MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bjoli | 2025-05-25 20:10:33+00:00
We have the same problem as every other western country. Sweden has lowered the taxes by about 500 billion SEK (corrected for inflation and population growth) since I was born close to 40 years ago. That is about a third of the annual budget.

How these tax cuts are distributed over the population is... not very evenly. There was even an article yesterday in the NYT (iirc) that warned about wealth accumulation patterns in Sweden.

It is the same neoiberal experiment that the US has had since Reagan, just with some more social democracy.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-25 20:11:18+00:00
> you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was)

Marx is the originator of precisely none of those thoughts, you couldn't find an economist that disagrees with them. "Unions" is also not the obvious solution for the problems of an individual. Unless you have a specific, existing union with a contact phone number that you're referring to, one that has a track record of making sure that individuals are not affected negatively by technological progress over the span of their entire careers, you're just lazily talking shit.

If it's the solution, so much easier than keeping ahead of the technology treadmill, and it's so obvious to you, it's strange that you haven't set up the One Big Union yet and fixed all the problems.
by autobodie | 2025-05-25 20:11:57+00:00
I think you're overcomplicating things. Castro was very vocal about medical care being a top proority during and after the revolution. There's no coincidence or conspiracy.

When you try to build a society around human needs instead of capital needs, you end up with different priorities. It's that simple.

If anyone thinks they're making the big bucks and accumulating "soft power" by training a bunch of doctors then selling treatments to Americans for cheap, I'm not sure they can be helped.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-25 20:12:21+00:00
I agree with the general sentiment. The article is vague on the specifics as to what counts as "added complexity" though, which I found to be the central issue.

Everyone loves a bit of abstraction that encapsulates a given complexity and make it a single simple concept. This is not: "a complex bit of technology that has pros and cons and will lock you in a particular architecture and vendor and would almost always necessitate 2 architectures because not all tasks/scenarios would be suitable for it". It is a "Lambda". So simple. Just a `handle(event) {}`, how much simpler can this be? No complex runtimes, VMs, environments, etc. It's just a `handle(event) {}` no complexity to see here. good luck.

On the other hand, sometimes people who "champion" simplicity are also the same people who don't care about the engineering part of it. The "Hey, I added a full text search. It's implemented as a:

select * from posts where column1::text like $1 or column2::text like $1 ... or columnN::text like $1

Lets push it. Oh out database CPU is burning, search is so slow. What a surprise this is. I guess it validates the popularity of search. Can we optimize it? Maybe we cache the result? Maybe we add an LLM to normalize queries so we can cache results more effectively? I'm trying to keep things simple"

There is also the requirement or ask that is trying to hide a particular complexity from one side by shoving it all under a rug somewhere. Once the complexity has been sufficiently shoved under the rug, we can think of the rug as just a rug. We can move it around and use it like a rug. Surely the shit underneath will never have any impact on anyone any time.
by cortesoft | 2025-05-25 20:12:25+00:00
> What's more valuable is the network and access to the alumni network of others who will hire you into their company just because you went to the same school as them.

This seems completely untrue in my 20 year career experience. I have hired dozens of people for both large and small companies, and networks do matter… but I have never once seen the network be from school. It is always about people you have worked with before. Even my coworkers with degrees don’t have contact with their schoolmates anymore, it is always people they worked with.
Show HN: Explore Spotify Playlists on a Globe
by schleo | 2025-05-25 20:12:34+00:00
My friend and I built a small web app where you can click somewhere on a globe and listen to a Spotify playlist from that location. (based on data from everynoise.com)

It’s like a frontend for everynoise.com/everyplace.cgi, a project by @glenn_mcdonald that organises music geographically. We wanted a way to explore those playlists in a more visual way, and tried out a globe interface.

We're not affiliated with Spotify or EveryNoise - just fans of the dataset and wanted to build something fun on top of it.

Would appreciate feedback on the UI, performance, or any other ideas.
by paulsutter | 2025-05-25 20:13:26+00:00
Suggestion for you then, in your first response you would have been clearer to say "The reason Chomsky seems like such a retard here, is because he clings to irrelevant nonsense"

It's completely unremarkable that humans are unable to learn certain languages, and soon it will be unremarkable when humans have no cognitive edge over machines.

Response: Science? "Ancient Linguistics" would more accurately describe Chomsky's field of study and its utility
by tgv | 2025-05-25 20:13:30+00:00
It's not a fraud. How can you say so? Also, the first pensioners didn't invest in the system. There isn't even a concept of investment in old-age social welfare, unlike other pensions. It's also not a pyramid scheme, since the structure is upside down, and there is no recruitment.

