MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by margalabargala | 2025-12-15 19:27:30+00:00
There are threats from without and threats from within.

China isn't going to physically invade the US. They want to take our place as the world's cultural leader and relegate the US to approximately the current state of the UK.

Companies like Amazon want to increase the wealth of the owners at any cost including domestic political capture. They would see the country being run by oligarchs like Russia.

Would you rather live in the UK or Russia?
by dvt | 2025-12-15 19:27:45+00:00
I'm always a bit weary of theoretical stuff like this. The best way to learn a new language is to move there (preferably somewhere where people don't speak or don't want to speak your native language). I know people that didn't speak a lick of Spanish, moved to Spain, and in a year they're basically fluent. Of course, still struggling with stuff they might not be used to: gendered language, conjugations, and so on. But overall, able to be fully understood by native speakers.

Theoretical educational frameworks don't replace the day-to-day struggle of trying to get shit done. (Doing this is, of course, extremely uncomfortable, and people will avoid it at all costs.)
by phantasmish | 2025-12-15 19:27:49+00:00
I was super-interested in this years ago. My interest vanished when I encountered the “tour of duty” concept. I don’t make FAANG money so the pay was roughly a lateral move for me if it’d included retirement, but having it be time-bound rather than career-oriented was a huge turnoff. Was ready to make that my whole deal, potentially for the rest of my life.

The US going politically totally batshit crazy shortly after ended up making it for the best that I did’t join, but still, it struck me as weird that they had to set it up with that extra sting of “we have to make sure this is a sacrifice”.
by Jtsummers | 2025-12-15 19:27:58+00:00
It looks like this is trying to fit into the same space as the former USDS and F18 which had term appointments. The key idea behind those was the industry partnership (recruiting experienced people from industry) and the knowledge/skills transfer that came with it. If you look at some other programs (Peace Corps, for instance) you'll see a similar thing. 2-year terms with extensions up to maybe 5 total years.

What's funny is the retirement benefits won't apply to most 2-year term employees. Unless they were prior military or civil service, or come back later, two years is not long enough to keep the TSP match (three year vesting period) or to qualify for the pension (five years). (EDIT: Funny because they explicitly list it as a benefit, but these folks won't qualify for it.)
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-15 19:27:59+00:00
> which are near universally poorer than all US states, are able to do these things

What do you mean that the countries are poorer? Are you just thinking about the gross salary people get per month, or is there something else in this calculation?

The fact that people get health care, parental leave, can freely move between countries, able to afford having a child, have emergency services that arrive relatively quick and all those things mean that a country is not poor, and the countries that don't have those, are "poorer", at least in my mind. When I think "poor country" I don't think about the GDP, but how well the citizens and residents are protected by ills.
by pessimizer | 2025-12-15 19:28:02+00:00
This is a powerfully stupid idea. The only reason to justify taxing income at all is because the government manages the relationship between employer and employee, and protects the employee from abuse - and even that's a bit shaky when it comes to income taxes, because the obligation to the government doesn't really scale up with income. Income taxes are new and weird. Other taxes are a lot easier to justify.

But the worst part is the idea of taxing automation and innovation. You might as well put a tax on intelligence and skill, because if you were dumber and hadn't learned anything, it would take more people to do your job. It's a comically stupid idea that no one is seriously considering.

It's just a distraction from taxing the usual suspects, the wealthy, who are more of a burden to government the more they own, and who are the least taxed they've ever been. Instead of being taxed by governments, they get direct cash grants, regulatory capture, intelligence agents and diplomats with a primary purpose of subverting and suborning foreign governments to their advantage, and perpetual wars to burn off their production.

The Western intellectual class is an annoying mix of morons and propagandists, often in the same person.

edit: US average wealth is 5x US median wealth.
by peeters | 2025-12-15 19:28:17+00:00
I don't think you're understanding what OP actually said. They didn't cite the Libya example as an example of bad behaviour; there wasn't any value statement on it at all. They were saying the fact that they intervened in Libya but not elsewhere was an example of the US intervening when it suits them.

