MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SamPatt | 2025-08-29 04:07:06+00:00
I don't believe it's dangerous at all.

I followed a guided meditation audio initially. It focuses on deep relaxation, lying down and staying very still while you focus on awareness of your body and breath.

I think folks who haven't tried to really relax and connect with their body might be surprised how much awareness and control you can have.

I have a fitbit and I can drop my heart rate quite a bit with practice, I've gotten down to 39 before with breathing and relaxation techniques.
by edg5000 | 2025-08-29 04:07:09+00:00
For making UIs, web or not, I always go for HTML+CSS. It can be a bit awkward to interact with native code (e.g. C++), since you'll have to generally do message passing which involves serialisation/deserialisation.

Given that HTML+CSS is really damn powerful as this post makes clear, how do other UI toolkits compare? I've always wanted to do more with Qt, but probably it won't come near HTML+CSS in terms of functionality and flexibility?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-29 04:07:55+00:00
Wireguard or OpenVPN might work, if someone has a server set up, set up your client to connect.

If those don't work you can try something like wssocks (https://github.com/genshen/wssocks) or wstunnel (https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel). It tunnels connections through WebSockets, so you can make the connection look like a regular HTTPS connection. Another option would just be a regular-old HTTPS proxy (Nginx, Apache2, etc). Set up an HTTPS proxy somewhere on the internet, connect through it, but configure it to return a regular web page if someone tries to make a non-proxy connection through it. Another tool that may help setting up is chisel (https://github.com/jpillora/chisel). Those HTTPS ones may work if, when authorities connect to the host, it returns pages that look like some kind of private video server. (Maybe run an actual video server, in addition to the proxy...) Also, try to enforce TLS 1.3 for the HTTPS server.

And another option, if all else fails, is to run a straight-up SOCKS proxy over the internet, on a weird port. It might be so obvious they aren't looking for it.

To mask your DNS requests with the SOCKS proxy, use something like Tor-DNS (https://github.com/bfix/Tor-DNS), or set up a VPN through the SOCKS proxy and use DNS through that route. Another option is DNS-over-HTTPS.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-29 04:08:07+00:00
i have a few chinese friends and they say it's always easy to get a working vpn. that might not be true in a Tien An Minh type crisis, i dunno, but month in month out year upon year they surf western sites, exchange winnie the pooh pictures, etc. i suppose the people i know could be relatively upper class, i have no idea what type difference that could make. i had a chinese gf in LA who would send... my >cough< pictures... to her mother in china because she enjoyed them
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-29 04:08:14+00:00
> any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm sea

"any democratic gov can sail a ship in calm sea"

As we see in europe and the usa, when democracy lasts too long, people get too relaxed and free and turn unhappy with random things that annoy them. They used to be at work too much to worry about them, but now they can stare at their neighbour and wonder why this 'migrant' has more than them etc. Or whatever happens to annoy them. And consequently start voting for ultimately authoritarian 'leaders', which will make everything worse for them and most others.
by jedberg | 2025-08-29 04:08:19+00:00
> what stops the employer from hiring someone who lives in a cheaper place?

I've worked with remote workers from around the world. Let me preface by saying there are of course exceptions but:

What I've found is that most often Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. What I mean by that is non-us workers are great if you give them a specific task, even a really hard task.

But if you give them a nebulous problem, or worse, a business outcome, they tend to perform much more poorly. And I rarely see non-americans say something like "I think our customers would like it if we added X to the product, can I work on that?".

I don't think it's because Americans are better at this -- I think it's cultural. America has a much higher risk tolerance than the rest of the world. Failing is considered a good thing in the USA. And the USA is much more entrepreneurial than the rest of the world.

These two things combined create a culture difference that makes a business difference.

Additionally, what I've found is that the exceptions tend to move here because their risk taking is much more acceptable here (or they are risk takers willing to move across the world, hard to say which way the causation goes).
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-08-29 04:08:25+00:00
I am also doing my part on fighting that, but it is an uphill battle. I will not stop fighting, and I am actively trying to bring my point into the public discourse in my country and organize myself in organizations that fight this.

Until we have laws that guarantee that I won't be forced to be a Google customer, I will demand freedom over my device if I am practically prevented from running an alternative OS because I risk getting my access to the rest of society limited. If it means that some people will be more vulnerable to scams in the mean time, that is not my fault, but the fault of politicians who have failed to secure our right to digital autonomy and our right to remain analog. I also think there should be other technical measures that could mitigate these scams that would not be as draconic, but I don't know enough about what scams you have in mind that I can offer concrete alternatives.