Calling it something else than it is, only to taint the system and its receivers by associating it with a criminal undertaking is bad faith, if not worse.
by brewdad | 2025-05-25 20:13:57+00:00
This was certainly true of my Polish ancestors. My great grandfather arrived at age 19. He never really became fluent in English but could get by when he needed to. My grandfather spoke both Polish and English but only spoke English at home once he had school aged children. My father really only knew the Polish swear words and I know a handful of Polish phrases that only get used amongst family at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Don’t ask me to write them down. I’ve only ever heard them verbally.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-05-25 20:14:16+00:00
The first specialist I went to, a top audiology lab in L.A. (the House Clinic), asked about COVID vaccine as the first diagnostic question. Their office noticed so many new patients coming in after just having the vaccine that they published a paper about it:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8443418/

Also, National Geographic (paywalled): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/covid-va...

https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/can-the...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/health/covid-vaccines-sid...

And I have more, and I'm sure there are many more since. This one discusses the fact that even scientists have been reluctant to report this harm, for fear of being "canceled:" https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/tinnitus-rare-sid...

A specialist I saw at UCLA came right out and said "this is a true agent" (pretty sure that was the terminology he used) and that information on it has been actively suppressed.

Aside from suppression, there's a huge under-reporting problem here. I had to spend a lot of time seeking out specialists for this issue, time that I happened to have and the insurance and money to pursue it. That is not MOST people.

General practitioners and even first-level ENTs pretty much shrugged and suggested known-to-be-ineffective treatment like steroids. Do you think these guys reported my complaint as vaccine-related to some central database?

Of course I did, but again... I'm sure that puts me in a small minority. Also I had good hearing and immediately noticed the problem. In fact, I have diligently protected my hearing my whole life, wearing ear plugs even in loud pubs.

So I submit that this is a way bigger problem than the "stats" show... stats that (even so) DO indicate a problem.
by thrance | 2025-05-25 20:14:34+00:00
Trump believes people are born with a set number of heartbeats [1], hence why he doesn't exercise. To save them for later.

Is that something you'd expect POTUS to catch because of "how absurd it is" or not?

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/donald-trump-exe...
by nicolashahn | 2025-05-25 20:14:44+00:00
I found this article from 2017:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...

The most recent birth rate stats I can find is 2005-2010 where Muslims have a birth rate of 3.0 while the rest of the country is at 1.8. Estimates say it's more like 2.5 now, but the current overall UK birth rate is only 1.57 from a quick Google.

https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2...

The same article also states that the average age for Muslims is much lower than non-Muslims as of 2016, 28 vs 41 for the UK.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/...
by SaltyBackendGuy | 2025-05-25 20:15:22+00:00
As a somewhat accomplished self taught outlier as well, my perspective is slightly different.

While it's absolutely possible to no have a degree and succeed in megacorp, don't discount the randomness (luck) involved in getting the right experience and meeting the right people at the right time of your career (and aligning with market demands).

Please don't hear this as "you didn't work hard to get to where you are". I certainly believe that folks like us, self taught, are able to work hard and teach ourselves what's needed to get to the next level because we cannot rely on credentials to carry us. A lot of things still need to go right for us to be successful, more so than folks with formal education, especially in the early stages of our careers.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-25 20:15:40+00:00
My grandpa went to prison (in Romania) in the 1950-es for being part of bourgeoise class because he fixed and ran a broken mill. He was a war refugee (from Romania to Romania) without any money, land or any other resources, but in Communist Romania running a mill would tag you as "super rich". I guess this is what you wanted to say there, correct?
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-25 20:15:51+00:00
> Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot

That's kind of what I mean by "syntax". For example, "how do I find a value that matches X in this specific type of data structure?" AI is very good at this and it's a huge time saver for me. But I can imagine how it might be less helpful if I did this full time.
by quotemstr | 2025-05-25 20:16:25+00:00
Except all those times you don't want color at all.

> By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly.

It's not outdated. It's a Chesterton's fence. Disregard for interoperability and feature discovery is why the terminal ecosystem has such immense difficulty getting traction on advanced features.
by Robotbeat | 2025-05-25 20:16:37+00:00
Part of the reason employees are reticent to hire someone past 50 is before they worry they’ll retire soon, even if they’re mentally and physically in good shape. So increasing the retirement age might actually improve the ability of folks in their 50s to find work.

Not saying this is a great trend, but it’s unavoidable due to the low fertility rate (already a problem everywhere in the developed world and soon to be a problem the world over, as by 2050–before I retire—the global average total fertility rate will have dropped below replacement.).
by cortesoft | 2025-05-25 20:16:41+00:00
Yeah, I am very confused by this persons experience. I have never once seen anyone utilize their school network, either to get a job or to bring someone on; every time we get a referral, it is for someone who they have worked with before, not who they went to school with.

I have worked with people for YEARS before i even learned that they have or don’t have a CS degree. I have interviewed many dozens of people, both as a hiring manager and a peer, and we only look at schooling if they have zero professional experience.

