MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-30 03:19:23+00:00
This is not an argument from authority (though I would in fact give some credence to a domain expert with a demonstrated reputation for diligence and accuracy, here). This is an argument backed by evidence refuting an article not supported by evidence.

(Also, the argument is not "credit cards are fair". The argument is "credit card reward programs are not a subsidy of the rich by the poor".)

> And Twitter doesn’t show threads unless you’re logged in btw, so you just linked Patrick’s opinion.

Fair point, thank you.

Some highlights of the thread, assuming that each directly linked tweet can be loaded:

Citation for people with more money spending more: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902556736956903589 (linking to https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm ).

The rich are paying far more of the "payment system overhead" of merchants than the poor are: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902556925826416841 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557078222176449 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557151807119735 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557413275775295

Identifying the key question: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557654603415768 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902557795800498477

Quoting and questioning the Atlantic's claim that rewards programs aren't funded by interchange: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558008283992313 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558055310434325

Citation refuting this: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558157169152158

Quoting relevant charts and data from the citation: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558268070711311 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902558360530002094

Claim (not specifically citation-backed) that in fact one group getting a subsidy is lower-income consumers during macroeconomic shocks: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559088631771397 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559166729802088

Observation that while wealthier people get higher-reward cards supported by interchange, poorer people get free checking supported by interchange: https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559216214134798 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559349655982387 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559372758155325 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559469470412913

Refutation of another part of the Atlantic article (article claims credit-card companies "make lucrative deals with airlines and hotel chains", but credit card companies pay for those deals, not the other way around): https://x.com/patio11/status/1902559896400203987 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560051644002726 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560160632963217 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560257282335024 and https://x.com/patio11/status/1902560386395545603 .
by devilbunny | 2025-05-30 03:22:12+00:00
In the US, government-regulated fares meant that fares were basically static on a given route. The only way to bring passengers to your airline was to serve places nobody else did, or to offer extras that slightly offset your profit in the hope that you'd get more, regular customers.

Since air travel was substantially more expensive then than now, the amenities gravitated to what attracted the most frequent fliers: businessmen. So stewardesses (they certainly weren't called flight attendants then) had weight limits, age limits, and if-you're-married-you-must-quit deals, and as a glance at some 1970s uniforms will show you, they were basically hiring models who happened to have the right skill set (usually at least one would be a trained nurse, and they all had to be reasonably confident) to dress them in revealing outfits. Like Hooters for travel.

If that's what you want, great. If you'd prefer other amenities... maybe not.

It has never struck me as coincidental that smoking was banned on US aircraft before no-smoking policies became nigh-universal at restaurants, but in just about the right timeframe for airplanes to shift from a boys' club to a place that catered to families.

If you want to pay more to get more, there are a lot of options, starting with coach plus (coach seats, business class legroom, priority boarding) and going through first class before branching out into niches like all-first-class flights (JSX is an airline in the US for which this is the business model; they fly smaller regional-size planes, and the reduced capacity legally allows them to skip the whole TSA and terminal experience and just let you on the plane if you show up and buy a ticket twenty minutes before departure) and then on into the various levels of chartered and truly private aviation.

You do, definitely, get what you pay for, but sometimes you don't need a Michelin-starred meal experience. And when that's the case, you've got cheaper options that didn't exist before deregulation (except for Southwest, which avoided problems by not making interstate flights at all in the early days.
by growlNark | 2025-05-30 03:22:29+00:00
Tbh, I really don't think there's much of value in the constitution for most people. It seems easier to characterize as a fig leaf for the crimes the state commits against its citizens (see eg our prisons, or our treatment of immigrants, the extremely shallow protections we have against our employers, etc).

> It seems you have an issue with just one part of it, the bill of rights. Besides property---which doesn't just mean land---that part addresses such other "outdated" concepts as speech, assembly, religion, rights of the individual in criminal investigations and trials, and a number of others. What connects all these ideas together is that they are the rights the people have _against_ government action. Things the government should not do to harm people.

Notably, we do not address material needs. It's hard to give a damn about speech, assembly, religion, and whatever people consider "rights" to mean, if we let people live on the street. It's hard to imagine an america that would feed its own people if we didn't produce such a ridiculous amount of food our food wastage is measured on the proportions of entire country's consumption.

Such an observation necessarily implies I'm going to view the constitution as broken. Who gives a damn about speech when we can't house our neighbors? The cost of housing would be quite small compared to the damage of stepping over a person to enter your workplace or home. It's just simple cruelty that persists such behavior.
by xorbax | 2025-05-30 03:24:08+00:00
How does "Blowtorch" handle things like the gravitational lensing difference between baryon-only and the fact that dark matter is able to account for it [1]?