I do not think that is tyranny, but I think Google is definitely being a tyrant and misuse their market position.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-29 04:08:43+00:00
I can explain a little bit

1- KYC, the bank is a highly regulated entity, regulated by the state, they are a branch of the executive, they enforce banking laws set by the legislative, and can get involved in cases of fraud, money laundering, or other illegal activities. If they see a million dollar transaction, they usually want to know where the money came from, if they don't they would essentially be looking the other way. In general know what your business partner needs, in any walk of business. Let them know that you have a such and such business, that you got a round of funding. Also know what kind of bad actors you want to differentiate yourself from, let them know you are not a drug dealer, you are not laundering money, or running a ponzi scheme, and that the money won't be frozen putting them in trouble.

2) Money is a very complex subject, the fact that you think of money as "something that is stored in a bank" is testament to the fact that banks do a good job, it's an illusion, there's a lot going on behind the scenes that you are unaware of, similar to how there's a lot going on behind the scenes in Google or ChatGPT, which have simple interfaces but complex inner workings.

3) In general, a bank is a vendor, a supplier a business partner, you pay them for services. Maybe in your personal life you don't care and you are used to anonymous transactions because of the low amounts. But in business, these are strategic relationships, you want to get the most out of your money and establish a relationship with your vendor. Loyalty goes a long way, although switching vendors is always possible, it's a tradeoff with consequences that needs to be considered, and not ignored.
by glenstein | 2025-08-29 04:08:48+00:00
Google reader was simple and beautifully designed, free, and online first. There are alternatives but they sacrifice one of the three. Inoreader, the old reader, and newsblur are all pretty good but require a subscription to fully replicate Google reader.

There are various local-first phone apps, desktop apps, and self-hostable apps that are good, completely free and have comprehensive features.

There are some what I would consider bait and switch options like Flipboard and Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol. I think you can find one that works for you.

The problem with RSS right now is not, imo, the lack of tools to do the reading, thankfully. It's more that the major vote of legitimacy previously extended by Google was revoked and prompted an unwinding from RSS as a universal form of content distribution basically across the whole internet.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-29 04:09:27+00:00
I like that essay but it completely fails to understand motivation. The current problem in software is that employers want developers to become interchangeable commodities. This isn’t to save money but to free management from talent restrictions. Many developers somehow falsely believe these decisions are in their personal interests because the barriers to entry are lowered to levels they find acceptable enough to allow their participation.

Solving for motivation just means being honest with yourself about what you really want.

If you want to be employable then be at the center of the bell curve and just do what everyone else does. If you want to make more money then find employment with far higher barriers of entry. If you actually want to enjoy what you do then write your own software without compensation.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-29 04:10:49+00:00
Lots of local branches sounds great for personal banking, but for businesses? Unless you have a nation wide franchise business or a logistics business, doesn't seem as important.

On the contrary, a highly concentrated bank might be better, everyone is on the same building, there are no encapsulated branches, you get assigned a banker that is the best fit, rather than the one who was born closest to you.
by WD-42 | 2025-08-29 04:11:24+00:00
I feel so similar. I love python, I’ve spent most of my career writing it. It’s done well for me. But damn is it just not fun anymore. Runtime errors are not fun anymore. Runtimes are not fun. Virtualenvs are not fun anymore even though uv is trying. Typeless loosy goosy code that passes dictionaries all over the place is just not fun. Rust ruined it for me. Or maybe I’m just bored.
by Spivak | 2025-08-29 04:11:31+00:00
Genuinely this. Every time an older employee gives me a "And thank you for shopping at <business>" I just feel sad for them. The company neither pays them enough nor gives even a single fuck to warrant that kind of behavior.

I approach customer service as the total opposite from the OP. I treat anyone I interact with like they're doing me a favor by providing me service—and honestly, they are. I mean they're working this absolutely thankless job that I think I would choose the mines before considering, and they owe their employer nothing other than the bare fucking minimum. We're all just trying to get by and they're in the trenches.
by shams93 | 2025-08-29 04:11:58+00:00
Yeah this is what we are seeing today, also its not just junior jobs going, according to Amazon they are using it to get rid of expensive senior employees while they are actually holding onto juniors using ai tools.

We have seen a lot of use of h1b and outsourcing despite the massive job shortage. Seeing lots of fake job sites filled with ai generated fake openings and paid membership for access to "premium jobs."

They're using ICE to effectively pay half the country to murder the other half, but the ICE budget is limited so that automated systems can then gun down the ICE community to replace 99.9% of humans with machines.

Ultimately this is great for Russia because they'll still be able to invade even if they have only 300 soldiers left in their military, after they hit a low orbit nuke blast to shutdown the Ai US, basically only Melania swinging her purse at the troops will be one of the few left alive to resist.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-29 04:12:32+00:00
This article reads like a chapter from the Boomer Bible. Not getting a free bag for your purchase? That is mostly controlled by local city rules about reducing plastic. Mostly highly developed places now try to reduce the amount of "free bags" given when shopping. This includes many high-end department stores and grocery stores.

