MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bravoetch | 2025-05-25 17:14:01+00:00
And the more date-specific 'best thing 2025' articles also update titles to match current year. Email is already a wasteland of notifications and things I haven't unsubscribed to after buying something. Web is now a wasteland of SEO optimized content. I'm bummed it's gone this way. Looking forward to AI becoming monetized in a similar way by inserting product placement etc.
by motorest | 2025-05-25 17:14:02+00:00
> Saddam was, without any doubt, an at-times brutal tyrant. Yet not only was Iraq vastly more stable and peaceful under his reign, but so too was the entire Mideast.

Hindsight is 20/20, but as consequences go I think that making a mockery of the UN in general and it's sanctions and weapons inspection in particular was something that had far more nefarious consequences. Most of today's stability issues in the middle east are caused by Iran financing and supporting terror groups, which isn't something that Saddam Hussein would counter. Worst case scenario, Saddam's post-normalization rule would double down on this playbook. Gaddafi's fate and Israel's handling of Iran shows that this blend of terrorism is only curtailed by going after the source.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-25 17:14:57+00:00
The social pension system always was a Ponzi scheme where the ones who got in first(boomers) get the biggest share of the pie(10-20 years of life left after retirement), while those coming into the system last(millennials+) and pay for the current retirees will get rug-pulled(5-10 years of life left after retirement).

Sustainable population and economic growth at that rate can't happen indefinitely.

Some people have been vocally saying this system in unsustainable long term, just that Europeans governments never wanted to publicly admit this due to fears of loosing elections, so they kept kicking the can down the road.
by zfnmxt | 2025-05-25 17:15:38+00:00
> But most everything he writes will be right.

I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-05-25 17:15:58+00:00
Not really. Modern hype cycles are an artifact of increasing irrationality in markets fueled at least in part by index fund investing, which moves a lot of money based solely on blind criteria like market cap. So these days hype cycles from the VC world start to impact the public market and get amplified by index funds. Companies then go chasing the money by jumping onboard the hype regardless of how irrational it is. As far as I can tell, that’s not how any of this worked in the 70s and 80s when DOD funded the development of ARPANET through traditional university research and computer companies developed microchips small enough and cheap enough to allow personal computers.
by WA | 2025-05-25 17:16:09+00:00
It’s the other way around: a few decades ago people retired only a few years earlier, had 5-10 years of retirement and then died.

Now people live way longer, but the retirement age never got adjusted properly to the new reality. So 15-20 years of retirement is the new normal.

In addition, way fewer young payers for the now old.
by epolanski | 2025-05-25 17:16:45+00:00
It doesn't just save money, it also makes it, the comparison tool (largely scrape based) allows us to fine tune our prices to competitors much more rapidly and efficiently which allows us to not leave thousands on the plate every day.

The other example also improved a lot customer satisfaction when dealing with our reps as they are much faster now, can often answer questions without putting them on hold.

I guess my examples weren't exciting (billion dollar) enough.
by princealiiiii | 2025-05-25 17:17:02+00:00
The same propoganda machine has been on full effect in Israel's war on Gaza with American support. As soon as the attacks happened, there was a rush of propaganda (40 beheaded babies, mass rapes) to make the Hamas attacks seem completely unprovoked to justify the complete destruction of Gaza. The good news is Americans are more questioning this time of why they need to be involved in this at all.
by pipo234 | 2025-05-25 17:17:13+00:00
For most of history, care for the elders was a family responsibility first and a local community one second.

Only for a short period were western population growing so fast relative to small number of retirees that transferring that responsibility to government was a no brainer.

With diminishing demographics anywhere except maybe Africa, we'll need to be more creative once again. Raising retirement age is just one of many hard but inevitable policies.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-25 17:17:28+00:00
It is important to keep in mind how these pension schemes are funded. Already now over 40% of Danish government expenses go towards social security a large part of that is pensions.

With a growing population of pensioners and a declining population of taxpayers many EU countries are walking towards a future where it is abundantly clear that the state can not finance pensions. Especially when at the same time their companies loose their economic competitiveness.

I do not believe that raising the retirement age in 15 years will be of any major help here. And it seems especially outrageous for the younger generation.
by zeroCalories | 2025-05-25 17:17:35+00:00
Economically, old people are a burden on society. If you want to have a long and easy retirement for your elderly, you need a growing population, forever. Like a ponzi scheme. The alternative is that you break young people's back by burdening them with providing for the elderly. No amount of redistribution will help a country with poor productivity. 60 was a reasonable retirement age years ago, because most people would be dead soon after retirement, but with people regularly reaching 80+, 70 for retirement seems very reasonable. It wouldn't surprise me if the average gen Z reaches 90+, so maybe they should be working until they're in their 80s.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-25 17:17:42+00:00
Consider yourself lucky. I’ve always adapted to the prevailing format of each mailing list, but the people who try to create a holy war out of different styles have always been insufferable.

