MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-18 20:48:56+00:00
Your reliance on the 1916 treaty ignores how that deal was actually reached. The treaty was finalized only after US Secretary Lansing issued a "plain spoken threat"[1] to seize the islands if Denmark refused to sell. Thus the agreement is not proof sovereignty is inviolable, but rather a precedent that the United States is willing to use coercion when it perceives an existential threat. Same as the US feared Germany then, fears of Russia and China today could lead the current administration to again pull a page out of Lansing’s book and use similar pressure to secure Greenland

[1]https://www.execfunctions.org/p/the-danish-west-indies-prece...
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-18 20:49:21+00:00
It depends what you mean by "it". FUSE clearly doesn't give you every feature in plan9, and in fact you can't have that without giving up the current Linux syscall API completely and replacing it with something vastly simpler that leaves a lot more to be done in user space. That's not something that Linux is going to do by default, seeing as they have a backward compatibility guarantee for existing software. Which is totally OK as far as it goes; the two systems just have different underlying goals.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-18 20:49:35+00:00
> You shouldn't wait for the bright future, because its unlikely one is coming for anyone, unless we (the west) thread the needle through one of very few green paths.

This statement both denies and confirms my previous comment. So, which one is it? Should we give up all hope for the bright future or wait for the nebulous "green paths" with a baited breath while surrendering everything we value?

If MAGA stands for "Don't wait for the Bright Future" it should be re-lettered as an acronym, ditto if it stands for "Surrender Your Values and Wait for the Tiny Green Paths".

I'm afraid to ask about the nature of the TGPs lest I get directed to watch for secret signs to appear the Orion Nebulae.

Just how far can demagogy go? And I'm not blaming you, you are simply channeling the conflicted messaging of MAGA GOP.

> We're less-than one generation away from wholesale human labor automation.

In an normal world that would be The Bright Future, it would take planned and evil actions to destroy it and turn it into something bad for everyone.

> All that matters, literally from the perspective of "the good of your people", is having the foundations in place to participate in the automation explosion that is already happening; or being a forever-serf to the countries that do (at best).

Now we get to fear becoming "serfs" in the times of "wholesale human labor automation" which, of course, doesn't need any serfs.

And how do you "participate in the automation explosion" by non-participating in the existing international division of labor? Without a shadow of doubt, if we (the US) used China for the importation of cheap commodities, we'd achieve the automation thing much faster and with much less risk. It's simple economics.

Conversely, not participating and rallying the world around China, carries the risk of them getting ahead and we being left behind... and isolated.

My major problem with MAGA GOP is their brazen disregard for reason, logic and decency, something that could indeed turn the wonders of AI into a tragedy for the US and humanity as a whole.
by CrulesAll | 2026-01-18 20:49:48+00:00
Both parties had this view even up to a decade ago. It was actually right-wing libertarian fanatics that advocated mass unchecked immigration with a view to cheap labor. The Koch brothers(now singular) and the vast amount of billionaires wanted a complete amnesty. Ronald Reagan did give a complete amnesty to Californians. Even Bernie Sanders warned about this years ago.
by atmavatar | 2026-01-18 20:49:51+00:00
> From an outsider’s viewpoint, current approach of letting almost anyone in does not seem to work that well.

By what metric do you make this determination?

From a crime perspective, legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens, and illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes still.

From an economic perspective, immigrants of all stripes tend to work harder than native-born citizens so they can establish themselves here. They contribute to society, pay their taxes, and in the case of illegal immigrants, aren't even afforded its protections and services.

The only metric by which I could see an argument that immigration has backfired is in political unrest, but that's mostly due to the fact that the right-wing media has been stoking panic over immigration for decades - anything to distract from how easily we're being fleeced by the wealthy and powerful.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-18 20:50:13+00:00
I don't think I'd call it a controversy exactly. There are places where the signs make sense (ex court buildings) and then there are places where they are purely performative. When a school in the ghetto that suffers gang related violence prominently posts such signs they rightfully get made fun of. Meanwhile most schools (at least where I grew up) either don't bother to post such signs or only post a subdued "all weapons illegal" near the entrance (that includes even pocket knives BTW it's not just a gun thing).

Another great one is "drug free zone" seen plastered all over a seedy highschool. Drugs are blanket illegal everywhere here. The US has made an art form out of persecuting drug users. We've peddled our "war on drugs" globally. What could possibly be the point of posting such a sign?
by cursuve | 2026-01-18 20:50:51+00:00
Can two things not be true at once? There are indeed "illegal immigrants", AND the current methods of enforcement are some straight up gestapo-BS in which themselves also illegal and warrant non-compliance. Why is this an either-or?

