MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-28 20:08:05+00:00
On the contrary, you appear to be suffering the confusion that a service which facilitates a legally protected activity cannot be regulated, interfered with, or discontinued in the general case. Typically only targeted, motivated interference would constitute a violation.

Shutting down a notebook factory for dodging sales tax is not a violation of the rights of would-be purchasers.
by Anon1096 | 2025-08-28 20:08:38+00:00
This is not really an accurate representation of FAANG hiring and job searching. In reality, there is a very very high amount of job hopping and also connections to people at other FAANGs (and there's also levels.fyi and blind) so we're well aware of comp structures, what employment agreements, levels, etc are across companies and how to compare then. There's very little information asymmetry in fact people go into negotiations with recruiters very well equipped, far better than at small companies.

> BTW, has anyone got a leaked (anonymized) copy of FAANG employment contracts so one can compare the various clauses across employers, and track changes of their standard templates over time

If this doesn't exist it's only because it's incredibly uninteresting. levels.fyi will tell you all you need to know. (also they aren't employment contracts, in the US we do agreements because we're at-will)

I've hopped multiple FAANG+s now across my career.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-28 20:08:42+00:00
I know I have politics brain, but I have to turn things to socioeconomic politics:

If we're going to compete with a free market against China's hybrid-communism, then we should do things that enable the strengths of a free market to be realized.

If our free market is a Magic The Gathering deck, it's like we're a blue deck that refuses to put any blue mana into the deck. Our deck isn't losing because it has bad ideas, it's because we weren't willing to put any of the supporting cards into play.

Patents are mostly used by large companies to protect themselves against smaller companies that could be more efficient. We choose to use patents in a way that stifles new competition. We refuse to put the "efficient new competitor" card in our deck.

Intellectual property lasts for--what?--150 years these days. Ridiculous.

What about labor vs capital? Income is taxed more than capital gains. This is not based on economic theory or anything, this is just a decision we've made. We have chosen to value moving money and capital around more than working and building things.

What about the "free" in free market?

Do we make it easy for laborers to move around freely? Nope.

We have weak social safety nets. Healthcare is tied to employment as though those who are not working a traditional job deserve to die.

We allow Jimmy John's to include non-complete clauses to prevent their workers from making sandwiches for a company that pays more.

We also allow a form of indentured servitude via "TRAPs"[0] which prevent workers from moving freely in the market.

We're trying to compete as a free market without allowing most of the things that make free markets effective because they would be inconvenient for those who already have wealth and power.

When the private data of millions of people is leaked twice a month, nobody cares--or rather, nobody with power to do something about it cares.

When giant companies fail because they made bad decisions, we bail them out, thus eliminating the opportunity for new and smarter companies to grow.

Our law making system seems completely unable to change any of these things and has devolved into one man making unpredictable threats and orders that are probably illegal and unenforceable, but most just follow them anyways.

What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905728
by hash872 | 2025-08-28 20:09:11+00:00
Adam Tooze's grandfather was one of the most notorious Soviet moles/traitors in British history, so I guess I don't find it surprising that he's found a new Communist regime to hang his hat on. (For anyone saying 'he can't choose his family'- Tooze famously dedicated his first book in effusive praise for his grandfather)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wynn
by more_corn | 2025-08-28 20:09:12+00:00
Because Indonesia is new to the game and might still be catching up. They’re probably playing whackamole with the most common public VPN providers and might not be doing deep packet inspection yet. I worked with someone getting traffic out of Hong Kong a year ago and there was a lot trial and error figuring out what was blocked and what was not. Wireguard was one that worked.
by msephton | 2025-08-28 20:09:13+00:00
Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say. It takes time for the information to disseminate. Perhaps tools like this will be the watershed moment that speeds up the flow. Like the time back ~1990 when I received GFA BASIC on a magazine cover disk and it unlocked the knowledge that I could make anything I wanted to. It took me 33 years from then to get a Game Of The Year. Good things take time. Hopefully less in future :)
by JeffJor | 2025-08-28 20:09:16+00:00
Bertrand's Box Paradox, which I wrote about in my own comment, applies to it. The upshot is that probability is not based on which prize placements _could_ lead the current game state, it is the set of all possible game states. Lets assume that the contestant starts off with door #3.

Case 1: The prize is behind door #1, and the host must open door #2. Probability 1/3.

Case 2: The prize is behind door #2, and the host must open door #1. Probability 1/3.

Case 3: The prize is behind door #3, and the host has a choice. Case 3A: The host opens door #1. Probability Q/3. Case 3B: The host opens door #2. Probability (1-Q)/3.

If the host actually opens door #1, the probability that door #2 has the prize is (Case 2)/(Case 2 + Case 3A) = (1/3)/(1/3+Q/3) = 1/(1+Q).

