MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-18 19:00:45+00:00
West coast climate and culture is the same as East coast Australia so that part is straightforward. Easy to make friends and a good life in that aspect.

For work-life balance I will acknowledge the biggest boom times are over. It was ridiculous at one point and the best move of my life. Nowadays though all big tech are starting to adopt some form of stack ranking and demands and pressure are going up while benefits are falling so it's not nearly as good as it once was.

Big tech is still ~5x take home pay though. I see a stint of working in the USA as necessary given Australian house prices. Do it for as long as you can stand, don't live up to the lifestyle of the wages. The net result is a big win for your life. As in if you work here for a year and get hit with layoffs? You'll still have 5x in savings for that year as you would have had in Australia.
by t_mahmood | 2025-07-18 19:01:38+00:00
Where can I get more of these small programming challenges?

I love small problems like this. I couldn't get all the steps in 25 minutes, but I think I was not that bad. (I was in stage 4 before time ended, got distracted about taking input with Rust, heh)

I think, working with these small problems would give my ADHD brain a boost before I start my daily works. If more detailed problem, I would spend the whole day on it, smaller would not give me much push.

This was just right!
by kccqzy | 2025-07-18 19:01:42+00:00
Exactly. In liberal cities I have lived in, it is almost always the earlier immigrants that resent and denigrate the later immigrants. It's pure gatekeeping. Like "I suffered during the immigration process and therefore you have to suffer at least as much as I have, or it isn't fair." Or like "the recent immigrants aren't as hardworking as older ones and they don't deserve immigration."
by mediaman | 2025-07-18 19:01:46+00:00
He's not saying it's only true when salaries are equal. It makes a significant difference at the margin: if you're an employer debating whether to employ US talent or offshore talent, weighing time zones, skill and other factors against cost, then introducing a tax advantage for domestic hiring will cause those employers who were otherwise indifferent between the two options to now prefer US labor.
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-18 19:01:53+00:00
> I think this very much depends on how companies are "outsourcing"/hiring.

Yes and no. Obviously there are a million ways to do business and taxes are really complex, but the law doesn't revolve around actual salaries but "cost of software R&D" so this still applies to hiring contractors and other companies if the deliverable is software.

From the article:

> US companies making foreign software development-related expenditures like hiring staff, or paying for contracts abroad, are still mandated to be expensed over 15 years.
by namibj | 2025-07-18 19:02:30+00:00
You can just ask io_uring what commands you have available to you. Though the way of the background thread should be readily available/usable by just indirectly calling the syscall (-helper) and replacing it with a futex-based handshake/wrapper. If you're not using the backend-ordering-imposing link bit, you could probably even use minor futex trickery to dispatch multiple background threads to snatch up from the submission queue in a "grab one at a time" fashion.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-18 19:02:41+00:00
> it's a voluntary code of conduct

So then it's something completely worthless in the globally competitive cutthroat business world, that even the companies who signed won't follow, they just signed it for virtue signaling.

If you want companies to actually follow a rule, you make it a law and you send their CEOs to jail when they break it.

"Voluntary codes of conduct" have less value in the business world than toilet paper. Zuck was just tired of this performative bullshit and said the quiet part out loud.
by poulsbohemian | 2025-07-18 19:02:54+00:00
Without exploring etymology, what strikes me as interesting here is that buildings are generally structures in which we live or work. Mausoleums and pyramids are interesting in this regard because they are the opposite: they are places for the dead. Perhaps it is this use rather than the actual form that is cause for debate in the description of building, given that a building can take so many forms even in our agreed definition of the term.
by opan | 2025-07-18 19:03:06+00:00
>(as is required for the 99% of users who need nonfree blobs)

If you forgo the built-in WiFi, the ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) works fine without any blobs (speaking from experience). I think all newer gens need iGPU blobs, sadly, but I wanted to point out a viable middle ground between modern Nvidia gamerware setups and Librebooted X200s that can barely browse the web.
by AkshatM | 2025-07-18 19:03:29+00:00
I'll also point out that it's actually harder for entry-level foreign workers (read: international students) to get jobs in general. F1 visa students are limited to one year of OPT, unless they have a STEM degree, in which case they can work for two more years for an e-Verified employer only in a field related to their major. There are significantly fewer e-Verified employers in the country. So you have a concentrated labour pool vying for a much smaller fraction of jobs than the general population - remember, we can't even be employed at McDonald's on STEM OPT.

Another factor that complicates the analysis is that foreign students do not necessarily represent the same cross-section as US students. The high cost of US education tends to bifurcate the sample size into a bimodal distribution: you have rich foreign students who can afford tuition rates, or you have scholarship students who earned their scholarship quite fairly thanks to merit. Neither population can be fairly compared against the average US citizen in terms of hiring likelihood - either you're pitting the top 1% of someone in the home country to the median US student, or you're comparing someone who's got the resources to find opportunities in ways US students can't.

Finally, it's been my experience, seeing others though the F1 -> H1B pipeline, that most people pursue that pipeline through a master's degree rather than a bachelor's degree. This is because both immigration law and tuition rates incentivise shorter programs for advanced education. If you're comparing the hiring rates of master's students to bachelor's students, naturally you're going to get a revealed preference for master's students.

tl;dr the simple statistic cited needs critical questioning.
by sershe | 2025-07-18 19:03:50+00:00
We are talking about micro plastics, the specific harms of which aren't even quantified that well (DALY?), and their future impact given current climate with regard to environmental tradeoffs.

Now, what would your comment look like, for example, in context of adopting coal, that is demonstrably much much worse for health and environment and also was adopted when there was hardly any law or public pressure to protect nature?

If we extrapolate the catastrophising it would seem downright apocalyptic. And yet, coal adoption unambiguously led to increased life expectancy and quality of life. Now let's do the tradeoff for plastics :)
by Ancapistani | 2025-07-18 19:03:54+00:00
You're right, but it's slightly more complicated than that.

My understanding is that payment processors are obligated to follow the policies of Visa/MasterCard, AmEx, and Discover, but that those parties' policies don't explicitly ban these specific things for sale. Instead, they "strongly encourage" processors to ban them in their user agreements under the implicit threat of their risk level being increased, which in turn impacts the fees they pay to the credit card companies.

I've not been deep in this world since ~2014, but at that time the only processor I could find that wasn't specific to the porn industry, offered physical terminals, had reasonable (if high) fees, and didn't ban legal transactions in their user agreement was PAI ("Payment Alliance International"). A quick look at their site today shows that they seem to have been acquired by Brinks, so that may no longer be the case.
by Expurple | 2025-07-18 19:04:37+00:00
That's true. But at the same time, the risk is kinda overblown. You can still use the last open version of Redis. There's even an open, community-maintained fork that you don't have to maintain yourself.

Even GPL can't force a company to maintain and keep developing an open version when the company doesn't want to. Even if Redis was GPL (no CLA), they could still abandon it and write a compatible clone from scratch. AI makes it even easier to do
by modeless | 2025-07-18 19:04:48+00:00
How certain are you that none of your printers or visitors' laptops or whatever were ever compromised by a botnet? Or that your ISP isn't also serving customers who are compromised or malicious on IPs adjacent to yours?

A few hardware security keys will probably prevent this problem for you. I'm wondering why you didn't consider getting them after you had login problems before.
by ookblah | 2025-07-18 19:06:20+00:00
and without concrete details about the exact steps you're taking to fail these conversations are heat without light. see how that works?

nobody can be bothered to show how these coding llms fall flat on their face apparently with their own real detailed examples and people can't be bothered to setup some detailed youtube video with all source code because in the end i'm not trying that hard to convince people to use tools they don't want to use.

i think with all the comments maybe the more people who stumble through this the better. the cloudflare example is a decent starting point and i've already given you the general approach. i'm fine with that being a copout lol.
Ask HN: OpenAI zero'd balance (actual money, not free credits) after inactivity
by footempbar | 2025-07-18 19:06:38+00:00
Does OpenAI wipe out API balance if you're not using for a few month(s)? I had some balance of actual money paid via credit card that I had not used for few months. I went yesterday and the balance was showing as $0.0 . I'm 100% sure I did not use it up.

Again, this was not free credits which I'm totally sure has an expiry, but this was paid by me via my credit card, so not sure what gives.

If so, this does not make sense. Has anyone else noticed this or was it some sort of anomaly at my end. Happy to give OpenAI benefit of doubt.
by onetimeusename | 2025-07-18 19:06:46+00:00
I doubt they would brazenly say that. That would be an open admission of ethnic conflict which would probably inevitably lead to violence. The word "need" in that quote is probably not literal, but Democrats do appear to desire demographic change. Here's some proof they want more of specific foreigners:

1) The biggest proof is under Biden's last term and at the end of Obama's last term, there were very large numbers of illegal border crossings. Especially under Biden where millions crossed. Let's conservatively say it was seven million people in four years. That doesn't happen by accident. Why do I say that? Under Trump's terms the border crossing numbers dramatically diminished. So it was just a question of enforcement which means the DHS, which happened to be run by the same guy Alejandro Mayorkas under both Biden and Obama, simply chose not to enforce the border and allow very large numbers of asylum claims (which I think are bogus and not our responsibility). That's a very nasty thing to do. Note that neither Biden nor Obama openly campaigned on letting millions of people in and it was a big concern of voters going into the 2024 elections.

