MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by triceratops | 2025-09-18 02:22:53+00:00
> With a wealth tax it can be highly variable year to year and out of one's control.

It could be designed to be closer to property tax.

> you could find yourself in the situation of having to liquidate assets to pay taxes

Maybe. There are many other ways: the stock pays enough in dividends to cover the tax, the owner has other sources of income, the owner borrows against the stock to pay tax, and so on. In many dual-class structures the privileged class stock becomes common stock when sold so some founders could maintain control even after selling.

Private companies are trickier but still manageable. I don't want to turn this into a long post though.

> many of its proponents see it as a means of reducing inequality and "leveling the playing field".

I see it as a way to reduce income taxes. Welfare states are currently funded by income and payroll taxes aka taxes on labor. For the math to work out you need higher and higher tax rates or more and more workers. And you're fighting an uphill battle because improving productivity constantly reduces the need for workers.

Instead let improved productivity pay for the welfare state. Stop penalizing people for working by taxing them more.
by koyote | 2025-09-18 02:23:05+00:00
I personally can't think of an all-rounder language that is better than C#. It's fast, has great tooling, powerful, extremely productive for working with large code bases and runs 'anywhere'.

JS has lost against TS which is basically C# for web (both designed by the same person) and Python is not really something you should build large applications with (execution speed + maintenance issues).

What do you believe is the current language du jour?
by Philpax | 2025-09-18 02:23:08+00:00
Apple is rumoured to have tried this and caused eye damage as a result: https://macdailynews.com/2017/04/20/leaked-document-details-...

It's quite difficult to do that safely, as it turns out! I would love a virtual retinal display, but I assume there's a good reason that nobody has managed to ship one in the last two decades.
by dhjilop | 2025-09-18 02:23:46+00:00
I would buy something from them, but until I know I could wear them safely at work while developing, using the bathroom, driving, and watching TV at home, and that I’d want to do that without being distracted all day by texts, etc., I wouldn’t wear them. I have to wear glasses, so they’d have to be clear, prescription glasses with reasonable small and stylish frames. This product isn’t for me, and I don’t see how it makes sense to continue spending money on this boondoggle, which is effectively a massively expensive human-testing project to help them develop reasonable-looking glasses. I love Ray-Ban glasses, but not this style or size, and not with these features.
by bigyabai | 2025-09-18 02:23:58+00:00
I grew up on the internet, I know what the CD-i is. Smart glasses are cool. For $800, I'd get one tomorrow if someone had a reproducible jailbreak. I own an Oculus Quest that was worth every dime.

Too often HN threads devolve into the same tired comparisons about laserdisks and Palm Pilots. The only precedent we have for a product like this failing is Vision Pro, and this is nothing like that. Your comment was jumping to a conclusion that I think many would disagree with.
by smelendez | 2025-09-18 02:24:03+00:00
Makes some sense to me.

In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction.

And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence.

You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
by zzzeek | 2025-09-18 02:24:31+00:00
hacker news moderation does not like political stories. it's explicitly in the guidelines of what not to post: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

it is of course in the interests of billionaire-owned companies like YC to keep the community all about "hacking" and "getting VC money" and away from rightfully discussing the most alarming period in the US' history since the Civil War. because hackers need to be at their screens spinning more gold for them and not getting disillusioned by the ongoing collapse of society into an authoritarian dystopia.
by al_borland | 2025-09-18 02:24:34+00:00
This is my #1 issue. I simply don’t trust them and I don’t know that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point. They’ve been violating my trust for decades.

I’m happy to let them prove out the tech, and if/when a company enters the market with a compelling product that I can trust, I will consider that competing product.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-18 02:24:36+00:00
I was ready to be unsympathetic - too bad for the company - but then I read TFA and it's a rug pull on a nonprofit teaching coding to kids....

https://hackclub.com/

(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
by jodacola | 2025-09-18 02:24:46+00:00
Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of TikTok and have many critical opinions of Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but…

This gives me vibes of a weird company takeover, a la the kinds of things that happened in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: government-driven benefits to large corporations and investors with friends in the right places, government involvement, forced licensure of a core aspect of the product (Rearden Metal?).

I’d like to learn more about: what are some other similar instances of such a thing?
by donatj | 2025-09-18 02:25:41+00:00
> Slack transitioned us from their free nonprofit plan to a $5,000/year arrangement, we happily paid. It was reasonable

Their definition of reasonable and mine are... not aligned.

