MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-25 19:55:41+00:00
> I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights.

Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.
by mandmandam | 2025-05-25 19:56:47+00:00
> running away from the right.

Huh? Harris campaigned with Dick Cheney. She removed torture from her platform to do so. She promised to keep arming Israel. She promised to be more harsh on immigration than Trump. She warbled about having "the most lethal military" at the DNC.

This was all tacitly endorsed by the party. So, how did you get the impression Democrats running from the right?
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-25 19:57:10+00:00
CS degree programs have never been about learning to code. They are learning about computers, data structures, machine structures, algorithms. The code was always done on your own time at least that's how my school did it. I never had a class in "Java" or "Python" or "C" or any other languge, that was always incidental to the particular course. I could have used ChatGPT (had it existed) or hired a friend to write the code but that wouldn't help me on the exams (written on paper, at that time). Dev bootcamps? Yeah they should probably be leaning hard into AI as that's just what junior devs are going to be asked to do from here on out.
by thechao | 2025-05-25 19:57:31+00:00
Not nesting: the ability (for a little while) to tell slack to locally reorder the conversation. This tends to happen with three users all trying to talk to each other: the communication is still dual, so you end up with "yeahs" and crud like that "out of place". The emoji solve this to a large extent; but, neither well nor articulately.
by atypicaluser | 2025-05-25 19:57:50+00:00
> I think the author, like many today who try to disparage democracy...

Democracy as has been used over the past decade or so (as in, such-and-such is a threat to our democracy) does a fine enough job disparaging itself.

> ... gets too caught up in the founders as scripture and old word usages.

And yet you also write—

> Democracy is superior... because of its moral and rational foundation, that all are created equal, all have universal, inalienable rights...

—which is based on scripture straight out of the founders.

Thing is, many of the founders (and the most important among them) were familiar not just with (then) present-day monarchy, taxation and war, but with ancient Athens, ancient Rome and enlightenment thinkers like John Locke. They had examples of both good and bad democracies to draw lessons from, and they realized early-on that without some binding agreement to rein in the worst tendencies of democracy, the nation wouldn't regularly self-evaluate, correct itself and prevent an implosion by majority rule.

We needn't look back as far as Jim Crow or American Prohibition or McCarthyism to see where 'majorities' can lead us. If you want, think California and its democratic super-majorities over the past decade. Or, if progressive, think of Florida and its anti-lgbt laws. You sure you want majority rule?

> The solution is human rights, as implemented in the Bill of Rights.

Which, again, is scripture out of the founders.

But let's say this solution didn't come out of the founders: who decides what human rights are? The majority? University professors? The self-selected intelligentsia? The current governors of California and Florida?

And who decides how these rights are enforced?
by pj_mukh | 2025-05-25 19:58:46+00:00
"Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks inside them. What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive."

It breaks all our brains too, because that $6 Trillion has very little to do with maintaining infrastructure. The bulk of it is just direct payouts (Social Security, Medicare and defense contracts).

Pretty frustrating that this big number means the government is politically forced to do drastic austerity for things like keeping planes flying safely.

Also, makes DOGE starting at USAID (<1% of budget) look especially incompetent.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-25 19:59:20+00:00
I'd call this soft power projection by medical means. Which is absolutely OK IMO, compared to lets say producing AK-47, or meddling in other countries internal affairs, invading and destroying them, and whatnot else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medic...

A recent form of profit seems to be offering cheap treatment/medical tourism

https://www.cubamundomedico.com/en/university-of-medical-sci...

Seems impractical for USians, though.
by peterhadlaw | 2025-05-25 19:59:36+00:00
I've been personally involved in the hiring process of our startup and I give you my word the school you went to makes no difference. In fact one of my favorite coworkers that I had an honor to work with was self taught and had a philosophy degree. In fact I've seen big school degrees go straight to heads and egos and been actively an obstacle to those folks.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-25 20:00:16+00:00
It is simple mathematics. European pension systems are not a saving system, but a pay as you go system, where pensions are paid from the people who work now. What you get in taxes this month you pay as pensions this month, as a state. This is the Bismarck model and it was invented at a time when the average lifespan was lower than the pension age, so many people were contributing very little as a percentage for very few people to get pensions. Today the situation is the opposite, with less and less people paying (not too many people start working at 16 years like in 1860), retirement age was lowered in most countries, the percentage of salary you pay as pension tax can be 25%, growing that is not too easy as this is just part of the taxes workers pay.

