MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epolanski | 2026-01-28 13:14:23+00:00
This made me research how much taxes would a wealthy californian pay assuming:

- 2.5M worth of real estate bought recently

- 1M of job income

- 1M selling shares that 10xed (some stock option idk)

- driving a 150k $ car

- spending 150k $ over the years in taxable goods

It came around 840'000 $ or around 40.1 %.

I wouldn't say it's that bad, this even includes sales taxes (probably the fairest of all taxes).

With even basic tax optimization (401k, federal deductions) you get that number down to 780'000 $, with something a bit more sophisticated depending on circumstances you can get it easily lower than 600k or 32% ish.

The biggest problem is that people above that tier end up effectively paying less sometimes even in absolute terms just by borrowing against their equity and not triggering taxable events.

Honestly taxes are complicated to implement, I'm not sure how can you implement a progressive yet fair system without loopholes and without severely degrading services (roads, infrastructure, education, healthcare, military, etc, etc).

And every time you decide to cut on services, you are just moving money elsewhere: more inequality -> more social tensions and criminality, you just end up paying way more to live in a safe place and pay for private and public security and prisons.

It's really difficult.
by dolni | 2026-01-28 13:14:32+00:00
The law being alluded to here is not "so unpopular".

Immigration enforcement is overwhelmingly favored by Americans, including immigrants.

The implementation has been awful, for lots of reasons everyone already knows. However, the situation has also been significantly escalated by often-violent obstructionists.

Obstructing enforcement of the law when it's something Americans voted for is not patriotism. It's undermining democracy.

Our law is explicit: immigration is the domain of the Federal government exclusively. State and local governments should "take it" as you say, because that's the law, and we should respect the law. If you don't like it, protest. But most are fine with enforcement in a reasonable way.

Trump and his cronies shoulder a lot of blame for how things have gone in Minneapolis. But so do democrats for stoking the flames.

Vote independent.
by gruez | 2026-01-28 13:14:36+00:00
>at one point Taxes in the US were 70-90%.

That figure is highly misleading to cite by itself because the high tax rate also came with a bunch of loopholes and exemptions. That's why despite the drop in the headline rate of 70-90% or whatever, the actual tax take as % of GDP has remained remarkably steady in the past 7 decades.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
by maximedupre | 2026-01-28 13:14:45+00:00
Cope. If you create something that genuinely solves a problem, people will buy no matter what.

Look entrepreneurship has never been easy. In fact it's always been one of the hardest thing ever. I'm just saying... *you don't have to do it*. Do whatever you want lol

Happy to hear what's your solution to avoid becoming totally replaceable and obsolete.
by florkbork | 2026-01-28 13:14:53+00:00
Here's one the members of that group:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tennessee-woman-sentenc...

> As a Health Center staff member ('Victim-1') attempted to open the door for the volunteer, WILLIAMS purposefully leaned against the door, crushing Victim-1’s hand. Victim-1 yelled, "She’s crushing my hand," but WILLIAMS remained against the door, trapping Victim-1’s hand and injuring it.

> On the livestream on June 19, 2020, WILLIAMS stood within inches of the Health Center’s chief administrative officer and threatened to “terrorize this place” and warned that “we’re gonna terrorize you so good, your business is gonna be over mama.” Similarly, WILLIAMS stood within inches of a Health Center security officer and threatened “war.” WILLIAMS also stated that she would act by “any means necessary.”

The reason they could prosecute to this degree?
https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/18/anti-abortion-surgi-clinic...

A member of the conspiracy admitted to the planning; they have text messages and detail of deciding who will risk arrest, after going over the fact they'd be trespassing and violating the FACE act.

Do you think the administrative and medical staff present in 2020 would agree with you? That the group that blockaded, threatened and assaulted in one instance access to health services are in fact the victims here of government overreach?
by netsharc | 2026-01-28 13:15:08+00:00
Yeah, power to execute laws is given to the executive branch. Power of the executive is bestowed upon... one person.

From https://archive.is/E6zXj :

> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.
by jorvi | 2026-01-28 13:15:29+00:00
Are you running this particular unit file as a user unit or a system unit? Some targets like network-online.target don't work from user unit files.

You could also try targeting NetworkManager or networkd's "wait-online" services. Or if that doesn't work, something is telling systemd that you have an IP when you don't. NetworkManager has "ipv4.may-fail" and "ipv6.may-fail" that might be errenously true.