In my experience, a degree can help you get your first job, but after that it is all about your work experience and the connections with the people you have worked with.
Show HN : A noise free Hackers News newsletters + catch up page
by Tan-Aki | 2025-05-25 20:17:12+00:00
Hey HN,

I built HN500 because I wanted a no-fuss way to stay updated on major HN stories — especially after taking time off. It’s a newsletter and a catch-up tool with a few handy features:

Set your own point threshold (250/500/750/1000) to get only the most upvoted posts. - Choose daily or weekly email updates. - Each email includes 3 random stories to help surface underrated gems. - The catch-up page lets you filter by points, time range, sort order, and more — great if you’ve been away for a while.

It’s free, lightweight, and designed to stay out of your way. Feedback is welcome!
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-25 20:17:43+00:00
I keep meaning to experiment with vibe-coded VSTs. The shell and UI parts should be easy to automate, because they're basically boilerplate. But I doubt AI knows enough about DSP to design an incredible new reverb algorithm, or is an expert on bandwidth-limited oscillator design.

Or maybe it is? When I have some time, I'll find out.
by busyant | 2025-05-25 20:18:15+00:00
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.

Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC

So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target.

*(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology)

* edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack"

https://archive.is/lUNox
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-25 20:18:59+00:00
> You can use a PC/console from that era, VMs or emulators, apply patches, or get the versions from storefronts like GOG.

Only insofar as those PCs and consoles are still circulating, or the platform was big enough to have good emulators (and the distribution format was standard enough that you can still rip the ROM, and the emulators themselves can still be run on modern systems), or the game was big enough for someone to have been willing to write patches for it. If you don't have the technical knowledge and skills to work around these (or you don't have the time), then the game might as well be dead for you.

And of course, it can't have died enough at any point for everyone with a copy to have lost it, which is the fate of a lot of the old text adventures.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-25 20:19:14+00:00
As far as what I'm focusing on this weekend:

1. Right now, working on standing up an MCP server in Java. Not using the Spring Boot support at the moment, but rather setting up embedded Tomcat and doing it the more "low level" way just for didactic purposes. I'm sure I'll use Spring Boot once I get deeper into all of this.

2. Plowing through the "AI Agents in Action" book. I'm just wrapping up the section on AutoGen and about to move into crew.ai stuff.

3. Reading a book on Software Product Line Engineering.

4. I have an older project that's Grails based that I let linger without any attention for a really long time. I'm working on updating it to run on the latest Grails and Java versions and also writing some automated smoke tests.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-25 20:19:28+00:00
I found there is some truth to this but it was almost all in the beginning and/or if you expect to be in ~the bottom half of your peer group. After those criteria pass it comes down to your overall ability to network throughout life (not just from a college) and general chance/luck (which remains a larger factor than most would like to admit).

What college can give you at the beginning of a career, beyond the premise of a guided education in the field of study, is a piece of paper that says "I really did learn some relevant stuff and have the ability to follow through" before you have a chance to prove these things in the field by already having had a job in it. It also gives you an initial chance to build a network but that's true of however you manage to spend your first 2-4 years getting into the field. After that initial in-field job or two the non-educational related value of a degree falls off a cliff (and the educational portion becomes an ever decreasing slice of job specific knowledge you acquire over decades).

My anecdote (that's all it is) comes from starting out without a degree and then getting a degree for the fun of it over a decade later. It's provided 0 value in any job, they've all come from references or recommendations from people I've worked with previously at this point. It was fun though, a chance to get involved with topics you wouldn't normally have a reason to touch.
by AlbinoDrought | 2025-05-25 20:20:01+00:00
Unifi Video was replaced by Unifi Protect some time in 2020. I wasn't sure how to self-host Protect, so I never migrated to it. I've recently reached a situation where some phones can no longer install the Unifi Video app. These phones are now relegated to using the rough-on-mobile UI. The Unifi Video web UI has also never worked well in Firefox for me.

In the past few months, I've finally started working on a basic replacement NVR that works for me: https://github.com/AlbinoDrought/creamy-nvr

Like many video projects, it's a glorified ffmpeg wrapper :)
by kacesensitive | 2025-05-25 20:20:42+00:00
Thought it was goofy that I was still reading newsletters through my inbox. I really don't want to open my email unless I'm working. Anyways, some friends and I made Scrollz to fix that and also add some cool features to the newsletter reading experience. AI summaries, newsletter discovery, audio narrations, etc.

https://www.scrollz.co/
by Duralias | 2025-05-25 20:20:50+00:00
AI pins lack any well functioning usecase, if any at all in my opinion, phone or smart watch makes more sense.

VR and AR headsets on the other hand have several good usecases, they just aren't for everyone.

