MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-09-21 13:55:06+00:00
Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment.

The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.

I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.

Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.

“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.
by pastage | 2025-09-21 13:55:06+00:00
You should look at Cost benefit analysis, there was one made on Copenhagen. [1] Bicycle infrastructure usually gets you 6x-12x on the invested amount, getting a 1.2 CBA is ok, 2 is amazing.

Bicycle infrastructure is often destroyed by those other investments and that is usually not counted as a con. But it is just too cheap to build bicycle infrastructure to be interesting.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
by constantcrying | 2025-09-21 13:55:15+00:00
From my experience at a German university, it was very clear that every student with a desire to learn would learn relevant skills and have no trouble passing any exam. The exams never were easy and studying was required,but if you understood the subject you would definitely pass.

The experience the author describes seems totally disconnected what I have ever experienced in university. The author believes (which I think is unlikely) that the university had nothing to teach to him, in my experience this always was the fault of the student. Often blaming "esoteric" and "irrelevant" subjects such as linear algebra for their lack of success, while not understanding that it is a vital course for any engineer.
by sparkie | 2025-09-21 13:55:18+00:00
The reason is often money. Even with visa sponsorship. Perhaps $100k is too much, but ~$5k is too little.

The $100k fee basically makes it not about money. It's going to be more expensive to hire a foreign worker - meaning that if they're chosen over a domestic applicant, it's for a real reason, not just because they'll take a lower salary.
by jaggederest | 2025-09-21 13:55:49+00:00
Claude has really gone downhill in the last month or so. They made a change to move the CLAUDE.md from the system prompt to being occasionally read in, and it really deprioritizes the instructions to the same attention level as the code it's working on.

I've been trying out Codex the last couple days and it's much more adherent and much less prone to lying and laziness. Anthropic says they're working on a significant release in Claude Code, but I'd much rather have them just revert back to the system as it was ~a month ago.
by ethical_source | 2025-09-21 13:55:53+00:00
You have to take Trump "seriously but not literally". The government threatened to revoke a broadcast license, a right to use a limited resource for the public good. Broadcast licenses come with rules to ensure the limited resource is used for public benefit: for example, you're not allowed to broadcast profanity over the air despite profanity in general being protected speech. Nobody is denying anyone's ability to communicate over privately owned channels. What Trump meant is that a network that uses limited spectrum to broadcast nonstop partisan lies isn't operating in the public interest and doesn't deserve the license.

Consider the contrast with the 2016-2024 state and corporate effort to suppress inconvenient truths as "misinformation". Remember when they used naked, hard power to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story? That's what real censorship looks like.

In America, you can express any viewpoint on social media and be treated fairly. That wasn't the case just a few years ago.

In most of Europe, and in the UK, you can't express certain ideas. The state will literally come to your house and arrest you if you have the wrong opinions on government policy. The US does not do that.
by tyleo | 2025-09-21 13:56:53+00:00
I own a couple of these devices and they are the real deal but I understand how that can be off putting.

Full disclosure: they use some Chinese shipping service I’ve never heard of that may raise scam alerts further.

The adapters are smaller than comparables I have and work with every device I’ve tried. That being said, I haven’t done a teardown and I’ve only used them about half a year so far.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 13:57:27+00:00
> it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.

It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
by ryeats | 2025-09-21 13:58:12+00:00
I think it has been happening for a while now cancel culture had a very negative effect on academia Jordon Peterson and Warren Smith being examples of that. I much appreciate Dr. Sam Richards who walks the fine line of trying to be centerist but he did comment recently how he does gets hate from both sides. Now I know this is going to be down voted because some will say I am both sidesing this when it's clearly one side right now. This is true I think that's however not a great argument to start a conversation. the founding fathers gave us a great foundation to work with it just takes open dialogue to convince enough of the other side that their is an actual good counter argument. The violence we have seen in the past couple months is only going to entrench positions because each side will want the result of that violence to have been meaningful furthering solidifing the separation. Currently I think American agree on the vast majority of things social media just does it's best to highlight our differences but the average person has mostly the same culture and the same day to day issues so I actually am hopeful.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-21 13:59:02+00:00
Partially true.

A lot of times you have something in Java which could be

ReturnValue someMethod(Parameter p) { … var x = anotherMethodThatMightThrowAnException(q); … }

and I’m going to argue that often that’s good enough but a lot of people think it isn’t so they might put 20 lines of code above that line to head off that exception or they might put it in a try-catch block [1] to respond to it or wrap it. Those unhappy paths bloat your code the same way as the guards in the blog post, make it unclear how the happy path works at a glance (place for bugs to hide in the happy path) and obviously create opportunities for bugs in the unhappy path.