Just self-host an IRC or Jabber server for crying out loud.

For a single $5,000 I'll personally teach each of your users to use it.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-18 02:25:58+00:00
I do think we're in for a bit of a reality check on how human attention works.

I have a HUD in my car that shows me directions, speed etc and when I'm looking at that the rest of the view out the windscreen is hardly even there to my visual perception even though I'm looking right at it. This seems to be getting largely overlooked but I feel like over time statistics are going to emerge that HUD type displays are increasing accidents rather than preventing them.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-09-18 02:25:59+00:00
I wanted to share a project I’ve been building for decades The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge, a massive handcrafted text adventure written in QBasic. Yes, QBasic in 2025. The game currently spans over 3,600 interconnected rooms, with unique NPCs, branching pathways, cursed villages, haunted castles, and secrets hidden across an ever-growing world. Every room is written by hand. Every description is crafted to spark the imagination. It’s built to run on the barest of systems, and it will always remain free to download and play. Why QBasic? Because simplicity has power. Modern engines demand assets, shaders, and endless pipelines. QBasic lets me focus on what text adventures do best imagination, atmosphere, and story. My philosophy is to expand outward rather than upward: instead of inflating systems, the Labyrinth grows through new areas, new lore, and new journeys, ensuring it always feels alive and endless.
by HoyaSaxa | 2025-09-18 02:27:01+00:00
> We don't directly manage AWS Bedrock deployments today, those are managed by AWS.

That was my understanding before this article. But the article is pretty clear that these were "infrastructure bugs" and the one related to AWS Bedrock specifically says it was because "requests were misrouted to servers". If Anthropic doesn't manage the AWS Bedrock deployments, how could it be impacting the load balancer?
by triceratops | 2025-09-18 02:27:22+00:00
> who have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits

* Fiduciary duty to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "maximize profits".

Maximizing profits makes the stock price go up. That benefits the C-suite. Because they're paid in stock.

The board designs their compensation package that way because they figure "number go up" is the easiest way to show they're acting in shareholders' interests.
by jppope | 2025-09-18 02:27:32+00:00
I totally feel for your group in this situation, and more than anything I think the timeline is pretty rough.

To address the rest of the comments in the thread though... most pricing structures are to incentivize growth or to maximize profit. In the days of Bill Macaitis Slack was a growth company, and they were trying to build as much good will as possible, because good will is good for growth (especially to reduce cost on marketing). Salesforce doesn't care about good will or growth at this point, because the market penetration phase is basically over. Retaining good will over maximizing profit at this stage won't help them with what they are trying to do, and they aren't that kind of company anyway. Its not like Patagonia bought slack or something.

The lesson, if there is one, is that as a consumer to keep the companies honest we need more competition (and no I'm not talking about Microsoft teams). However this is exactly the opposite of what investors want. Think about that when you decide to buy a product from a well funded VC backed startup. Being cheap and moving fast aren't the end state.
by Smerity | 2025-09-18 02:27:53+00:00
Ton Roosendaal is brilliant both strategically (taking a closed source codebase and growing it into the open source success story that is Blender today) but also as a person.

When I was 15 or so, mid 2000s, I was heavily into the Blender community. Shortly after the closed source to open source transition I ran into a segfault. I could half heartedly sling code at the time but not enough to work out the issue I had.

After noting the issue on IRC Ton personally helped tease out the bug. I _might_ have misdirected him by saying the bug occurred "with just a cube" (and he was like "Yay! Bugs are easier when they're simple cases!") but I neglected to note it was a cube subdivided half a dozen times, with a few thousand vertices ;)

He had a vision and quiet persistent execution plan for Blender and the community that was far ahead of anything else in those (relatively) early days of OSS and the web.