I don't think the author realises how much it would cost to have a native-level English speaker available at a call center. Wages are probably 20 USD per hour (unless you use Philippines or India, but I am sure the author would object).
by godelski | 2025-08-29 04:12:49+00:00
It's almost as if we write code because it is a very precise language... a feature that natural languages don't have.

I'm just going to leave this here...

On the foolishness of "natural language programming". - Dijkstra https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
by triceratops | 2025-08-29 04:13:34+00:00
> in part due to carbon emissions... fracking made natural gas cheaper [than coal]

Well which one is it? From what I can remember natural gas electric generation took off along with the fracking boom, which is when it became cheaper. If it was really for emissions natural gas should've taken over generation before it became cheap, right?

I contend it was purely for economic reasons, and the relative emissions benefits were a nice bonus.

> China still onboarded more than 173GW of coal in the last 5 years

Citation needed. And again, they don't have natural gas. They have coal. What they don't have is an energy policy that beats down solar power and renewable energy due to ideology and "coal interests". What more do you expect?

> That is 3x what Germany spends in a year

They have like 12x the population of Germany. It's a meaningless comparison. And they even had a 1 child policy for such a long time. Unlike you with the natural gas I won't claim they did it for the emissions. But just like natural gas it was a bit lucky for the environment, right?

Pretend China is 10 separate countries and put this vapid fossil fuel industry talking point out of your mind. The humans are there and they produce carbon emissions. Why do lines on a map matter?
by im3w1l | 2025-08-29 04:14:16+00:00
Well what I was talking about was whether there is a bias for fear. And so to see whether that is true you have to compare fear levels to actual risks and see if they are disproportionate or not. If bad things are always happening and people are never afraid it's fair to say they aren't afraid enough. If bad things never happen but people are always afraid then it's fair to say they are too afraid. I don't think either of these are the case though.
by wahern | 2025-08-29 04:14:56+00:00
There are plenty of American tourists and American brands in China, too. But the article mentioned "ancient towns", which is another way of saying old areas, often preserved as historic districts (if an enclave of a larger city) or at least removed from modern expansion; and Yunnan province, which is like Kansas or North Carolina in terms of foreign interest and tourism. Basically, the person was shocked that a place like China could be anything but completely overrun, border-to-border, by foreign cultural influence.

And for what it's worth, Google Maps says there are about a dozen or more each of McDonalds, KFCs, and Starbucks in Yunnan province. Predictably they're concentrated in the major metro regions. But like has happened with Europe over the past 30 years, in time they very well might spread out into the hinterland, presuming they can compete with domestic and regional competition. (Chinese culture has one of the longest and richest traditions of eating out, so even were we to assume local entrepreneurs are naifs, ignorant of how to leverage modernity, they still have a leg up in a domestic context. One of the reasons McDonalds became so prominent in US culture is because outside major cities with foreign influences--e.g. Asian or Southern European immigrants--we didn't have a strong tradition of eating out. Until the early-mid 20th century American food culture was very much meat & potatoes prepared at home or at least non-commercially. McDonalds is as much a reflection about how modernity transformed our own culture, not just how we transformed other cultures.)
by esbranson | 2025-08-29 04:15:43+00:00
> learn from the experiences of others

They are wrong. Here they can be wrong and survive, there they cannot. By law. We learn what we can from the laogai ren/laogai fan (劳改犯). (Thought criminals, laogai being reeducation camps.)

> ideologically inflexible

Perhaps. At any given time, possibly, but over time I think I disagree with you.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-29 04:16:03+00:00
Don't underestimate how much of the economy is "superfluous email jobs". Have you seen how stupid the average person is?[0] These people need jobs too.

[0] I was going to going to mark this as sarcasm but then I remembered that the US elected Donald Trump as president, 2 times so far, so I'm going to play it straight.
by sershe | 2025-08-29 04:16:19+00:00
What data or special insight do you have as to whether amplifying or eliminating is actually productive?

This argument is vacuous if you consider a marginal worker. Let's say AI eliminates one worker, Bob. You could argue "it was better to amplify Bob and share the gains". However, that assumes the company needs more of whatever Bob produces. That means you could also make an argument "given that the company didn't previously hire another worker Bill ~= Bob, it doesn't want to share gains that Bill would have provided blah blah". Ad absurdum, any company not trying to keep hiring infinitely is doing rent extraction.

