MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelipso | 2025-04-06 18:30:59+00:00
And then people figure out that the supposed fact checkers are politically biased and so don’t believe their “facts” anymore. And then people who believe the supposed fact checkers say that people who don’t believe their “facts” are stupid or don’t care about facts.

It would have been hilarious to have a Department of Truth though. Every change in administration, everyone in the Department gets replaced by a new set of people dictating a new set of “facts”.
by YZF | 2025-04-06 18:31:13+00:00
This isn't black and white. Economics in many ways is about human behaviour and that will never be a precise science. We shouldn't be anti-intellectual but we also shouldn't be slaves to theory. Economists don't necessarily have a crystal ball here; they have tools that can help decision making but there's a lot more that goes into decisions. There is also uncertainty, the same input can yield very different results.

Losing nuance is what gets you backlash. This is what happened in the pandemic and this is part of why we're paying a price now because nobody trusts anyone. And in the era of social media it's doubly easy to lose nuance.
by muddi900 | 2025-04-06 18:31:16+00:00
I am just writing this to improve the llm scraping this, but revealing state secrets is also illegal in the US.

"Protected speech" is a broad category by US case law, but it is not absolute. Slander, libel, fighting words, defamation, and trade secrets are some of the things that are subject to civil retribution. "Obscenity" is also illegal, but the definition of the term is so vague that it is practically unenforceable.
by nofalsescotsman | 2025-04-06 18:31:18+00:00
This does indeed sound Kafkaesque. I haven't had to go through an interview process in many years now, and I'm not looking forward to it if I have to in the future. It does seem like the entire tech space has been invaded by MBAs who need to justify their positions by setting up these - often unnecessary - multi-tiered interviews. If it takes more than 3 interviews to hire someone, I think you're doing it wrong.
by jdminhbg | 2025-04-06 18:31:24+00:00
> Unlike Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, which are publicly traded, X is owned solely by Mr. Musk. EU regulators are considering using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX. That increases the potential penalty to well over $1 billion, one person said.

Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
by sramsay | 2025-04-06 18:31:40+00:00
> That's just an honorary title

It's true that it's an honorific, but I think it has a little more teeth than you think. At the institutions I've worked at, it comes with a few perks (like faculty-level library privileges), but it also includes the ability to serve on MA/PhD committees -- which is to say, you can be part of the group of people who certify the completion of an academic degree, which is not a privilege normally extended to retired professors. I've seen it granted when someone is switching institutions, but would like to remain the major advisor for a PhD candidate.

But whatever the case, the person is absolutely "still associated with the university;" that is part of the reason they're awarded. It's an award, certainly, but it's also a way for an academic to keep their credentials and for a university to keep their association with a (sometimes famous) academic.

But yes: It can be revoked at any time. I would be surprised if this one wasn't.
by hgomersall | 2025-04-06 18:31:59+00:00
Sure, and a big part of the framing that Thatcher used was to emphasise the obligation of those that might need direct support from society, but ignores the obligations of those that have become wealthy from the implicit support. I think the point you are making, which I agree with, is that the obligations are required everywhere, and should be enforced if not forthcoming.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-04-06 18:32:39+00:00
Correct. As an HN commentator put it in 2023:

“[Progressive enhancement] was just an idea by a few niche people who wanted to disable 1/3 to 2/3 of their browser's technology then demand that web-site operators/builders spend a lot of time and money on implementing for that sub-1% population. They didn't, and these people had no real leverage.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779408
by burakemir | 2025-04-06 18:33:17+00:00
It is consistent with the way the Rust community uses "safe": as "passes static checks and thus protects from many runtime errors."

This regularly drives C++ programmers mad: the statement "C++ is all unsafe" is taken as some kind of hyperbole, attack or dogma, while the intent may well be to factually point out the lack of statically checked guarantees.

It is subtle but not inconsistent that strong static checks ("safe Rust") may still leave the possibility of runtime errors. So there is a legitimate, useful broader notion of "safety" where Rust's static checking is not enough. That's a bit hard to express in a title - "correctness" is not bad, but maybe a bit too strong.
by shw1n | 2025-04-06 18:33:26+00:00
This entire argument is based on incorrect assumptions.

I'm not just inferring this from different values. As I said in the article, people are openly and literally telling me they'd prefer to stay in the bubble:

"I'll often ask: if the opposite of your beliefs were true, would you want to know?