The Blender community was and is an amazing combination of technology, creativity, and positivity, and I think we owe Ton for helping steward much of it.
by gcau | 2025-09-18 02:28:00+00:00
I'm not sure if they meet the requirements for being a terrorist group or if I agree with them being considered terrorists, but I just want to point out the name of the organisation isn't a valid argument in favour of them, the actions of the organisation matter a lot more than the name, for example on many occasions they've used violence to prevent people from political speech (is that antifascism or fascism?)
by windexh8er | 2025-09-18 02:28:21+00:00
If OP isn't in huge hurry I'd also add the impending Snapmaker U1 [0] to the list. It looks like it's going to be a better machine than Bambu has out in the long run for cheaper and much more in-line with one that you have full control of, unlike Bambu.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/snapmaker/snapmaker-u1-...
by novatea | 2025-09-18 02:28:44+00:00
Another Hack Club member here, this situation is hard on many of us since we built many of our projects around Slack integration, and we now have to rapidly re-code them so they don't break. It's not great, especially in the middle of the school week (reminder that hack club is a coding nonprofit for teenagers, so i have to go to school and have homework while doing this)
by squigz | 2025-09-18 02:29:24+00:00
> Their "threads" feature was also great: it was just like replies in Discord (all go into the channel) but you could open up the thread to get it isolated. Worked way better than slack replies which just devolve instantly into you losing all track and messages can't be found again.

I desperately wish Discord worked like this. As you say, current threads just shove away conversation and it's quickly lost.
by theamk | 2025-09-18 02:29:28+00:00
Spoiler: this is not implemented, once you click through demo, there is "join the waitlist" prompt.

I am guessing it's one of those fake websites to judge interest.

(In related news, I am looking forward for this to be used - by other people of course. Imagine: I arrive to downtown, fully intending to pay, but all spots are taken by illegally parked people. No worries - head to parkremark, report a (fake) police sighting, and watch some spots mysteriously free up. Sweet! And the best part there is no ethical downsides, those people were jerks to begin with.)
by suzdude | 2025-09-18 02:30:22+00:00
It seems like there is, and will be, a strong reaction from the public (I may, of course, be hoping for something I'd like to see).

This thread is certainly active with those critical of the administration.

Note, the public at large did not know what Kimmel said until now. The Streisand effect is coming into play, because it was so uncontroversial.

The podcast part, I agree, although it's sad in someways, as it demolishes the national conversation, and makes easier to appeal to "your group" rather than "all groups".
by sadeshmukh | 2025-09-18 02:30:26+00:00
The price came out of nowhere for Hack Club. Slack had a unique agreement, also lowering the minimum age, with this specific nonprofit. I'd argue that for their scale, 200k/yr from 5k/yr with a week of warning is absolutely crazy. And I'm talking from experience - I got this message literally today, out of the blue, that after eleven years, we had to migrate within days. The community is so much larger than I imagined previously, and it sucks that it just had to end this way.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-18 02:30:46+00:00
Honestly, yeah. I know on HN we’re all used to it and over it, but the general population is not.

Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:

“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”

“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“

“I’m sorry, tried what?!”

“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“

“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”

“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“

“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”

I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.
by gary_0 | 2025-09-18 02:31:48+00:00
Not even "do good"; even just honest business where you exchange a good or service with a customer for a fair market price.

Technology allowed companies to expand and centralize on a national scale, and capital pushed that to the conclusion we're at now, where there are a few gigantic players (at most) and almost all recourse against bad faith has been precluded. Nowadays if a customer is taken advantage of, they can't drive 5 extra minutes in the opposite direction and take their business elsewhere, or shame the owner in the local paper. Only impenetrable monoliths remain.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-18 02:31:58+00:00
Biden literally had, and used, back door channels to compel private companies to censor speech online. These companies complied either due to ideological alignment or fear of regulatory attacks from the Biden administration. To the extent that the FCC (which is more than just the one commissioner) were to take some action, it may have been less of an issue than Biden’s explicit violation of constitutional rights, because the Supreme Court has upheld the FCC’s ability to regulate content to some extent.
by suzdude | 2025-09-18 02:31:59+00:00
> We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it

Kimmel did not assert Mr. Robinson was anything he wasn't. Kimmel noted how some people are doing everything possible to distance themselves from Mr. Robinson.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-18 02:32:33+00:00
I just confirmed that Android uses a largely unmodified kernel, so in theory it should be possible to just implement whatever extra components make up the Android system. To your points:

- Sandboxing: Android accomplishes this by running each app in the context of a different UID.

- No root access: Like above, user-installable apps are given separate UIDs. The GUI and other system processes probably also get random UIDs. Probably very little of the Android system runs as UID 0. (However, I don't really believe that keeping the user from doing things as root is a valuable security feature, as long as the user is competent)

- Verified boot: There's nothing specific to Linux/Android about this, right? The bootloader handles checking the signature.

- Hardware-backed key store: Isn't this, as the name implies, "hardware"? So it should be OS-agnostic, right? Maybe Linux doesn't use it, and Android does, but someone just needs to write a driver for it (and maybe some bytecode implementation or whatever, if it's some secure enclave thing, which it seems to be).