2) Democrats have run on a racial platform and it has been very successful. See: https://keywiki.org/Race_Will_Win_the_Race. For example, California used to be a GOP state. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California. The demographics of California have changed dramatically in just a few decades as has the politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#202...

3) Democrats have refused to comply with ICE. ICE is responsible for deportations. They have created sanctuary cities, counties, and states. What reason is there for this besides not wanting illegals to be removed? "Human rights" is just a way of saying "endless litigation to prevent deportations".

4) The census was changed under Biden to include illegals in the population count. This is used to apportion representatives. So that would give more representation in the House to Democrats since illegals tend to live in urban areas which are all represented by Democrats.

5) Democrats have repeatedly made claims about how diversity is our strength. If diversity is to be valued, they must favor more immigration. Diversity here seems to be a euphemism. No one calls for diversity in China or Saudi Arabia for example. Why not? I think we know. So immigration and diversity are seemingly euphemisms for something else. https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/user-clip-joe-...

6) The 1965 Immigration Act signed and sponsored under Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac.... It called for less homogeneity of immigrants. It has caused demographic change. If we look at how ethnic groups vote, demographic change has primarily benefited Democrats.

I think it's just obvious also. Lots of political things are put in terms of euphemisms that use watered down language. But it's quite hard not to notice ethnic conflict and balkanization beginning in the US and even across Europe.
by akmarinov | 2025-07-18 19:07:09+00:00
Hopefully the EU wakes up and starts enforcing its laws. There’s a law saying that if one country requires visa against any of its members, the whole of EU will require visas for that country.

Currently the US requires visas for Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus and the European Commission has refused to follow that law, regardless of how many times the European Parliament votes for it to be followed, since they don’t want to impact France’s and Italy’s tourism sectors.

With this $250 fee, this refusal of theirs becomes even more egregious.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-07-18 19:07:47+00:00
Insurance is largely about pricing risk. At the heart of most insurance platforms is a risk engine of sorts that takes a list of parameters and produces a premium.

The better your risk models, the more easily you can offer competitive premiums without over-exposure.

(I have worked in insuretech. Although my work was on transactional services and our white labelling capabilities rather than the math heavy stuff)
by donatj | 2025-07-18 19:07:52+00:00
I attended Amazon Re:Invent a number of years ago and one of the keynote speakers was talking about providing medical information to law enforcement - the theory being that if they know you suffer from schizophrenia, for instance, the police would be informed of this and in theory less likely to murder you.

I found the whole idea very prone to abuse and posted about it on social media, and the whole thread flew into people fighting about Obamacare… but I still think I was right.

The older I get, the more I become a strong proponent of keeping data out of the hands of the people who can murder you without recourse.
by jahewson | 2025-07-18 19:07:55+00:00
I didn’t realise we’d entered a time machine to 2007. I’ve worked extensively with OOXML and yes, the documentation is cryptic and often absent, but Microsoft will help you out if you contact them on their forums. I see Libre Office devs there all the time!

But the complexity is not some kind of conspiracy - it’s inherent - it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features. Many features are implemented in backwards compatible way on top of the old version of similar features and then the whole thing has been back ported from a bunch of C structure to XML which has the most woeful and underpowered schema language imaginable.
by Tharre | 2025-07-18 19:08:17+00:00
PKGBUILDs are just bash scripts following a certain function and variable naming convention. Even if you could somehow parse it safely and extract the URLs of the 'source' array, any attacker can just simply put an obfuscated version of the malware URL into the build() function and download it there.

AUR clients already show you the diff if you update a package, but note that this were completely new packages anyway, uploaded 2 days ago, so that doesn't really apply here.

LLMs are useless for reviewing if something is malicious, their false-positive rates would be way to high. And even ignoring that you'd have to hide the LLMs code from the attacker or he can just check if his package is detected as malicious and modify it until it isn't. Not something open source projects are keen on doing.
by peterldowns | 2025-07-18 19:08:43+00:00
Very interesting writeup, as a long-time Nix user I've always been interested in trying guix but never gotten around to it. Great post overall.

> The thing is, I'm not actually sure if Guix's better documentation helps smooth the onboarding in any way because you have to already know Scheme, which is a more complex language than Nix.