The America I grew up in is fervently against kings, as a defining principle, and put the lawmaking powers purposefully in the hands of not the president, but in the representatives of the people. Unless you straight-up buy Nixon's view that "[...] when the president does it… that means that it is not illegal.", and maybe you do, this view doesn't pass any kind of scrutiny what-so-ever...
by cheema33 | 2026-01-18 20:52:13+00:00
I work for a small company with a handful of devs. We don't have a dedicated devops person, so I do it all. Everything is self-hosted. Been that way for years. But, yeah, if I go on vacation and something foes screwy, the business is hosed. However, even if it were hosted on AWS or elsewhere, it would not be any better. If anything, it may be worse. Instead of a person being well versed in standards based tech, they'd have to be an AWS expert. Why would we want that?

I have recently started using terraform/tofu and ansible to automate nearly all of the devops operations. We are at a point where Claude Code can use these tools and our existing configs to make configuration changes, debug issues by reviewing logs etc. It is much faster at debugging an issue than I am and I know our stuff inside and out.

I am beginning to think that AI will soon force people to rethink their cloud hosting strategy.
by bostik | 2026-01-18 20:52:52+00:00
I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.

Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.

As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.

ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-18 20:53:01+00:00
I absolutely think we should put people in bad boxes, and would go so far as to suggest if you are worried about this possibility, you may be worried about which box you belong in. ;)

I think the important part is there must always remain a possibility for someone to exit that box. Repentance and forgiveness are key values in themselves, and we must be able to accept people if they can change.

Unrepentant garbage people who still make garbage statements and do garbage things, however, can remain in the dumpster where they belong until such time they warrant climbing out.
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-18 20:53:02+00:00
In agreement with sibling colechristensen but wanted to add.

>The voters decided to pull the lever for "massively bad" during the last presidential election because they could not tell the difference.

That is being intellectually dishonest, we had already had 4 years of Trump and similarly had 4 years of Kahmala with Biden.

Saying they were ignorant or didn't understand is to ignore the electorate and their issues.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 20:53:19+00:00
Why so much cynicism? The people working there genuinely care about this stuff. Maybe you disagree with technical decisions but why start by projecting your fantasies about their motivations?

RSS is OK for what it does, but it isn't realtime, isn't signed, and doesn't support arbitrary structured data. Whereas AT is signed, works with any application-defined data structures, and lets you aggregate over millions of users in real time with subsecond end-to-end latency.
by jshier | 2026-01-18 20:53:43+00:00
They found a weakness to justify an increase in violence to their base: the day care corruption. Despite the fact that most of that was found and prosecuted years ago, right-wing influencers were successfully able to bring it back to the forefront, and the administration jumped on it to justify an increased ICE presence, naturally leading to the violence we see. They didn't get the same thing in Chicago, where ICE avoided most of the areas likely to see violence in the first place. And they didn't leave Chicago, they just aren't publicizing it like they were.
by kcplate | 2026-01-18 20:54:05+00:00
> Specially when the the difference between human rights in US and China are becoming smaller

Really? Seems to me that whatever you think that is happening that’s bad in the US right now it kind of still pales in comparison to the cultural and religious prosecutions of folks like the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, Chinese Christians, and just about anyone who speaks against the CCP.
by ctoth | 2026-01-18 20:54:31+00:00
Honest question: what do you do when your spec has grown to over a megabyte?

Some things I've been doing:

- Move as much actual data into YML as possible.

- Use CEL?

- Ask Claude to rewrite pseudocode in specs into RFC-style constrained language?

How do you sync your spec and code both directions? I have some slash commands that do this but I'm not thrilled with them?

I tend to have to use Gemini for actually juggling the whole spec. Of course it's nice and chunked as much as it can be? but still. There's gonna need to be a whole new way of doing this.

If programming languages can have spooky language at a distance wait until we get into "but paragraph 7, subsection 5 of section G clearly defines asshole as..."

What does a structured language look like when it doesn't need mechanical sympathy?
YML + CEL is really powerful and underexplored but it's still just ... not what I'm actually wanting.
by VerifiedReports | 2026-01-18 20:54:34+00:00
Apple's guidelines have long been flouted by Apple itself, not to mention that they're replete with stupid ideas.

I've developed a few iOS apps, and one of my favorite Apple "guidelines" (which they essentially enforced at the OS level without developer choice) was that, upon launch, your app should show a fake UI while doing startup tasks in the background. The recommendation was part of Apple's admonishment against splash screens. Think about how dumb this is, and how it makes your app look inept. Apparently plenty of developers did, and shunned this dumb idea; because Apple then forced it on developers whenever technically possible.

Upon your app going into the background or being kicked out of memory, Apple will take a screenshot of what your app is showing. When the user returns to your application, Apple will present this old screen shot; but none of the controls on it will work. The user can tap away furiously, but nothing will happen. When the app returns to functionality, the screen will be replaced by the real UI.

The problem here goes beyond ineptitude into a major privacy issue. You can think you "closed" or changed what an application is showing before handing your device to someone, only to find that Apple still shows a screen shot of its old contents in the open-apps stack. This could be a disaster.
by giantg2 | 2026-01-18 20:55:08+00:00
What is the legality for US residents?

Right now Polymarket is subject to a federal agreement that they don't let US people participate. Apparently this is just a checkbox for the user to attest to. They don't even do IP geolocation, never mind payment checks.

So it's currently illegal for them to run this in the US. But is it illegal for users to participate?
by CrulesAll | 2026-01-18 20:55:37+00:00
Can't find evidence! They become eligible to vote after a single election cycle. And the farcical thing is, dotards like you will be hardest hit. You'll be the first to complain about lack of housing, never mind affordable housing, real wages falling, and the crime level skyrocketing per capita(Jesus even Denmark and the Netherlands released reports matching this.) Don't you find it at all odd, why the billionaires are all for this mass immigration? Why Musk, while claiming to not want mass immigration, threw a strop when his cheap labor was threatened? Because they will not be affected while gaining from cheap labor. It's you, buddy, and the rest of the working and middle class that gets pummelled by anarchic immigration.
by bshaughn | 2026-01-18 20:55:40+00:00
I completely agree insider trading is an issue, especially with the legality of sitting congressmen being able to day trade. But with the exception of elected officials voting for bad bills / policies, the "victim" is whomever loses money on those trade. Its reactive to world events, meaning the world events aren't being changed by the insider trader.

Polymarket is worse as it gives a mechanism for proactively changing the outcome of events to a much more extreme degree, simply because someone can make money on it.

A benign version of this would be NFL employees betting $1million on the color of gatorade in the Superbowl.

An insane version of this would be Trump issuing a single airstrike on Iran after having a friend or family member place a $10M bet on polymarket that pays out $1B. It completely erodes the obligation our government officials have to not act in their self interests.
by danabramov | 2026-01-18 20:55:51+00:00
To be clear, I'm using files in a relatively loose sense to focus on the "apps : formats are many-to-many" angle. AT does not literally implement a full filesystem. As the article progresses, I restrict some freedoms in the metaphor (no directories except collections, everything is JSON, etc). If you're interested in the actual low-level repository format, it is described here: https://atproto.com/specs/repository
by cursuve | 2026-01-18 20:56:15+00:00
I certainly feel the two party system has really hampered us and largely contributed to where we are today. I never feel actually represented, yet nearly every candidate has to align themselves officially with one party or the other and tow that party line. Sure there is individual variance between representatives, but it's still mostly within a set of boundaries the party is more or less okay with. It sucks, and is often why the "just go vote" ethos feels about as inept as any other action or non-action I can take...
by netghost | 2026-01-18 20:57:07+00:00
Hands down one of my favorite series. It's inventive, cynical, wry, dark, and entirely engrossing.

If you enjoy him, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Dogs of War series (1st and 3rd especially).

At some point you start to see his themes recycled across all these series, but it's still fun.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 20:57:25+00:00
> And Facism starts with civilians who act as enforcers and intimidators, not with the police. Hitler’s brown shirts and Mussolini's black shirts elevated the Facists to power. The SS came afterwords. Antifa is far closer to the brownshirts than any other organization in the US. Power through intimidation and chaos. Facist.

Here's a video of the people you refuse to recognise meet that exact description:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...

As you're not willing to listen to words, there's no point me wasting effort debunking the rest.
by jt2190 | 2026-01-18 20:57:33+00:00
That is not what Eric S. Raymond (esr) was describing.

GNUnix was developed using the Cathedral-style, Linux was developed using the bazaar-style. How Linux development was coordinated was thought to be impossible for something that had to be as solid as an operating system. The essay is a deep dive, exploring the conditions that the Linux project needed to ship an OS.
by nospice | 2026-01-18 20:59:55+00:00
> The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article)

Also, "knitting kits" were not a thing for most of my life. You'd just go and buy knitting supplies, which are really, just yarn needles and yarn. The idea of turning that into an overpriced boxed kit is a product of the TikTok / YT influencer era.
by volleyball | 2026-01-18 20:59:57+00:00
They embarrassed themselves by giving the prize to such an obvious neocon toady. It was a weak attempt at appeasing Trump and the neocons by using the prize to burnish another foreign intervention, while using the compliant press to spin it as a snub against him.

Got to hand it to Trump. He hit 3 birds with this one - He de-legitimized yet another European/International institution, while simultaneously using the same to bless his war of aggression. And he got half a nobel prize out of it too.
by sparrish | 2026-01-18 21:00:43+00:00
Because the 'protesters' are all riled up against 'the law' and will see these troops as opponents (like they see ICE). They'll attack the troops first and I firmly believe federal troops will respond (in defense) violently and in unison. That's the training.

Minnesota has no clue how serious a can of whoop-ass they're about to pry open.
by tpm | 2026-01-18 21:01:01+00:00
> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?

Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in physical branches and on the website, along with completely transparent information that it is all random, source of randomness was even some government audited hardware. The customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of random numbers would be generated and based on that a new 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4 in hour or something like that.

And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical locations) were often debating the form of the individual 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes, really.
by luckylion | 2026-01-18 21:01:21+00:00
I consider "understanding what people want when they well you" part of soft skills, and LLMs are good at that.

I've know a few non-developers who use AI to solve the things they need. Nothing huge, it's not anything amazing, but what impressed me is how well the process works for them. They describe what they want in very vague terms with a lot of contradictions and in convoluted stream-of-thought paragraphs. But it mostly works, and LLMs produce something that's very close to what they want, and they get to their desired result with a few iterations.
by abustamam | 2026-01-18 21:03:00+00:00
I think what often gets lost in the "AI is replacing developers" framing is that someone still has to technically steer the system.

I'm a lead engineer and I've barely written code directly in weeks, yet I've shipped side projects and continued shipping at work. My job hasn't disappeared. It's shifted up a layer. I spend my time designing the system, decomposing problems, setting constraints, probing tradeoffs, correcting plans, and iterating on architecture. The AI writes most of the tokens. I supply most of the technical judgment.

Tools like v0 or Replit hide some of this by baking rules and scaffolding into the product. But the work doesn't go away. Someone still has to know what to ask, what to doubt, what to measure, and when the AI is confidently wrong.

That role is not "customer who doesn't know what's possible." It's still a technical role. It just operates at a different abstraction layer.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-01-18 21:03:06+00:00
Non-flag based overflow checks are still pretty cheap. The overflow check is only 1 extra instruction for unsigned (both add and multiply), and 3/4 extra for signed overflow (see https://godbolt.org/z/nq1nb5Whr for details). It's also worth noting that in many cases, the overflow checks will be removable or simplify-able by the compiler entirely (e.g. if you're adding 1 or know the sign of one of the operands etc). As such, the extra couple instructions are likely worthwhile if it makes designing a wider core easier. Signed overflow instructions would be reasonable to add, but it's not like modern high performance cores are bottlenecked by scalar instructions that don't touch memory anyway.
by lizknope | 2026-01-18 21:03:15+00:00
I just think this sounds very elegant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/net

> Plan 9 does not have specialised system calls or ioctls for accessing the networking stack or networking hardware. Instead, the /net file system is used. Network connections are controlled by reading and writing control messages to control files. Sub-directories such as /net/tcp and /net/udp are used as an interface to their respective protocols.

> Combining the design concepts

> Though interesting on their own, the design concepts of Plan 9 were supposed to be most useful when combined. For example, to implement a network address translation (NAT) server, a union directory can be created, overlaying the router's /net directory tree with its own /net. Similarly, a virtual private network (VPN) can be implemented by overlaying in a union directory a /net hierarchy from a remote gateway, using secured 9P over the public Internet. A union directory with the /net hierarchy and filters can be used to sandbox an untrusted application or to implement a firewall.[43] In the same manner, a distributed computing network can be composed with a union directory of /proc hierarchies from remote hosts, which allows interacting with them as if they are local.

> When used together, these features allow for assembling a complex distributed computing environment by reusing the existing hierarchical name system

I remember first setting up NAT or IP masquerading around 1998. It seemed like an ugly hack and some custom protocols did not work.

I use a bunch of VPNs now and it still seems like a hack.

The Plan 9 way just seems very clean although you now have to secure the server more strongly because you are exporting filesystems from it and others are mounting it.