MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fao_ | 2026-02-10 17:03:38+00:00
Incorrect. ICE is built off the background of 30-50 years of propaganda against "immigrants", most of it completely untrue.

The same is done for "benefits scroungers", despite the evidence being that welfare fraud only accounts for approximately 1-5% of the cost of administering state welfare, and state welfare would be about 50%+ cheaper to administer if it was a UBI rather than being means-tested. In fact, much of the measures that are implemented with the excuse of "we need to stop benefits scroungers", such as testing if someone is disabled enough to work or not, etc. are simulatenously ineffective and make up most of the cost.

Nevertheless, "benefits scroungers" has entered the zeitgeist in the UK (and the US) because of this propaganda.

The same is true for propaganda against people who have migrated to the UK/US. Many have done so as asylum seekers under horrifying circumstances, and many die in the journey. However, instead of empathy, the media greets them with distaste and horror — dehumanising them in a fundamentally racist way, specifically so that a movement that grants them rights as a workforce never takes off, so that companies can employ them for zero-hour contracts to do work in conditions that are subhuman, and pay them substantially less than minimum wage (It's incredibly beneficial for the economy, unfortunately).
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-02-10 17:03:50+00:00
The problem with these is always who pays for fraud.

With credit cards, they actually claw that money back from the merchant, and then if the merchant can't pay they just eat it themselves.

So the merchant has to work in fraud rates into their pricing, and the credit card company has to work in fraud rates that the merchant can't cover into their rates.

It always seemed toxic it to me that the merchants are the one's responsible, despite the fact that they easily have the least power to do anything about it. But the ease of payment processing, and the number of people who just won't buy it if they can't use a card, outweighs dealing with fraud I guess.
Ask HN: What's your opinion on the Swisscows search engine?
by palata | 2026-02-10 17:04:08+00:00
I have been a happy user of Kagi for years, and I was looking into supporting an alternative for a while. So I went for Qwant (based in France), which is nice, but I miss some of Kagi's features like being able to pay and not have ads (which I block anyway) and some customisation (like giving more or less weight to a specific website or setting a redirection from reddit to old.reddit).

Swisscows (based in Switzerland) seems to be more like this. Similar to Qwant, it seems like it's backed partly with their own crawler and partly (mostly?) with Bing. Similar to Kagi, I can pay for it, and I want to support that model.

Do you have any experience with Swisscows?
by thfuran | 2026-02-10 17:04:08+00:00
>But the context this type of an alias should exist in is one where a string isn't turned into a PhoneNumber until you've validated it.

Even if you don't do any validation as part of the construction (and yeah, having a separate type for validated vs unvalidated is extremely helpful), universally using type aliases like that pretty much entirely prevents the class of bugs from accidentally passing a string/int typed value into a variable of the wrong stringy/inty type, e.g. mixing up different categories of id or name or whatever.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 17:04:17+00:00
Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
by consp | 2026-02-10 17:04:28+00:00
There is also a major difference as I understand it. They need to be resolved at the end of a certain period. There is a legal difference from Credit cards as in there is no continual liability and thus no continued line of credit. Getting a true credit card is also a lot harder here (not France) than a deferred payment card (usually 1 month) and has stricter credit checks.
by hwillis | 2026-02-10 17:04:57+00:00
> An earth-like planet orbiting a different star would likely have evolved photoreceptor arrangements which match that star instead.

No, not really- the limitation is chemical, not evolutionarily-driven. Earth is very well lit in infrared, but it's very difficult to make a chemical that is biologically useful for seeing infrared because the wavelengths are just too long. Its very challenging to do more than the most primitive kinds of sensing in infrared. If our sun was much dimmer, we would probably be blind, but if not our eyes would still not see in far infrared. Same goes for ultraviolet- the energy is too high and molecular bonds are too weak. Seeing in visible light is a reversible reaction, but ultraviolet wouldn't be.

What you're saying is true of ocean animals, especially in the deep sea. They don't see red very well or at all, but the evolutionary pressure against seeing red is not terribly high except very deep where food is very limited.

There also is evolutionary pressure on our vision, but it has nothing to do with the sun. We're twice as sensitive to green since it is so common and important, but green comes from photosynthesis and not from the color of the sun. In a way, we are most sensitive to the least important color of light- the color that is not absorbed by plants. The wasted, useless byproduct of sunlight is what lets us identify food.

