MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msm_ | 2025-11-14 18:51:54+00:00
Occam's razor. Either:

* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor

* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.

Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.

If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-14 18:52:10+00:00
there is a lot of evidence for this. this isn't a hypothesis, this is what's going on.

why else would Valve spend so much time and money on Proton? To eliminate the dependency on Windows. Windows is still the OS for gaming. Valve doesn't like that and they are successfully slowly changing that.

Now, if they would just build their 1st party titles for arm64 macOS. I would love to play Portal 1, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2 et al on my decked out MacBook Pro, but I can't. Why can't I? Well, MacBooks are such a slim slice of the market. Yeah well it would be slightly more of the market if I could play Team Fortress 2 on this thing.
by dboreham | 2025-11-14 18:52:20+00:00
Although the article has an SEO-optimized vibe, I think it's reasonable to take it as true until refuted. My rule of thumb is that any rarely executed, very tricky operation (e.g. database writer fail over) is likely to not work because there are too many variables in play and way too few opportunities to find and fix bugs. So the overall story sounds very plausible to me. It has a feel of: it doesn't work under continuous heavy write load, in combination with some set of hardware performance parameters that plays badly with some arbitrary time out. Note that the system didn't actually fail. It just didn't process the fail over operation. It reverted to the original configuration and afaics preserved data.
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-14 18:52:22+00:00
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process?

Other than hoping for a large meteorite or the second coming to end this misery, or stirring up the bloodbath a la Nepal - then, by recognizing the power of large numbers of people doing little things, like sabotaging the system at the personal level. But that implies unity, and unity and mutual support have been deliberately annihilated in this society for too long. Thus, this outcome is even less probable than the first two.
by hellcow | 2025-11-14 18:52:24+00:00
I'd argue a missing social safety net combined with grossly inadequate public education, no job opportunities, unaffordable healthcare and housing, and a prison system designed to punish all drive people to take drugs. Drug addiction is just the symptom. Let's focus on giving people real hope and value and meaning in their lives, from birth to death, instead of killing people, without trial, a world away.
by carlosjobim | 2025-11-14 18:52:33+00:00
Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?

No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.

Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
by chaosprint | 2025-11-14 18:52:36+00:00
The most foolish method is calculating startup valuations. While there are some so-called discounts, they are essentially negligible. You can think of it this way: if you receive $3 million in seed funding, the government considers you to have $30 million * your equity wealth. If you're one of two co-founders, owning 40% of the shares, that's $12 million in assets! Haha, the government thinks that's equivalent to owning 20 apartments in Oslo. Okay, they seem to have completely ignored the risks and mortality rates of startups.

Of course, this policy wasn't initially targeted at startups; it was primarily aimed at traditional industries. The reality is that the wealthy have plenty of ways to avoid taxes or even leave the country. People who own 20 houses in Oslo are unaffected; the only problem is that there are fewer people starting businesses and fewer opportunities to raise funds.

It's just that the people who formulated the policy were so stupid that they didn't understand the situation at all. These fundamental aspects won't change, because Norway's oil and sovereign wealth fund are enough to sustain them for a long time.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-14 18:53:01+00:00
> Is the discussion about only one particular kind of poor person?

Yes, according to the OP. The article already describes the people you are talking about as "broke," not "poor." We already know that those in the broke category can, in most cases, make better decisions and reduce their spending and possibly get ahead.

The ones not in that category can't, which is who the article is about. The discussion is how do we address and help eliminate poverty, not how do we help educate people who are broke because they make bad choices.
by Ocerge | 2025-11-14 18:53:16+00:00
My knee-jerk reaction is "No" if your goal is an easy-mode career that will give you a high salary right out of college, I think that dream is (largely) dead. If you really do love CS/related fields, I think there is plenty of room for you still, but it's no longer a free ride.

I graduated with a CS degree in 2012 so I fully benefited from the tech boom. If I were a senior in high school in 2025 knowing what I know now, I would probably go into Civil Engineering.
by MLR | 2025-11-14 18:53:19+00:00
By the by, one of the people specifically pointed out in this article was apparently paying a total tax bill of 17 million dollars against a net worth of 2 billion, and whatever tiny increase in taxes he would've ended up paying was enough to make him flee the country.

