Python or Lean. You would need an advanced LLM for that. But they (the LaTeX formulas) are still more precise than most natural language. I assume something similar is the case with legalese.
by seec | 2025-04-03 12:16:11+00:00
I think this is already happening. OVH built a datacenter in Canada, close to a big dam, so they could get access to cheap electricity and a lot of it.

This is just one example, but I would be surprised if that wasn't a consideration in more datacenter placements.

The problem of course is to find a place where electricity is abundant, but you also have easy access to the large fiber backbone network. If you have a lot of traffic, fibers aren't cheap, especially interconnecting them with others.
by Tade0 | 2025-04-03 12:16:23+00:00
That's great to hear, as I recommended this model recently to a relative but was worried about its repairability.

I've only ever swapped the battery on a late 2011 MacBook and it was kept in place by three tri-wing screws - really simple procedure and reportedly the device is still in use. I would not attempt the same on a 2015 or 2019 model due to the glue situation.
by addicted | 2025-04-03 12:16:32+00:00
There are both hard and soft reasons for this.

Hard reason: Oil was traded in U.S. dollars. This was basically built off America’s status as the only open superpower and its military strength.

Soft reasons: U.S. political stability (yeah, it’s hard to understand that now after the past decade, but generally the U.S. has been extremely politically stable with Presidents largely maintaining their predecessors foreign policy even if they didn’t agree with them), US company culture which is much cleaner than the rest of the world (American companies are far less likely to bribe, for example), and strong financial institutions like the independent Fed and the publishing of reliable and open data.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-03 12:16:34+00:00
I would absolutely love for the plumber whom I hired to fix my toilet to let me know what other crap I missed in my house's plumbing. Just doing the smallest, cheapest thing to fix the toilet is sometimes desirable but if it's just going to cause issues again soon, or if there are other issues I'm not aware of, I'd better at least start planning for those!
by DonaldFisk | 2025-04-03 12:16:44+00:00
> If it increases cost to tax payers over all then the tax payers (people/voters) have every right to oppose this.

They should be informed. There are various proposals (this one is new to me), and issues with it which are still unclear. And there's a lot of misinformation from people ideologically opposed to UBI.

For some people, UBI would replace existing benefits (examples of which might include child benefit, unemployment benefit, student grant, the non-contributory part of old age pension). That doesn't cost anything. Reduction of bureaucracy (no further need for means-testing the benefits UBI would replace) actually saves money. People already earning an income would of course pay extra taxes to fund UBI, but they would also receive it, so that would just be redistribution with no net cost. That leaves only people not seeking work, e.g. those looking after their children but not claiming any benefits.
by acdha | 2025-04-03 12:17:09+00:00
Usually it comes down to travel and the challenges of documenting eligibility which can require additional travel and expenses.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/chal...

> Nearly 500,000 eligible voters do not have access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. Many of them live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options. > More than 10 million eligible voters live more than 10 miles from their nearest state ID-issuing office open more than two days a week.

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/how-id-requirements...

> According to the study, between 15 and 18 million people in the U.S. lack access to documents proving their birth or citizenship, which can be integral to acquiring other forms of IDs.

This can force circular dependencies: for example, older black or Native American people who were born when they weren’t welcome at hospitals might never have been issued a birth certificate so they first need the travel, expense, and difficulty to get one from the clerk where they were born. Poor people are far more likely not to have bank accounts, so they can’t establish their in-state residency that way, etc.

None of these are insolvable problems but the people pushing restrictions haven’t been willing to put effort into solving them and often make things worse by cutting office locations and hours in ways which disproportionately impact poor and minority voters.
by noduerme | 2025-04-03 12:17:42+00:00
whew. Well, I and almost everyone I know are the sons and daughters of legal (and some illegal) immigrants to the US. Among us, a small group: Irish, Austrian, Persian, Jewish, Russian, Mexican, Filipina and Haitian. I've actually only met a few people in my life who claimed their family had been here more than 3 generations. My grandparents were illegal aliens who were granted amnesty. As such, almost everyone I know is very pro-immigration. We're all aware that there are nativist forces out there who think America is just a white christian nation, but I don't run into them much.

As far as deporting visa seekers who lied on their forms and are shilling agitprop for terrorist organizations? sure.