> at that point I might as well go back to init=/etc/rc

The difference is that systemd is much better at ensuring correctness. If you write the invoked shell command properly, it'll communicate failure or success correct and systemd will then communicate that state to the unit. It's still a lot more robust than before.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-28 13:15:34+00:00
I discovered that setting macOS input volume to 0 doesn't actually stop "Listen for Siri" or Apple Intelligence from hearing you. The wake-word detection bypasses the system volume setting
entirely.

So la I built NoSpy — a 156-line Swift CLI that:

- Toggles your mic with one command

- Warns you if Siri can still listen (even when "muted")

- Opens the right settings pane to actually disable it

No dependencies. Just compile and run:

swiftc nospy.swift -o nospy
./nospy status

Example output when you think you're muted but aren't:

Microphone is MUTED (input volume: 0)

Siri/Apple Intelligence is ENABLED — "Listen for Siri" can still hear you.

GitHub: https://github.com/BrowserBox/NoSpy

Inspired by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790765

Curious if others have run into this. The distinction between "system mute" and "voice assistant mute" isn't obvious in macOS, and I suspect most people assume muting the mic means nothing is listening??
by pge | 2026-01-28 13:15:56+00:00
What is not clear to me from the article is what data they are getting from CMS. The article references Medicaid data, but everyone that has access to Medicaid is legally present in the country. They have to be to qualify. Some possiblities:

* They are going after people legally here on temporary visas such as SIV that give them access to medicaid

* They are going after people that are not on medicaid and have no insurance but received care (either emergency care or charity care) at a hospital or clinic that takes medicaid (I don’t know if hospitals capture this information for CMS).

* ?
by marbs | 2026-01-28 13:16:19+00:00
If you drive from Cambridge (UK) to Wimpole, you'll see some impressively large radio telescopes that belong to the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO).

However, there's much more that's not visible from the road. Hidden behind the trees, MRAO has a prototype SKA-Low array (from before the full installation in Australia), and three dishes from a HERA prototype.

The MRAO itself has a fascinating history, notably including the discovery of the first pulsar by Jocelyn Bell using the wonderfully named Interplanetary Scintillation Array, which consisted of over four thousand dipole antennas spread across nine acres. In WWI the site was a mustard gas factory, with train station and sidings. The train tracks have long since gone, but the station building remains. Inside hangs a large, coloured but faded image titled "GALACTIC RADIO EMISSION AT 38 Mc/s". This appears to be a coloured visualisation based upon the black & white figure in pages 654-655 of a 1957 paper [0].

The above 1957 paper illustrates a survey of half the celestial sphere at 38 MHz. In comparison, this specific MeerKAT image from the article [1] appears to be a 1.28 GHz measurement focusing on the galactic center (6.5 square degrees) [2]. So it's not a 100% like-for-like comparison, but interesting nonetheless to see how much the detail has improved in the past ~70 years!

[0] https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1957MNRAS.117..652B ("RESULTS OF A SURVEY OF GALACTIC RADIATION AT 38 Mc/s")

[1] https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-02-...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541 ("The 1.28 GHz MeerKAT Galactic Center Mosaic")
by elif | 2026-01-28 13:16:29+00:00
Why am I not surprised that a blog was written about LLM coding going from 20% to 80% useful, yet all of the HN comments are still nit picking about some negative details rather than building positive ideas toward some progress...

Is the programmer ego really this fragile? At least luddites had an ideological reasoning, whereas here we just seem to have emotional reflexes.
by flohofwoe | 2026-01-28 13:16:33+00:00
Tbh, why bother?

kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)

Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those fixes would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 etc...

TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
by mcny | 2026-01-28 13:17:23+00:00
Not to be too glib but my mom would ask counter questions like this:

Why is it that we have to trim out nails when they grow? Why not leave it natural?

Why do we remove the weed in between the pavers in our backyard? Why not let it be natural?

The fact is the world around us needs constant work. Our capitalism is no different. It needs constant pruning or it becomes gluttonous. There was a book I think which said most people involved in illegal drug trafficking are barely getting by, most of the income is soaked up at the top. I don't remember the point the bio was trying to make but it feels like that way for any enterprise these days.

The richest people in the US have reportedly increased their net worth by over 1.5T over the course of the last year or so.