If you can't bear to pay back even a tiny, tiny fraction of what you've been given then you shouldn't have it at all.
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-14 18:53:25+00:00
Apart from the Haskell fun, xmonad is really really good. Especially how it handles workspaces on multiple monitors. By default, each monitor has one workspace. Not one workspace for ALL monitors.

So if your side screen has say documentation open, and you switch on your main screen from terminal to editor, only the main screen changes. The side screen stays untouched. Some people prefer it, some hate it. But it's good that xmonad offers it. It also has hot reloading of the config, which is also nice.

Sure, Niri's config is approachable, but is it hackable? It only offers what Niri offers, right? You can't extend its functionality by config alone.

That is where XMonad and others shine. Sure, they might not be for the "I don't wanna spend time configuring my WM to death" crowd (and I mean absolutely no derision in that. We all have different rabbit holes we want to customize to oblivion), but Xmonad or Stumpwm etc allow for those shenanigans, and I myself am very very happy to have those.

Long story short, it's not all 100% about the type safety, it's also a lot about the extensibility of it.

Niri is nice, not mocking it. But infinite scrolling is not everyone's jam. Some others might even question the choice of KDL instead of JSON without any clear benifit.

Whatever you prefer and if it works for you, great. That's why we have choices ^^
by tchalla | 2025-11-14 18:53:26+00:00
> “We’ll discuss with industry what we can do, not only to make ourselves independent from China, but also for example independent from the USA, independent from the big tech companies,” Merz said.

Good to know it's not just China.

> Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.”

And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
by 9rx | 2025-11-14 18:54:12+00:00
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else

I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
by brudgers | 2025-11-14 18:54:17+00:00
If you already have a mini-split, that has some truth. Most AC's in Houston are not mini-splits.

And the segment of the homeowner market that takes pride in doing the cheapest possible improvement is limited and not one that makes a lot of business sense to cater to as an HVAC company. Because not only does that segment not open its wallets wide (if at all) but also because cheap HVAC systems are cheap in part because of the places that costs are cut such as noise and manufacturer support.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that people don't get joy from the noisy installation they installed themselves and maybe even joy from dealing with the lack of manufacturer support for that unit.

Only that people don't find delight in the crappy unit they paid to have installed once they realize it;s crappy. And as an HVAC business, that's your problem and not one worth having.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-14 18:54:20+00:00
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.

I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-14 18:54:25+00:00
But that's the problem right there, thinking in terms of blame. The left seems to be more interested in moral correctness than winning. It doesn't matter whose "fault" it is, it is literally an irrelevant discussion. I'd just like to see the left win more.

There's also the tension between "the sort of narratives they tell the people to gain public support" and realpolitik. Narrative is necessary in politics but I'd like to see more of the informed, educated left think more in terms of political realities.
by tencentshill | 2025-11-14 18:54:32+00:00
It's an ad for their service. By "The Network state AG", co-founded by Alex Recouso (who curiously does not have a Wikipedia page, and very little information on google not controlled by him). Related to a concept promoted by A16Z, Vitalik Buterin, Srinivasan (an investor!) and other creepy crypto billionaires.

It uses the same sentence structure as Palantir's advertising. Very final. Very direct. Inevitable.

Incredibly off-putting knowing the philosophy of those invested in the concept.
by mothballed | 2025-11-14 18:54:53+00:00
Yeah if you just do part 1 you could probably google real-time.

The universal is proctored, so you have to have the *FCs and limits somewhat memorized, it's definitely just rote memorization and if you have exceptional memory you might just remember it all the first time without any 'study'. A person like me with relatively average intelligence would probably take a couple days, but it's definitely a lot better than needing 4 years of HVAC apprenticeship or something.

Technically you need part 2 or universal to do most home HVAC systems, but part 1 (or even an EPA 609 probably) would get you the refrigerants, so it's largely a moot point.
by davidsainez | 2025-11-14 18:55:02+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I am working on a rag engine and that document provides great guidance.