Ireland wasn't a country until what, 1916 or something. That's like saying the Czech Republic never invaded anyone. It's not quite clear it was due to any moral high standing, obviously when you're not in any position to do so it's easy to say you never did. What Ireland did excell at was terrorism, (er, anti colonialism) similar to the early anti-British forces in Jewish Palestine, although you wouldn't know it since the IRA went off to train in Iran.
by readingnews | 2025-04-03 12:17:46+00:00
>> be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic

Interestingly, I have seen Elon (DOGE) and others outside of politics (that mega-church leader) telling the public (dare I say, their followers) that one of the main problems with America is empathy, and that we need to _stop_ empathizing with others.
by jinushaun | 2025-04-03 12:18:02+00:00
I prefer the old map and I would argue it’s better. The old geographically accurate map is better for tourists, but the streamlined map is easier for locals to read.

IMO, locals don’t really look at transit maps since they have them memorized and only travel the same few lines regularly.

It’s tourists that are unfamiliar with the lines that need to read these maps. They also want to know the distance between stations.

So it becomes the question: who is the transit map made for?
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-03 12:18:19+00:00
> on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance.

The UN is not for “global governance”, it is to prevent the nuclear holocaust that would be WWIII by giving super powers a place to resolve conflicts. The international court at the Hague is only able to try war criminals, for example from the Yugoslav Wars, because the countries were not powerful enough to just ignore it. Just because we were able to try and convict Slobodan Milošević, doesn’t mean that China or Russia would ever extradite a former head of state for trial.
by vonzepp | 2025-04-03 12:18:20+00:00
If India buys a widget off Brazil it will probably be paid in dollars. Therefore, people need to own dollars. Thus a demand for US debt. This lowers the potential interest rate. Other countries who's currency is not a need for people to buy, their debt is purchased by the attractiveness of its offering (i.e interest rate). If US dollar is no longer required than government bonds have to be attractive. Also, not all sovereign debt is issued in the home countries currency, which means that the printing press doesn't help. US debt is very large, interest repayment are close to military spending. Without the reserve currency that would get worse. Something like 68% of world holding is dollar 17% Euro, nothing else of note.

The other side is that as there is a demand for dollars. The value of the currency is higher than if it wasn't which increases the price of exports and reduce price of imports. Trump might want to weaken the dollar.
by InfinityByTen | 2025-04-03 12:18:45+00:00
Absolutely. While I am a person who would avoid politics in most contexts myself, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable with this attitude in this write up.

If you see others as being "insufficiently equipped" to handle nuance, "because it's hard" or "because they are too resistant" is a judgement I prefer not to pass on others.

> "Because if a desire to seek truth isn't there"

Who defines the truth? As much as I understand there is a need to draw a line somewhere, I also believe that everyone has a right to their truth. And that's my truth. I let everyone have their perspective and don't see a need to impose mine or look down upon them if they don't agree to mine, this included :)
by piva00 | 2025-04-03 12:18:47+00:00
> The fact that this modern "art" needs to be subsidized by the people that actually works with their taxes, is all the argument needed to tell you that indeed this is nothing more than fake intellectualism.

When exactly did art not need financial support from the State, or rich patrons, to be able to be made?

You are moving the discussion into a completely different territory now, and again showing how your view of art is principled in some kind of "productivity" measurement, which is so absurd that is not even wrong.

> I'm not missing on absolutely anything by not appreciating a banana glued to a wall. In fact, nobody really appreciates that, it's just a bunch of sycophants pretending they have some artistic knowledge the rest of us, the poor populace, lack, that go on pretending with the charade.

The banana glued to a wall is one work of art (and polemic for a reason), and you are using that to paint a broad stroke over all contemporary art as if there is nothing being told there... You don't know what you are missing exactly because you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know the colours you'd be missing if you were born with black-and-white sight, nor would know you are missing music if you were born deaf. The difference is that you are not born with an unchangeable characteristic to not appreciate art in different ways, you can work on that, you just choose not to.

There's no charade, the actual charade is why are you so vitriolic opposed to something you do not even understand, lol. It reeks of some sort of insecurity, since you do not understand you feel it's beneath you because makes you feel lesser that others might "get it" and you are out of the club? I don't know, look inside you to find an answer because the passionate rage about something you do not understand has deeper roots.
by wiz21c | 2025-04-03 12:19:06+00:00
> Remark. As a result of the educational trend away from intellectual discipline, the last decades have shown in the Western world a sharp decline of people's mastery of their own language: many people that by the standards of a previous generation should know better, are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively, even for purposes for which it is pretty adequate.

Compare that to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43522966
by addicted | 2025-04-03 12:19:39+00:00
Where does the Russian company get its Philippine Peso from?