I know the theory doesn't do anything mathematically, but I'm curious how you deal with the unexplained mass issues. Does it explain things like galactic rotation [2]?

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-024-01087-w

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve
by csomar | 2025-05-30 03:26:16+00:00
I won't get into the politics, the author is way off base...

> Tunisian cities are mostly ugly as hell.

Bare a few touristic spots, yes. It is unfortunate as Tunisia could have looked more like Santorini and less like the nuclear apocalypse that it is today. I guess on the upside you have little to no homelessness?

> The only problem with Tunisian niceness is that it blends into Tunisian mercantile craftiness.

This is mostly a problem in touristic craft stores which I never visit. I guess tourists are attracted to the Medina; but most Tunisians "Medinas" have completely collapsed economically.

> Informality Has Its Advantages

Given how broken the system is, that's how anything can run in Tunisia.

> Tunisian butcher shops tend to hang not just hunks of meat but animal heads in front of their stores

This is kind of an ad that we just had the animal slaughtered now. Fresh meat.

> Sorry Tunisia, but your mosque game is weak.

He should have focused on Churches, Cathedrals and Synagogues.

> There aren’t many bars in Tunisia, even in the major cities.

There are lot of bars in Tunisia but the second major city is a conservative one. It is the last place where you want to have a beer.

> Alcohol is still fairly taboo in most Arab countries, even in relatively liberal Tunisia, so they probably adopted cafe cultural norms.

No, the cafe cultural norms came from the French. You can see a similarity with Vietnam in this regard.

> but he was most excited to tell me that the U.S. Ambassador had just visited the House of the Governor two weeks ago along with his “black wife” who “wasn’t white like you and me.” Ok, then.

You are reading too much into this. Tunisians are pretty chatty and gossip to unhealthy levels.

> ... where there’s a lot of lingering resentment against their former overlord

France was a popular (and the) destination until 10 years ago or so. France now sucks economically. It has nothing to do with it being a former overlord.
by ash-ali | 2025-05-30 03:26:33+00:00
Table of contents & the books description seem a little gloomy to anyone else?

GNU Radio, filters, AM/FM, IQ demod ... I remember working through all these topics on GNU Radio Tutorials wiki [0] but I don't know if the book offers anything more of value?

Also, if the authors focus on GNU Radio as their software stack why would they not include a chapter on creating your own Python Blocks which is the biggest upside (imo) to GNU Radio. I love SDRs and think anyone interested in electrical engineering should play around with them. I dont know if I'd recommend this book based off what the sample chapter 4 provided.

[0] https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/Tutorials
by moozilla | 2025-05-30 03:27:38+00:00
I'm surprised this doesn't get brought up more often, but I think the main explanation for the divide is simple: current LLMs are only good at programming in the most popular programming languages. Every time I see this brought up in the HN comments section and people are asked what they are actually working on that the LLM is not able to help with, inevitably it's using a (relatively) less popular language like Rust or Clojure. The article is good example of this, before clicking I guessed correctly it would be complaining about how LLMs can't program in Rust. (Granted, the point that Cursor uses this as an example on their webpage despite all of this is funny.)

I struggled to find benchmark data to support this hunch, best I could find was [1] which shows a performance of 81% with Python/Typescript vs 62% with Rust, but this fits with my intuition. I primarily code in Python for work and despite trying I didn't get that much use out of LLMs until the Claude 3.6 release, where it suddenly crossed over that invisible threshold and became dramatically more useful. I suspect for devs that are not using Python or JS, LLMs have just not yet crossed this threshold.

[1] https://terhech.de/posts/2025-01-31-llms-vs-programming-lang...
by jcranmer | 2025-05-30 03:28:08+00:00
The article mentions this briefly, but Tunisia just wasn't as important to the French as Algeria was. To France, Algeria (at least the populated northern coast of it) wasn't a colony, it was Metropolitan France--it received full representation in the French legislature, for example. (Note that this was in practice limited to the French settlers in Algeria, as the natives were largely excluded from civic participation--not unlike the apartheid system in South Africa). Given that native populations weren't particularly well-treated, especially after their lot failed to improve despite being the major backbone of the Free French Army in WW2, it's not much of a surprise that they resented French rule and chose to become independent.

