MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-08-26 16:37:35+00:00
> Wondering why raising higher-bracket income tax is such a problem

Economists don’t love income taxes, and they really don’t love investment/capital gains taxes (see the NPR article I linked).[1]

The bigger problem is what you mean by “higher-bracket income tax.” 60% of all income is earned by the top 40% outside the top 1%: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr.... To have the kind of welfare state the U.S. has, you need to raise taxes on those people a lot. But that’s politically impossible. In 40 years, we never managed to undo the bulk of Reagan’s tax cuts.

If you’re not willing to raise the rates on more than half your potential tax base, then you’ll need to do very steep hikes on the top 1%. Or you need to explore things like wealth taxes and taxing unrealized capital gains, which economists really hate.

The European countries realized that in a globalized economy, you have to be competitive on business and investment taxes. That’s why they heavily tax the middle class, including with consumption taxes.

[1] They don’t love tariffs either. But tariffs implicate concerns about foreign relations that are basically outside the scope of economics. The economic models simply don’t factor in the political risk of outsourcing all your steel production to a potential enemy. That’s why nearly every developed country ignores the economic consensus when it comes to things like agricultural subsidies. The political risk of not being food sufficient simply outweighs the economic downside.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-26 16:37:39+00:00
No shit! I'm still rocking the M1 Pro for personal and the M2 Air for work so I do have magsafe back for one of them at least, but just USB-C besides that.

But yeah IMHO there's just no comparison. Unless you're one of those folks who simply cannot fucking stand Mac, it's just no contest.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-26 16:39:17+00:00
The actual evidence is that Obama's own director of national intelligence never saw anything convincing according to sworn testimony in 2017. Period.

Edit: Also, what report? The Durham Report, in 2023, was anything but a proof. Wikipedia: "On May 15, 2023, Durham's final 306-page unclassified report was publicly released. Durham said there was inadequate predication to open a full investigation and that only an assessment or preliminary investigation should have been launched. The report concluded the FBI had shown confirmation bias and a 'lack of analytical rigor' toward the information they received, especially information the FBI received from politically affiliated persons and entities. The report extensively discusses 'Clinton Plan intelligence' stolen from Russian intelligence that alleged the Clinton campaign was involved in a plot against Trump, though Durham acknowledged it might be fabricated. Durham recommended that the FBI create 'a position for an FBI agent or lawyer to provide oversight of politically sensitive investigations.'"

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

Even the Associated Press admits: "The findings aren’t flattering for the FBI, with Durham asserting that it rushed into the investigation without an adequate basis and routinely ignored or rationalized evidence that undercut its premise."

https://apnews.com/article/durham-report-fbi-trump-clinton-2...

Edit 2: Nonsense, Durham is arguing that while Trump's claims of a "deep state" plot are false, the initial investigation absolutely was badly handled with the FBI committing egregious errors of judgement, regardless of any provable political motivation.

Edit 3: Durham, a "trump lackey"? Who was in charge while he was writing this report? Keep in mind he was submitting this report to his boss, Merrick Garland for the Biden DOJ. You can't be serious.
by jtbayly | 2025-08-26 16:39:17+00:00
One example is FreePBX, which supposedly supports automated SSL renewal via LetsEncrypt, but constantly overwrites the config, thus breaking the “auto.” So I have to manually renew the cert, or I have to upgrade (ie rebuild the whole system from scratch, including installing the OS) to the next major version of FreePBX and hope they fixed the issue.

So I’m really not excited about the time limit dropping from 90 days to 47 days.
by 0xcafefood | 2025-08-26 16:39:23+00:00
"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population."

This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].

Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
by myrmidon | 2025-08-26 16:39:42+00:00
For the record: I don't think there was significantly more "election meddling" by the Russians in favor of Trump than what you would typically see, even though he is the preferrable candidate to them by quite a bit.

But James Clapper is literally the worst person to quote in your favor, that man is literally on record for lying to congress under oat.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-26 16:39:59+00:00
This just seems obviously false. I'm sure their data shows something but come on, take a population of 5,000,000. Reduce it to 1. 1 person can not do all the things needed to run a society. They can barely do the stuff needed for 1. Specialization makes things possible. So then the question becomes, what number is too small.

Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
by slipperydippery | 2025-08-26 16:40:04+00:00
1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted.

2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.

I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.
by TomLisankie | 2025-08-26 16:40:12+00:00
Yes, he's a human. But what you are failing to mention is that those corporations are made up of humans. And don't just imagine the C-suite when I say that. I'm talking about the developers and other highly-technical positions who may care very little about what's good for the corporation they work for over the long term. Those people also have instincts around and standards for what they consider decent behavior. Many of them (just like most people from most walks of life) will just stop listening if the person making the argument seems actively antagonistic upfront even if they would agree with the main argument that person is making.

Diplomacy does matter whether you like it or not. Especially before the person or people you're trying to persuade have heard your argument.
by elzbardico | 2025-08-26 16:40:29+00:00
No. The reason lights are on in california is because california imports massive amounts of firm power from other states. Intermitent renewables are a terrible investment, because you need to back up every single GW with dispatchable sources like gas generation. Battery storage is a joke and will probably never be economical.

Every single place in earth that went all in in solar and wind is now paying the price of their eletrical engineering ignorance in absurdly expensive bills and low reliability.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-26 16:40:42+00:00
I had similar experience, usually I'd ignore Gemini be it flash or pro but on several occasions it fixed complex errors like it's nothing. Yet when it comes to codegen it is "cheap" on tokens and struggles outputting complex logic. As a great bonus: their easy to setup API is freemium but a generous freemium (google AI studio I mean). My "ecosystem" atm will be something like: gpt5, claude 4.1 - if they both fail: try to fix with gemini. I'd skip Grok for privacy issues mostly not that I completely ignore its capabilities, qwen is good but sometimes 'overengineered' i don't need 400bn , given the large params maybe it will work for non-coding like if you ask it some exotic questions about science: casimir effect, acoustic levitation, ununennium etc etc you name it.
by pesus | 2025-08-26 16:40:42+00:00
No, the actual evidence would be the investigation and report that says the opposite of what you're claiming. A baseless "this random person said it didn't happen!" claim isn't evidence.

Edit: what exactly do you think you just linked in your edit? That's an investigation by a Trump lackey into the origins of the investigations of Russian interference. You just provided proof that the initial investigation was not politically motivated and is credible. You're welcome to analyze the actual reports and evidence instead of clinging to the word of someone appointed by a convicted felon and fraudster in an attempt to prove they didn't cheat.
by jeffbee | 2025-08-26 16:40:47+00:00
This is not even a remotely accurate characterization of the relative performance of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and the Apple M4. I have both an expensive implementation of the former and the $499 version of the latter, and my M4 Mac mini beats the Ryzen by 80% or more in many single-threaded workloads, like browser benchmarks.
by westurner | 2025-08-26 16:40:47+00:00
> But now, the team has found that spin loss actually has the opposite effect, altering magnetization. This means that spin loss induces a spontaneous magnetization switch within the magnetic material, just as the balloon moves as a reaction to the wind being taken out of it.

> In their experiments, the team demonstrated the paradox that the greater the spin loss, the less power is required to switch magnetization. As a result, the energy efficiency is up to three times higher than conventional methods, and it can be realized without special materials or complex device structures, making it highly practical and industrially scalable.

"Magnetization switching driven by magnonic spin dissipation" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61073-w :

> Abstract: [...] we present an unconventional approach that exploits magnon dissipation for magnetization control, rather than mitigating it. By combining a single ferromagnetic metal with an antiferromagnetic insulator that breaks symmetry in spin transport across the layers while preserving the symmetry in charge transport, we realize considerable spin-orbit torques comparable to those found in non-magnetic metals, enough for magnetization switching. Our systematic experiments and comprehensive analysis confirm that our findings are a result of magnonic spin dissipation, rather than external spin sources
by ndegruchy | 2025-08-26 16:41:05+00:00
It's a stretch to say /var is for application _user_ data. For a certain value of "user" sure, like MariaDB or Redis. They're "users", and have data in /var but it's a non-interactive session.

User data is stored in the user's $HOME, of which none of those locations are, generally, writable to an end-user, and wouldn't be a place to permanently store that data.
by ryao | 2025-08-26 16:41:21+00:00
> The article describes how the Linux kernel, despite being written in C, embraces object-oriented principles by using function pointers in structures to achieve polymorphism.