Russia overall may have exported some stuff to Philippines but it’s a huge country. The specific company would now need to find a way to acquire a highly illiquid currency available in tiny numbers which would be expensive.

Instead, they simply buy dollars which are highly liquid, available in huge numbers, until now absolutely reliable, and accepted by everyone.

Trading in dollars was at the end of the day cheap.
by basisword | 2025-04-03 12:20:45+00:00
>> We shouldn't drive as much as we can do

I wouldn't consider this a political view. It's a lifestyle choice based on personal beliefs. Two people can be fully behind the idea we need to do something about climate change and have different ideas on how that should be done. And I think that's part of the problem in recent times - instead of politics being about the big ideas and how a country is run it's become about small personal choices. If a person has heavy arguments with a partner about how much/little they drive I would say they've got an issue with a need to control others, rather than just a strong political opinion.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-04-03 12:20:55+00:00
I'm not one to defend dark patterns in, shall we say, 'creative resource acquisition', but then the West including the US is definitely not free from this particular guilt. More to the point, it is precisely the managerial class in the Free West that has been insisting for decades that wherever it's cheaper to have people work for you is where production facilities should be moved, and it's our societies who still take it as gospel that employing people is basically a burden that should be avoided as much as possible.

For the same reason and under the dictate of efficiency things like, to pick a random example, the number of repair and maintenance facilities operated by the Deutsche Bahn and Berlin public transport both have been pared down to a minimum because having more of one kind for these manager types means redundancy that you can just throw out of the window. In this case it's the people who rely on public transport who have to pay the price (in terms of less reliable and BTW more expensive service) while said managerial class is enjoying the-sky-is-the-limit pay raises.

So I'm not a fan of the CCP and in particular not of their present leadership but it's not like the West hasn't be handing over their know-how and their means of production quite happily: for the managers it has so far nearly always meant better bottom lines and handsome bonuses. All the while everybody else has to believe that higher productivity will trickle down in terms of higher paychecks for everyone (which stopped to be true at some point in the past), and, as for China, the unfounded hope that somehow democracy will travel back to China in those half-empty cargo ships that are headed for Shanghai.
by zimpenfish | 2025-04-03 12:21:28+00:00
> [alas, I can't find the source for this pre-presidency, its been blown out by current events].

Doesn't help that Google's custom time range search is complete garbage. Searched for "trump tariffs" from 1/1/1980 to 1/1/2010 and almost every link is about the current tariffs but with timestamps between 1980 and 2010.

e.g. "20 Nov 1987 — President Donald Trump issued a slew of tariffs on Chinese goods", "30 Jun 1981 — Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced Monday a 25% increase on electricity exports to some American states as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs", "31 Dec 1999 — IMF says too early for precise analysis on Trump tariff impact", "1 Feb 2001 — Trump's Global Tariff War Begins"

Did find a couple of links that were chronologically correct - a 1999 Guardian story about Trump wanting to tax the rich(!) and a 1987 NYT story about Reagan putting tariffs on Japan.

(duckduckgo was even worse)
by aa-jv | 2025-04-03 12:21:30+00:00
>Russia is the number one war criminal in the world.

This is absolutely incorrect by sheer statistics, alone. Anyone making this claim is simply utterly ignorant of the actual statistics, and I challenge you to overcome that personal limitation.

Russia has a long, long way to go to catch up to the +million murders done in Iraq, alone - where the USA has murdered 5% of Iraqs population with its wars (including the continuing deformed baby deaths as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium all over Iraq).

The USA is a major funder and supporter of the mass murder of Gaza - Gaza is just another Mosul, just another Raqqa .. Israel would not be getting away with mass murder if the USA hadn't set the precedent for war crimes and mass murder in multiple other theatres. Russia, too, follows the USA's lead and uses the USA's own prior inculpability for multiple illegal wars to justify its actions.

This is why it is just so dangerous for citizens to allow their nations to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, and allow those politicians responsible for such acts to go unpunished. This is why it is so irresponsible for the American people to allow their nation to degrade the capabilities of the International Criminal Court, and to fail to prosecute their own war criminals.

Because, if you let your nation do it, you are giving carte blanche to any other nation in the world to do it too. And that is precisely why states such as Russia and Israel are wilfully committing mass murder - under the cover of the prior unprosecuted crimes of extraordinary magnitude committed by the American people and their representatives.