How is this sustainable?
by rswail | 2026-01-28 13:17:28+00:00
Minnesota is only a drop in the ocean compared to Florida and other states. One of the current FL senators was CEO of one of the companies convicted of a much larger fraud.

That's more an indictment of the way you (the US) starve your public services of proper regulatory power with the right level of personnel to handle it.

But your Congress voted last year to defund the IRS and the administration are busy gutting the SEC and other regulators.

Oh and government fraud has nothing on the commercial and rent-seeker frauds extracting wealth for no benefit from their positions of control. But anti-trust prosecutions are basically a dead path for rectification.

Blaming the "government" for what happens from obvious policy failures is the fault of the policies and those that set them, not the "government" as some nameless bureaucracy.
by ifwinterco | 2026-01-28 13:17:45+00:00
Yep people will pay rates in "high tax" US states where you're still only paying ~40% ish total income tax and they're really nice places to live.

That would still be considered a fair and reasonable level of tax by european standards.

Obviously there is a level though - if you made it 95% then people would leave. I don't think there's any reasonable argument that the level doesn't exist, the question is where is it for a specific place at a specific time
by keepamovin | 2026-01-28 13:17:48+00:00
Without assuming correctness, assuming instead "risk probability" - if previous advanced civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth, after evolving here naturally - what should we do as a species to not share their fate?

edit: I am not sure backupping to 'Mars', with its lack of magnetic field, inhospitality, and necessity to live underground is a positive idea
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-28 13:17:56+00:00
Has anyone calculated a hazard score for apprehension for illegal immigrants with a violent criminal conviction? As in, with dragnet deportation, are the violent ones also being picked up? Or are they actually safer today than they were a few years ago given Noem and Miller are more interested in making TikTok videos than pursuing hard-to-get criminals?
by moduspol | 2026-01-28 13:17:59+00:00
No, I accept the outcomes you are claiming are likely. I'm talking about the net results for the rest of us.

There are now 10k STEM PhDs who are (presumably, mostly) not being paid by the federal government, and are now employed in the private sector and contributing more to the federal budget than taking from it. Or retired, as noted in the article.

On the downside, some grants are maybe taking longer to be disbursed? Not ideal, but again: there's some reason we didn't previously have 100k more STEM PhDs. And we could make the same argument: if we had, we'd have faster regulatory reviews, better grant decisions, and stronger technical evaluations.

There's basically no way to argue for any number other than "more." That suggests an unfalsifiable argument.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 13:18:25+00:00
These were accidents, not court proceedings where you have weeks or months to think things over.

My prediction is that if you investigate them, then in the case where the woman was trying to drive away, the officer likely has no fault at all, as the drive may have easily be interpreted as driving towards him. On the armed protestor occasion, there might be some fault as the gun seemed to have gone off unexpectedly. But it won't be punished too hard, if at all, as the victim was actively escalating the situation.

These weren't punishments ("death sentences" as someone else called them). These were accidents where the victims themselves were (mostly) at fault.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-28 13:18:35+00:00
This. And when you start to think about how pervasive this is it's very likely that organizations like BCA and DHS are leveraging big tech with respect to location data of targets like students. I'm appalled at the lack of concern districts have levied against these organizations with respect to protecting their students. I wouldn't be surprised to see leaked memos between Palantir / Flock / Google / Microsoft / TikTok / Meta in the future.
by throw0101a | 2026-01-28 13:18:47+00:00
> Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.

Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.

Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):

* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...

* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-28 13:18:48+00:00
A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.
by interestpiqued | 2026-01-28 13:18:48+00:00
This only works if stocks go up, up, and up. Otherwise they will have to realize gains at some point to pay off the loans.

I don't get why we have to jump all the way to a wealth tax, could they not just force asset backed loans to trigger a tax? This seems way more targeted and we won't have people assessing what everyone is worth. I think it would avoid some unnecessary precedent setting. They could put the impetus on the billionaire taking the loan to state what the assets are worth and related gains.
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-28 13:19:09+00:00
I think there's clearly a question of envy which doesn't seem addressed.

I'm not particularly in favour of high taxation, but I think that the argument is a bit more subtle than that. The general point is that "the ultra rich" are able to benefit from a whole host of loopholes which allow them to pay proportionally less than the plebs.

Now, this specific point seems somewhat debatable, judging by the fact that people don't seem to agree; I personally have not looked into the matter to form an opinion.