This system was working back in 1860, but it is a Ponzi scheme in decline for the past 50 years. And there is no way out, most people rely on state pensions to live after retirement; it is the perfect trap.
by rawgabbit | 2025-05-25 20:00:41+00:00
Quote from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables

After the election, Diane Hessan, who had been hired by the Clinton campaign to track undecided voters, wrote in The Boston Globe that "all hell broke loose" after the "basket of deplorables" comment, which prompted what she saw as the largest shift of undecided voters towards Trump.[40] Political scientist Charles Murray said, in a post-election interview with Sam Harris, that because the comment helped get Donald Trump elected, it had "changed the history of the world, and he [Haidt] may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans".
by stock_toaster | 2025-05-25 20:01:30+00:00
I wonder about codebase maintainability over time.

I hypothesize that it takes some period of time for vibe-coding to slowly "bit rot" a complex codebase with abstractions and subtle bugs, slowly making it less robust and more difficult to maintain, and more difficult to add new features/functionality.

So while companies may be seeing what appears to be increases in output _now_, they may be missing the increased drag on features and bugfixes _later_.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-25 20:01:58+00:00
The Amazon site search and at least some product pages seem to be down right now, although I'm hesitant to say that because I don't remember Amazon ever breaking.

I'm getting 503s ("Sorry! Something went wrong on our end") on searches and "We're sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again" on product pages.

The AIs should probably fix that.
by logicmagix | 2025-05-25 20:02:12+00:00
Introducing XTide86 — a new terminal IDE powered by tmux and Neovim. Hotkey-based live interpreter panes (Python & C) with fast install, and full retro vibes. Tested on multiple systems. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

github.com/logicmagix/XTide86 #linux #vim #nvim #tmux #opensource
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-25 20:02:26+00:00
If I say that you can get a house for 80K in the US, do you then automatically assume I mean San Fransisco or New York?

> but I find disingeneus portraing a picture where in dk you can buy a house for 80k USD and leaving out the information that you are probably in the middle of nowhere - no jobs, no public transport, no services

The point is exactly the opposite. You can get a house at a reasonable cost, 20 minutes away from a city you can likely get a job in - Even well paid tech jobs (They exists in both Odense and Aalborg).

I fint it disingenuous to pick pick out a very specific situation like this instead of looking at the broader argument.
Ask HN: How do you plan, estimate, and delegate engineering work?
by kwakubiney | 2025-05-25 20:02:31+00:00
I recently moved from a regular engineering role into a team lead position. Previously, team leads handled task breakdowns, PMs brought in product designs, and senior engineers did most of the planning. Now, with the previous team lead gone, I'm responsible for interfacing with PMs, gathering requirements, breaking features down into engineering tasks, allocating work to junior engineers, and setting timelines. This is new territory for me, and I’m looking to learn from others who have been in similar positions. What techniques or frameworks have worked well for you in:

1. Collaborating with PMs to define and clarify requirements

2. Breaking down product features into manageable engineering tasks

3. Estimating effort and setting realistic timelines

4. Allocating work to junior engineers while supporting their growth

5. Ensuring alignment and avoiding surprises during implementation

Any advice, best practices, or pitfalls to avoid would be greatly appreciated :)
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 20:02:36+00:00
Self taught, no degree, zero friction in the job market either early in my career (job offers on Wall Street and the startups I wanted to work with) or 25 years later; have done consulting work almost everywhere, and had offers from both big tech companies and unicorn startups. No investor has ever cared, either.

The "you'll be stuck with all the jobs other people don't want" thing is risible.
by brewdad | 2025-05-25 20:03:11+00:00
I had a great grandparent live to 102. 3 of my 4 grandparents lived into their late 80s with the oldest passing a month shy of 90. Even my grandparent who smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day lived to 78. For all of them, their last good year was about year 80.

My dad just turned 78 and has really slowed the last 5 years. Longer life says little about quality of life.
by ck2 | 2025-05-25 20:03:20+00:00
We had a 9/11's worth of death EVERY DAY for the first TWO YEARS of covid

Then a 9/11's worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid

We still have a 9/11's worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025

Personally I don't want anyone to die in a plane crash

But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly

So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?
by whoopdedo | 2025-05-25 20:03:22+00:00
I expect there's some selection bias at play. If you're taking a philosophy major in college it's likely you already feel confident in your post-graduation career, so can study things that you like. Whereas if you're in a CS track it's because whether you get a job depends on getting a degree. The student studying philosophy is in school as an alternative to work. The STEM major is in school as a prerequisite to work.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-05-25 20:03:31+00:00
Me neither. Was pretty enthused, and even more so when I found that they have a desktop app instead of being yet another Web-only tool.