If you want to do something effective about Russia and Israel, Americans, you must first prosecute your own war criminals and establish the international precedent for those prosecutions which can be used against Russian and Israeli war criminals, also. Leaving your own war criminals unpunished gives a free ride to all other nations, who will gleefully follow you into the madness - and have done so now, for 25 years of the utterly atrocious "war on terror", in which the American people gave themselves the ultimate right to destroy any state their callous rulling class - factually fundamentalist racists - decides is inferior to their own.
by fluidcruft | 2025-04-03 12:21:41+00:00
That's probably analogous to reading levels. So it would depend on the reading level of the intended audience. I haven't used C in almost a decade and I would have to refresh/confirm the precise orders of operations there. I do at least know that I need to refresh and after I look it up it should be fine until I forget it again. For people fluent in the language unlikely to be a big deal.

Conceivably, if there were an equivalent of "8th grade reading level" for C that forbade pointer arithmetic on the left hand side of an assignment (for example) it could be reformatted by an LLM fairly easily. Some for loop expressions would probably be significantly less elegant, though. But that seems better that converting it to English.

That might actually make a clever tooltip sort of thing--highlight a snippet of code and ask for a dumbed-down version in a popup or even an English translation to explain it. Would save me hitting the reference.

APL is another example of dense languages that (some) people like to work in. I personally have never had the time to learn it though.
by IgorPartola | 2025-04-03 12:21:41+00:00
It basically dates back to when having access to a Unix system meant that you needed to be at a university or a big employer or some such. These guys provided one for free.

Currently you can get some basic email, web hosting, etc. for a one time $1 donation. You can get more for a one time $36 donation.

They also have internal “forums” and chat and such as well as offering a bunch of related services like VPS, dial up, VPN, a Minecraft server, etc. Realistically, you can get a lot more for a lot less with modern hosts but between nostalgia and the limited environment having a particular kind of charm, it is kinda neat.
by roxolotl | 2025-04-03 12:22:12+00:00
So I asked this question back when the wiki page for exorbitant privilege[0], the term used to refer to the US’ status, was posted. I was provided with a few links of people who do seem to understand[1]. The Hudson Bay capital piece was probably the most interesting[2].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege?wprov=sft... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43529614 2: https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
by emptysongglass | 2025-04-03 12:22:14+00:00
> When I said Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates, that means people like you who love to point out it's technically there, but who also fail to understand what it takes for such feature to be even used on a daily basis.

But you are being dishonest when you make an incorrect statement like this. Don't do that.

EDIT:

> makes you look like an astroturfer employed by Telegram: https://tsf.telegram.org/

I just read the linked page through: this is a request for volunteers to answer support questions for Telegram. How did you make the mental leap from a request for support volunteers to recruitment ad for astroturfers?
by docmechanic | 2025-04-03 12:22:30+00:00
'An international team has sequenced the first ancient genomes from the so-called Green Sahara, a period when the largest desert in the world temporarily turned into a humid savanna-like environment. By analyzing the DNA of two 7,000-year-old naturally mummified individuals excavated in the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya, the team showed that they belonged to a long-isolated and now extinct North African human lineage.'
by eddie_catflap | 2025-04-03 12:23:35+00:00
I bought a Logitech MX Ergo a couple of years back and genuinely love it for many of the reasons other trackballs users cite in this thread - but I have noticed in the last few months that my thumb joint will get 'stuck' and makes a click when I unstick it. Definitely related to the MX Ergo and the thumb navigation like you say. I'm an older gentleman which likely contributes.

So might be tempted by an all finger alternative - at the moment I'm attempting to up my use of a terminal window manager to minimise pointer use
by myrmidon | 2025-04-03 12:23:41+00:00
> The idea the pickup trucks are wanted in Europe is hilarious.

While demand is much lower than in the US, it's still not zero.

But I'm talking about US import tariffs, not EU.

"Light trucks" have like 80% market share in the US; if you have 25% tariffs on those (for over 60 years now, too) then there is no room to complain about 10% car tariffs in the EU, full stop.

You could make a strong argument that Fords dominance in the segment was significantly helped by protectionism (without those tariffs Ford etc. would face much stiffer foreign competition).
by vbezhenar | 2025-04-03 12:23:52+00:00
The point of LLM is to enable "ordinary people" to write software. This movement is along with "zero code platform", for example. Creating algorithms by drawing block-schemes, by dragging rectangles and arrows. This is old discussion and there are many successful applications of this nature. LLM is just another attempt to tackle this beast.

Professional developers don't need this ability indeed. Most professional developers, who had to deal with zero code platforms, probably would prefer to just work with ordinary code.