Maybe our tax code hasn't kept up with the financialization of the economy. In any case, this whole tax increase thing, at least as I see it in France, since to spill over to "regular rich people", as in engineers or similar who "just" have a relatively high salary.

Another issue, which I think is different but is rolled into complaints about rising tax rates is what the state actually does with the money. As in "I'm ok with paying tax, but not to fund this or that thing". In France, specifically, many "public service" offices have closed, having people either travel great distances or fight half-assed computer systems, while, at the same time, the number of public servants (so, cost) has increased.
Show HN: Prism.Tools – Now 100% Offline capable
by BLGardner | 2026-01-28 13:19:32+00:00
I've completely overhauled Prism.Tools to be 100% offline-capable and privacy-focused, with significant tool improvements.

WHAT CHANGED?

- Dependencies: Moved from external CDN libraries to LOCAL libraries only (/lib folder)
- Privacy: Zero external requests now (no potential CDN tracking)
- Offline Use: Works completely offline after download (no internet required)
- Licenses: All licenses included (/lib/license/)
- Assets: Local Web Safe fonts (/tools/fonts/)

TOOL UPDATES:

1. ASCII Art Generator:
- Improved performance using FIGlet.js
Credit: Created by Glenn Chappell and other FIGlet contributors
- Animate button cycles through all fonts for quick review

2. SVG Editor:
- Completely reworked with expanded capabilities
- Educational design with help tooltips
- Professional features (transform engine, gradients, grouping)
- Beginner-friendly with default example to explore features

3. Other Updated Tools:
- Code Formatter, Diff Checker, Hash Generator, SQL Formatter, YAML/JSON Converter, QR Code Generator
- All libraries for these tools are now local

4. Two new tools, now 48 tools total:
- HTML Viewer, Image Metadata Viewer

FOR GITHUB PAGES VISITORS:
You're already using latest version but be sure to Refresh the pages!
>> https://blgardner.github.io/prism.tools

TESTING OFFLINE FUNCTIONALITY:
1. Download complete repository
2. Disconnect from internet
3. Open index.html in browser
4. Test all tools - should work normally

TIP: Use Chrome's "Application" tab in Developer Tools to verify no network requests are made.

Q: Why these changes?
A: To ensure privacy and provide reliable, always-available tools regardless of internet connectivity.

Q: What if I don't update?
A: Old versions will eventually break when CDNs change or shut down. They also send data to third parties.

Download Latest Version: https://github.com/blgardner/prism.tools/archive/main.zip
Live Version: https://blgardner.github.io/prism.tools/
by ryani | 2026-01-28 13:19:49+00:00
What statutory penalty?

https://www.copyright.gov/512/

Read the requirements for a takedown notice. The only thing a DMCA notice needs to claim under penalty of perjury is that you are authorized to enforce the copyright that you are claiming. The report from the copyright office on the linked page states:

> Senders of both takedown notices and counter-notices are liable for damages if they make knowing material misrepresentations regarding whether the material to be taken down is infringing, or has been removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification. Courts have appropriately interpreted this provision by requiring actual knowledge or willful blindness of falsity, not merely negligent or unreasonable misrepresentation.

"Knowing" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Courts have determined that someone who uses an automated system to identify infringing content and submits takedown notices against all of that content does not "knowingly" misrepresent anything.

Furthermore, even in the case where there is bad faith, there's no statutory penalty, it relies on the targeted party suing and in court proving BOTH bad faith, and damages.

The DMCA has no teeth against false claims.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 13:20:23+00:00
> If europe protects its DRAM manufacturer

I never argued for protectionism since Chinese DRAM makers and EV industry also didn't grow out of protectionism. On the contrary, they invited Tesla to build a EV factory in Shanghai without the usual 51% state ownership simply to light a fire under the asses of Chinese domestic EV makers on an even playing field with Tesla forcing them to innovate to Tesla's level or die.

I was arguing for positive state management like that, not protectionism. The kind of state management our aerospace industry had.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-28 13:20:24+00:00
> Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public

Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.
by samiv | 2026-01-28 13:20:29+00:00
This is an anomaly and left over from the time when middle class was growing after the 2nd world war. We (Western countries) are dismantling all the back stops and the process will reverse and move all the wealth to the few rich people in the capital class. When this process is complete the poverty levels in the west will equal those of the countries you mentioned, Afghanistan etc.

The USA and UK are leading the process since they started to pursue this goal aggressively during the 80s with Reaganism and Thatcherism.