And quite like the settler colonies of other countries in Africa, the settler minority who held power in Algeria weren't particularly inclined to give it up to the majority they largely felt beneath them. And since it was a severe insult to national pride to let a core part of France become independent, the French government resisted to the point that it literally broke the government (the Fourth Republic fell because of it, leading to the Fifth Republic).
by josephcsible | 2025-05-30 03:28:31+00:00
> The "reporter" did not even watch the linked raw footage which shows that FSD was, in fact, engaged

It was not engaged. Note this part of the article and the immediately following image:

> Sure enough, The Dawn Project’s own video of the test shows the driver “activating” FSD Beta by pressing on the Autopilot stalk, but we can clearly see that it didn’t activate because the course prediction line stays grey and the Autopilot wheel doesn’t appear on the top left:

And if these problems were real, people other than O'Dowd would be able to replicate them. But in other people's tests, they don't happen.

> if you are claiming that it only consistently runs down children when they do that

Yes, I am claiming that. The only way Teslas consistently run down children is when their built-in assistive and safety systems are shut off, and a human drives fully manually into them.
by rchaud | 2025-05-30 03:28:33+00:00
Even the iPod would've flopped without Apple blanketing the world with ads, making it Windows-compatible and setting up deals with record labels to buy music for a buck a pop. I'm not sure what chance Humane would have had even in the best of circumstances, they had no ecosystem or manufacturing advantage and were completely dependent on third parties to provide the "brain" of the interface.
by Nursie | 2025-05-30 03:28:55+00:00
There was an opinion piece in The Guardian a few years ago expounding the idea that 'awareness' and particularly the medicalisation of minor cases of things like anxiety and depression may be counterproductive, may lead more people to sink into these conditions rather than battle through and pull themselves out of them - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/medica...

And it's interesting to me that we now have the UK government talking about providing mental health support to try to foster grit and self-reliance - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/16/much-needed-...
by BurningFrog | 2025-05-30 03:28:56+00:00
This is a misunderstanding. I meant "you" as the "generic you" (any job seeker), not the "specific you" (you).

I hope the fact that you need good skills to get good jobs is not controversial.

I meant this as a message of hope: There really are good jobs out there, so don't give up on the industry!
by kadoban | 2025-05-30 03:28:58+00:00
> They mention the large chunk of high explosive in there, but the key attribute of high explosives - by definition - is how hard they are to actually trigger.

I think the term you might mean is "secondary explosive"? Because as stated this is _very_ wrong. Nitroglycerine is a high explosive. Nitrogen triiodide is a high explosive. Not really compounds known for being hard to trigger, unless you consider a light featherdusting to be rough treatment.

Otherwise I suspect you have a good point, just the terminology seems wrong to me.
by muglug | 2025-05-30 03:29:00+00:00
Nice quick read, but this isn't a proper oral history of Flash.

I've chatted with a colleague who used to work at Macromedia, and she has some great stories.

Also any history of Flash which doesn't mention shockwave.com (or Princess[1]) is incomplete.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_(web_series)
by mullingitover | 2025-05-30 03:30:12+00:00
> Sure there are also people who think things like "my roulette strategy is bound to work", but it's a tiny proportion.

Depends on which activities you gamble on, I suppose.

There's an old quote: “When as a young and unknown man I started to be successful I was referred to as a gambler. My operations increased in scope. Then I was a speculator. The sphere of my activities continued to expand and presently I was known as a banker. Actually I had been doing the same thing all the time.”
by jdeibele | 2025-05-30 03:30:25+00:00
I didn't know what a GDS was. Apparently it's a Global Distribution System and there's 4 major ones, including Sabre which I've heard of and 3 that I haven't.

I don't know how a normal person would have access to any of them. They're described as being offered via subscription to businesses.

https://www.bookingninjas.com/blog/gds-system-top-reasons-wh...
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-05-30 03:30:49+00:00
> I mean if someone masters running, does it mean you never use a car?

It means you shouldn't run with weights on your shoes even if running with weights on shoes is a more efficient way for others to run.

LLM tech is popular because (1) people like taking shortcuts and (2) their bosses like the prospect of hiring fewer people.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-30 03:31:51+00:00
I don't think AI LLM are very good at Rust, no ? I tried multiple times with Sonnet 3.5 last year to produce web interface with Tauri and it got in infinite loops with async functions. On the other hand setting up shaders in Rust worked out of the box. But I couldn't ask too much before the AI was looping over bad code over and over.

Do this in C++ and I'm pretty sure you won't have any issue
by daseiner1 | 2025-05-30 03:33:21+00:00
Is your comment just in response to the falling testosterone levels point? Because that’s been an ongoing trend since I believe the 80s and has absolutely nothing to do with performance enhancing drugs. Testosterone levels being in healthy range is absolutely critical for men’s health for psychological as well as physical reasons and being in said healthy range is unrelated with sports culture. Whether meathead or whiz kid, physical activity, healthy food, good sleep, limited drugs & alcohol, and minimal or no pornography are all essential parts of reaching one’s peak.