I’ll argue that (1) error handling is a function of the application as a whole or of a “unit of work” (e.g. database transaction) so unless you’re at the top level method of a unit of work you should “let it throw”, (2) try-finally is preferable to try-catch when it comes to cleaning up and tearing down, and (3) it is fair to wrap and rethrow exceptions if you want the unit of work manager to have more context to know what to do, or provide a better error message.

In theory, you could spend time writing and maintaining error preempting and handling code and get better error messages. However that code isn’t always correct. One funny thing about AI agent programming for me is that if I ask Junie to code me some tests it works harder at testing unhappy paths than I would.
by StilesCrisis | 2025-09-21 13:59:22+00:00
Several others “get it” but answer the question in a general-hygiene sense, e.g.:

``` Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking (¢0.87) The question contains an assumption - people without arms wouldn't have hands to wash in the traditional sense. ```

``` DeepSeek-R1 (¢0.47) People without arms (and consequently without hands) adapt their handwashing routine using a variety of methods and tools tailored to their abilities and needs. ```

``` Claude Opus 4.1 People without arms typically don't need to wash their hands in the traditional sense, since they use their feet or assistive devices for daily tasks instead. ```

I think realistically it’s still a valid question because people without arms still manipulate things in their environment, e.g. with feet, and still need to be hygienic while prepping food, etc., and the AI pivots to answering “what it thinks you were asking about” instead of just telling the user that they are wrong.
by ezekiel68 | 2025-09-21 13:59:24+00:00
They would not. I love Kimmel, but it turns out the story of the gunman is now much more layered and nuanced than "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them..." In Kimmel's defense, this was a developing story at the time, but it is not untrue, in hindsignt, that Kimmel spread misinformation.
by jerrythegerbil | 2025-09-21 13:59:46+00:00
That’s my exact point. Just because you repeatedly see it used a certain way by non-practitioners to generalize for simplified communication doesn’t mean it’s the correct usage, and leads to the exact confusion I’m attempting to clarify for you.

Phishing is by default email. It’s varying mediums are subcategories.

Bottom paragraph of first section of the very same Wikipedia article.

“Phishing techniques and vectors include email spam, vishing (voice phishing), targeted phishing (spear phishing, whaling), smishing (SMS), quishing (QR code), cross-site scripting, and MiTM 2FA attacks.”
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-21 13:59:54+00:00
A passenger can’t use your phone connected with BT and control the audio?

But it looks like the USB port in that model year Subaru supports the iPod protocol meaning if you have an iPhone, why wouldn’t the passenger be able to control the music?

If you have an Android it looks like it supports just using your phone as a dumb mass storage device that contains music.
by casenmgreen | 2025-09-21 14:00:35+00:00
You can read into this something like mugger says "my victim, whom when I was holding a knife out promised not to tell anyone about the robbery, went on to tell the police".

"I then sued my victim for causing me harm."

But it's hard to know about a situation when it's complex and you're a long way away from it. Maybe the book was unfair. Maybe it was fair. Or both. Maybe what happened was so bad it should supersede this kind of agreement. Who decides, and how?
by bilbo0s | 2025-09-21 14:00:52+00:00
But this is just a tacit admission that a lot of jobs need the credential.

And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.

Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-21 14:01:41+00:00
> She was likely very strongly pressured to sign it with various threats and consequences if she didn't.

Like what? If it's something you sign when you leave, it generally comes down to whether you want some level of severance payments/accelerated vesting or not, even when you're fired (when you're at the executive level).

Basically, the company says: if you agree not to sue us or disparage us, here's a bunch of money.

There are no threats. The consequence is, if you don't sign, you don't get the extra money. It's completely and entirely voluntary.

She was a highly paid executive who chose to get even more money in exchange for keeping her mouth shut. Now I think it's great she wrote the book, I love transparency. But nobody can be surprised Facebook is taking legal action when she presumably took their money under an agreement not to disparage. Nobody made her take the extra money.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-09-21 14:02:42+00:00
You don’t need to feel bad for the author.

You need to feel afraid for the ability for a corporation to so easily get you to surrender your own fundamental rights.

It’s not a coincidence you rarely hear stories like this in Scandinavian or even broader European countries because they have basic safety nets that mean you don’t need to sign away your rights in order to just live peacefully.
by doublerabbit | 2025-09-21 14:02:44+00:00
What's the point in whistle blowing when you can't blow the whistle? I've always called bullshit to those whistle blowing hotlines.

