MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by numpad0 | 2025-12-15 23:17:52+00:00
The real whole shtick is run economy in closed cycle to keep currency weak. Or the good old 1930s trade bloc economy. They're not just good at optimizing costs, they charge appropriately in CNY and inappropriately in USD. Workers don't care about obscene undervaluation in USD so long that they have bacon on the table after few hours of work.

It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.

The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-15 23:17:54+00:00
Something like this has been going on in the restaurant world since seemingly forever. When I worked at a pizza joint (40-some years ago) we only served Pepsi drinks.

I was young and dumb enough then not to know that, for example, 7-Up and Sprite were not independent soft-drinks. I assumed every flavor of soda was its own company. I soon started to notice the drink pattern based on whether they had Coke or Pepsi. Those two owned all the other flavors—and they each had their own variant of the other's.

I was told too by management that we only bought Pepsi drinks. Again, native me thought, "Why not have both Coke and Pepsi and let the customer decide?" I am not sure whether there was a pricing issue that prevented management from buying both—like the loss of a discount for going Coke-only or whatever.

Of course you always saw signage, etc. around the restaurant with Pepsi logos (or Coca-Cola logos at other restaurants) so you knew there were gifts in other forms that one of the two would entice the owner with.

What a slow growing up I have gone through since then. It seems like the kind of thing they ought to teach in primary education.
by arjie | 2025-12-15 23:18:16+00:00
When I was a child, I learned badminton from a friend[0]. He was a fairly highly ranked player in our nation and so was very good. One of the first things he said was "Don't be stiff. Relax your muscles and hit the shuttlecock fluidly not rigidly.". I couldn't. When I finally could, it's because I was much better than I was when I started. The fluidity came after some degree of unconscious muscular competence, rather than prior to.

This aligns with what I know about Flow State: it requires some degree of unconscious competence before you can access it. When playing table-tennis, I could not access it when I was rubbish, but when I reached some degree of skill I wasn't thinking while I was playing, I was playing instinctually.

Over the years, many people have given me the same "don't be stiff; relax your muscles; move fluidly" and some of the time it has worked, but it has never worked when I did not have competence because I did not even know what it was to relax something.

So perhaps after one has acquired a base amount of skill at something, someone could "expend no effort", but that's just being in flow state.

0: not as a coach-student relationship but so that he could have someone to play against.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-15 23:18:33+00:00
2005 Hurricane Katrina, news described a black man carrying bread through floodwater as "looting a grocery store" and white people carrying bread through floodwater as "finding bread and soda from a local grocery store".

Image: https://media.snopes.com/2016/09/looting.jpg

Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-looters/
by consumer451 | 2025-12-15 23:18:47+00:00
Wow. That's a lot of modern keywords you have there. Now I am curious about your brain/point of view.

1. When you say "libtards," do you mean non-authoritarian democracy believers? If not, then what does that mean exactly?

2. How do you see Taiwan's sovereignty in the next few years? Will the CCP kill many, and put the rest into re-education camps, or will that be entirely unnecessary?
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-15 23:18:51+00:00
> A million dots scattered randomly over a graph can all land on the exact same coordinate if it’s truly random.

It won't happen though. 0.00000000% chance it happens even once in a trillion attempts.

> What most people intuit as random is some sort of noise function that is generally dispersed and doesn’t trigger the pattern matching part of their brain

Yes, people intuit the texture of random wrong in a situation where most buckets are empty. But when you have orders of magnitude more events than buckets, that effect doesn't apply. You get pretty even results that people expect.
by tetha | 2025-12-15 23:18:58+00:00
Our internal CAs run 72 hour TTLs, because we figured "why not" 5-6 years ago, and now everyone is too stubborn to stop. You'd be surprised how much software is bad at handling certificates well.

It ranges from old systems like libpq which just loads certs on connection creation to my knowledge, so it works, down to some JS or Java libraries that just read certs into main memory on startup and never deal with them again. Or other software folding a feature request like "reload certs on SIGHUP" with "oh, transparently do listen socket transfer between listener threads on SIGHUP", and the latter is hard and thus both never happen.

45 days is going to be a huge pain for legacy systems. Less than 2 weeks is a huge pain even with modern frameworks. Even Spring didn't do it right until a year or two ago and we had to keep in-house hacks around.
by sigwinch | 2025-12-15 23:19:01+00:00
On a site called Hacker News, we need more analysis of one of the classic hacker skills, social engineering. Our first luminary hackers, and their first books, and our first movies, are about manipulating your average office worker or security guard. It doesn't work every time, but those people vote and hackers illuminated some early tools at automating the manipulation.

The turning point was smartphones. No, they don't clandestinely listen to the audio, or smuggle tower locations of unimportant people. But (all of our) behavior changes when we rely on an app and give up those other liberties because app. Some social engineering was required for mass adoption thereof, and most of us here are acquainted with the analytical means to concentrate delivering that. Half of our society has weaknesses that we euphemize as "gaming habits" or "addictive personalities". Maybe they know it; I'm not down here haughtily scoffing that they cannot know it.

China and Russia and North Korea don't show those weaknesses because those people are down in the mines. The powers learned social engineering within their closed societies, not in our open societies. They promote a nation and a people unified with one personality. The United States and similar freedom exponents have to contend with attracting the world's talent by explicitly tolerating any personality. At least for now
by eterm | 2025-12-15 23:19:07+00:00
This is a bit off-topic, this repo isn't even .NET.

I work with a very large ( 280+ project ) .NET semi-monolithic semi-services code base with internal nuget packages.

I've only a handful of times hit the limits on a team plan and even then only minutes before the window refreshes.

I'll chime in with some of my workflow and tips when I have a more appropriate place to do so as it feels disrespectfully off-topic to elaborate further here about too much .NET specific.

As a general tip for working with large code-bases, if you have:

/docs /src /src/projectA /src/sub-projectB /src/sub-projectC /src/sub-sub-depdencyD /tests/

etc.

Then don't just run claude at the root directory (/).

Run it in ./src/projectA and then use /add-dir to bring in only the depenedencies you care about for the problem you're working on.

Or even run it in /docs and then bring in just the places where it needs.

It will prompt to ask to read from / semi-often, but you can just deny it, either explicitly through claude.settings.local, or just through a prompt for that action.

By carefully controlling the scope, you limit what it tries to read. If you catch it trying to read from /sub-project-B and you think it's irrelevant, you can not just deny it, but ask it why it thought it wanted to read from it, and then update your documentation (or your priors) appropriately.

I've found the worst time for just blowing through credits / usage is when I hit a problem that's just not solvable, but more on that another time.
by didibus | 2025-12-15 23:19:24+00:00
What is fallacious about it?

The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down, and might even cause us to fail in the process.

Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their definition, is excess and should be avoided.

Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-12-15 23:19:25+00:00
Free speech by foreign governments (or controlled by foreign governments) has never been protected by the US constitution, right?

I do agree that Trump, in both his administrations, has made it starkly clear that its checks and balances are quite impotent against a person or party that doesn’t care to follow the rules, so long as they have enough supporters that also don’t care, or are misled
by observationist | 2025-12-15 23:19:31+00:00
Everything that is being done on TikTok is not being done on the other socials. Some of the actions are more or less the same. The difference is in consequences.

Yes, they are all manipulating feeds. Yes, they are are using psychological sabotage and attention hacks to steal as much attention as they possibly can from every pair of eyeballs they encounter.

If Meta, Youtube, Snap, et al do something that is illegal, or violates social norms, or commits any of a thousand different offenses, legal or cultural or otherwise, they can be held to account. They have. Facebook and Instagram and Youtube and all US platforms have been sued, settle out of court, have been subpoenaed and forced to account for themselves in front of congress, etc.

China can use TikTok for many purposes, whether it's purely disruptive, or in pursuit of nation-state agendas, or any sort of nefarious deliberate action they might take. You can hold Zuck accountable. You cannot, with China, and because all Chinese companies are under state control, they are by definition not operating in good faith. They do not follow trade agreements, norms, or deal in good faith. They will steal IP, ignore sanctions, and do whatever benefits them most regardless of any agreements to the contrary, and will actively seek to undermine opposition to their greatest advantage. And they're more or less immune to accountability for anything they do outside of China, except and unless they make the state look bad, or costs them money or reputation in the market.

China chose to deliberately manipulate and abuse their platform by using it to cause all sorts of users to flood their representatives with calls - that one move, by itself, the choice of a paltform to deliberately intervene at scale and advocate for political action, should be sufficient to have seized the platform outright, and then tell China to go pound sand. Imagine how they'd respond to us broadcasting American Freedom TV across their whole country from Starlink satellites, with free satellite 5G compatible with their carriers, bypassing all their great firewall and censorship? As much as I loathe the authoritarianism, we ostensibly have to respect state sovereignty - China deliberately and specifically violated US sovereignty by manipulating a bunch of useful idiots to their own purposes, flexing on the US, threatening them with manipulating the electorate unless they played ball on TikTok control.

We should just seize it and tell them to pound sand, then auction the assets. You can't trust the code, so sell off the name, domain, the network to other platforms if they want to rebuild it, then scour the content and software and hardware, burn it, and salt the earth over it.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-15 23:19:40+00:00
What a bunch of nonsense. Top performers aren’t top performers because they’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort. They’re relaxed and don’t put in extra effort because they’re top performers. This is like saying that the way to run fast is to put a gold medal around your neck, since that’s what the fastest runners do. It’s a complete reversal of cause and effect.
by ruralfam | 2025-12-15 23:19:50+00:00
Daughter in the Material Science Phd progam at major state university with "world class" MS program. Vast majority of her peers are from abroad. Met some. All were the nicest, smartest folks you have ever met. I guess a benefit is that the probability of them leaving may help to increase the teamwork aspect in the program. But that is a guess. Great group of folks who hopefully might help change the world. Went to the recent Phd presentation where recent Phd graduates were honored. Let me tell you... hard to describe how inspiring these folks are. (MS is a pretty hard subject, with amazing applications. You may be thanking one guy who recently got his Phd should you ever get cancer.) Glad our universities welcome talent not demographics. HTH, RF.
by jackfranklyn | 2025-12-15 23:20:01+00:00
The timing feels significant. "Slop" emerged as shorthand for AI-generated garbage, but it's already being stretched to cover any output someone doesn't like. I've seen it applied to legitimate content that just happened to be formatted cleanly or use common phrasing.

The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.

What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.
by exceptione | 2025-12-15 23:20:36+00:00
The US got talent for free for years; young people whose upbringing and education has been paid by/in a foreign country. The most expensive formative years had been paid for by the sponsoring country.

> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development

The rhetoric is learned from a well balanced media diet, served for free by the 0.0001%

"Increasingly few Americans are" getting to evade the consequence of wealth concentration and monopolies. Large parts of the US economy have been starved by monopolist practices in the past decennia. I recently linked a very approachable documentary¹ from ARTE, in thee parts, if you want to understand what is really happening.

1. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-15 23:20:39+00:00
That's not how information works. Learning more from one outcome than the other decreases the probability of that outcome occurring, so the expected information (which is the sum of the outcome probability times the outcome information for each of the two possible outcomes) is always less than or equal to one.

If all you can get is a "true" or "false" you expect, at most, one bit of information.
by jimmaswell | 2025-12-15 23:20:44+00:00
That little headphone jack is seriously driving bookshelf speakers to a reasonable volume? If it works it works but that doesn't sound right, unless these are actually self-powered speakers with their own amplifiers inside. I'd really like to know the details because this sounds crazy.

Also, I collect a lot of old receivers and speakers. It's really not that complicated and the basics have been the same since the 70s and 80s. Any flatscreen TV made in the past 20 years typically has a TOSLINK output which will be compatible with receivers stretching back to the 80s - I have my LG C1 connected to some 90s Marantz receiver this way. Any old receiver you find on Facebook Marketplace for $20 will typically suffice here as long as you check for the TOSLINK port first, but you do need a separate actual amplifier somewhere along the line to drive a speaker larger than a pair of headphones unless the speaker has its own amp built-in.

I find all this stuff fun so my own setup has that chained to a series of other receivers acting as subwoofer amplifiers as well as using the pre-amp output to drive a Mesa Baron tube amplifier/Acoustat electrostats I was gifted, but most people don't need anything so complex.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 23:20:44+00:00
There are people who believe that proof-of-work isn't very effective, but none of them have succeeded in spamming the Bitcoin network with blocks they've mined, driving the other miners out of business, nor (for the last several years) with spamming the Bitcoin network with dust transactions they've signed, so I don't think we should take their opinions very seriously.

Bots may be better than humans at Captchas now, although I'm not certain of that, but they certainly weren't when Signal was designed.

I don't see why invite codes would be a problem for mainstream use.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-15 23:20:58+00:00
Even 10 years they wanted to stay. I was at Microsoft China at the time, and management would complain about Google or Facebook in CA still getting the best prospects from Qinghua/PKU. It wasn't about freedom or democracy at all, they just wanted big paychecks without the 996.

Today it is an easier case to stay, although 996 is still a thing. Still, if you can make your FU money by age 35 (and it still has to be by age 35 according to a relative), you have it set.
by verteu | 2025-12-15 23:21:10+00:00
Fun post. I'd be interested to know: How many consecutive Truth Booths (or: how many consecutive Match Ups) are needed to narrow down the 10! possibilities to a single one?

Discussing "events" (ie, Truth Booth or Match Up) together muddles the analysis a bit.

I agree with Medea above that a Truth Booth should give at most 1 bit of information.
by resters | 2025-12-15 23:21:23+00:00
It's the second (so far bc he hasn't ruled out a third) presidential term for a strongly anti-immigrant / anti-immigration president who has a lot of support domestically.

Immigrants are being chased out of the US in record numbers. Many of my friends with brown skin (second generation immigrants) are worried their kids will be harrassed by ICE, etc.

The sad fact is that there are a LOT of Americans who deeply resent when someone from another country comes to the US, works hard, and earns a prosperous and happy life.

The US is now led by an emotional revenge-driven crusade against the American Dream, against capitalism, against the "melting pot" that fuels culture and innovation. It's a weird kind of revenge idiocracy going on right now.

In case it's not obvious, many of us here are deeply ashamed of what is going on and we will make it right eventually. I'm personally looking forward to the lawsuits that end up paying people mistreated by ICE significant sums of money, give them flights back to the US, etc. The US has a labor shortage and a talent shortage right now, we need the best and brightest, the most hard working, etc., not the lazy ones who think they are owed something and believe the orange clown.
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 23:21:31+00:00
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.

That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.
by GenerWork | 2025-12-15 23:21:34+00:00
>“I actually think we’re capable of taking whatever pricing we need,” said CFO Hugh Johnston in 2022. And the company did just that, raising prices by double digit percentages for seven straight quarters in 2022-2023.

I hate to say it, but was he proven wrong? People are still buying junk food and soda (their primary products) despite prices going up. Looking at Pepsis profit margin, it seems to have hovered between 9.5% and 10.5% since 2021.
by Yoric | 2025-12-15 23:22:19+00:00
> This might be the fault of opt-out serialization library (by default it serializes the hole object and you need to manually opt-out fields from it). So a programmer adds a field, forgets to add opt-out annotation and voilà.

In a previous job, on my first audit of the code, I spotted such vulnerabilities pretty much everywhere.

Developers simply need to stop using these libraries.
by lysace | 2025-12-15 23:22:43+00:00
Your quest is thankfully unrelated to ARC/CEC.

Find a tiny TPA3255- or TPA3116-based amp. These are class D amplifier chips made by TI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-D_amplifier

Buy one of these from e.g. Amazon.

Optionally: Throw away/recycle away the supplied chinese noname power supply. Buy a used laptop PSU from a reputable brand locally for cheap instead. I scored a Lenovo 135W/20V laptop PSU for $5 at my local Goodwill equivalent. Solder on a 5.5mm barrel jack connector.

My fav for your use case: Fosi Audio TB10D.
by pxc | 2025-12-15 23:22:50+00:00
They do mean the same thing, but they have different moods. With the em-dashes it's self-interjection that foregrounds the detour, but with parentheses it's, well... parenthetical.

Aside: it's probably just style (maybe some style guides call for the way you did it), but using em-dashes for this purpose with whitespace on each side of them looks/feels wrong to me. Anyone know if that's regional or something?
by jofer | 2025-12-15 23:22:55+00:00
What really worries me is that I keep hearing "cooling is cheap and easy in space!" in a lot of these conversations, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Cooling is _really_ hard and can't use efficient (i.e. advection-based air or water cooling) approaches and are limited to dramatically less efficient radiative cooling. It doesn't matter that space is cold because cooling is damned hard in a vacuum.

The article makes this point, but it's relatively far in and I felt it was worth making again.

With that said, my employer now appears to be in this business, so I guess if there's money there, we can build the satellites. (Note: opinions my own) I just don't see how it makes sense from a practical technical perspective.

Space is a much harder place to run datacenters.
by keybored | 2025-12-15 23:23:04+00:00
That this is the top comment says all you need to know about this board.

Being a city on the hill is a cudgel, not a halo. It’s always been used in a self-serving way, and always against enemies.

Who is someone who points out the flaws of their enemies but never the flaws of themselves or their friends, even though they are all equally likely to commit the same crimes?[1] That is a scoundrel. Not someone that anyone needs to wait to Call Out anyone on anything.

That it is (in this context) a self-admitted “aspiration” is the laughable part. No one else gets credit for “aspiring” (just words) to be a city on a hill. Except if it’s us.

[1] Being generous here.
by stefan_ | 2025-12-15 23:23:07+00:00
I'm the first to say they should have been shut down the day the original deadline ran out, and if new leadership comes to the WH they should aggressively prosecute all the platforms that broke the law under promises of the corrupt DOJ (Google, Apple et al). But that's between your joke of a constitution and political leadership, it hardly sways the case one way or another.