MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcusverus | 2025-05-23 21:17:34+00:00
Will the United States exist for the remainder of human history simply because "there is no handy 'process'" by which states can secede? The idea is silly. If people actually cared about such things, the US would never have come into existence. After all, as of 1776, the question of rebellion was clearly settled by the Treason Act of 1351. There was no meaningful 'process' by which the colonies could secede. And yet the American revolution happened. It happened in the same way that history always happens. Not in strict adherence to some scrap of paper, or in accordance to a process flow chart, but off the cuff. After all, what proportion of successful secession movements in human history have followed a strictly legal process? I can only think of a few, all small nations, all in the last 100 years or so. Bismarck was right (as usual) when he said:

> Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided... but by iron and blood.

When people are determined to secede, they won't be stopped by words. They'll be stopped by "iron and blood", or they'll be on their way. I've heard many Americans express their fear of another civil war, but I have never heard a single one express their support for starting one and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives for the sake of preserving a polity.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 21:17:36+00:00
Well, I will perhaps endure flak or downvotes for pointing a few things out, but Rachel:

- Is female [TIL the term "wogrammer"]

- Works for Facebook [formerly Rackspace and Google] so an undeniably Big MAMAA

- Has been blogging prolifically for at least 14 years [let's call it 40 years: she admin'd a BBS at age 12]

- Website is custom self-hosted; very old school and accessible; no ads or popup bullshit

- Probably has more CSE/SWE experience+talent in her little pinky finger than 80% of HN commenters

https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692

So I'd say that her position and experience command enough respect that we cannot judge her merely by peeking at a few trifling journal entries.
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-23 21:18:14+00:00
I think that that gets back to the whole memory thing. A person is unlikely to forget those kinds of decisions.

But there has been research indicating, for example, that judges' rulings vary with the time of day. In a way that implies that, if it were possible to construct such an experiment, you might find that the same judge given the same case would rule in very different ways depending on whether you present it in the morning or in the afternoon. For example judges tend to hand out significantly harsher penalties toward the end of the work day.
by compumike | 2025-05-23 21:18:30+00:00
> This fact is so terrifying that a lot of people try to remain in denial about it.

I remember talking as college seniors about how: for two decades there’s always been some near-future end-of-school-term date that we’re all marching together toward, and isn’t it so strange that the whole cycle is about to disappear?

if next_end_date.nil? # ?!? FIXME end

Some rhythm of starting and efforting and finishing and relaxing, before starting the next cycle.

Of course it’s somewhat possible to join new calendar cycles. A two-week engineering sprint. Even YC’s batch concept recreates this for a few months, to great effect! But not the same.

But for the most part, when the calendar rhythm is no longer the source of medium-term stability and inspiration and motivation, I think this makes a good point that the people you surround yourself with can be. If not, what else?

Thank you, Jessica.
by api | 2025-05-23 21:18:35+00:00
I can’t stand Trump and didn’t vote for him but I understand why some people did, and people like him will keep getting elected until the rest of the political world removes its head from its ass and realizes that no, they cannot just eat cake. Any politician or movement able to channel the rage that’s out there is going to win.

When it comes to foreign influence we need to be asking why people are so angry that they can be swayed by some lame low effort memes and honestly kind of dumb propaganda. Russian, Chinese, and other propaganda is not even very good, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to channel that rage.

As for what’s wrong, there’s a list but I think the top item on that list is something almost disappointingly boring. I am a huge believer in the housing theory of everything:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-23 21:18:44+00:00
I think the right way to understand it is as a kind of theft of service.

Somebody does something which takes some work. There's nothing special about his work other than that it is available-- there's so many stories you can tell, there's so many ways to express an idea, that to, if the author hadn't created a particular work, making it illegal to create that particular work, people wouldn't have lost anything. It would be a trivial restriction.

Thus when someone takes a particular work and does something with it, he chooses to not develop one of the other similar works he himself could have created, and takes advantage of somebody else's effort.
by leoc | 2025-05-23 21:18:52+00:00
> I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects.

On the whole the graduate market has indeed been getting fairly steadily worse, and student greater, for the past forty or more years, no?
by dnoberon | 2025-05-23 21:18:57+00:00
I can see that. Whether or not it's worth the time spent in setting it up is something I can't answer myself yet.