In a normal office environment e-mail moves much faster, people open threads with the context already in mind, and expect to see the relevant new info at the top. Bottom posting would either make everyone sigh heavily when they see an e-mail from that one person or would earn someone a quick coaching session to adopt the prevailing style of the office environment.

But if you go on to a mailing list that wants bottom posting, that’s what you do. It’s a courtesy.
by arp242 | 2025-05-25 17:18:22+00:00
It's well documented. I'm not going to spend ages finding citations because this is a HN comment and not a scientific paper.

If you prefer to live in the psychological simplicity and safety of "neocons do evil because they're {evil,greedy,powerhungry,...}" or whatever then you're free to do so. But at that point you've also disqualified yourself from serious discussion.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-25 17:19:05+00:00
This is 100% it, but this goes far beyond just Bush or Iraq. If you ever want to understand what's really happening in US geopolitics, their paper, Rebuilding America's Defenses [1], is critical reading. It describes every motivation, goal, and purpose with 0 effort to fluff it up for public. This absolutely transcends parties as well. It is the position of the US political establishment. For instance Robert Kagan is the founder of the Project for the New American Century and his wife is Victoria Nuland who served as deputy head of state under Biden.

It's not easy to give cliff notes, because there's too much to say. But in general, this was at the time when the USSR had still only relatively recently fallen and the US was not only essentially the king of the world, but had 0 meaningful competition for said claim. The goal of PNAC, and of the US political establishment, was to take this scenario, expand it, and perpetuate it. So the primary point was to prevent the rise of any other power and to essentially dominate the world primarily through being seen as the unquestioned premier military power, which would entail dramatic increases in military spending, regular demonstrations of power including preemptive and unilateral attacks on other countries if necessary, and so forth, wrapped in a tidy package of 'spreading democracy and freedom.'

Most famously they acknowledged that all of their goals would be quite difficult without, in their own words, something like a new Pearl Harbor: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." 9/11 happened less than a year later, and everything went into overdrive, a trend that continued long after Bush was but a fading memory.

[1] - https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses
by agent281 | 2025-05-25 17:20:05+00:00
Maybe? But it destabilized the Middle East, caused the migrant crisis in Europe, the migrant crisis caused a rise in right wing movements in Europe, it caused the rise of ISIS (lots of Iraqi ex-military), ISIS was involved in the the civil war in Syria, it caused a loss of faith in the American government, created a generation of disillusioned combat vets, so on and so forth.

I really think we're still recovering from the damage caused by Bush administration.
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-25 17:20:09+00:00
> It’s not really a Ponzi scheme, it is completely possible for the system to be balanced, it’s just very very hard to get people to vote for you if you say they’ll have less tomorrow

This is exactly what happens in Denmark - a balancing of the pension system.

Also,rgis has been planned since 2006 - so it is nothing new.
by vkou | 2025-05-25 17:20:23+00:00
That's not a conservative problem, that's an anyone problem. Most of the liberal zeitgeist has done a 180 on globalism and tariffs this year, as a very prominent example.

The problem isn't that a political party is acting as hive mind, the problem is that the core pillar of conservatism they practice is 'I will use the law as a weapon against you, but I will not ever be bound by it'.

Which is no way to run a society, any I cannot have any respect for its disciples.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-25 17:21:10+00:00
If you didn't feel the machine in all those other cases it has gone full swing since then, that just means these two attempts were extremely crude by comparison (and they were indeed). But Cambridge Analytica has really ushered us into a new era of manipulation, where most citizens don't even have the slightest chance of perceiving how they are getting played by nefarious actors. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Today we have stuff like the Saudis buying access to Twitter/X after getting busted for planting literal double agents inside the company. The level and sophistication of propaganda we see right now is unprecedented in human history.
by ath3nd | 2025-05-25 17:21:11+00:00
There is much more equivalency between a dissent crushing nation like Iran, and the tactics big-corp have been utilizing to crush dissenting opinions.

You can definitely go in jail for going against big oil:

For example, environmental lawyer Steven Donzinger was placed under arrest for exposing the crimes against the planet of big oil: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/urgent-actions/environmental-lawy...

You can also be financially ruined: https://climatebase.org/blog/greenpeace-slapped-by-big-oil-s...

You, a scientist, can also be deported for your views if they don't align with the state's false narrative: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/mahmoud-khal...

You can even get some death threats for doing your job by debunking disinformation: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/03/anth...

I'd say it's pretty good whataboutism, the parallels are more than enough. Iran was a progressive country with flourishing science before nationalistic/religious fundamentalists took over, sadly the US taking its first steps on the same path.
by the8472 | 2025-05-25 17:21:34+00:00
First of all, you didn't directly answer my question, it wasn't a yes/no question. I don't know how these systems work. If they're almost always offline it would be a lot less concerning.

Secondly, the government makes both regulations (cell tower data retention, emergency calling). So in combination the government regulated user tracking. Where exactly it happens isn't really that important. Once the data is being collected it'll end up being used. Usually it starts with major crimes and anonymized statistics, once the automated infrastructure has been created it'll be abused either illegally by police overreach or legally by a tough-on-X government changing the rules. It's not like this is some novel pattern...
by jagraff | 2025-05-25 17:22:01+00:00
I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.

I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?
by intelekshual | 2025-05-25 17:22:08+00:00
This is a pretty shallow take.

Not everyone's brain works the same way. For people with ADHD (and other neurodivergent conditions), executive dysfunction can make it really hard to remember to reach out -- even to people they care about deeply. It's not about not valuing the friendship; it's about how memory and motivation work differently.

Instead of disparaging people for using tools that help them maintain relationships, maybe try having a little empathy -- or at the very least, an open mind. Not everyone connects the way you do, and that doesn't make their friendships any less real.
by boricj | 2025-05-25 17:22:15+00:00
Yup. I've shoved bits of a PlayStation game inside a Linux MIPS program and I've made a native port of a Linux x86 program to Windows, all without source code, decompiling anything or even fully reverse-engineering said bits. The toolchains happened to agree on calling conventions and structure padding/alignment, so it was mostly a matter of writing shims to glue everything together.

I don't have the tooling to meld together incompatible ABIs. I tried once with two really similar ABIs (MIPS PIC and non-PIC) and while I've managed to work around incompatibilities with assembly trampolines, the debugging experience was so poor that I rage quit. Never tried with different CPUs.

I'm crazy enough to think it ought to be possible (there's plenty of prior art for most of the needed pieces), but I'm already stuck inside a rabbit hole so deep I can't see the bottom... I'll let someone else investigate that.
by candlemas | 2025-05-25 17:22:25+00:00
There were a few reasons but an important one is that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were convinced by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq really had something to do with 9/11 and everybody in the administration was paranoid about another attack. Wolfowitz also felt guilty about the George H. W. Bush administration abandoning the Shiites. All of them (except maybe Powell and Armitage) already disliked Iraq, felt like the first war was unfinished business, and didn't need much prodding to go after Saddam but the 9/11 connection they thought existed gave it urgency. Ultimately it came down to Bush and he probably thought it sounded like a good idea and not for any particular reason.
by mikewarot | 2025-05-25 17:22:58+00:00
It's a real shame that Object Oriented programming got perverted into a boatload of boilerplate, as evidenced in C++, Java, etc.

I was all on board with it in Borland Pascal for Windows, and Delphi, but when I looked at C++, I got off that train. You can always take a good idea, and go too far with it... I never did understand the whole Factories for classes thing.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-25 17:23:35+00:00
No. It is about how the system is funded.

If pensions were funded by actual retirement accounts, where employees invested money into some state fund and have it paid out for retirement this would be entirely unproblematic.

But the pension system in many EU countries is set up in a way in which tax contributions now finance pensions now. This can only work with a steadily growing economy which continually generates more revenue when more people retire. In some sense it is a literal Pyramid scheme, in which the obligations are continually pushed to younger generations, which have to contribute based on how many pensioners there are.

Especially now as EU economies become weaker this issue becomes bigger and bigger.
by simonw | 2025-05-25 17:23:50+00:00
My best guess is that this is a reflection of how these things actually work.

When you "chat" with an LLM you are actually still participating in a "next token" prediction sequence.

The trick to get it to behave like it is a chat is to arrange that sequence as a screenplay:

User: five facts about squirrels Assistant: (provide five facts) User: two more Assistant:

When you think about the problem like that, it makes sense that the LLM is instructed in terms of how that assistant should behave, kind of like screen directions.
by polipus | 2025-05-25 17:24:29+00:00
Living in Copenhagen for the last 7 years.

- housing for 80k USD is 525k DKK: no way you can find anything at that price anywhere close to cph. Not sure for other "major" cities, but in cph you can expect to pay 4mil DKK (600K USD) for a ~60 sqmt apartment, prices will fall outside the cities, but nowhere close to 80k USD. Where did you get that number?