If the host actually opens door #2, the probability that door #1 has the prize is (Case 1)/(Case 1 + Case 3B) = (1/3)/(1/3+(1-Q)/3) = 1/(2-Q).

My point is that, since you get to see which door is opened, 2/3 is correct only if you assume Q=1/2. We aren't told what Q is, but we must assume it is 1/2 because otherwise the answer is different depending on which door is chosen.
by fakedang | 2025-08-28 20:09:23+00:00
Precisely. And you'll see parallels across other similar communities - Gujaratis, Persians, Keralites, Armenians, Jews, Punjabi Sikhs, Lebanese Maronites, Ahmadiyyas, Sindhis, Parsees and Dawoodi Bohras, etc. All communities which faced/face historical or modern-day persecution, or rampant corruption and cronyism in their original regions, but tend to do miraculously well once they leave them behind.

Either these people will migrate abroad and improve their host countries, or their home countries will grow a brain and beg them to stay behind with carrots. Lots of carrots. Like China.
by didericis | 2025-08-28 20:09:57+00:00
Part of what got me into software was this: no matter how complex or impressive the operation, with enough time and determination, you could trace each step and learn how a tap on a joystick lead to the specific pixels on a screen changing.

There’s a beautiful invitation to learn and contribute baked into a world where each command is fully deterministic and spec-ed out.

Yes, there have always been poorly documented black boxes, but I thought the goal was to minimize those.

People don’t understand how much is going to be lost if that goal is abandoned.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-28 20:11:08+00:00
There might be one or two exceptions, but generally the schools you are referring to are bursting at the seams with students.

Quick web search:

University of Georgia - enrollment up 3%

Ohio State - enrollment up 2.3%, highest in history

University of Alabama - enrollment exceeds 40,000 for first time in history

University of Michigan - couldn’t find enrollment, but it reported a record number of applications
by qzw | 2025-08-28 20:11:17+00:00
This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.
by jack_pp | 2025-08-28 20:11:32+00:00
From gemini.. (edited for brevity)

Kape Technologies Owns: ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate

> is there any suspicion that Kape Technologies is influenced or has ties to the Mossad?

Yes, there is significant suspicion and public discussion about Kape Technologies having ties to former Israeli intelligence personnel. While a direct operational link to Mossad has not been proven, the concerns stem from the company's history, its key figures, and their backgrounds.

...

Kape Technologies is owned by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. While Sagi himself does not have a documented intelligence background, his business history, which includes a conviction for insider trading in the 1990s, has been a point of concern for some privacy advocates. The consolidation of several major VPN providers under his ownership has raised questions about the potential for centralized data access.

----

Sure there isn't direct proof but there wasn't any proof the CIA was driving drug trade while it was happening. Proof materializes when the dust settles on such matters.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-28 20:12:28+00:00
Pretty cheap by some definitions, yes, but as best as I can tell (historical prices aren’t exactly readily available), the Micro PC 2 ($700 list price before tax) is still between 1.5× and 2× the price of the original (€300—presumably including about 20% tax—per the linked article, between $200 and $500 per the Wayback Machine, in nominal dollars before 10% inflation).
by hkpack | 2025-08-28 20:12:32+00:00
> The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine

Wow, so we are on rewriting history now?

“Lenin” and his cronies caused a massive famines with their own hands.

Substantial percentage of population died of hunger on a very fertile soil without any natural disaster [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
by ziftface | 2025-08-28 20:12:38+00:00
I had the opposite experience. I liked the niceties of Pydantic AI, but had trouble with it that I found difficult to deal with. For example, some of the models wouldn't stream, but the OpenAI models did. It took months to resolve, and well before that I switched to LiteLLM and just hand-rolled the agentic logic stuff. LiteLLM's docs were simple and everything worked as expected. The agentic code is simple enough that I'm not sure what the value-add for some of these libraries is besides adding complexity and the opportunity for more bugs. I'm sure for more complex use cases they can be useful, but for most of the applications I've seen, a simple translation layer like LiteLLM or maybe OpenRouter is more than enough.
by jolmg | 2025-08-28 20:13:22+00:00
> it felt like they were riding the popularity of linux phones while not contributing a lot to their future

I think they're the ones that contributed the most. They've provided the most open-source phone out there at the lowest price out there. The only other equivalent option is the Librem 5 at $800, double the price.

They didn't contribute much/any software, but they contributed the most accessible, viable hardware to make an open source linux phone.
by net01 | 2025-08-28 20:14:00+00:00
UPDATE

Update August 28: A day after publication, Apple informed us that the distribution rights (notarization) were revoked due to sanctions-related rules.