I think my biggest point further down is that you have to _already know_ that it's a bad idea - if you don't you can't instruct the agent to avoid it. What I see is so many more developers who just never get to that point now.

> For many people in this industry this became the default when Google and StackOverflow appeared. Is AI really so much different there if you look at the root cause? I feel AI is just another tool for quick answers without investing time in understanding the problem. That mentality is not new and has not changed in decades with previous knowledge bases. Sadly.

Excellent point :)
by justinrubek | 2025-05-23 21:18:59+00:00
Who said anything about sustainability?

My parents would heat their home this way. Actually, I think they still do. They'd gather all sorts of wood from fallen trees on other peoples' land as a sort of "service" aka- they haul it away and you don't deal with it. Is it worth the cost savings? I highly doubt it. They're just not good with managing time/money.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 21:19:00+00:00
> seems like it would be much easier to identify the handful of well-compensated but problematic industries

That would only incentivize a brain drain. A good example of this is software engineering in UK, Germany, Canada, South Korea, and Japan, as SWE salaries in those countries are not significantly different compared to other vocations.

Also, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but they are one of the few industries left in the US that incentivizes NAND-to-Tetris level knowledge, and it did help subsidize the GPU buildout that made foundational models easier to train cost effectively.

You can't "command economy" innovation - it can only be nudged.

The solution I've seen most industrial planners use is provide tax holidays and subsidizes for targeted industries, as this helps reduce the upfront cost of hiring, and does give wiggle room to raise compensation. Linking that with production, timeline locks, or even tariffs tends to help force an ecosystem to develop - which is what Japan used to build their shipbuilding and automotive industries in the post-war era.
by peterburkimsher | 2025-05-23 21:19:09+00:00
In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.

BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.

If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-23 21:20:05+00:00
You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-23 21:20:07+00:00
> JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format

They are??

As someone who wallows in ASN.1, Kerberos, and PKI, I don't find JWS so "gnarly". Even if you're open-coding a JSON Web Signature it will be easier than to open-code S/MIME, CMS, Kerberos, etc. Can you explain what is so gnarly about JWS?

Mind you, there are problems with JWT. Mainly that HTTP user-agents don't know how to fetch the darned things because there is not standard for how to find out how to fetch the darned things, when you should honor a request for them, etc.
by DFHippie | 2025-05-23 21:20:09+00:00
> The democrats in the U.S. are the blocker for god knows what actual reason.

It's not just God. I also know!

The Democrats believe climate change is real, the externalities of fossil fuel extraction, processing, and consumption are real, the injured parties in pipeline construction are their constituents, and the fossil fuel companies fund Republicans and Republican-aligned organizations.

It's a really deep mystery, but I've sussed it out. Me and God.
by jamesgill | 2025-05-23 21:20:12+00:00
It's great advice. Reminds me of Steve Jobs' statement:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
by kragen | 2025-05-23 21:20:28+00:00
If you were short on CPU, you could handle "normal" combining diacritics like 0̩́ in a variety of ways, including just alpha-compositing several glyphs into the same pixels every time you redraw, and (except for emoji!) you could compute each scan line of a text layer as 8-bit-deep pixelwise coverage first, opening up the possibility of compositing each pixel with bytewise max() rather than alpha-compositing, before mapping those coverages onto pixel colors. But I think the high nibble of the above discussion is that there's quite a bit of performance headroom.
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-23 21:21:04+00:00
You're right, I should have put 'imperial' in quotes as it's not the same as the British Imperial measurement. You'll note however I did distinguish the French system from the British one by referring to it in lowercase, that was intentional.

The issue came up in a round about way on HN several weeks ago and I should have been more careful here because I wasn't precise enough in my comment then. As I inferred in that post 'imperial' nomenclature is used rather loosely to refer to measurement and coinage/currency as they're often closely linked (in the sense that the 'Crown' once regulated both).

Pre-revolution French coinage used the same 1/12/20 number divisions as did the old English LSD and currencies in other parts of Europe, and that system is often referred to as 'imperial' coinage which likely goes back to Roman Imperial Coinage — but to confuse matters it was decimal.

One can't cover the long historical lineage here except to mention the sign for the Roman [decimal] denarius is 'd' which is also used for the LSD penny, 12 of which make the shilling (£=240d).

So for various reasons both 'old' physical measurement and 'old' coinage are often referred to as (I)imperial. To add to the confusion, modern currencies when converting from LSD/1/12/20 to metric and '1/12… measurement' are often done around the same time. Nomenclature overlaps.

For example, I'm in Australia and the 1966 conversion from LSD to metrified coinage occurred shortly before the metrication of measurement. It was all lumped together as Imperial (note u/c) to Metric (that's how the public perceived it). The Government staged both changeovers close enough so that the reeducation of the citizenry wasn't forgotten by the time the measurement program started.

For the record here's part of length in the old French measurement system:

"Pied du Roi (foot) ≈ 32.48 cm (Slightly longer than an English foot, which is about 30.48 cm.)

Pouce (inch) = 1/12 of a pied ≈ 2.707 cm

Ligne = 1/12 of a pouce ≈ 2.256 mm

Toise ≈ 1.949 metres (A toise is 6 pieds.) <...>"

The other units can be found on the same site: https://interessia.com/medieval-french-measurements/
by breno12321 | 2025-05-23 21:21:15+00:00
What a great essay, this make me laugh out loud as I'm finishing my week. Thanks for this masterpiece, just shared in some engineering channels in my company even the AI ones!

People think LLM is magic but its just engineering and we should treat like so, it has flaws, can be improved and in the end many times is just a tool for a job. Not the tool for all the jobs.
by a-priori | 2025-05-23 21:21:34+00:00
Alberta would need the consent of the councils for Treaty 4, 6, 7 and 8 in order to take their land with them. The treaties are between various First Nations and the Crown of Canada and are not transferable to an independent Alberta without consent.

Some provinces have non-treaty land, acquired through land purchases or conquest. Quebec, for example, had the right to take roughly the southern third of its territory when it discussed separatism. But that's not the case with Alberta — it is entirely composed of treaty land.

This means that Canada cannot grant them independence, even if it were to accept the results of a referendum that meets Clarity Act requirements. That alone makes Alberta separatism a non-starter. There's no legal route for Alberta to separate from Canada without negotiating new treaties with the treaty councils in order to get their consent, and they've already signalled they are not willing to do so.
by anildash | 2025-05-23 21:21:35+00:00
Not sure how many national magazines you’ve written for, but it is in fact fairly standard practice to write first-person essays in the first person. You did make up a whole bunch of people you don’t like in your example there, but literally none of them nap to what I did here, so I’m not sure what your enumerating except your lack of comprehension of the situation here. Hope that helps.
by internet_points | 2025-05-23 21:21:46+00:00
Can't speak for the US, but that is not the case in Norway.

There have been massive protests due to the amount of nature destroyed. There are some before-after sliders on

https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/dokumentar/her-er-norges-s...

(scroll around for "wind") that give an indication, although the most striking difference is experience by the people who used to go for hikes in remote places where there are now immense wind parks. The wind companies love building them up in the previously-untouched mountain regions since I guess height = more power, also less NIMBY neighbours.

https://www.google.no/maps/place/Buheii/@58.6554134,6.887061... had zero roads a decade ago, now it's all roads. And with roads come traffic and people and cabins and tourism and more roads.

Now they're saying we need more wind parks for AI data centers (a few years ago it was for crypto). We're tearing down nature so we can keep growing our energy use while staying "green".
by eugenekolo | 2025-05-23 21:21:47+00:00
Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be.

It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area....

Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
by mrandish | 2025-05-23 21:22:12+00:00
> People often fall into the trap of thinking that because they are highly intelligent and an expert in one domain that this makes them an expert in one or more other domains.

While this is certainly true, I'm not aware of any evidence that Carmack thinks this way about himself. I think he's been successful enough that's he's personally 'post-economic' and is choosing to spend his time working on unsolved hard problems he thinks are extremely interesting and potentially tractable. In fact, he's actively sought out domain experts to work with him and accelerate his learning.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-23 21:22:19+00:00
I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.

FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation.

Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-23 21:22:20+00:00
> Some of those people might be much happier working 5 hours a week and living in the country.

