MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by radpanda | 2025-06-17 12:56:43+00:00
I’ve always seen UBI as part of a post-scarcity sci-fi future. Once the robots run the farms and deliver the food and build the buildings and so on, and there just isn’t enough work to go around for humans, of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population (both morally and to prevent uprisings). Sure, in this sci-fi future you can live in your basic pod and eat basic food for free or you can work a little or a lot to try to upgrade your situation.

But I don’t think we’re there yet. We do have a lot of industries that rely on shit jobs that people would rather not do. If we, IMHO prematurely, try to institute a UBI now we’d be in for a world of pain along the way as the prices of basic services skyrocket without robots being ready to step in.
by resource_waste | 2025-06-17 12:56:49+00:00
Farms or Tech? What is better?

Its obvious from an economic standpoint, so I looked up from a security standpoint what crops Spain produces and it seems to be non-essentials. So its purely for export purposes.

Tech will win if all is rational, but people have a soft heart for the status quo. Those poor farmers, what a sad story. I imagine they can probably rally the population against their own interests with the correct moral coating and maybe create a faux crisis of raising the prices of food by hoarding for a few months.
by echelon | 2025-06-17 12:57:01+00:00
> prices are dependent on demand/supply rather than how much money people have.

That's not the full story of how the economics of demand work.

Demand increases as the money supply increases, but supply remains constant. This is inflation. More dollars chasing the same basket of goods.

Another way to look at it is as the money supply increases, the cost of money and the cost to borrow decreases. This leads to an increased desire to spend. It's an aggregate demand increase across businesses and consumers.

We recently saw the impact of this when the money supply was increased during Covid. It led to one of the largest jumps in inflation in our lifetimes.
by simonw | 2025-06-17 12:57:05+00:00
I've always been fascinated to learn more about cultural differences around this topic.

I've seen arguments in the past that different nationalities may have different norms around this kind of thing, in particular over whether it's polite to launch straight into a request for help without confirming the other person is available and receptive first.

There may be a power dynamics thing here too - if somebody is seen as being more "senior" there may be additional perceived constraints on how a conversation should be conducted.

Since you've been involved in conversations about this for more than 15 years now have you seen any credible evidence of cultural differences that come into play here?
by randomNumber7 | 2025-06-17 12:57:18+00:00
It didnt even touch the main points, imho.

1. You have to maintain both documentation and code. If you change code and forget to update documentation it can be very confusing and cost a lot of time.

2. Proper code should explain itself (to some extend).

3. Taking a lot of time to write proper documentation is rarely appreciated in a world where long term strategic thinking has no place anymore.

4. It's harder to fire you if you when you are the only guy who knows all the stuff.
by hedora | 2025-06-17 12:57:53+00:00
With UBI and a flat tax, you end up paying:

tax_rate * income - ubi

to the government. Tax rate has to go up for UBI to be revenue neutral. So, it is not inflationary. It just provides safety net for low income people.

Note that this formula would greatly simplify the tax code (especially if income included capital gains and maybe excluded donations), and is also actually progressive (your effective tax rate increases monotonically with income), unlike the current US system.
by fn-mote | 2025-06-17 12:58:09+00:00
The report is horrifying, but in the current US political climate it is very hard to see how a government agency could undergo any positive cultural change.

A quick search finds recent firings [1] and [2]... who would lead a change?

[1]: https://floridianpress.com/2025/06/rep-wasserman-schultz-sla... [2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/16/trump-cuts-fda-layoffs-food-s...
by solstice | 2025-06-17 12:58:19+00:00
I use them and like them. One thing to be aware of with the dialer (that might not be unique to Fossify): when dialing the number of an emergency service (like 112 in Germany), there is no indication in the app's UI that something is happening and it looks as if the call failed and you will be back looking at the dial pad, even though the call will eventually be connected. The reason is that these types of calls get handled by something deeper in the Android system and will show up neither in the "calling" UI of the dialer nor in the list of calls.
by gloosx | 2025-06-17 12:59:09+00:00
Never trust Google on anything mission-critical, always have an emergency plan in mind and backup everything from their services. Getting locked out is as easy as changing the country and finding out the "change country" menus on your google pixel phone inside the play store are simply non-functional decoys, pressing confirm buttons will just be silently doing nothing without any error and if you file a support ticket there will be no reply.
by abalashov | 2025-06-17 12:59:52+00:00
Am I the only one who still thinks that telnet is a basic utility that should be installed on every system? It's a lot easier and more explicit to verify that a TCP listener is working using telnet than netcat and the like.

I know I'm living in a different and hitherto unimaginable universe when I paste modern cloud-devops sysadmin types the output of a hung telnet connection attempt to port 22, as implicit evidence that it's blocked by a firewall or whatnot, e.g.