You could make a much more narrow argument that cost of hiring Bill was higher than his marginal contribution but cost of keeping Bob + AI is lower than their combined contribution, but that's something you actually need to justify. Or, at the very least, justify why you know that it is, better than people running the company.
by rifty | 2025-08-29 04:16:19+00:00
To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.
Ask HN: Anyone else pretend to get a phone call to escape awkward moments?
by chetansorted | 2025-08-29 04:16:25+00:00
I’ve noticed that whenever I’m in uncomfortable social situations (like standing alone at a café, or stuck in small talk I don’t want), I instinctively reach for my phone and pretend I’m on a call.

It started as a way to avoid eye contact, but now it’s almost my go-to “defense mechanism.”

Sometimes I even wish my phone would actually ring at those moments, so I’d have a natural excuse to step away.

Does anyone else do this? Is this just a “me thing,” or a common social anxiety coping habit?

I’m curious how others manage these awkward situations—do you use tricks like this, or something else that helps?
by DANmode | 2025-08-29 04:16:59+00:00
Pick something that resembles a vuln→patch interval,

not just a context-less number that means they're popular, audited, or reviewing their OWN code all the time.

Instances where 0-days can't be used in isolation are a perfect example of where nontechnical people absolutely need to "just trust" someone to triage, and perform threat modeling for them.
by YZF | 2025-08-29 04:17:04+00:00
There are many different structures. Sprints, standups and burning through backlogs to many of us sound like a non-productive setup. But it also can work, especially when coming from dysfunction. On the flip side it can also be abused.

One framework is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If this is what drives people and helps them be productive then the manager's job is to give his team autonomy, facilitate them becoming masters, and explain the purpose of their work.

To the author's point re: tools. Autonomy should mean you don't force tools and processes on the team. In the real world however there are constraints and tools are used across teams and larger organizations for purposes that may not always perfectly align with the team's productivity goals. Like anything, judgement and balance are important.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-29 04:17:54+00:00
But this divide is farcical. People like Musk/Bezos/etc don't make their money from literal profits, but from the stock price going up, which is driven by speculation. In particular the total valuation of the stock market is worth more than literally all money in existence. And neither Amazon nor Tesla pay dividends, so you can't even go that route. And the owners rarely just sit around letting the money come in, but quite often are obsessive work-a-holics.

I'm very antagonistic towards people like the Waltons who, themselves, have mostly contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever to society and are just coasting off daddy's success - being born to tens of billions of dollars and then dying with your biggest accomplishment being born to tens of billions of dollars is just so many degrees of pathetic. They fit quite closely to what you're describing (and WalMart does pay dividends), but they're a vanishingly small percent of the ultra-wealthy.
by jonahx | 2025-08-29 04:18:07+00:00
Your claim is not supported by the paper:

"Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor."

No mention of rent-seeking.

No evidence they are being economically short-sighted.

> they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity

They're using cheap AI to replace more expensive humans. There's no reason to think they are missing some exponential expansion opportunity that keeping those humans would achieve, and every reason to think otherwise.
by 3RTB297 | 2025-08-29 04:18:13+00:00
This also varies significantly, but I think supports the idea that the farther you are from ownership, the more service is equated to demeaning one's self for a salary that remains unchanged if you help someone or not.

If the shop isn't ran and staffed by the owner and family, it quickly devolves to the point that it's a challenge to throw money at anyone, because the money doesn't go to the person you're talking to. Any store with more than 5 employees is a jobs program for friends and family and you're inconveniencing someone's chit-chat or doomscrolling to bother them to ask a question.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-29 04:18:17+00:00
They have been pushing for independence for a while now but sanctions and tarrifs will push it all to go faster. And it is a big mistake: the west has some type of misplaced arrogance that china wont catch up that fast because asml, nvidia etc but I would not be so sure. Like more said here: a disadvantage is authoritarian but thats also an advantage: Xi can just command everyone to go one way and 'defeat the west'. And seems he is doing exactly that.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-29 04:19:35+00:00
It's affordable now using reclaimed Tesla parts.

Here's one vendor: https://www.evwest.com/

I really want to ditch the 1.9L H4 Digijet in my '85 Westfalia. It's a total PITA (direct fuel injection and a distributor) but I'm not keen on dropping in a GoWesty or "Subagon" ICE motor when EV is the way to go.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-08-29 04:19:46+00:00
Both. Most Chinese (older ones) I've talked to mention how "thing aren't that amazing, but compared to 90s, this is heaven". Retired ones especially. The younger ones (early 20s), haven't experienced the dramatic change, so they don't have point of comparison, but to be fair, I haven't talked to many of them. Of course it's a big country, and they have a lot of problems. But there's still a general trust towards government institutions and how they'll eventually fix themselves up. Obviously not everyone, and some have valid reasons. And again, this goes without saying, China has 1.4B people, extremely different regions and very different cultures between each region.