Maybe I’m totally misinterpreting your comment but it kinda just seems like a diatribe unrelated to the comment you’re responding to.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-30 03:36:50+00:00
> The "standard" argument is that grocery stores bake in a 2% (or whatever) interchange rate into their prices, but only rich people get 1% (or whatever) back in cash back, whereas poor people don't. As a result, poor people are paying 1% higher prices on goods compared to rich people.

And the thread counters that in several ways: rich people spend more in total at the store so their interchange costs are more than made up for by actual spending; and poor people are getting different rewards in exchange for the interchange system, such as free checking/banking (which was made free by using interchange fees to subsidize it so there aren't monthly fees).

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the financial system overall is particularly fair. If you want cases where it's extremely unfair, a target-rich environment would be bank accounts that have fees that just so happen to disproportionately affect poorer people (e.g. overdraft fees).

But credit card reward programs aren't a case of transferring money from poor individual cardholders to rich individual cardholders; credit cards are a case of transferring money from poor and "rich" cardholders to ultra-rich credit card companies. The right target for the ire, there, is the credit card company, not the "rich" individual cardholders. This is a standard divide-and-conquer tactic: better to pit low-income and high-income people against each other, rather than cast attentions on the very large companies that have constructed a system to profit heavily from both of them.
by jmitcheson | 2025-05-30 03:37:14+00:00
Umm this is amazing!

The company I work for displays large engineering drawings in the browser; right now we have to choose between manual png conversion and loading the vectors directly (each one has its own problems). I tried the snippet application with one drawing and it renders perfectly.

For our application we have a 'Google Maps' style viewport where you pan and zoom with the mouse, though. Right now I'm seeing if Gemini 2.5 Pro can refactor the snippet application to work this way. Did you have any plans for building another type of snippet application which works in the fashion?
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-30 03:37:33+00:00
In this case for me its is it really an emotional support chicken? Or it is just a cuddly chicken that people like and find enjoyment from.

Not everything that brings people joy is an emotional support xxx.

Similar to saying you have OCD because you double checked if you switched your iron off. It's not obsessive compulsive you just double checked something.
by silisili | 2025-05-30 03:38:24+00:00
Sorry to hear that. Makes me angry just reading it, I can't imagine how it makes you feel.

I've mentioned before here wondering if there is a name for this phenomenon, it's similar to sunk cost fallacy, but more emotionally charged. Like, the thought of having been scammed makes you put on blinders and keep going hoping you weren't. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me, but it happens all the time, to people of all ages.

This guy was only 53 and fell for the same traps, rather famously -

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/cryptocurrency-shan-hanes-pi...
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-30 03:38:27+00:00
Those clubs still exist in London but they're just for the elite to make shady backroom deals with their rich buddies :)

They're really exclusive and they always have been. You and I would not get in, not now and not in the Victorian days. Even 'new money' is usually not ok. You really have to have gone to the right school and have the right family.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-30 03:40:31+00:00
Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point).

See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
by ehnto | 2025-05-30 03:42:50+00:00
To me delegation requires the full cycle of agency, with the awareness that I probably shouldn't be interrupted shortly after delegating. I delegated so I can have space from the task and so babysitting it really doesn't suit my needs. I want the task done, but some time in the future.

From my coworkers I want to be able to say, here's the ticket, you got this? And they take the ticket all the way or PR, interacting with clients, collecting more information etc.

I do somewhat think an LLM could handle client comms for simple extra requirements gathering on already well defined tasks. But I wouldn't trust my business relationships to it, so I would never do that.
by daseiner1 | 2025-05-30 03:42:57+00:00
I think the failing point with all(?) of the attempts in this space is that, to phrase it in a very handwavy pseudo graph way, “real world” social groups depend on people who are “hubs” with a disproportionately large number of links to individuals, the majority of whom have far fewer links comparatively. Communities are anchored by these “super friends”. Those are exactly the least likely people to ever consider using a site/app like the above, but the most important to have as they are the ones with the requisite initiative and/or social clout to actually "herd the cats".

Basically, the Friendship Paradox https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Friendship_paradox
by more_corn | 2025-05-30 03:42:58+00:00
It’s more than that. Life isn’t about happiness. We’re not happy all the time. We often do things that sorta suck because at the end the accomplishment makes the pain and difficulty worth it. Giving away a thing I worked hard for robs me of the satisfaction of accomplishment. It steals from me the thing that makes the suffering worthwhile.

It’s not that I don’t want other people to succeed it’s that I don’t want you to make my accomplishments meaningless.