I'm not an expert in US foreign policy so I'll refrain from entering the debate itself, I just think you're not arguing against what the OP is actually saying.
by aprentic | 2025-12-15 19:28:26+00:00
Do you have some test for fairness or justice?

The best measure I can think of is per capita prison population. It's not great because it doesn't directly address fairness but it's likely related.

Two countries, with roughly the same "fairness" of courts, should, ceteris paribus, have roughly the same per-capita prison population. By that measure, China would be slightly on the fairer end 92nd lowest out of 224.

I don't remember if HK does the same thing but China divides their police into two groups. The more common type are basically public safety officers. They are unarmed but I saw a few places where the had plastic riot shields and catch poles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_catcher#/media/File:Mancat... The armed police are only called out as needed.

The airport had a two of military guys standing at attention with rifles. They looked like a couple of wax figures until I saw them do a formal changing of the guard.

I don't know if anyone has assembled data on actual court records. How often are police charges prosecuted? How often do they go to trial? What percentage end up getting convictions? What are the average sentences?

It would also be good to decide what we're comparing it to. A rich white person in the US can expect a very different level of fairness than a poor black person. Is a random Chinese person's experience more like the rich white persons' or the poor black person's?
by maxglute | 2025-12-15 19:28:27+00:00
Can't I be both. This just primarily PRC geopolitics shitpost account (because ppl get wierdly stalkery if I talk PRC geopolitics on main account) along with some lifting. The lack of grammar and care is because talking about geopolitics online doesn't warrant higher effort.

Regardess above comment isn't even about PRC system. It's about how HKers and their supporters who thinks it's reasonable for city of 7m to have no NSL coverage while serving as intelligence hub for PRC geopolitical adversaries is delulu and unserious position. Anyone rubbing 2 brain cells together should understand how anomlous and not sustainable that arrangement was, and indeed it was never suppose to be that way if not for sheer HK arrogance to skirt NSL implementation requirements and PRC patience.
by helterskelter | 2025-12-15 19:28:48+00:00
I'm curious, and I figure you would know more about this than I do: when using real yarrow stalks for the I Ching, how do you split them into groups? I mean like, roughly equal? Don't think about it too much and just split? Just separating them into, say, groups where one group is just a single stalk doesn't seem random.

I guess it's a question of philosophy, either split into groups based off of your intuition, or aim for a truly random split in the pile.

Anyway, I wasn't sure if this is something that's a settled matter or what.
by Supermancho | 2025-12-15 19:28:55+00:00
Didn't work out well for the river camp in Santa Ana, CA 8 years ago (or so) that had to be bulldozed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy3zI3wvAo

The vast majority (that accepted accommodation) destroyed the spaces and eventually fled back to the streets. It is generally not productive to simply rehome all the homeless en mass. There are first order drug abuse and mental illness issues that cannot be ignored.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 19:29:37+00:00
It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.

One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
by judah | 2025-12-15 19:29:39+00:00
Thank you for acknowledging that 2 million Arabs live in Israel with full citizenship and rights. That undermines the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.

As for the West Bank, it's ruled by Fatah, not Israel. Israel provides for its own citizens -- regardless of ethnicity -- but it's not responsible for the citizens of foreign territories and their governments. Israel is under no obligation to provide services to foreign governments, especially those compromised by antisemitic terrorist organizations.
by rayiner | 2025-12-15 19:29:45+00:00
You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers."

We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
by timschmidt | 2025-12-15 19:30:16+00:00
I believe the simulation I spoke to the researcher about was around 100 atoms cubed. So 1,000,000 atoms. Numbers vary wildly with cell size, but a typical cell might contain 100 trillion atoms. So, a factor of 100,000 difference in scale. Which would be between 16 and 17 doublings. Around 25 years given Moore's law. The conversation happened probably 8 years ago, so only 17 years to go! lol
by zdragnar | 2025-12-15 19:30:33+00:00
The last time I asked it to write something in a programming language, it put together a class that seemed reasonable at first blush, but after review found it did not do what it was supposed to do.