$ telnet 172.30.110.9 22 Trying 172.30.110.9... ^C

and they say, "But it's SSH, so you can't use Telnet!"

... bro. I know it's a DeVry Cloud DevOps certificate, but...
by crmi | 2025-06-17 13:00:23+00:00
I agree most are flawed. I read one (I think from Sweden perhaps) that had a longer timeline and actually used some better methodology than others which seemed more insightful.

But as others say, at the end of the day if everyone has an extra $1000 a month, there will be groups such as landlords trying to jack up prices.

To counter other commenters on this issue - we do have price controls on things such as milk, bread etc and it does 'work' to some degree. In the landlords example above - a smart gov would implement an algorithm for 'greed' and fine/tax offenders and put that money into the UBI cash reserves.

I think UBI as a real possibility needs to be taken seriously. The level of AI has accelerated in such a short timeframe that (imo) we're starting to see the knock on effects into society. This is just in tech for now - thousands applicants for positions, and no one really needing to hire juniors as Claude et al easily replace the tasks they do.

Once other industries realize that they can replace a lot of tasks with ai, we'll see a gradual shortage of jobs for unskilled admin jobs (not manual labour... Yet)

There's a lot of shouting about AGI but the current LLM landscape effects are slowly happening around us right now. UBI studies should be taken more seriously and at a larger scale.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-17 13:00:34+00:00
As with "Chinese Fire drill" (referring to disorganised and chaotic efforts) the problem is that it's racist. Not like mid-20th century US "People who look different are the enemy" level racist, but it's still objectionable.

So we should avoid doing this, "Telephone" is a perfectly good name for this idea, and it's not racist. There are lots of small changes we can make, which make the world slightly better for everybody.
by alganet | 2025-06-17 13:00:47+00:00
Documentation and automated tests belong together.

It makes tests better. Instead of a shady snippet of code that just passes an assertion, it should generate human readable examples with additional prose included by the developer for special cases.

It makes docs easier to maintain. You probably already need to find the test for the code you changed. If the docs are really close, it's easier to maintain it.

There are many ways of achieving this. I particularly like literate programming, just for the test suite. You can code whatever way you like, but the tests must be in a literate form.

I also like the idea of having a documentation that can fail a build. If you commit a bad example snippet on a markdown somewhere, the CI should fail. This can already be done with clitest, for example (scaling it culturally is a bit hard though).

Somehow, xUnit-like tools and spec frameworks already point in that direction (DSLs that embrace human language, messages in assertions, etc). They're already documentation, and developers already use test suites for "knowing how something works" very often. We just need to stop writing it twice (once on the tests, once on prose) and find a common ground that can serve both purposes.

I mean this for API docs mainly, but for other stuff as well.
by bjourne | 2025-06-17 13:01:14+00:00
I read in a forum about psychedelics about a guy who had been carving up his whole arm while tripping on LSD. The response befuddled me and wasn't what I expected: "Classic newbie mistake", "Your own fault for tripping alone", and "You should put knifes and weapons away when you trip." It made me realize these people are like adopters of niche programming languages. To outsiders they tell everyone how great their language is and how you'll become 10x more productive switching to it. Only on bug trackers will you find out about lack of tooling support, stochastic compiler bugs, and bad api designs.
by structax | 2025-06-17 13:01:26+00:00
Body: Hello HN

I built Tirne, a lightweight API framework designed to bring structure and testability back to web APIs — especially in the Edge era.

Why Tirne? Many developers are frustrated with API codebases that become unreadable:

Middleware chains are invisible

Authentication is scattered

Side effects are hidden in multiple layers

Next.js API Routes and similar abstractions make it easy to start, but hard to reason about as systems grow.

Tirne flips that model.

Core Ideas: Declarative routes — structure first, behavior second

Explicit middleware — no guessing, no globals

Fetch-native — works on Bun, Cloudflare Workers, etc.

Type-safe logic — zero-magic runtime, clear flow
by mtlynch | 2025-06-17 13:01:52+00:00
>I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store.

A $3 one-time payment (which I'm guessing is about $2.75 after BlackBerry app store fees) is not sustainable for lifetime access and updates on a service that needs 4-5 nines of service availability and data integrity.
by thefz | 2025-06-17 13:02:11+00:00
> I want to deal with and understand the minutia of what I am doing, I got into programming, database bothering, and infrastructure kicking, because I enjoyed it, enjoyed learning it, and wanted to do it

A million times yes.