“Notarization for this app was removed in order to comply with government sanctions-related rules in various jurisdictions. We have communicated this to the developer,” Apple told us.

No further context was provided, but the developer purportedly had a Russian developer account, despite living in Malta.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-28 20:14:02+00:00
The speed issue could in the short term be bruteforced with stronger hardware, but as far as I'm aware there’s no Linux phone out there with anything approaching what one might consider “strong” hardware.

It’s a bit puzzling because there’s Chinese companies like Retroid and AYN pumping out Snapdragon 8 Gen 2/3 handheld gaming devices that the community has ported Linux to, with working graphics acceleration and everything. I doubt these companies are using fully bespoke mainboards, because most of their components are borrowed from existing smartphones. Seems like some company could stick one of these Snapdragon boards into a phone chassis and have a reasonably compelling Linux phone.
by hinkley | 2025-08-28 20:14:14+00:00
I can’t say where AI will end up but I firmly believe it will pick winners and losers in the next generations of programming languages. Not always for the better.

Any language that is difficult for an AI to understand will have to get popular by needing far less boilerplate code for AIs to write in the first place. We may finally start designing better APIs. Or lean into it and make much worse ones that necessitate AI. Look especially to an AI company to create a free razor and sell you the blades.
by yorwba | 2025-08-28 20:14:29+00:00
Lots of things sound like good ideas that aren't. China has fewer checks and balances, so lots of things get built that sound like good ideas. This impresses people! Especially when they hear the huge numbers involved. E.g. the author gushes about "40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h."

So as a counterpoint, consider the former President of the Geographic Society of China arguing to that there was too much focus on impressing with speed and scale and too little big-picture thinking about door-to-door transport within cities, which would've benefited more from suburban light rail and buses https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-hig...
by mystraline | 2025-08-28 20:14:30+00:00
I also had run ins with their Pine A64 LTS.

You can buy eMMC cards that fit on the board. Their documents say you can boot from them. Like 10x performance of a mSD card and less wear-out.

I use a USB device to make the drive mountable from a Linux box, and copy the firmware as prescribed. I then unmount and load in the A64, and.... NOTHING.

Supposedly there's a uboot command that maybe enables it. Or maybe its autodetect. Or maybe (5 other ideas, that all fail).

I returned that shit too because they make claims that it works these official ways, and it never does.

Pine is a parasite. Always has been, but they make-pretend that they're some great FLOSS company.
by jll29 | 2025-08-28 20:16:10+00:00
When ES leaked his info to the Guardian people, they could still (2013) use the Guardian's US base to publish, protected by the US' stronger freedom of speech laws. Now, in 2025, if the same were to happen again, I'm not sure that would work quite the same way, with Trump aggressively taking American citizens' rights away.

Maybe The Guardian should open a branch in Sealand...
by mqtx | 2025-08-28 20:16:16+00:00
I'm talking about interactive play with an LLM - for example, explaining the rules and scoring in detail first. Then I tell it to pick colors, and I provide the score. When the score indicate 2 colors matched, it's supposed to keep those 2 colors constant in the next move. But after I pointed out that it forgot again after the next move and continued making the same mistake, it was Claude 3.5. So at the end I said, 'It looks like you can never solve this puzzle. Now that you know all the rules, can you write the game in JavaScript?' Sure enough, it did, and it worked on the first try - and was much prettier than my version. Same for ChatGPT, DeepSeek.
by xmprt | 2025-08-28 20:16:26+00:00
I think you're both correct but have different definitions of hallucinations. You're judging it as a hallucination based on the veracity of the output. Whereas Fowler is judging it based on the method by which the output is achieved. By that judgement, everything is a hallucination because the user cannot differentiate between when the LLM is telling the truth and isn't.

This is different from human hallucinations where it makes something up because of something wrong with the mind rather than some underlying issue with the brain's architecture.
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-28 20:16:33+00:00
Aligning a god-like superintelligence is asking "what do you want when you can have everything?"

The Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place to Visit"* is about a man who gets whatever wish he desires. Initially he's overjoyed, but after a month he becomes numb and miserable: with no conflict, he has no purpose (it turns out, he's in hell). In reality, a superintelligence that could grant anything could grant more: it could make people not "feel" numb and purposeless even though they have everything. But what would they "feel", would they be conscious, would they be "human"?

This is something that the article sort of addresses: perhaps there's something inherent to conflict and struggle. Also, that people often ask for things that make them sad in the long run: e.g. children asking to eat junk food and stay up late, forming bad habits that hurt them later in life. A near-godlike superintelligence could solve most modern problems (e.g. maintain people's health and sleep/wake states regardless of what/when they eat/sleep), but would those fixes create future problems it can't solve? Basically, giving people whatever they want (the article's definition of "liberalism", which has become a term with many common definitions) has consequences.