Then I downloaded the app and found you can't use it without setting up an "account" and being online.

So in the end, this is more tiresome Web-only crap. Deleted.
by const_cast | 2025-05-25 20:03:36+00:00
The thing is since we're just throwing people to El Salvadorian prison with no trials, we can't actually believe anything this admin is saying.

Of course Trumpies will tell you it's completely justified. That's, of course, impossible to know. If we wanted to know if it's justified we might, oh I don't know, hold a trial? Eh?

But we're not doing that, presumably because the powers to be understand they probably aren't always justified, so a trial would put their entire operation at risk.
by coderatlarge | 2025-05-25 20:03:40+00:00
i flew delta out of ewr last week. the pilot announced over speaker that air traffic control was serializing take offs on one runway to avoid problems. we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting our turn. that was on top of another hour delay for our flight arriving due to this policy.

delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.

it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.
by patapong | 2025-05-25 20:03:41+00:00
Interesting. I also think a lot of complexity stems from developers preferring building systems over building products. It is much more satisfying to build somehting that can address many use-cases, even if we are only working on a single use-case. But, this also introduces the cost of complexity as the user/downstream developer is pushed into making the choice of which of the many available paths they want to take.

See the eternal urge of gamedevs to build engines instead of building the game.
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-25 20:03:55+00:00
Integration is the job of the state as much as it is the job of the immigrant.

In America, we discovered basically by accident[0] how to bring in large groups of people and have them be economically and socially productive. Specifically, we had very generous family reunification programs, which outsourced the question of "what immigrants do we admit" to immigrants who had already successfully integrated. Effectively America became an invite system. The end result is that, for basically any background, every American city has a large and established immigrant population from that country for new immigrants to fall back on.

Other Western countries (e.g. western Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Korea, and Japan) didn't do this. Instead, they treated immigration as a transaction: you can't come in unless you have some immediately beneficial purpose, and permanent residency is going to be an even higher bar still. What this gives you is immigration systems that select entirely for disaffected, college-educated workaholic youths with no connections to the local city. To put it in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney:

"America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic. In the United States, they don't recognize differences[1]. They don't recognize First Nations. And there will never be the right to the French language."

These words are telling, in ways Carney probably didn't intend. He is proudly admitting that the thing that sets Canada apart from America - the thing that they should fight with military force against a wannabe dictator with annexation dreams - is the fact that they can't integrate people worth a damn.

[0] Family reunification visas were originally intended to deliberately preserve racist prejudices in the US immigration system. This backfired comically.

[1] ...has this guy never heard the phrase 'African-American' before?
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 20:04:55+00:00
> After reading it seems even more true that Chomsky's Tom Jones is a strawman.

Lol. It's clear you are not interested in having any kind of rational discussion on the topic and are driven by some kind of zealotry when you claim to have read a technical 40 page paper (with an additional 18 pages of citations) in 30 minutes.

Even if by some miraculous feat you had read it you haven't made a single actual argument or addressed any of the points made by Chomsky.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-25 20:04:59+00:00
I basically agree but I think it would be really tricky to implement.

What about giving you bank employees performance numbers that can’t really be met with due diligence, and then not checking their work too much.

Similarly, it is evident that software companies are not able to produce defect-free software (so, somebody is setting up an incentive structure to push bugs into production). There must be some wrong incentive structures, but it is hard to say where they come from.
by a-ungurianu | 2025-05-25 20:05:21+00:00
I’m not clear what you’re asking with this question.

Do you mean a LLM to write printer drivers? For that I think any of the coding LLMs should be able to help

Or do you mean using an LLM to do the raster -> FGL format translation? While I’m sure it might be possible, feels like an awful waste of resources, and when it comes to printers, you kinda want the guarantee that what comes out is the same that comes in.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-25 20:05:44+00:00
Actually the factors inhibiting birth rate are well known, but the actions to take are not something states wants to take. In Europe you cannot even talk about it, usually, unless you talk to younger family members and ask them why they don't want kids at or or just 1 or 2 max. There are economic, education and legal aspects that are clear for anyone that looked not farther than 50 years ago when having 3-4 kids was not exceptional.
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 20:06:31+00:00
No one have the language syntax memorized, unless you're working with the language daily. Instead we store patterns, and there isn't a lot (checkout the formal grammar for any programming language). For any C like language, they overlap a lot, the difference are mostly in syntax minutia (which we can refresh in an afternoon with a reference) and the higher abstractions (which you learn once, like OOP, pattern matching).