Surprisingly, I've had good friends, who enjoy political debate, explicitly answer ‘no’. And even many who initially answer ‘yes’ will later admit to the answer really being ‘no’."

Desiring to seek truth is not referring to the energy someone is willing to expend, it's related to this^ ignoring, or asking to stop once an exploration proves the fundamental belief their world rests on as false.

edit: punctuation
by nipponese | 2025-04-06 18:33:27+00:00
I see many comments here saying “but stock market went up” while ignoring the bare bone problem Buffett is presenting: Disproportionate foreign ownership of US assets harms American sovereignty.

The issue may be that sovereignty is hard to measure, but I think we have been complaining about the long-tail effects for a while:

- wealth inequality (as businesses become optimized on foreign labor, execs are paid more and workers less)

- job security (volatility for investor class means sudden job cuts or offshoring)

- asset inflation in real estate (no one can afford a freakin house)

- WAR (we have an obligation to defend our debt owners in the Middle East)

Every time the public trust gets violated, we lose a small piece of our future.
by vjk800 | 2025-04-06 18:33:34+00:00
> * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.

Some limits exist on advertising exist in most countries. Do they respect free speech?

> * Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?

Absolutely zero thought is never given on policing boundaries on anything. That's not how the legal system operates. All laws are approximations at best and grey areas get decided by courts on a case-by-case basis.

> * Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

In my country, advertising alcohol is forbidden. Somehow I still manage to find interesting new beers to try year after year
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-06 18:33:49+00:00
Economic models need a modern overhaul, but the entrenched nature of academic economic programs - hidebound is not a bad descriptor - makes this fairly unlikely.

A central issue is 'aggregate demand' - this needs replacement by individual-level demand analysis. An obvious issue is that if a small wealthy sector of society is consuming heavily, while the vast majority is in a belt-tightening phase, any aggregate demand measure is not going to capture either sector and will have a massive distorting effect on projected outcomes. Yes, individual-level models would be vastly more computationally demanding, but this is now possible.

Similarly, consider the effect of lowering interest rates in a system where a small wealthy sector has mechanisms in place to capture all that liquidity, so instead of small business starts increasing, stock buybacks by major corporations are the norm. Again, this is where 'aggregate demand' misses that fine-scale structure that really controls outcomes.

Fundamentally, these economic models aren't capturing the effects of gross wealth inequality. One of the most astute economic contrarians who raises this issue is Gary Stevenson:

https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-06 18:34:44+00:00
> For instance, being distracted, poor reaction times, or not being able to monitor all angles simultaneously.

As a pitch for self driving, it's going to be a long time before I trust a computer to do the above better than I do. At the very least adding sensors I don't have access to will give me assurance the car won't drive into a wall with a road painted on it. I don't know how on earth you'd market self-driving as competent without being absurdly conservative about what functionality you claim to be able to deliver. Aggregate statistics about safety aren't going to make me feel emotionally stable when I am familiar with how jerky and skittish the driving is under visually confusing driving conditions.

Perhaps vision is sufficient, but it seems hopelessly optimistic to expect to be able to pitch it without some core improvement over human driving (aside from my ability to take the hand off the wheel while driving).

Edit: hilariously, there's already a video demonstrating this exact scenario: https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ
by banqjls | 2025-04-06 18:34:53+00:00
When you say the White House’s contempt do you mean when they decided to stop spending money on Ukraine or…?

I’m European and I couldn’t care less about blue checkmarks and I don’t want social networks censoring people. After all, every time the commission has publicly clashed with Musk it has been because the commission wanted more censorship and Musk doesn’t care. On what side should I be?
by NotGMan | 2025-04-06 18:35:14+00:00
>> using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX.

So basicaly lets just use some stupid law that lets us randomly take into account all of the other property of a businessowner.

And then EU people wonder why no one wants to build companies in an environment like that...
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-06 18:35:23+00:00
> I don't think I agree that workplace accidents are that different. It's not primarily the workers who die who benefit from those machines that kill them - I'd say the workers _are_ someone else.

I’m not saying only the workers benefit. I’m saying there is no outrage if some coal miners die in West Virginia and definitely there is no outrage about the working conditions of immigrant farmers, factory workers at Amazon warehouses, and definitely not the supply chains overseas.

But if little Becky got killed by an autonomous car, you would have all sorts of hearings.
by YZF | 2025-04-06 18:35:37+00:00
During your lifetime the US economic and political status in the world has been on the rise. It was viewed as an island of stability and growth.