And, agreed, each individual technique seems marginal but they really add up. What seems to be missing is some automated layer that determines the best way to chunk documents into embeddings. My use case is mostly normalized mostly technical documents so I have a pretty clear idea of how to chunk to preserve semantics. But I imagine that for generalized documents it is a lot trickier.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-11-14 18:55:10+00:00
> It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.

IMO good government (i.e. the government that I would want to live under) treats all citizens equally under the law, not because everyone is equally lucky or everyone who is poor is a terrible person or something but because it's not the government's business to do anything but enforce the law. Good government is not a caretaker and is not a bank. Communities should look after their needy members and give them a lift up, not the government. If our communities aren't tightly knit enough for that, then that's a different and IMO deeper problem.
by anonymousiam | 2025-11-14 18:55:14+00:00
The problem with revealing the evidence is the risk it poses to the "methods and sources." For this reason, it's highly unusual for CIA to release "raw" intel to anybody. They always want to "process" it. This feature can be exploited by politicians, as it was by President Obama and John Brennan against their political adversaries.

South American governments that refuse to stop the cartels are in effect supporting them. The cartels are powerful, and use any and every means to get what they want. The US recently offered to help Claudia Sheinbaum, and that offer was rejected. Nicolás Maduro is most likely supportive of the cartels because they pay him, and their actions are destructive to his enemies (namely us).

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-confirms-he-off...
by topaz0 | 2025-11-14 18:55:28+00:00
I think the reason people talk past each other on this is that some of them are using LLMs for every little question they have, and others are using them only for questions that they can't trivially answer some other way. Sure, if all your questions have straightforward, uncontroversial answers then the LLMs will often find them on the first try, but on the other hand you'd also find them on the first try on wikipedia, or the man page, or a google search. You'll only think the ChatGPT is useful if you've forgotten how to use the web.

If you're only asking genuinely difficult questions, then you need to check every single time. And it's worse, because for genuinely difficult questions, it's often just as hard to check whether it's giving garbage as it would have been to learn enough to answer the question in the first place.
by yubblegum | 2025-11-14 18:55:58+00:00
The very fact that you merely see this as "a new productivity source" support my sense of the disconnect I mentioned.

Human beings have patterns of behavior that varies from person to person. This is such an established fact that the concept of personal character is a universal and not culturally centered.

(Deterministic) machines and men fail in regular patterns. This is the "human flaws" that you mentioned. It is true that you do not have to be Einstein but the point was missed or not clearly stated. Whether an Einstein or a Joe Random, a person can be observed and we can gauge the capacity of the individual for various tasks. Einstein can be relied upon if we need input on Physics. Random Joe may be an excellent carpenter. Jill writes clearly. Jack is good at organizing people, etc.

So while it is certainly true that human beings are flawed and capabilities are not evenly distributed, they are fairly deterministic components of a production system. Even 'dumb' machines fail in certain characteristic manner, after certain lifetime of service. We know how to make reliable production systems using parts that fail according to patterns.

None of this is true for langauge models and the "AI" built around them. One prompt and your model is "brilliant" and yet entirely possibly it will completely drop the ball in the next sequence. The failure patterns are not deterministic. There is no model, as of now, that would permit the same confidence that we have in building 'fault tolerant systems' using deterministically unreliable/failing parts. None.

Yet every aspect of (cognitive components of) human society is being forcibly affected to incorporate this half-baked technology.
by glenstein | 2025-11-14 18:56:02+00:00
I think it would have to be alternative search licenses, crowdsourced fundraising or some new product offering.

There's little precedent for crowdsourced fundraising on the scale of what Mozilla gets from its search deals. The examples I hear are Wikipedia and Tor. Wikipedia is the largest of its kind, I suspect the largest year-by-year internet crowdsourced project in existence and it gets half of what Mozilla's operations cost. Tor even less. So Mozilla would have to have more than double the largest crowdsourcing effort in history. So there goes crowdsourcing, at least as a primary option.

I don't think there's other licensing opportunities that pay out as much as Google, so there's strike two.