- you pay for your unemployment benefit, thought an a-kasse. Its not forever and it might barely cover your bills depending on where you live/your mortgage. If you have family its probably not enough and you need to add an insurance on your salary on top of that.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents.
by zugi | 2025-05-25 17:26:20+00:00
> However, they’ve consolidated themselves as quasi-monopolies

I don't understand the recent trend of mentioning a field being a "monopoly" while then discussing Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, and Mastodon all in that very same article.

Social networks definitely benefit from economies of scale as larger platforms enable interaction with more users. But consumers have many, many choices for social networking, including nearly every website and app that adds social networking features.

It reminds me of the time a decade or two ago when the government accused three companies of having a monopoly on "super premium ice cream." There are thousands of suppliers of ice cream, and hundreds of suppliers of "premium ice cream", but only three suppliers of "super premium ice cream."

Certainly if you artificially define any market small enough you can declare a monopoly. But there are so many sites, apps, and options to interact socially with others online that it seems absurd to imply that anyone has a monopoly on social networking.
by Bender | 2025-05-25 17:26:34+00:00
And in doing so, ensure that the network is too boring for anyone to use, except for the local flower shop posting its ads.

Agreed. That's kindof my point though. The only way to keep out the dingdongs is to lock it down. Leave it open and exciting then it quickly develops a bad smell from all the manipulators, trolls, shills, agent provocateurs, etc...
by detritus | 2025-05-25 17:26:51+00:00
The problem, as I see it, is that the Flash editing environment doesn't have a widely-accepted descendant, and the person you're responding to is right - there's not really a contemporary editor that is as easy - and more importantly: as potentially deep (as it was also shallow) - for non-techies to pick up and work with.

There are plenty of options today for technically-minded or 'computer people' to work with, but there's a dearth of options for the 'merely' creative to play around with and investigate.

A lot of the magic from the 'old' (mid?) web came from people who had very little initial interest in the technical nature of the solution from just going ahead and making Cool Shit™ anyway. Some of those people might then relish getting their hands grubbier and delving deeper into the technical guts (eg. Praystation et al).

- ed : for the record, at the time i was also critical of the proprietary nature of Flash.
by Retric | 2025-05-25 17:26:52+00:00
The math for pensions is fine as long as the maxes payout isn’t excessive and you don’t start too early. There’s a huge cost difference between a 30k/year pension at 70 and a 45k per year pension at 60.

People also focus on a fixed percentage being returned while ignoring the long term increase in productivity and people’s standards of living. In real terms people in 2025 get way more out of pension systems than people did in 1925, that’s as central to the problem as any changes in lifespan.
by simonw | 2025-05-25 17:27:06+00:00
Using parameters in your SQL query in place of string concatenation to avoid SQL injection.

Correctly escaping untrusted markup in your HTML to avoid XSS attacks.

Both of those are 100% effective... unless you make a mistake in applying those fixes.

That is why prompt injection is different: we do not know what the 100% reliable fixes for it are.
by MithrilTuxedo | 2025-05-25 17:27:06+00:00
If it's all under one hierarchy controlling it, that's true. If the platform is decentralized and the development of the platform is independent from its use, that vulnerability from the top doesn't exist.

I'm thinking of public platforms like the internet or Bitcoin or Mastodon. Twitter isn't public, so there is no way to know what influence other entities have on it. The same is true of any individual using any platform, but there are too many individuals. We want control over the use of a platform to be divided across as many entities as possible.

There is no unbiased platform for all people to discuss ideas in nature. I don't know why anyone thinks they can create one. You can't increase communication by raising the noise floor.
by AdamH12113 | 2025-05-25 17:27:31+00:00
I went looking for the date of this post because I honestly thought it was from the 1990s, when top-posting actually won.

The date is more important than you're giving it credit for. Every creative work has a context and an implicit perspective that comes from that context. This is especially true for nonfiction articles, where the date tells you things like:

* Whether the author is reacting to something that just happened or whether they have the benefit of historical hindsight.

* Where the article fits in the author's overall body of work (including works they haven't written yet!).

* What, if any, recent events may have prompted the author to write the article.

* The prevailing intellectual climate, which carries focuses and blind spots that may be very different from what we have now.

* Whether the article is about something immediately useful or whether it's more likely to be of historical interest.

You can already tell, for instance, that "Thoughts on Software Development (1998)" is going to be talking about very different things than "Thoughts on Software Development (2012)" or "Thoughts on Software Development (2025)". An article like "Better C Programming (2020)" probably contains some useful advice; whereas "Better C Programming (1991)" should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Instead of making readers ask questions like "Why is the person talking about operating system monopolies while saying nothing about LLM model ownership?", it's easier and more helpful to just put the date at the top.