Sure, taking this reasoning too far lets you justify any suffering (because "suffering is necessary") and restriction (because "allowing would make you unhappy in the long run"). But I think even most liberals can acknowledge it's a fair consideration: at least to prevent the Twilight Zone or loss of humanity, or at least because solving problems too fast without thinking through and accomodating the solution, can create larger unsolvable problems later. See: LLMs making people stupid, promoting delusions, increasing the wealth gap, and polluting social discourse even more than now.

My stupid opinion: that's an impossible question, but it's also one we don't need to solve. What we have right now is AI that's far from superintelligent, and lots of problems, including the ones I described above. I think what we should do, and the only thing we can do right now, is keep solving problems; we should try to in ways that create the smallest second-order problems, but only avoid solving a problem if every solution is likely to create a larger second-order one.

My politics lean towards "live and let live" largely because it's practical. Restraints based on "moral" and "holistic" principles do benefit some people in the long run, but whenever they're applied on a large scale, they hurt more people. Because somebody only knows what's better for somebody else than themselves, if they're significantly more competent (in whatever category they know what's better for), and they really understand the person's values and emotions (especially what makes them happy or sad).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit
by lotharcable | 2025-08-28 20:16:43+00:00
Modern science is derived from Christian Scholasticism from the middle ages so this way of talking and thinking about science as being divinely originated is only unusual in the past couple centuries or so.

It is from that era that they developed systems of rigorous debate, formal logic, and things like peered reviewed papers that we call "the scientific method".

As far as the history of these sorts of mathematical discussions the concept of negative numbers didn't exist until the 15 century. I am sure that each new concept was faced with some resistance and debate on its true nature before it became widely accepted.

So I am sure that somebody looking through the historical record could find all sorts of wild quotes from different theologians trying to grasp new concepts and reconcile them with existing mathmatical standards.
by NomDePlum | 2025-08-28 20:16:48+00:00
It's a war crimes to mount an attack on a hospital. The presence of a camera regardless of who is using it and why, does not change that one bit. Dressing up the murder of journalists like this is just propaganda.

That Israel then bombed the people going to help those hurt, trapped or dead is a heinous.

All involved will hopefully be tried some day and brought to justice.
by jacobgkau | 2025-08-28 20:17:03+00:00
> the housing allowance for a month for a parliamentarian is now ten times the minimum wage for a month.

I'm almost positive that everyone in the US Congress is making at least ten times the minimum wage in this country. The "housing allowance" being referred to is separate from their normal salary in Indonesia, but still, interesting to imagine how much more seriously people there would take that disparity than in many other countries.

This caught my attention more:

> Indonesia passed a law in March allowing for the military to assume more civilian posts, while this month the government announced 100 new military battalions that will be trained in agriculture and animal husbandry. In July the government said the military would also start manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

They're replacing civilian industry with military, apparently not out of any emergency requirement but just to benefit the military with jobs (and the government with control over those sectors) at the expense of civilian jobs.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-28 20:17:11+00:00
Just as with "over 18" banners, I expect that if all users self-certify as being non-californians the law won't apply to you. And that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Perhaps with the exception that I also think that a modal banner to the effect of "you acknowledge that you are now doing business in Utah" also ought to suffice.

If you actually sell things to Californians that's different. At that point, yeah, I think you _should_ be subject to California law. You're doing the equivalent of mail order business with a resident after all.
by fakedang | 2025-08-28 20:17:43+00:00
That does not explain why other similar communities haven't done as well, even though more of their people have migrated.

Take the example of Britain, where they currently have a larger ethnic British Pakistani population than the British Indian population. Yet there are only 25% Indian households and 33% Chinese households in the bottom income quintile, while there are 44% Pakistani households and 49% Bangladeshi households in the same (White British is at 17%). On the other hand, Indians and Chinese are massively represented in the top income quintile at 20% and 28% of households (compared to White British at 21%). Only 7% of either Bangladeshi or Pakistani British come in the top income quintile, even underperforming the Other Asian category (who are 2x at 14%).

Data source: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-...
by tzot | 2025-08-28 20:18:45+00:00
> The problem (as felt by me and also as identified by the person you replied to) is that you can't copy-paste/munge some stuff into the right spot and then just let the formatter to fix the indentation.

That problem I undestand, and that is why I suggested to convert both into JSON —or YaML with default_flow_style=True which would preserve datetimes and other non-JSON stuff— and copy-paste without the hassle of having to indent/unindent correctly. Of course that doesn't help with copying comments. That would need extra copy-paste operations, but still one hasn't the hassle of significant whitespace. The following is also valid YaML:

{"some_key": { "attr1": # an intermittent comment "val1", "attr2": 12312 # more comments! } }