So then it's a matter of dabbling in side bets, which risk being inconsequential, compromising core mission values (e.g. adtech), or user backlash (VPN, Pocket) and stand accused of losing track of their mission. I personally wouldn't mind doing what Proton does and offering a drive/calendar/email suite but, again they would get accused of losing sight of their mission and I don't know how much they would stand to make from it. Nevertheless I do think continuing to experiment in side bets is worth trying.

Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly imo, they do some Ycombinator-style VC funding, which I believe are done out of the returns on their endowment. That might be one of the most intriguing directions over the long term, but again I have seen people on HN and point to that as yet another example of Mozilla supposedly failing to stay focused on their core mission.
Show HN: Embedr, an AI copilot for embedded engineers
by sinharishabh | 2025-11-14 18:56:17+00:00
I have been building embedded projects for years and always felt the tooling lagged behind software dev. Things like quick prototyping, debugging messy hardware specific issues, or figuring out why a peripheral is not responding still take way too long.

So I built Embedr, an AI copilot focused on embedded engineering. It is not a general code assistant. It is tuned around real hardware workflows like:

- Reading your project structure and understanding your board setup - Helping with ESP32, STM32, RP2040 and similar MCU projects - Explaining registers, peripheral configs, linker issues, build errors - Suggesting fixes for hardware faults and integration problems - Letting you pick toolchains or generate build systems - Walking you through bring up steps and driver level debugging

My goal was to get closer to an IDE that works with you while you are wiring, flashing, or debugging boards.

This is still early, and I am actively improving model behavior, prompt flows, and tooling integration. I would love feedback from people who work with microcontrollers daily. What feels useful, what feels wrong, what should it learn next.

You can try it here: https://embedr.app

Happy to answer anything.
by rootnod3 | 2025-11-14 18:57:11+00:00
I honestly do not understand the scrolling WMs. The last thing I want to do is move my hand to my mouse to scroll. I tried them, didn't work for me. So yes, there's still a crowd of people hanging on to old tiling WMs and therefore sticking to Xorg instead of Wayland. Because you can pry EXWM and StumpWM out of my cold dead hands.
by theanomaly | 2025-11-14 18:57:13+00:00
I'm surprised this hasn't come up more often too. When we worked with AWS on this, they confirmed there was nothing unique about our traffic pattern that would trigger this issue. We also didn't run into this race condition in any of our other regions running similar workloads. What's particularly concerning is that this seems to be a fundamental flaw in Aurora's failover mechanism that could theoretically affect anyone doing manual failover.
by Jensson | 2025-11-14 18:57:26+00:00
> Being poor is you already did all those things. ... You make all your food from scratch all the time.

If poor americans did this they wouldn't be so fat, so that is wrong. Food stamps lets the poor eat unhealthily even though they are poor, while most of the world poor means you have to make your own and not get all the industrial crap.

The other interpretation is that people who don't make their own food aren't really poor, which would mean there are barely any poor Americans. But I doubt that is what they mean.
by andrekandre | 2025-11-14 18:57:31+00:00
> I had to make a fucking account.

ea games are like this, same for ubisoft... in my case i just disconnect my switch 2 from wifi and they don't bother about it (much anyways).

i wish console makers would be a bit more strict with policies like this cause as you indicate, it hurts whole usecase of consoles in the first place
by rao-v | 2025-11-14 18:57:40+00:00
I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the food supply and in California consume more water than the entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water).

Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.
by bluGill | 2025-11-14 18:57:41+00:00
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that is wrong. Still consult a lawyer if you need real legal advice.

If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).

A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
by twisteriffic | 2025-11-14 18:59:02+00:00
> How is it possible that other users of Aurora aren't experiencing this issue basically all the time? How could AWS not know it exists?

If it's anything like how Azure handles this kind of issue, it's likely "lots of people have experienced it, a restart fixes it so no one cares that much, few have any idea how to figure out a root cause on their own, and the process to find a root cause with the vendor is so painful that no one ever sees it through"
by guestbest | 2025-11-14 18:59:05+00:00
I looked at the top 25 grossing apps on iOS and Android. There is only one explicitly ai app and it’s the one that ran a Super Bowl commercial, ChatGPT. I don’t see the demand from regular consumers. When or if it grosses top in the charts then it arrived. It’s more windows 3.0 than windows 95.