This technique predates object oriented programming. It is called an abstract data type or data abstraction. A key difference between data abstraction and object oriented programming is that you can leave functions unimplemented in your abstract data type while OOP requires that the functions always be implemented.

The sanest way to have optional functions in object oriented programming that occurs to me would be to have an additional class for each optional function and inherit each one you implement alongside your base class via multiple inheritance. Then you would need to check at runtime whether the object is an instance of the additional class before using an optional function. With an abstract data type, you would just be do a simple NULL check to see if the function pointer is present before using it.
by bhouston | 2025-08-26 16:41:56+00:00
> Is the same not true in Canada? In Edmonton's upcoming elections 39% of the donations came from corporations, but they made up 84% of the donated dollars

It is quite different. Here is how campaign finance works:

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

And this includes all PACs and equivalents. We don't have dark money PACs.
by 9dev | 2025-08-26 16:42:09+00:00
> I think the most rational takeaway is just that it's too difficult for a typical IT guy to understand, and most SMBs that aren't in tech don't have anyone more knowledgeable on staff.

Where would that kind of thinking lead us..? Most medical procedures are too complex for someone untrained to understand. Does that mean clinics should just not offer those procedures anymore, or should they rather make sure to train their physicians appropriately so they’re able to… do their job properly?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-26 16:43:00+00:00
There are two problems with a command economy.

First, as you say, because of communication bottlenecks. 300 small bakeries (number made up) keep a better eye on how much bread is needed in Manhattan than a technocrat in DC, or even Albany. As you say, we now have the communication technology to overcome that.

But second, there is the command problem. You may be able to get the data there, but who's going to make the decisions? They were made by 300 (or however many) bakery owners; now they're going to be made by one or a few people. They may have the data, but do they know what to do with it? Do they know enough about bakeries and bread? Do they have the mental capacity to replace 300 people?

This gets worse as you get bigger scale. What if you're not just trying to do the bakeries of Manhattan? What if you're trying to do all the food supply in Manhattan? All of retail in Manhattan? All of retail in the whole country?

The other problem with a commander is that they can decide that they want something, whether or not the data supports it. And their subordinates may decide that they'll get better promotions (or at least keep their jobs) if they 1) do what the commander says and 2) tell the commander what he wants to hear.

Better ability to communicate the data does not fix the second problem at all.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-26 16:43:30+00:00
Does the capture check on Secret prevent you from just using `_.value` as your extractor now? I'm not seeing how this approach could ever be made to work without tracking primitives, and even with that it's not clear that you can actually use this to prevent a leak. You're always going to have to serialize the secret somehow (unless the capability is entirely used as a token within your same process, and then you don't need to wrap anything and can just pass an opaque object around), so you can always get at it.
by ygjb | 2025-08-26 16:43:34+00:00
> So understand that when one of us comments "I'm so tired and disillusioned," we do so after years of resisting, and those words are not uttered lightly.

My great-grandfather fled France with his family during the second world war. My grandfather fought in the second world war - essentially after he got to Canada, he enlisted and headed back to fight against fascism. He eventually came back to Canada because the rest of his surviving family was here.

I get tired of fighting for privacy, and standing up for users, and pushing back against some of the most egregious abuses of tech companies, including the tech companies I work for. When I think that it's not worth fighting, or I think that I could probably get a promotion and way more money if I just suck it up and start building ad-tech or surveillance tech, I think about how disappointed my grandfather would be with my decision.

Stoicism isn't the shitty memes that folks post online re-enforcing toxic masculinity, it's getting up in the morning after taking a break from the good fight, and continuing to push back despite being tired. Understand that when you wake up in the morning, or feel the need to comment "I'm so tired and disillusioned", remember that there are many, many other people tired and disillusioned along side you or OP continuing the fight. Take a break if you need to, and come back to keep fighting.
by aeve890 | 2025-08-26 16:43:35+00:00
>The speed of light is incredibly slow

I get where you're coming from but still I find funny in so many levels that the literal speed limit of the universe is too slow for our mundane (or even banal in FB case) needs. the universe isn't good enough to our need to move bullshit across the globe. surreal.