Who's really going to go after a mega corp-entity when they do $bad? "Whistle Blower" is like an oxymoron to that the likes of "Friendly Fire".
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-09-21 14:02:52+00:00
Well, yes, that was my thought. I mean my own employer had some company branded power banks that they gave out to employees. They're crap! But they were requested by the Sales team to hand out as swag at trade shows and whatnot, so they probably didn't put much more thought into it than "Find supplier that can create small power banks, slap company logo on them. Do it cheaply."

I have to think the Haribo power banks were on the same lines, although it's a bit strange that they're actually being sold on the company's Amazon storefront.
by antonvs | 2025-09-21 14:03:01+00:00
Physicists already started to use alternate meanings of the word with the “holographic universe” in the 1990s. The generalized meaning in physics then became, essentially, “something that looks 3D but is actually 2D.” Which is also how the public uses it.

One could quibble and claim that the nature of the 2D encoding in the case of the holographic universe is closer to that of the original concept, but it’s a weak defense at best. After all, the holographic universe isn’t even just about light, it proposes that matter and space itself is only apparently 3D.
by panzi | 2025-09-21 14:03:07+00:00
Does this include the GC at the end of it all? Because if that happens after the end timestamp it's not an exact comparison. I read something once about speeding up a C/C++ compiler by simply turning free into a no-op. Such a compiler basically allocates more and more data and only frees it all at the end of execution, so then doing all the free calls is just wasted CPU cycles.
by herdcall | 2025-09-21 14:03:39+00:00
There's a BIG difference, at least with tools like Claude Code: plan mode. I'm now using Claude Code a lot at at work, and the first thing I do is enter plan mode where I can have a "conversation" asking it explain how it would implement. Just a few back/forth later I end up refining its plan to conform to good (or what I think is "good") design, after which it will tell me exactly what it is going to do (with code diffs), which I sign off on (again, potentially after a few iterations). It's only then that it generates the code.

By contrast, on one project many years ago I was reviewing the code generated by an overseas team, and I couldn't make head or tail of it, it was an absolute tangled mess that was impossible to fix.
by BDPW | 2025-09-21 14:05:39+00:00
What I took away from the book was that all these people were very eager to say variants of 'das haben wir nicht gewusst' when at the same time they also describe how the jews were systematically removed from their society and every part of civil society was taken over by the nazi's.

I would add to your statement that almost everyone should read it. It's unnerving to read how 'normal' all these people were in some way and how 'easily' it all happened because the population generally disliked jews.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 14:06:00+00:00
No city simulation game properly models the real cost of parking and car-centric infrastructure: https://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-pa...

>Now with kids, I understand why "Americans love their cars"

In other words: I was okay with demanding change when it didn't inconvenience me, but now that I get to benefit from economic policy that heavily subsidize my lifestyle I rather keep the status quo.
by chillingeffect | 2025-09-21 14:06:10+00:00
In their defense, there is an inexhaustable supply of "take over w my ideology material."

This is a confluence of many conditions. Some long-focused efforts, some architecting and annealing of interests, some individual greed, some long-lasting effects of trauma, and some massive ignorance.

One of the only good points is that the American people are stubbornly allergic to authoritarianism. Yes there are exceptions, but mainly carved out by people trading it for self-interest. Many good surprises like Tucker Carlson's opposition to squashing free speech and the Republican's long-lasting distaste for pedophilia are still out there.

The post above pointing out how we're diff to Nazism is on point. There have been many more authoritarian plays since then. Americans remain conveniently ignorant of them.

Also we're being economically crushed and everyone feels it. Although racism is a powerful tool by this movement, it's actually centered around impoverishing everyone and the dizzying egos of its leaders.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-21 14:06:19+00:00
It's a bit strange that Karpathy's "vibe coding" ever gained traction as a concept, although perhaps only among those without enough experience to know better.

As I understand it, what Karpathy was referring to as "vibe coding" was some sort of flow state "just talk to the AI, never look back" thing. Don't look at the generated code, just feel the AGI vibes ...

It sounds absolutely horrific if you care even the tiniest bit about the quality of what you are building! Good for laughs and "AGI is here!" Twitter posts, maybe for home projects and throwaway scripts, but as a way of developing serious software ?!!!

I think part of the reason this has taken off (other than the cool sounding name) is because it came from Karpathy. The same idea from anyone less well known would have probably been shot down.