Plus, we actually basically only see in blue and green. The overlap between rods and red/green cones is huge. "red" and "green" as we perceive them are mostly fabrications of our neural circuits- if we were seeing them how our photoreceptors actually receive light, all shades of green/red would be very strongly mixed together. All shades of red would look significantly green except for the very farthest reds, which would look very dark because of low sensitivity.
by Groxx | 2026-02-10 17:05:09+00:00
Unless you use Cloudflare (or roughly any other DDOS protection system), in which case you're letting those companies MITM all requests on purpose. Protected between you and Cloudflare by PFS and any other acronym you like.

I think the odds that Cloudflare hasn't been forced into data snooping by the government are approximately zero. It's the by far the biggest, juiciest target.
by mlhpdx | 2026-02-10 17:05:13+00:00
I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC) when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it, then found the source code for the game and randomly started changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and simply kept at it until I wasn't.

I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing.

I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore.

That's what it's always been about.
by acjohnson55 | 2026-02-10 17:05:14+00:00
I regret using the term "one-shot", because my reality isn't really that. It's more that the first shot gets the code 80-90% of the way there, usually, and it short-circuits a ton of the "code archaeology" I would normally have to do to get to that point.

Some bugs really can be one-shotted, but that's with the benefit of a lot of scaffolding our company has built and the prompting process. It's not as simple as Claude Code being able to do this out of the box.
by stephc_int13 | 2026-02-10 17:05:15+00:00
And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny.
This is a bigger issue than it may seem.

Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.

That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
by warunsl | 2026-02-10 17:05:29+00:00
> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.

Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-10 17:05:32+00:00
And you can escape asterisks using backslashes:

Italic

*Escaped asterisks*

\*Double-Escaped asterisks\*

*Italic*

\*Escaped asterisks\*

\\*Double-Escaped asterisks\\*

(tomhow seems to have goofed his escapes above. As I've done many times myself...)
by Windchaser | 2026-02-10 17:05:35+00:00
This doesn't really address their counterarguments.

If the new-fangled "automobile" is too unreliable or slow to be useful, then yes, it might be best to stick with the horse for now.

And yes, automobiles were pretty bad for a while there. It was 22 years from the first automobile to the Model T, and even the Model T was prone to breaking down a lot.
by lapcat | 2026-02-10 17:05:50+00:00
What you just said seems reasonable. However, what the earlier commenter said, which led to this subthread, seems unreasonable: those people unwilling to try the tools "are absolutely going to get left in the dust."

Returning to the iOS analogy, though, there was only a short period of time in history when a random developer with a flashlight or fart app could become successful in the App Store. Nowadays, such a new app would flop, if Apple even allowed it, as you admitted: "You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different." The software market in general is not new. There are already a huge number of competitors. Thus, when you say, "This is the time to go start a company, or build every weird idea that you were never going to get around to," it's unclear why this would be the case. Perhaps the barrier to entry for competitors has been lowered, yet the competition is as fierce as ever (unlike in the early App Store).

In any case, there's a huge difference between "the barrier to entry has been lowered" and "those who don't use LLMs will be left in the dust". I think the latter is ridiculous.

Where are the original flashlight and fart app developers now? Hopefully they made enough money to last a lifetime, otherwise they're back in the same boat as everyone else.
by addcn | 2026-02-10 17:05:59+00:00
love the shout but git-ai is decidedly not trying to replace the SCMs. there are teams building code review tools (commercial and internal) on top of the standard and I don't think it'll be long before GitHub, GitLab and the usual suspects start supporting it since folks the community have already been hacking it into Chrome extensions - this one got play on HN last week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871473
by esseph | 2026-02-10 17:06:09+00:00
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.

These were designed to solve different problems.

PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.

Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).

Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc

Snap happened in 2014

Flatpak in 2015

So you've got about 10 years of catch-up ;)
by jghn | 2026-02-10 17:06:19+00:00
I would argue it's the other way around. If I take a string I believe to be a phone number and wrap it in a `PhoneNumber` type, and then later I try to pass it in as the wrong argument to a function like say I get order of name & phone number reversed, it'll complain. Whereas if both name & phone number are strings, it won't complain.