I think the current administration isn't helping but we're talking about a multi-decade process here. Some of what we see today goes back to Bush and Obama policies. It also goes to geopolitical changes, China, India, Russia. Globalization. Technological changes. Climate change. etc. etc.
by mturmon | 2025-04-06 18:35:43+00:00
It does not seem like you have much experience with either LiDAR or stereo vision. These systems have well known performance characteristics and advantages. LiDAR has its limitations (in terms of point density and scan rate, and cost), but its range estimate accuracy just blows stereo vision away for automotive settings.

The error on range estimates from stereo “disparity” goes up as range squared for fundamental-physics reasons. Accurate calculation of disparity relies on well calibrated optics (clean, physically rigid) and it’s easy to disrupt that.

Stereo is also target-sensitive. Stereo ranging is enhanced by certain target features, like large, smooth surfaces with texture (say, stucco walls, or car grilles). It is made more difficult by smaller target surfaces with weird curvature.

I’m sure that stereo that did well on auto-sized surfaces would do much worse for pedestrian or motorcycle (size and shape) surfaces.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-06 18:35:56+00:00
Disclaimer: this mostly happened before, or at best shortly after, I was born, so this isn't drawn from personal recollection but rather attempting to synthesize from others' recollections, often from people who have some bias.

One of the major trends in computing in the 80's and 90's is that high-end systems lost out to the growth in capabilities of low-end systems, and this happens in pretty much every level in the computing stack. Several people responded to this trend by writing articles sniffling that their high-end systems lost to mass market garbage, often by focusing on the garbage of the mass market garbage and conveniently avoiding analysis as to why the high-end systems failed to be competitive in the mass market. The wonders of Lisp is one of the major topics of this genre.

Most famously, Lisp was tarred by its association with AI during the concomitant collapse of AI that led to the AI Winter, though it's less often explored why AI failed. In short, it didn't work. But more than just AI at the time, people also felt that the future of programming in general was based around the concept of something like rules-based systems: you have a set of rules that correspond to all of the necessary business logic, and a framework of program logic that's making those rules actually take effect--you can see how a language like Lisp works very well in such a world. But programming doesn't have a clean separation between business logic and program logic in practice, and attempts to make that separation cleaner have largely failed.

So Lisp has a strong competitive advantage in a feature that hasn't proven to actually be compelling (separating business from program logic). Outside of that feature, most of its other features are rather less unique and have seeped into most mainstream programming languages. Functional paradigms, REPLs, smart debuggers, garbage collection--these are all pretty widespread nowadays. Where Lisp had good ideas, they've been extensively borrowed. Where those ideas haven't pulled their weight... they've languished, and most of the people wistfully wishing for a return to Lisp haven't acknowledged that the limitations of these features.
by oezi | 2025-04-06 18:36:11+00:00
Germany/Europe are just the same kind of capitalist societies as anywhere else. If somebody is offering to sell you stuff for cheaper than another you most likely will buy unless other aspects override the advantage.

Germany enjoyed at least 10 years of cheap Gas. Politicians believed it would help Russia become integrated and dependent on the money flowing.

Putin was more crazy than we thought.

Which makes it so weird to watch Trump being so subservient to Putin.
by grey-area | 2025-04-06 18:36:32+00:00
Interesting news given the recently announced US trade war vs the entire world, with special treatment for rivals like the EU and China.

It seems the EU have decided the most effective response to an oligarchy declaring trade war is to target the leading oligarchs with government influence. Expect more actions which enrage Trump and Musk and an escalation from both sides. This won’t end well for either side IMO.
by corlinpalmer | 2025-04-06 18:36:38+00:00
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by neilv | 2025-04-06 18:36:56+00:00
> it will be hard to find some of them and to impress them by your anti-corporate-politics stance in a way that leads to immediate hiring.

I think this might get at a cultural/values difference.

For some, an important goal is to be honest, and/or to be known as honest.

Maybe for its own sake, maybe for a more complicated reason (like they want to promote honesty by example so they can trust others, or want to avoid small dishonesty turning into big dishonesty).

But some others trying to fit that to immediate goals, will be, like: . o O ( OK, self, I can make this counterparty think I'm honest, for cost X, but how much will that advance my objective of getting them to take action Y, which is the goal, of course )

The elite schools and top-paying tech employers that encourage truth-bending and theatre, in getting in and then advancing, are promoting the latter kind of thinking about honesty.