Generally you spend 80% of the time wrangling abstractions, especially in mature project. The coding part is often a quick mental break where you just doing translation. Checking the syntax is often a quick action that no one mind.
Ask HN: Should I take an internship or learn skills and build?
by yamirghofran | 2025-05-25 20:06:33+00:00
I'm finishing my second year of my bachelor's of CS and AI in Madrid. Should I use it for internship or focus on improving my CS skills (proper coding, devops, AI/ML) and building projects?

I feel like I would benefit much more, in the long term and probably also short term, by improving and building but am scared of not having experiences on my cv.
by michaelficek15g | 2025-05-25 20:06:52+00:00
As an accomplished Lead/Rhythm Guitarist for over 40 years, I could not have said it any Better. I play A 50th Anniversary American Fender Stratocaster through a Line 6 Spider 50. I couldn't ask for anything better. I have a 1001+ different tones at the touch of my fingers. In My World it doesn't get Any Better Than That. There's absolutely nothing Better Sounding than "Eruption" at EVH's Speed,Tone,Sound and Playing Level. Kids Today May Have Abilities and some skills, but they don't have the same skills and touch as Us OG'S. Many Happy Trails Ahead My Friends
by blooalien | 2025-05-25 20:08:32+00:00
Problem is that in some fields of study / work, and in some other situations absolute clarity and accuracy are super important to avoid dangerous or harmful mistakes. Many of the sciences are that way, and A.I. is absolutely one of those sciences where communicating accurately can matter quite a lot. Otherwise you end up with massive misunderstandings about the technology being spread around as gospel truth by people who are quite simply mis-informed (like you see happening right now with all the A.I. hype).
by martin-t | 2025-05-25 20:08:41+00:00
> This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.

Certainly. Planned obsolescence and devices being impossible (or illegal) to repair is another. If a device costs 20% less but lasts only half a long, buyers are losing money because the profits go to the rich more often.

Food has ingredients and an expiration date on the packaging as required by law. Expected lifespan should be required for petty much everything.
by const_cast | 2025-05-25 20:10:12+00:00
Again, this is reductionist.

You think I don't want a third party to win? Of course I do. But I'm not stupid, and I recognize that just going out and randomly voting for a third party is just a vote for the status-quo. This is part of the reason (just part, don't worry) that Trump won.

Until you, and others, can name me one specific third party and then also make your community and local representation at least 50% of the same third party, then I don't care. I don't want to hear it, nobody wants to hear it, you sound stupid, keep your mouth shut.

We have to do the work if we want results. Yeah, that means you too.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-25 20:10:18+00:00
Excluding the possible exception of healthcare I’m not sure what you mean.

The hypothetical person is paying property taxes on the house they own. He’s paying income tax on his income. He’s paying sales tax on the food and necessities he buys.

I live in state with no income tax. If I decide to live in a cheap house, eat cheaply, and save most of my income does that mean I’m a burden on my community because I’m not paying enough property tax and sales tax?

In addition to the taxes he’s paying, he’s taking a previously blighted property, fixing it up, and maintaining it. He’s providing a service to the owner of the gas station by working there a few days a month. He’s presumably purchasing things from local stores instead of driving outside the community to shop. Maybe he’s even volunteering or providing other help to people in the community.

All in exchange for a few library books and some bus trips. I think most communities would love to have him.
by geoctl | 2025-05-25 20:10:21+00:00
Thank you. The harsh reality is that I've been undecided on the license for years while working the project (the initial private repo had it all AGPLv3 as opposed to only the Cluster side in this public repo). The reason for choosing it AGPL for Cluster-side/Apache for client-side is that I am basically working on it solo and I have neither the funding nor the press to prove that that my work is the original work of any derivative proprietary work. Also the license issue is very weird to say the least, If I release it fully Apache, it might mean to some that I am probably pulling the rug at some point like many others who did even if I have no intention to do so. If I release it fully AGPL, some might see this as not really true FOSS regardless of the fact that it actually is. It's truly a bizarre situation releasing open source these days with all the bait-and-switch VC-backed "open source" software and all the licensing changes that happened since 2020 for many of the most popular open source projects. Also, I never intended for Octelium to become a SaaS product and the architecture itself proves that. This project is more akin to Kubernetes and cilium (without the funding part!) that the idea of any company self-hosting it in anyway has no conflicts with me since that's what I intended to build in the first place (as opposed to releasing a "demo" FOSS project while forcing you to move to a separate, fully functional SaaS product).