The tests were even worse. They exercised the code, tossed the result, then essentially asserted that true was equal to true.

When I told it what was wrong and how to fix it, it instead introduced some superfluous public properties and a few new defects without correcting the original mistake.

The only code I would trust today's agents with is so simple I don't want or need an agent to write it.
by telesilla | 2025-12-15 19:30:41+00:00
The village blacksmith of 1934, it was clear, had to learn new skills to survive.

“The influence of the automobile has driven the horse from the city’s streets,” according to the article. “The blacksmith now earns his livelihood by straightening automobile axles, repairing broken springs and welding frames.”

https://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/8921-examining-the...
by pxc | 2025-12-15 19:31:05+00:00
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say compression. Knopper picked up and became maintainer of a kernel module called "cloop" that supports zlib-compressed loopback filesystems.

If Knoppix had this and Finnix didn't, or if Knopper was able to supply enhancements and bugfixes in order to support Knoppix releases, then he was likely able to fit a much more complete system onto a given CD or DVD.

But idk what kind of compression early Finnix used, if any. (Nowadays, everything uses SquashFS, right?)
by kortex | 2025-12-15 19:31:05+00:00
I've been using ULIDs [0] in prod for many years now, and I love them. I just use string encoding, though if I really wanted to squeeze out every last MB, I could do some conversion so it is stored as 16 bytes instead of 26 chars. In practice it's never mattered, and the simplicity of just string IDs everywhere is nice.

Sometimes I have to talk to legacy systems, all my APIs have str IDs, and I encode int IDs as just decimal left padded with leading zeros up to 26 chars. Technically not a compliant ULID but practically speaking, if I see leading `00` I know it's not an actual ULID, since that would be before Nov-2004, and ULID was invented in 2017. The ORM automatically strips the zeros and the query just works.

I'm just kind of over using sequential int IDs for anything bigger than hobby level stuff. Testing/fixturing/QA are just so much easier when you do not have to care about whether an ID happens to already exist.

[0] https://github.com/ulid/spec
by jecel | 2025-12-15 19:31:07+00:00
One issue he mentioned is still true today in Brazil's universities: while in theory you can ask to transfer from one course to another, in practice you have to drop out of your current school and take the entrance exam for the other one. And then you waste a lot of time trying to get your grades for the courses you have already taken recognized as equivalent so you don't have to start from scratch.

For him to move from math to electrical engineering to physics in Brazil would mean going through this twice. This might make him take some 7 or 8 years to graduate.

I guess this inflexibility makes things easier for the administrators. They know they will have 25 students in the statistics class in 2028 and so know how many teachers to hire to handle that.
Show HN: I built an open-source alternative to the "brainrot IDE" that YC funded
by DrSparrowhawk | 2025-12-15 19:31:19+00:00
VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only.

Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra...

Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.
by cantdutchthis | 2025-12-15 19:31:36+00:00
Multiple people have offered but decided against it for a few reasons.

- Proper reviews actually feel like they would take me as much time as doing it myself.

- One benefit of doing it all myself is that all the content has a familiar style.

- The downside of contributions is that a lot of the stuff that I see on YT just simply doesn't fit the style that I intend to have on calmcode. So before accepting contributions it also feels like I would have to vet the person who makes the contrib.

A lot of the aforementioned is more complex now as well due to the fact that folks can pay for the platform. It was a 100% free platform before, and right now it's a 99% free platform and some people pay a stipend to keep the site running. If contributions come in, I would also need to figure out a way to keep the incentives aligned, which also complicates things.

I've had a collaborator in the past and a bunch of things worked out there. But he's gone off to do other things, all of which is fair enough.
by jcims | 2025-12-15 19:31:59+00:00
>It's kind of why I think sentient life is incredibly rare.

Agreed. The universe is big, but combinatorics are bigger.

I'd be disappointed but ultimately unsurprised if an all-knowing oracle said it has only happened once in the history of the universe. My follow up question, of course, would be whether or not it happened on Earth.
by alexandretrotel | 2025-12-15 19:32:02+00:00
Authorization logic is often scattered and duplicated — so we built @zap-studio/permit to centralize it with declarative, type-safe policies and composable rule building blocks.

Works with Express, Fastify, Next.js, Deno, and really anywhere you need authz.

MIT licensed, ecosystem-agnostic, and great DX. Try it out!
by wafflemaker | 2025-12-15 19:32:14+00:00
You might enjoy the fact that some experts call it the "fruit salad of autism/ADHD".

The say that spectrum is inaccurate and the fruit salad is a better name) analogy/description.

Like with fruit salad, you can serve it to a table of people and everyone will have fruit salad on their plate, but it will be randomly varied for all. Some will have a lot of one fruit and a few others. Some will have all but one and so on.
by jairuhme | 2025-12-15 19:32:30+00:00
My blog. I created it a couple years ago but didn't really know what to do with it. Have started to use it as a way to learn and have enjoyed writing more than I thought I would. Nothing crazy with UI and I am not talking about anything groundbreaking, but it's been fun!

Shameless plug: https://jeremymaslanko.com/
by aranelsurion | 2025-12-15 19:32:44+00:00
As someone who has been recently a customer to multiple language learning apps, I think multiple things are true:

* The market for actually useful, non-gamified learning apps is smaller than, say, Duolingo.

* Yet the market for bullshit apps is too saturated. There are maybe 50 such apps for each major language already in the App Stores.

* As a customer I'd be happy to pay for serious, boring learning apps, and I believe such serious customers exist. (but in much smaller numbers)

* Market for serious, boring language learning apps is underserved. (for German there are apps like Readle, Vocabeo, Vocabuo (yes, lol naming), DerDieDas that cover specific niches, and (afaik) only DW has a quite comprehensive actual learning program)

I believe potential customers like me exist, but our numbers are much less than "learn Spanish in 5 minute games" crowd and our expectations are higher too. Up to you to decide if this is a valuable niche to serve.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-15 19:32:50+00:00
> incompetent teachers

I'm not really talking about incompetence, and incomptenece isn't the largest issue in the category of "things that make people say ACAB."

https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/teacher-charged-with-sex-cr...

I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/daniel-holtz...
by notahacker | 2025-12-15 19:32:58+00:00
As your own article points out that stuff has been on the statute books for years (covering stuff which is generally illegal everywhere like death threats as well as stuff which was merely allegedly sent to cause others distress or anxiety) and convictions actually fell between 2015 and 2023. For all its much vaunted constitutional protections, the United States has also arrested a whole bunch of people for vague and difficult to call a crime stuff like Charlie Kirk memes or (nuanced or otherwise) criticisms of Israeli policy recently as well as more obviously menacing stuff that happened to take the form of social media communication.

Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
by Terr_ | 2025-12-15 19:33:11+00:00
Ahhh, nostalgia: Some games like Super Mario and Duck Hunt were quite doable without a manual, but I specifically remember Legacy of the Wizard [0]. With no manual and almost zero in-game text to work from, our progress was limited to stumbling around a giant labyrinth, never realizing certain obstacles required switching characters to use unique abilities, and then finding special items that unlock abilities for other characters...

[0] https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Legacy_of_the_Wizard/Walkthrou...
by andy_ppp | 2025-12-15 19:33:18+00:00
You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude.

With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.

The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.

I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-15 19:33:25+00:00
> All the time? Being in a train station,

Phone. Or a wristwatch if you're that type.

> a (class)room (during exam),

My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.

> in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.

Phone. Or wristwatch again.
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-15 19:33:44+00:00
Yes and no.

I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.

For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-15 19:33:46+00:00
ugh i had forgotten all about this game until I clicked your link and then promptly closed the tab. Carrier landing was frustrating enough but the re-fueling was another level. I played this at my friend's house whenever I would go there and spend the night.

That was an actual thing back in the day, you'd get your parents to let you stay the night at a friend's house and then you'd stay up all night playing NES, eating pizza and watching movies.
by echelon | 2025-12-15 19:33:50+00:00
How do we recover from this?

Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc.

China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering.

The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation.

You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us.

We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't.

I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.