- User profiles encrypted independently: I don't think the Linux kernel supports encrypting profiles, this is a userland feature of Android, and could therefore be ported to Linux.
by AvAn12 | 2025-09-18 02:32:37+00:00
Out of curiosity, for what purpose? Do you go back and watch your videos of everyday things? Share them with friends? With photography (and most visual media) the secret seems to be to take many many photos, or draw many many pictures, or shoot tons of video, and then curate and edit meticulously to find just the very best parts. Do you really get much value out of recording lots of day to day video? Is this part of some kind of art project?
by ncgl | 2025-09-18 02:32:59+00:00
I no longer succumb to the emotional response opinions or claims like this try to evoke.

Don't we all remember how worked up we were over the russia collusion story, and the special prosecutor Robert muller...and nothing came of it...and we all forgot about it.

I genuinely feel that the constant exposure to a media that fights for your outrage is the single most dividing factor in our country. It's not a president, its not a Charlie Kirk, its not a Nancy Pelosi. Its a news channel that blasts the worst extreme of an interpretation of a quote into a dedicated story, day in and day out.

We no longer have conversations, in person or online, that don't include a whatsaboutism for every single thing.

What about Charlie kirks assassin, what about the January riots, what about blm riots, what about trumps assassination attempts, what about Nancy Pelosis husband, what about ....

Question the media you consume. Really consider the quality of information you're digesting or if its just a play for an emotional reaction.
by doubled112 | 2025-09-18 02:33:03+00:00
I think we were allowed to discount products up to 10% when I was a computer technician in a big retail store. I always felt it would be frowned upon, it wasn't something we did often.

Services, though, were very flexible. Nobody was looking at the receipt, just the work order. 80% of something beats 100% of nothing every time.
by mythrwy | 2025-09-18 02:33:16+00:00
They bankrupted Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani, paraded Steve Bannon in handcuffs. Kicked people with even moderate right wing opinions off social media.

I fully disagree with cancelling Kimmel due to any governmental pressure (if that's what happened) and I'm absolutely horrified with the firings that are being gloated about at the moment but let's not pretend here. The left was very much out of bounds on the cancelling. Which doesn't make it any better when the right does it.

I really think this needs to stop. It's not the society we want to live in. People need to be able to express controversial or disagreeable opinions and I don't care what ideology they are.
by amarant | 2025-09-18 02:34:04+00:00
Everything is relative.

My previous employer had daily revenue in the area of $10 million.

$250k barely registers. They've got more pocket change than that lost in their couch.

Anything that's less than an hour worth of revenue is a small expenditure. To them, this extortion would probably elicit the equivalence of a shrug, or at most a mildly annoyed grunt
by onetimeusename | 2025-09-18 02:34:51+00:00
I had a job where everything was self hosted and some things custom made and the company abandoned it and moved everything to cloud providers. We had internal IRC and XMPP servers, internal accounting apps, wikis, etc. and moved it all. We paid substantially more money and our previous internal apps were actually better. The reasons given for this were kind of strange.

It was things like "internally hosted wikis were too hard to use for non-technical staff", "even though they work, the internal apps are old", "we want something that is standard", "we can't fall behind the other firms". The point about cloud provider apps all being familiar is valid but none of this stuff was that hard. It felt like the reason we switched (apart from persistent rumors about deals between sales teams) was because executives decided our internal apps lacked a cool factor. So good luck convincing non-technical executives that the cloud apps they are accustomed to seeing shouldn't be used.
by fn-mote | 2025-09-18 02:35:36+00:00
The value of money depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, you could stop working for a year or maybe two with that much money, especially if you didn't care about health insurance. You can call it distortion if you want.

I understand that you could also take that money and move somewhere it would last for a long long time.

Insisting that money is absolute does not seem accurate to me. That is sounds like making the claim that the things you could buy with that money are the same everywhere.
by AvAn12 | 2025-09-18 02:36:05+00:00
Yes. I work on a trading floor. Personal tech is a big issue in the world of private equity, investment banking, capital markets, law, medicine, proprietary research, coding, national defense, homeland security, most government roles, law enforcement, and may other professions. An employee may try to steal IP, but in the case of regulated industries, they can wind up in jail very quickly for doing so. This is no joke, and there is no room for sloppy move-fast-and-break-things jackassery.