LMAO absolutely not. Nix-the-language is the worst programming language I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. I picked up Scheme in about 1 day during a class in college. It's night-and-day different.
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-18 19:08:44+00:00
It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc

It’s an entire ecosystem

Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished

There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either

Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult

Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb
by qqqwerty | 2025-07-18 19:08:47+00:00
Perhaps OP can clarify, because I too read that as a snarky dig. Perhaps that wasn't their intention, but it felt off. The only place I saw a "subtle suggestion" for a donation was by clicking the "Support" link all the way at the bottom of the page. The site has probably the least intrusive monetization scheme one could implement without forgoing it entirely.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-18 19:08:55+00:00
Nice writeup. I suspect you're measuring the cost of abstraction. Specifically, routines that can handle lots of things (like locale based strings and utf8 character) have more things to do before they can produce results. This was something I ran into head on at Sun when we did the I18N[1] project.

In my experience there was a direct correlation between the number of different environments where a program would "just work" and its speed. The original UNIX ls(1) which had maximum sized filenames, no pesky characters allowed, all representable by 7-bit ASCII characters, and only the 12 bits of meta data that God intended[2] was really quite fast. You add things like a VFS which is mapping the source file system into the parameters of the "expected" file system that adds delay. You're mapping different character sets? adds delay. Colors for the display? Adds delay. Small costs that add up.

1: The first time I saw a long word like 'internationalization' reduced to first and last letter and the count of letters in between :-).

2: Those being Read, Write, and eXecute for user, group, and other, setuid, setgid, and 'sticky' :-)
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-07-18 19:09:22+00:00
Our country is massively in debt, and healthcare fraud is off the charts currently.

We don't need more people exploiting the system.

Legal immigrants pay into the system, and do their fair share.

The illegals broadly do not support federal expenses.

> Personally, I'm ok paying 30 bucks a year to make sure fellow human beings in the US don't die of preventable causes in our streets

EMTALA forces hospitals to treat emergent conditions regardless of ability to pay/status.

But what you are talking about as "preventable causes" sounds more like chronic conditions and universalized healthcare that does not meet the definition of emergent situations.
by ElectronCharge | 2025-07-18 19:09:34+00:00
Because the number of senile/crazy people voting is a tiny percentage. The 16-17 year old block is potentially much larger, and might actually swing an election.

I share the opinion of many here that almost all those below 18 are too ill-informed, poorly educated, and immature to deserve a vote. They'd be easily propagandized and peer-pressured into voting poorly. That's not to say that many 18 and older don't fall into the same category, but we don't need a new large group like that.
by nucleardog | 2025-07-18 19:10:07+00:00
Pretty much. Like everyone's saying... an absolute moral stance here is pretty much impossible to take.

Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month into the economy of a country that's invaded another and sent people in that have literally raped infants to death? Uh, no.

Do I like that I'm contributing some cents a month to a company headed by someone that contributes to anti-gay causes and is a COVID skeptic and amplified COVID denial? Also no.

Are those contributions worse than using Google and contributing to their damage of society and the internet?

Are those contributions worse than using one of the AI providers who will gobble up power at absurd rates and contribute meaningfully to the slow death of the planet?

Are those contributions a meaningful concern compared to the fact that I work remotely creating value for a US company whose tax dollars end up going to support Israel and the genocide they're committing in Gaza?

I honestly have no idea. But I can't really see how "not using Yandex" is the absolute stance that everyone should be expected to take, all things considered.
by ofalkaed | 2025-07-18 19:10:12+00:00
Many modern Thinkpads have superb compatibility as well these days, they sell linux laptops and many of their non-linux laptops are fully linux compatible. From what I saw when I was last laptop shopping much of their lineup works out of the box with linux as long as you use a recent kernel. Just search their support forums for the models you are interested in, there generally will be threads on installing linux on them and Lenovo staff will generally be there providing solutions.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 19:10:17+00:00
There's no need to get a new B-1/B-2 visa to attend YC if one already has such a visa. But when to try to get such visa if one doesn't have it already, whether before or after getting accepted into YC, will depend on a variety of factors specific to that person, such as his or her countries of citizenship and residence, current employment/student status, U.S. immigration history, etc.
by Hackbraten | 2025-07-18 19:10:41+00:00
They (or someone in cahoots with them) made at least one attempt [0] to lure readers of the Arch Linux subreddit to the malicious PKGBUILD.

IIRC, the post was just a single paragraph, praising how they “found” the zen-browser-patched-bin package on the AUR and how much it helped them.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1m30py8/aur_is_s...