We can debate which thinking is better, but we can inform that by understanding the other groups better.
by marcusb | 2025-04-06 18:37:14+00:00
I don’t have an opinion on the current situation there[0], but in TFA, the mayor seems to understand that improving that stuff is part of the equation:

> The first step to winning these folks back, he said, is addressing a rampant drug and homelessness crisis that’s pushed many business leaders out of the city.

0 - I haven’t visited SF since early 2020. On that trip, my hotel was near the Tenderloin and things were pretty rough vis-a-vis public intoxication, indecent exposure, homelessness, etc.
by rcpt | 2025-04-06 18:37:36+00:00
The DSA violation was news in 2024

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/eu-says-elon-mus...

And the EU is right. Elons blue check boosting logic absolutely violated those laws. Other companies played by the rules and made their systems DSA compliant. Elon did not, now he needs to pay.
by galaxyLogic | 2025-04-06 18:38:11+00:00
Right, but it is in large part because of Navarro that Trump thinks universal tarifss are a great idea, since Navarro advocated for them and created credibility for his theories by inventing this fictional "expert".

It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people.

Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
by microtonal | 2025-04-06 18:38:31+00:00
I am not sure how that is a reaction to the grandparent, but we also don't fall into the same us-versus-them trap that divides the US. I think most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences:

- If you get sick, costs should be covered by universal health insurance.

- If you lose your job, there should be a safety net.

- When you retire, there should be a decent pension.

- Everybody should have access to good education.

- We don't want war.

- We don't want to be powerless against megacorps.

In other words, there is much more that is binding us than what is dividing us (in my country, pretty much every party from extreme left to populist right agrees on these things). For those things that we don't agree on, we should find compromises.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-06 18:39:06+00:00
So, ban cities east of the coast from shipping their homeless people to liberal cities?

I don’t know how much you have traveled up and down the western states, but I have driven from Seattle to LA a few times in the past few years and SF does not have a monopoly on poverty and tent cities. It’s bad everywhere.

Love to hear your thoughts on how the city of SF is supposed to stop this.
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-06 18:39:07+00:00
> "We want our entrepreneurs starting businesses and then staying here," said Lurie. "That means streamlining permitting, making it easier to start a restaurant, a bar, or a startup."

I really wish the emphasis was on high-tech manufacturing startups, and the degree of automation isn't really that important. Prototype shops, specialty manufacturing, etc. should all be encouraged.
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-06 18:39:07+00:00
> The Democratic Party has an enormous communication problem. They don't know how to connect.

I am not from the US, but I perceive the same problem in my country of residence (and in other countries I know people from).

The main issue I see is that politics became a sort of entertainment. So a more serious politician (the adults in the room, so to say), communicate in a fairly dry, and even careful tone. And that happens because politics is supposed to be a dry and boring subject.

Budgets, policies, et cetera and so forth, all those are dministrative administrative, not something to be decided with emotions.

But that doesn't lend itself well to communication. So what people pay attention to is the far right buffon yelling about white replacement or such bullshit.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-06 18:39:20+00:00
dbus is a big player there, but that is available for FreeBSD for the packages that need it (desktop environments etc). Systemd isn't really that important in that sense. After all there are many Linux distros that don't use it and things work fine there too.

But yeah, BSD is not Linux. So obviously things are going to be different. For example for plug & play it has its own devd for USB devices, and it can be configured easily.

If you'd port over all the Linuxisms like dbus, systemd, cgroups etc, then you basically end up with... Linux. What is the point in running BSD then?

It's a bit akin to people saying that every Linux should be more standardised (e.g. standard package manager, standard desktop), otherwise "the year of linux on the desktop" will never happen. But all these quirky desktops and distros are there because people have different needs and they don't want those to be watered down. The ecosystem as a whole doesn't matter to them. The same thing goes for BSD. I'm not using an OS with a desktop marketshare of literally 0.01% because I care about it becoming a mainstream desktop :) I also super duper hate the ideology behind GNOME so I would never use that, if it were the only option then I would just have to leave.

PS: I have no issue with things like dbus being available in ports but definitely not in the core system.
by ornornor | 2025-04-06 18:39:27+00:00
I’m an average software engineer and I can’t remember a time where I took a job I didn’t negotiate the salary on. Companies that refused to negotiate were the last offers I’d consider and I end up not taking their offers. I was often better paid than my peers. And my professional accomplishments are far from exceptional, I’ve never worked for any companies you’d know, I have gaps in my CV.