And we live in a time in which people want to be called "programmers" because it's oh-so-cool but not doing the work necessary to earn the title.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-06-17 13:02:13+00:00
In this scheme, what prevents a central bank from abusing its position and denying you access to food due to ideological concern? Cash (for basic stuff) spends the same regardless of my political affiliation or criminal history. An employer can do the same, but I can get a new employer with some effort. I'm not sure I can switch to a different central bank easily.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-17 13:02:16+00:00
No system can credibly claim to sustain massive consumer scale until proven in real life.

Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head:

- spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone

- infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols

- maintainers get poached by mega corps

- hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions

- a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting)

- VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users

I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
by throwanem | 2025-06-17 13:02:31+00:00
You say that as though they were two semiotically distinguishable activities. Futures trading is wholesale and what we talked about is retail, but they are the same general line of business and if you think no one would ever do it to try to avoid waiting all day for an empty pump, then check out how the 70s oil shock and supply crisis - the last time anyone ever dared "sanction" the U. S. and A. - played out here domestically.
by ajross | 2025-06-17 13:02:35+00:00
Generally a notable counter-example to a broad-brush point stands as "substantive engagement", yeah. Stating that the Pentagon buys software badly in the general case is a less specific and less engaged point than "ARPANET and IPv4 were DoD projects that ate the world".

If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-17 13:02:50+00:00
You do know how to distinguish between the number of legal immigrants a country lets in and facilitates entry for vs their efforts at stopping illegal migrants?

I have my many criticisms of US immigration policy and how its ICE agency manages its part of that, but lets compare apples to apples before throwing shit on the whole bowl of fruit.

Also, just like the U.S, many other countries (including Mexico itself by the way) enforce deportations, border controls and militarized border security against illegal migrants. It's nothing unique to the United States. The current administration has skewed the trend with its harsh rhetoric and anti-migrant policing drives but yeah, there's no shortage of documented evidence showing that the U.S. has a long history of being exceptionally welcoming to immigrants by global average standards. It's a country literally built by them, whose demographic reflects this across the board as it does in only a few other countries worldwide.
by rogerthis | 2025-06-17 13:02:54+00:00
My rules: if it's a person I interact everyday, private hello (hi, hey) is ok, and answered with equivalent. If we don't interact usually or have never, if I'm the one starting, then it's "Hi, I'm ..., the one responsible for ... We have this case ... etc etc.". I accept anything.

But, anyways, it's just life, don't know why people (even from my generation) are nervous these days.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-17 13:02:57+00:00
There is no "extra" payment with UBI, it's just an altering of the tax code so that it starts at a negative value instead of at zero. The slope is steeper to compensate. The total tax and the total income remain unchanged.

Note that UBI is effectively "everyone gets extra income" for the poorest parts of society, so things only poor people buy will get some inflationary effect.
by kajumix | 2025-06-17 13:02:58+00:00
Your suggestion basically amounts to: digitize and centralize welfare. There are already electronic cards for food. If the money is drawn directly from the central bank as credit instead of from the state welfare fund, it won't make it any more efficient. In fact any experimentation among states will disappear. Also, if CBDCs become a thing, you could see a slow slide into behavior control. What people eat, and where they live becomes a concern for the central bank, because they get to decide who the approved vendors are for those things. "Central" anything is a design smell in most cases.

Getting rid of cash also requires proper paper work and identification so you can sign up for the CBDC wallet. In that case you're excluding the very people from the system who need it the most.
by billylb42 | 2025-06-17 13:03:34+00:00
How did you arrive at that conclusion? All of the evidence provided in the article is prior to the “freedom of regulation” as you call it.

To me, it’s indicative of a rotting regulatory institution that lost its way. FDA is about safety, not low cost drugs. I don’t know how that mandate became mission critical for them but it happened before the current administration.
by splix | 2025-06-17 13:03:41+00:00
I think you're referring to the Winston Churchill's "on Land Monopoly".

I don't remember exact details and may miss something, but the work is very short so please check it. In short, he described, I believe, a real situation when a major of people in a town got extra extra money because a toll on the bridge to the fabric was eliminated. But in a short time the town's rental cost grew up by exactly this amount.
by kevindamm | 2025-06-17 13:03:51+00:00
The relevance of TFA is that this only works if the initiating party is still connected, and to make matters worse there is no ERR_SOCKET_CLOSED returned by most chat clients if that party got distracted before seeing the ACK. Then minutes or hours later they get back "hey sorry, missed your reply, ${QUERY}"

when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
by MC995 | 2025-06-17 13:04:06+00:00
I use my browser for most PDFs. But for PDFs that have a lot of vector graphics and are over 50-100mb, the browser viewer is very slow to load and render the pages. Even zooming in on a part of a drawing can take 10-15 seconds in the browser which is pretty disruptive.

Sumatra has no issues with 200mb+ PDFs, or ones with complex drawings.