In the same vein it would be awesome if this _need for speed_ would materialize in infinite funding of neutrino based communication research.
by pcfwik | 2025-08-26 16:43:38+00:00
I assume the poster is referencing Citizens United v. FEC, specifically about the government's use of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act to restrict showing of political documentaries (apparently, called "Hillary: The Movie" and "Celsius 41.11").

While (as far as I know) the law was never actually used to ban books (only documentaries), the case became infamous because the government argued that it had the right to ban books if it wanted to. See, e.g., the NYTimes article below: "The [government's] lawyer, Malcolm L. Stewart, said Congress has the power to ban political books, signs and Internet videos, if they are paid for by corporations and distributed not long before an election.".

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washington/25scotus.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-205
by runarberg | 2025-08-26 16:43:41+00:00
There are a lot of people on the internet, and every individual on the internet is in a unique situation. Chances are some of them are very likely to be persuaded by a scam which seems obvious to you.

Parent’s story is very believable, even if parent made this particular story up (which I personally don‘t think is the case) this has probably happened to somebody.
by jfengel | 2025-08-26 16:43:42+00:00
The efficiencies in air travel don't come from the airplanes. They come from optimizing routes, eliminating competition, and cramming far more people on an airplane.

That saves a lot of money, and despite complaining people seem to accept the tradeoff of cheaper flights for an unpleasant experience. That comes from using basically the same technology as a half-century ago, with more customers.
by anthomtb | 2025-08-26 16:43:55+00:00
Big O was introduced in my Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) class which was nominally a second year undergrad class. In practice, most Computer Science (CS) students were far enough advanced to take DSA in their first year.

I took DSA as a third-year Electrical and Computer Engineering student. I recall maybe 15 minutes of exposition on the topic and exam questions of a near-throwaway nature (ergo: write this tree parsing algorithm, 95 points for your code's correctness, 5 points for explaining your algorithm's Big O complexity). It did seem like something that CS professors and teaching assistants considered either trivial or self-explanatory.
by wavemode | 2025-08-26 16:44:05+00:00
This is an article where I agree with its statements yet disagree with its spirit. Everything written is true, but has to be put in context - the writer he's responding to was challenging these specific claims:

> what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the Universe ... We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships ... What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical Universe ...

I don't think there's anything wrong with making casual statements of this sort, but I also don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out (in response) that these statements are philosophically unrigorous. I mean, what makes something a "basic rule", and how can you tell that we have apprehended all such rules in existence?
by notahacker | 2025-08-26 16:44:21+00:00
The old "half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I have no idea which half" quote springs to mind...

Not sure how you're defining "underfunded" candidates, but the incumbents in competitive races where enormous amounts are spent by both sides to try to gain an advantage don't win anywhere near as often as the incumbent in nom-competitive races which parties and PACs barely bother spending in. Ultimately the spending is positional and cancels out, and the biggest spender often loses because there's not nearly enough difference between the candidates' spending levels to affect whether voters hear their messages.
by raincole | 2025-08-26 16:44:30+00:00
It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are.

It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-26 16:44:47+00:00
> We're just one step behind the US because there's less money to be made

There's plenty to be made - it's just very under the radar.

Anecdotally, extended family of mine run a fairly decent sized construction contracting company out in BC (Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland), and have been having family members and family friends donate as a group for both Conservative and NDP MLAs for over a decade now, as well as helping organize voter drives and non-partisan activities at Gurdwaras (if partisan activities came up, they tended to be in Punjabi and thus not reported on - but tbf, in depth local news is dead in much of Canada as well outside of metros).

Lobbying is common across democracies, but how it manifests is different. I feel that there is also a level of visibility into the American system that really highlights bad actors, but similar scrutiny isn't as common in other countries other than maybe the UK.
by bhouston | 2025-08-26 16:44:59+00:00
> Case in point: Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. Trump's campaign was about $541M cheaper.

You are skipping Super PACs which is pretty much exclusively ultra rich people political spending.

Here is the Super PAC spending and Kamala was destroyed by pro-Trump spending:

Conservative/Trump: $1,754,585,468

Liberal/Kamala: $786,990,015

https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs