MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tehjoker | 2025-12-12 19:26:49+00:00
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.

U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.

Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.

The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...

Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.
by fwip | 2025-12-12 19:27:09+00:00
They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.

If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
by AndyKelley | 2025-12-12 19:27:10+00:00
What's crazy is that it's almost good. All they had to do was make the next syscall return ECANCELED (already a defined error code!) rather than terminating the thread.

Musl has an undocumented extension that does exactly this: PTHREAD_CANCEL_MASKED passed to pthread_setcancelstate.

It's great and it should be standardized.
by siliconc0w | 2025-12-12 19:29:17+00:00
The problem is that unions are only as strong as the NLRB which depends on the current administration. One of Trump's first actions was firing of a democratic member making them unable to form quorum, so it's not looking good for the rest of his term and the supreme court is likely going to bless that firing making it even more susceptible to executive branch meddling in the future.

I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
by kg | 2025-12-12 19:29:19+00:00
When people complain about game devs being exempt, I think they're usually not complaining that salaries are too low - they're generally fine these days - but the expectation of 80+ hour weeks during 'crunch' when crunch often lasts 6+ months. Doing hours like that for a long period of time is destructive to health and to family ties.
by hellojesus | 2025-12-12 19:29:24+00:00
My point is exactly that the union didn't do what was best for its members because their actions collapsed the company.

Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.

Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
by tomjakubowski | 2025-12-12 19:29:24+00:00
I had to check what the gold standard McMaster-Carr does: their torque wrench drive size widget is sorted 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2". Glorious. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/torque-wrenches/
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-12 19:29:46+00:00
The underlying reason is a lack of cultural fluidity, or in other words, an over-abundance of cultural rigidity, which manifests as a desire to be free of other cultures.

The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.

German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.
by andy99 | 2025-12-12 19:30:10+00:00
Being interchangeable is literally why unions are formed. If you have some unique skill set that is valued, a union is unnecessary and would hold you back. If you’re happy being slotted in to whatever the next available position is based on your seniority with no regard to you as an individual, unions are great.

That’s why they’re mostly autoworkers or longshoremen and whatnot an not professionals, outside a few niches motivated by ideology.
by rsync | 2025-12-12 19:30:36+00:00
Evolution isn’t stupid … it’s not a random outcome that we don’t produce our own vitamin c, or have an appendix, or (urate oxidize blah blah).

I wish you all the luck in fixing these problems and would be fascinated to see the outcomes… However, this notion that these changes would be cost free is a mistaken one.

Mutants with these characteristics have certainly existed over evolutionary time… Our version outcompeted them.
by tolciho | 2025-12-12 19:31:12+00:00
Some drunks in a gnu-shaped echo chamber concluded that the world is gnu-shaped. That's not much a joke, if there is one here. Such presently popular axioms as "unix means linux" or "the userland must be gnu" or "bash is installed" can be shown as poor foundations to reason from by using a unix system that violates all those assumptions. That the XCDD comic did not define what a unix system is is another concern; there are various definitions, some of which would exclude both linux and OpenBSD.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-12 19:31:15+00:00
> Anyone else interested in a temporary moratorium on all things LLM? We could have GPT-free-Wednesday, or something like that :)

I would be interested in a permanent moratorium, personally. There's no interesting content to be had in the various LLM articles that litter HN these days. Or failing a topic ban, at least give a way to filter it for those of us who are sick of hearing about AI hype.
by gruez | 2025-12-12 19:31:20+00:00
1. I highly doubt the adversarial image generated by Jordan actually works in practice, especially since it needs to be fined tuned for a specific model, not to mention that different angles/noise will probably break it even more

2. Louis tries to defend whatever Ben's doing by saying that it's basically like random specks of mud or bird shit, but he doesn't seem to realize that intent is a thing. Having random specks on your license plate isn't going to send you to jail, but if it's obvious that you intentionally crafted the specks to defeat the ANPR, that's a whole different thing entirely, even if they vaguely look the same.

3. As much as I don't like ANPR networks or government surveillance, haven't courts consistently ruled that drivers have less rights (ie. "driving is a privilege, not a right")? For instance, the constitution guarantees free movement, but you need a drivers license to drive and police can ask for your license without probable cause. You also can't refuse a blood alcohol test while driving.
by kmeisthax | 2025-12-12 19:31:49+00:00
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.

OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.

[0] Ala https://xkcd.com/545/
by dc396 | 2025-12-12 19:31:56+00:00
Who said anything about merit?

Given the US is a democracy (presuming voting is reasonably representative of the voter's intent, i.e., voter fraud is not significant in determining the "will of the people"), and plenty of examples where the candidate that was outspent/had less money still won, blaming money is a cop out.

The majority of people who bothered to vote in Wisconsin since 2010 voted for Johnson. Money has an influence but isn't determinative.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-12-12 19:32:14+00:00
Almost? I'd fully support

1. Programmer skill and talent are not enough to achieve similar security properties with memory-unsafe languages as with memory-safe languages.

2. Therefore, "memory-safe languages are technically superior, period, for applications processing untrusted data where security is an important goal"

but the problem entirely boils down to what comes next:

3a. Therefore everything should use rust.

3b. Therefore everything processing untrusted data where security is an important goal should use rust. (Some folks like to stretch what could possibly process untrusted data to turn this into 3a, but there is a difference.)

3c. Therefore most programs really should be written with a garbage-collector, or if they really need to be low-level or high performance they should use an appropriate stack to avoid gc while remaining safe (whether that's Rust, Ada+SPARK, formally-verified assembly, or whatever).
by programmertote | 2025-12-12 19:33:05+00:00
I generally don't like the idea of relying on one private company to track private individual citizens' movement. So, I have an issue with this punishment (although I see that allowing that would also make it harder for automated toll charging systems to collect tolls).

On a related note, when I lived in FL, I often saw cars with this opaque plastic cover on number plates. I think these are installed by the drivers so that they can avoid paying road toll (FL has many road tolls). I also noticed that these drivers tend to be more aggressive in driving than others (that's how I noticed their license plates are covered). Will the same punishment be applied to those drivers?
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-12-12 19:33:21+00:00
>There is no excuse for making people pay

I know! I was just out shopping for a towel and these armed gunmen grabbed me and pulled me into this store and held a gun to my kids head until I bought them a new iPad Pro M5. I am traumatized.

Oh, no, wait, I remember, my kid wanted an iPad Pro for their art and for school. They liked their wacom, but the iPad was more portable, and with the keyboard, it was perfect for taking notes.
by pegasus | 2025-12-12 19:33:26+00:00
Consider that you might have become polarized yourself. I often encounter good arguments against current AI systems emulating all essential aspects of human thinking. For example, the fact that they can't learn from few examples, that they can't perform simple mathematical operations without access to external help (via tool calling) or that they have to expend so much more energy to do their magic (and yes, to me they are a bit magical), which makes some wonder if what these models do is a form of refined brute-force search, rather than ideating.

Personally, I'm ok with reusing the word "thinking", but there are dogmatic stances on both sides. For example, lots of people decreeing that biology in the end can't but reduce to maths, since "what else could it be". The truth is we don't actually know if it is possible, for any conceivable computational system, to emulate all essential aspects of human thought. There are good arguments for this (in)possibility, like those presented by Roger Penrose in "the Emperor's new Mind" and "Shadows of the Mind".
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-12 19:33:27+00:00
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.

What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.

Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
by vkou | 2025-12-12 19:33:35+00:00
Employers having to pay more than they'd prefer to pay for a given type of work/provide better working conditions does not imply "unfair exploitation" of the company by the union, either.

It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.
by an_cap | 2025-12-12 19:34:06+00:00
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2.... I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-12 19:34:18+00:00
I prefer Google Maps. Apple Maps lead me astray too often and though they are better than they used to be they still give weird directions (such as using more obscure state route names for roads rather than the dominant Interstate Higway name).

CarPlay would be a complete non-issue for me, its absence would even be a positive. I just use my phone anyway; integrating it with the car is just added hassle and one less thing I have to worry about remaining compatible 5-10 years from now.
by drdeca | 2025-12-12 19:34:29+00:00
Pardon, but, huh? I very much thought that Lorentz invariance was built into the assumptions of string theory.

Concluding from “A AND B” that “A”, while it does reach a conclusion that is distinct from the assumption, is not impressive.

If string theory does not bake SR into its assumptions, wouldn’t that make the way it is formulated, not manifestly Lorentz invariant? Don’t physicists typically prefer that their theories be, not just Lorentz invariant, but ideally formulated in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant?

Of course, not that it is a critical requirement, but it is very much something I thought string theory satisfied. Why wouldn’t it be?

Like, just don’t combine coordinates in ways that aren’t automatically compatible with Lorentz invariance, right?

If you formulate a theory in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant, claiming to have derived Lorentz invariance from it, seems to me a bit like saying you derived “A” from “A AND B”.

If string theory isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, then, I have to ask: why not??
by seec | 2025-12-12 19:34:32+00:00
You probably do, but you don't count the calories, and instead of everything being in the salad, you have a few ingredients outside (bread, nuts, cheese, whatever).

Salads being a healthy, low-calorie thing is an idiocy; it's only possible if you don't use any dressing, and at this point you are only eating crunchy water. Otherwise, the oil in the dressing is over 800 kcal per 100g. Most people will put the equivalent of 50-70g of bread just as dressing in their salad. It's mostly fat and not filing.

In other words, it's extremely dumb to think salads are healthy; only fat women believe that shit and this is exactly why they end up like this.
by Noaidi | 2025-12-12 19:34:36+00:00
> but he doesn't seem to realize that intent is a thing.

He does realize this. The problem is the police can make up intent just to mess with people. How easy is it fro the cops to say "You purposely splattered mud on you license plate" and fine you or put you in jail. Or even use it as an excuse to pull you over.

> haven't courts consistently ruled that drivers have less rights

This is not about the right to drive. This is about a database of collected data on you that can be searched by anyone. ANYONE.
by craftkiller | 2025-12-12 19:34:41+00:00
You don't NEED to fill the 12 ram slots. My personal 1U has an Epyc 9124 and only 4 of the 12 ram slots filled. I figured, ram will only get cheaper with time so I can fill the remaining 8 slots in the future. Turns out I was wrong, but regardless, the server runs fine on 4 sticks.
by cameldrv | 2025-12-12 19:36:00+00:00
For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm.

For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one.

Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-12-12 19:36:02+00:00
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?

You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.

Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?

If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
by RankingMember | 2025-12-12 19:36:30+00:00
Yeah I think it'll be location dependent. FWIW I've got both by me and they're equally terrible as far as the availability and knowledge of their employees. Lowes edges out Home Depot a tiny bit for me simply because I've never been accosted by a sanctioned in-store roaming sales person for solar or siding at Lowes (yet!).
by viccis | 2025-12-12 19:36:36+00:00
Dictionaries are descriptive and do not prescribe what definition is correct. I am basing my definition on Norman Mailer's definition and I am defining "incorrect" as differing from a word's explicit definition. From the original definition: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper". I can think of no clearer "factoid" than to justify a meaning that didn't exist until a dictionary published it.

In a broader sense, I am always entertained at how Americans will literally change dictionaries before admitting they used a word incorrectly. Sometimes it is tedious, but sometimes when they do it to scientific jargon, it risks muddying the waters of discourse about scientific phenomena with that from "pop science" definition. Psychology in particular is prone to this, with "learned helplessness" and "trauma bonding" being two phrases used incorrectly probably 9 out of 10 times I see them, to the extent that the fake meanings (which are always just the most literal interpretation of the phrase) are incorrectly being treated with the scientific basis of the originals despite having no real clinical evidence.
by quitit | 2025-12-12 19:36:41+00:00
It's odd to celebrate having the key sanctions unwound.

Before this ruling:

1. Apple were prohibited from charging any fee for external/referral purchases. Now this is once again allowed and the district court will work with all parties to develop a reasonable commission.

2. External links were permitted to dominate over IAP options. Now they must have equal size, prominence and quantity.

3. Apple were prevented from showing any kind of exit screen, that is now restored (but it can't be a scare screen).

4. Apple were barred from preventing certain developers/app classes from using external links (such as those enrolled in the News or Video Partner Programs) those are now reversed and Apple can once again prevent them.

Epic/Tim Sweeney are trying to spin these recent losses as a win. It's the old marketing playbook of hoping no one reads the fine print.
by rekabis | 2025-12-12 19:37:02+00:00
This is like looking into a mirror, only without the formal sheepskin and the associated big-company gigs.

Hell, back when I started I would have had to move 5hrs away from home just to get a degree in CS, and into a region where one needed twice minimum wage just to live away from parents. And I just wasn’t that fantastically wealthy. So I tried to bootstrap myself into web dev close to home, did decently, but my neuroatypical brain just never cottoned on to making any professional connections, either.

Networks are just so immensely difficult and laborious to maintain, in ways a normie is likely to never be able to fully understand. I can code for a solid 10-12hrs a day for days on end, zero problems even into my sixth decade on this rock. But even an hour’s worth of networking has me absolutely knackered for the next 24. If I could outsource my world+dog professional interactions in a reliable manner that faithfully reproduces my actual being, I absolutely would.

And there is just so much else with this article that strikes home, including whiteboard exercises in which the evaluators have totally lost the plot with why those even exist.

I swear, if I can’t find a way to build a SAAS or some other personal income stream, imma gonna put my woodworking skills to more profitable use.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-12 19:37:12+00:00
Deprived of all options by the manifest oppression of the Republican Party, American youths of today face the grim choice between shoplifting Louis Vuitton below their AG’s prosecution threshold or working several hours a week in the shadow of the menacing smokestacks of ID Software to afford their meager iPhones. Affluent Ugandans make monthly donations to American charities who will send them pictures of smiling American 20-something’s named “Jaden” their charity has lifted out of complete destitution and given hope of owning their own Miami condo.
by subpixel | 2025-12-12 19:37:25+00:00
Bearblog.dev keeps subdomains out of search indexes until it approves them, as a measure against hosting the sort of things that would get the whole system de-indexed.

My guess is that they are more successful at suppressing subdomains than at getting them indexed. After all, they are not in control of what search engines do, they can only send signals.

For reference, I have a simple community event site on bearblog.dev which has been up for months and is not in any search index.
by cyanydeez | 2025-12-12 19:38:10+00:00
Well, lets be fair here. Oracle is a predatory company that extorts its customers for the highest price. Adopters of AI in the enterprise are going to be building such shitty and shoddy products using AI that they'll need huge support contracts just to keep these poorly made AI products alive.

Adding AI to the oracle infrastructure cancer will certainly a boon to it's business model. Sure it might kill 10-20% of it's customers, but if it can become a pure AI parasitic play and spread it's seed, it's going to grow.

People dont realize that capitalism is size agnostic: As long as you can sell 1 boner pill for $1 million, you only need one customer rather than say 1 million pills for 1$. And, isn't it easier to keep one customer happier if they pay your bills?