These are all engineering drawings such as mechanical, electrical, and architectural drawings, so mine might not be a use case everyone has.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-17 13:04:31+00:00
>"Naturally, the situation is extremely dangerous. So far, no serious damage has been done—according to our sources and information obtained from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—but this is just a happy coincidence. The risks remain far too high," Ryabkov said.

Before reacting - know that they are talking about the power plant, not nuclear war.
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-17 13:04:52+00:00
This is being discussed in Prague, but it is going to be very expensive.

The city is very much not-flat, with significant altitude differences, a lot of already existing infrastructure under the surface (three extant lines of metro with fourth one being built, some road tunnels, parking spaces etc.), and a major river must be crossed. Plus, the rocks underneath are fractured and finicky. It isn't a nice big slab of granite, but a mixture of sediments, water and various primordial rocks. Quite hellish to put tunnels into.
by cowpig | 2025-06-17 13:04:59+00:00
I have a pet theory about the medical industry in the USA.

The US is the most pure-capitalist nation on the planet, and medical services are as bad a fit as it gets for a market economy:

* interactions with the market are ideally as few as possible

* there is massive information asymmetry

* people can't "shop around" during medical emergencies

* the externalities are orders of magnitude more potent than the forces directly acting on a transaction

* most importantly, individuals in many cases *literally cannot exit the marketplace* (unless you consider death a viable consumer choice).

That second property creates a market incentive to squeeze every consumer dry. What can they do about it, really?

But it's insanely unethical, and extremely against the common good (externalities abound).

Those forces push the middlemen, the insurance providers, to do horrible shit. And since they are the middlemen with all of the power, and interact with literally every market actor, the culture of pure evil seeps into everything. Clinicians either becomes numb to the fact that insurance companies will literally just not pay things they agreed to pay, or live a life of endless frustration.

This is just "how it is", and so everyone, including regulators, shift their overton window to be able to function in a decrepit, toxic system.
by devilbunny | 2025-06-17 13:05:00+00:00
Cocaine is still legal for medical use, but in twenty years of anesthesia I've never seen it used (though we are not an ENT-heavy practice). Too much concern about diversion. It's a great drug for ENT use but the way little bits of excess disappear means that most hospital pharmacies don't want to touch it (and surgery centers that don't have 24/7-staffed pharmacies want it even less due to risk of break-ins and theft).

Heroin is not legal in the US, although it is in the UK at least as a hospice med (under the generic name diamorphine).
by neilwilson | 2025-06-17 13:05:31+00:00
Every 'successful trial' is trumped by the far greater data set that comes from the widest 'UBI' trial of them all - state pension payments.

That is a permanent payment to live on to a section of the population, except that section is divided by age not location. And the results from millions and millions of data points across the globe are crystal clear - the people stop working and the dependency ratio goes up.

To the extent that Denmark has just increased the age to 70, ie reduced the size of the section of the population entitled to the payment. They wouldn't have needed to do that if 'people continued to work'.

Of course a payment to a small section of a fixed currency area will work. It's paid for by all the other people from that fixed currency area not getting the payment. As will a small payment that is not enough to live on - which ends up as a subsidy to private sector employers and results in wage compression towards the minimum wage.

The fun starts when you try to give a living payment to all the people within a fixed currency area. And that has yet to be trialed anywhere.

Premature extrapolation is a cruel affliction.
by codersfocus | 2025-06-17 13:05:52+00:00
Interest is not always fulfilled by usury.

For example, friends lend each other money without usury simply because the "interest" comes from helping a friend.

Similarly, the central bank which is an agent of the government fulfills its interest by having healthy citizens. So there probably wouldn't be usury.

Instead, earnings from the citizen would be garnished if they had debt.
Show HN: screen recorder made for bug reporting on mobile
by thedg | 2025-06-17 13:05:54+00:00
Hey HN, when I was a PM at Cloudflare 7 years ago, whenever we’d test our site on mobile, it was super annoying to make Jira tickets: I’d take a bunch of screenshots on my phone, email them to myself, then go one by one and make Jira tickets for them.

Now 7 years later and this is actually still the way people do mobile QA. It takes ages to create 1 ticket let alone 10. How is there no tool for this yet!

We just pushed an app to the App Store that lets you record your screen and make a Jira/Linear/etc ticket right from your phone, and the ticket auto-includes device/OS level details like battery, memory, etc to help engineers repro.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jam-fix-bugs-faster/id64690372...

I would love to hear what you think, how we can develop it more to make reporting bugs from your phone practically instant. We’re looking at ways to capture console logs next. Curious what else you think would be good to add.

PS we are hiring - especially Android engineers to build this for Android too - so if you are interested, would love to hear from you: jam.dev/careers