Have you ever lived out in the country, grown your own food, made your own clothes, and such? That's so much more work than five hours a week, and at peak times, much more than 40 hours a week for a harder life that you do not get to retire from when you get old.
by xwiz | 2025-05-23 21:22:42+00:00
> The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations.

I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.

> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.

Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]

[1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-library/rese...
by dowager_dan99 | 2025-05-23 21:22:51+00:00
I went to my daughter's (high school) graduation yesterday. The speeches were uniformly weak except for the school trustee, who's job is basically campaigning or speaking at graduation ceremonies. Part of it was a graduate talking to his former principal at the 25-yr reunion: says the alumnus: "...and I've tried to live my life by the advice you gave to me that day." "Can you refresh my memory?" asks the principal. "You said to me 'keep moving! keep moving!'"
by guywithahat | 2025-05-23 21:23:28+00:00
This sounds like the order was paused while they go through court.

The reality however is that presidents have very broad power to restrict the ingress of aliens into the country, and so unless there is some new legal wordplay and generous judges I don't see Harvard winning this one. I really wish they'd just get rid of their DEI program and stop playing chicken with their students futures.

Unrelated but I wonder what will happen to Harvard's US News ranking in a year or two
by talkingtab | 2025-05-23 21:23:41+00:00
The original Boids is from Craig Reynolds, here:

https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

It was a java applet (sigh) and unfortunately I have not been able to find a working version. That version based on his three "steering" mechanisms had very realistic movement. Other versions, including this one, which are good do not have that same kind of quality. They look like simulations whereas the Reynolds version, for whatever reason, seemed much closer to watching an actual flock.

No criticism intended, it would just be nice to understand the why the difference.

Looking briefly at the code, it seems the fitness function is simply how close the boids are?

Very cool!
by nkurz | 2025-05-23 21:23:54+00:00
Coincidentally, there was an interesting article about the relationship between Massena and their power company here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992032

They have a publicly operated utility that seems to be working well for them. It's a good story! Direct link: https://nysfocus.com/2023/06/21/public-power-utility-massena...
by pempem | 2025-05-23 21:24:46+00:00
Name that town!! --

There is a growing divide and there are many towns (and many parts of metropolises) where its a weird class inverted food desert. There are tons of boutiques and vintage shops, and more tatoo shops than you'd think is necessary. Maybe there's a upvamped "bodega" with fishwife tinned fish, and apples for .80 each. "Main street"s that seems pulled out of Disney's imagination and Rick Caruso's execution. Six coffee shops and a bunch of restaurants but no grocery without driving, no affordable gas without driving, no public schools without driving etc.
by Sunspark | 2025-05-23 21:24:48+00:00
I agree with this article. Executives are going to say, why pay anyone when we can just have the receptionist tell the AI to make whatever and if it has bugs, we'll type another prompt and ask to have it fixed.

It's sad because true craftpersons who have an understanding of things can do good work and feel fulfilled doing it.

So, is the future going to be a camera attached to glasses continually coaching people through every single step completely removing agency whether it is coding or doing carpentry?
by Alupis | 2025-05-23 21:25:38+00:00
What were/are the consequences, though?

Darn near every graph/poll I've seen completely ignores COVID-19 happening, and points to economic turmoil (which every nation on the planet suffered). AKA, the data is political and not objective.

The rest of the world enjoys trade relations with EU member nations, but aren't part of the EU themselves.

So, besides EU citizens (whatever they're actually called) being able to freely come/go from the UK, what else actually happened that was negative?

The immigration issues brought up by Brexit supporters, in my opinion, cannot casually be tossed aside. The UK isn't a huge nation, and having it's culture and national identity changed so rapidly by outsiders is a net negative for any society - something many nations are currently grappling with today (including the US).

You mentioned the EFTA rejecting the UK in another comment - my googling indicates EFTA is made up of 4 relatively small nations. Is this really a significant problem? Won't those nations openly trade with the UK in time, like they do with the rest of the world (hinting at my "spite" comment from earlier).

Reviewing all of your comments in this thread, so far, nothing seems to be an actual problem for the UK.

My opinion here is meaningless since I do not live in the region - but I just want to point out your responses are slightly colored by your political views - as you indicate which politicians you believe are liars but somehow others are fine, etc. Perhaps there's some objective truth to what you are asserting, but I'm not seeing it very clearly.