Social VR, more fun exercise and the media watching experience is quite nice, especially on planes and in general nice on the Apple Vision Pro.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-05-25 20:21:29+00:00
Thanks for that. I've added that to my list.

It's been exhausting to respond to (reasonable) questions about non-anecdotal evidence... or outright scorn, with personally-scraped-up evidence that should have been public knowledge.

Everyone should have been armed with this information before making a risk/reward decision about the vaccine, especially as it became less effective and/or critical. Now I have a degraded life for a nearly-useless second booster.
by genezeta | 2025-05-25 20:22:46+00:00
It might work, but you'll probably need to sort out some details.

If I understood it right, let's say your pieces fall from top to bottom and mine from bottom to top. And when our pieces collide they stop. But what happens if they don't collide? What if I avoid your piece and sneak past? What happens when my piece reaches the top or yours the bottom? Would that mean the end of the game? Because if it would, then the game could degenerate into a race towards instant game over and I don't know if that would be fun.
by brewdad | 2025-05-25 20:23:37+00:00
While some can continue to work longer, most adults I’ve known simply can’t work, at least in their chosen field, much past 67. Physical pain and loss of mental acuity take their toll. Pushing the retirement age out to 70 might prevent the whole system from collapsing but we need to make sure younger people save with the understanding that working until age 70 might simply not be possible.

Living longer doesn’t necessarily mean having more productive years than in the past. We simply have the medical tools to keep people alive even if they can’t much get out of bed.
by euvin | 2025-05-25 20:23:47+00:00
Inspired by MathAcademy, I'm developing:

1) a note-taking workflow in Obsidian (you take bite-sized notes about a topic, then connect "prerequisite" notes in Obsidian's canvas editor)

2) a tool that uploads each note and graph data to a database

3) a webapp that presents those notes algorithmically using spaced repetition. This enables you to allow others to "traverse" your note graph in a guided and self-paced manner.

You can add "challenge presets" to each note so that your mastery of each piece of knowledge can be tested with simple flashcards, multiple choice, free response, or some visual/actionable task to force active recall. An algorithm uses your success rate and spaced repetition data to introduce & drill more advanced notes into your long term memory.

Here's some more reading I was inspired by:

https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy

https://www.justinmath.com/individualized-spaced-repetition-...

Even if there are a lot of imperfections and flaws about this project (like the sheer difficulty of curating a good knowledge graph to begin with), I'm hoping to make my note-taking in Obsidian more structured and thorough, replace my Anki routine, and make any of my notes into an automated + algorithmic course. If someone has another similar project (combining note-taking with hierarchal, topological knowledge graphs with spaced repetition and testing all in one platform) I would love to hear more about your approaches. Quick shoutout to one person I've seen who is doing something similar: https://x.com/JeffreyBiles/status/1926639544666816774
by delusional | 2025-05-25 20:24:03+00:00
Do you not think I've heard that line before? The framework knows nothing. It's made by a bunch of children that make CRUD apps wrapping an SQL query behind an HTTP server over and over again. They don't make any applications that do anything commercially or technically interesting, resorting themselves to infinitely copying data structures with increasingly complex annotations, a practice they call "business logic", to trick themselves into feeling like they're doing something.

I've been there. I've seen it. It doesn't lead anywhere. The abstractions that spring (and other heavyweight JavaEE-style frameworks) provide is razor thin, and usually implemented in the most trivial possible way. The frameworks, like the applications often built on them, do nothing interesting.

EDIT: I realize this is a pretty unkind way to put it. I hope readers can understand the argument along with the indignation I express. I do believe very strongly in these points, but wish I could express them without quite as much anger. I can't tough. Parse out what useful stuff you can glean, and leave the rest along with the knowledge that you don't have to impress me.
by amluto | 2025-05-25 20:24:51+00:00
> Aerospace is hard.

I would believe it was hard. And maybe it still is if you’re unwilling or unable to take advantage of modern technology.

Current low-cost equipment can easily send 10 or 100Gbps over long distance fiber links. Depending on how quickly you want to fail over when a link or an entire switch, router or rack fails, there are plenty of options that make various tradeoffs between failover latency and bandwidth, all the way up to completely duplicating all the traffic on redundant routes. I would bet that the entire aggregate traffic needed for air traffic control in a region is well under 10Gbps. And 10Gbps dedicated links or leases or (effective) purchases of dark fiber are not expensive on the scale of the FAA. Air traffic should use a network with a lot of redundancy, so maybe multiple those low costs by something like 5.
by Retric | 2025-05-25 20:25:26+00:00
The value you get is as an inflation and lifespan hedge. There’s no investment built into the system but the money being paid in by younger workers for people who are 100 is adjusted for inflation that year not whatever the currency was worth 75 years ago when they started. Similarly if you die at 55 you don’t benefit from retirement savings either.

Historically payouts also benefited from rising productivity and populations but those assumptions are breaking down.