I've seen junior developers (and even not so junior), pre-AI, code in this kind of way - copy some code from someplace and just hack it until it works. Got a nasty core dump bug? - just reorder your source code until it goes away. At minimum in a corporate environment this way or working would get you talked to, if not put on a performance plan or worse!
by latexr | 2025-09-21 14:06:28+00:00
My experience is very similar to yours. I am the biggest Apple critic I personally know (don’t get me started on Tim Cook) though I don’t even share a tenth of it because I don’t want to bother my non-technical friends. But I do use a Mac and an iPhone because I prefer them to the alternatives. If I had my way, several things about those products and the company would be different, but at a certain point I had to make a choice and get on with my life.

Still, I have found several people who are outright Apple haters and can’t fathom that anyone who uses their products is anything but a brainwashed puppet. These people talk about Apple more than their most ardent fans. It’s an irrational amount of hate I only ever see from meat eaters who hate vegetarians.

A while back I had a friend who (by choice) uses both a Mac and Android describe to me what they disliked about the iPhone when they used one for a few minutes, in a tone that sounded like personal criticism and disappointment. What do I care? It has nothing to do with me, the products I use aren’t a part of my identity.

Another friend, one who uses Windows and Android, used to grill me about Apple on every chance. I mostly ignored it, but eventually just explained: “Look, it’s not that I think Apple is flawless. On the contrary, I think they have plenty of flaws. But I have tried many operating systems (he, on the other hand, always lived on Windows and Android) and Apple’s are the ones which fit what I need to do the least badly”. To his credit, he understood and never again touched the subject.

My philosophy regarding operating systems, text editors, and other subjective sources of flame wars is pretty simple: Use whatever makes you happy and works for you. I don’t care what that is, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. If you ask me a question or an opinion, I’ll try to answer it as truthfully and with as much relevancy as possible for you. I’ll tell you if there’s something I think you may benefit from knowing, but you control the conversation. But if you just want to ignorantly gush about my very informed picks, I’m not interested. Live and let live.
by phatfish | 2025-09-21 14:06:37+00:00
A Channel 4 documentary reckoned locked iPhones end up in Shenzhen. Because (according to someone they were interviewing) that is the only place that can deal with locked iPhones. People who's phones were stolen got pings from the Shenzhen area before they went dark. They showed location history for at least one.

Of course they could just be being stripped for parts, which is probably hard for most places to do at scale and Shenzhen could also deal with.

I'm sceptical that the idea of stealing while unlocked really stacks up. It seems it would be hard to keep it unlocked after an e-bike snatch. Then thief would have to stop and reset the Apple ID password before the phone locked (presumably with the access they have to the owners emails), and factory reset the phone before the owner got access to their Apple ID again.
by zimpenfish | 2025-09-21 14:07:20+00:00
> How good is the illusion? Will it look 3D or somewhat off?

I've got the original 8" Looking Glass Portrait (from the Kickstarter) and it's not bad? Works well enough to get the sense of depth but wouldn't fool anyone for a second[1][2].

> Will it look 3D still if I am still and nothing is moving in view?

Yes (or at least mine does)

[1] May be just my workflow, mind; it's not like I'm spending a huge amount of time crafting content for it.

[2] And I'd assume they've refined the technology since then.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-21 14:07:39+00:00
Can you elaborate on the financial problems she was facing? She seems to have been a highly paid Facebook exec who would have had great health insurance. And if her employment was in the US she could keep that insurance through COBRA for between 18 and 36 months.

Life threatening medical problems are obviously horrific and she has my full sympathies. But I'm having a tough time drawing a from that to "coercion" for someone who was a director at Facebook.
by herval | 2025-09-21 14:07:51+00:00
The US has always been a very moralistic country. From banning alcohol and burning witches to its long struggle to accept differences (in skin color, gender or even the definition of freedom). “Cancel culture” is part of America since its foundation. It’s a moral tug of war.

It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream that “democrats are the same”, there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge (“if the left cancels, I can cancel too”). It’s a flight from moral infighting to authoritarian rule.
by p_ing | 2025-09-21 14:08:06+00:00
SC2K has Parking Lots.

https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_SimCity_2000_buildin...

Obviously that doesn't get to your point, which is accurate.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-p...

> I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.