That's what I see as the primary value to this sort of typing. Enforcing the invariants is a separate matter.
by x3ro | 2026-02-10 17:06:26+00:00
> For many consumers there isn't sufficient money in the account to settle all the one-time and ongoing transactions they are liable for -- credit cards are giving you a revolving loan, there's risk it will not be repaid, and that risk ends up reflected in processing fees

This is really much less of a thing in Europe, or at the very least in Germany and Spain. Mostly it's the overdraft from banks that you can use as what you call a revolving loan. Most of the visa and mastercards I've had in my life simply debit from my main account.
by malux85 | 2026-02-10 17:06:29+00:00
Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.

In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.

But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"

Very different things
by instagib | 2026-02-10 17:06:48+00:00
I had an install of a heat pump slightly oversized for the work trailer used. Every day it was below 30-40F 0C-4C, the pre-heater would kick on. A heat strip inside the heat pump.

It would take 30min to an hour to get heat out of the heat pump. We had to get portable heaters to supplement the heat generated and while the pre-heater was running.

Then in summer it could not handle cooling so we needed an additional loud window AC.
by ziml77 | 2026-02-10 17:06:52+00:00
I went with CachyOS. It's based off of Arch and compiles packages with flags for more modern CPUs. They also build extra packages that aren't normally provided by Arch (always nice to rely a little less on the AUR). And their default scheduler is supposed to provide a smoother gaming experience, though they have a selection of schedulers if you don't like that one.
by dreadsword | 2026-02-10 17:06:57+00:00
Current AI is the tip of the spear, but the fundamental nature of our economy will blunt that tip, and adoption will be slower than most anticipate. Purchasing cycles. Compliance. Board approvals, budgets, legal sign off, regulation, test phases, etc etc. Were still a long way from Accelerando.

Consider: There are still things that can't be self-serviced on the INTERNET - anything with moderate complexity or risk.
by mannanj | 2026-02-10 17:07:10+00:00
For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and an AI replaces us fully.
by throwawayohio | 2026-02-10 17:07:22+00:00
What?

This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest...

As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...

These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.

My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.

I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
by supern0va | 2026-02-10 17:07:23+00:00
>With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them.

That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
by davidw | 2026-02-10 17:07:25+00:00
50 myself, and started coding with a Commodore 64, but only really picked it up seriously with the advent of open source software, and that feeling of being able to dig around any component of the system I wanted to was exhilarating.

I think that's one of the biggest things that gives me pause about AI: the fact that, if they prove to be a big productivity boost, you're beholden to huge corporations, and not just for a one-time purchase, but on an ongoing basis.

Maybe the open source models will improve, but if keeps being driven by raw compute power and big numbers, it seems to tilt things very much in favor of those with lots and lots of capital to deploy.
by pmontra | 2026-02-10 17:07:32+00:00
Cash flow and fraud, yes. Credit, not much in most of Europe. AFAIK nobody has had something close to real credit cards until recently. They were called credit cards but it was a debit card with payment and deferred to the end of the month and backed only by the cash in the bank account linked to the card. I guess that no financial institution did like to risk any money on the behavior of European customers.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-02-10 17:07:37+00:00
Starting code when I was 14, sold my first bit of code at 17, which was written in 6502 assembler.

40+ years later, been through many BASICs, C, C++ (CFront on onwards) and now NodeJS, and I still love writing code.

Tinkering with RPi, getting used to having a coding assistant, looking forward to having some time to work on other fun projects and getting back into C++ sooooon.

What's not to love?
by tosti | 2026-02-10 17:07:49+00:00
The situation was such that they lived far off because their city was destroyed. There would've been no more offspring. Oddly enough, Lot is a man and his daughters slept with their father.

Anyway, the sex was incestuous and therefore your conclusion is invalid because it disregards that fact. Of course when adults of different families have sex it's not child abuse, that goes without saying.

But you do have a good point that the age of the 2 daughters wasn't mentioned.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-02-10 17:07:54+00:00
The historical luddites are literally the human death drive externalized. Reject them and all of their garbage ideas with extreme prejudice.

Related, the word “meritocracy” was coined in a book which was extremely critical of the whole concept. AI thankfully destroys it. Good riddance, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
by Hizonner | 2026-02-10 17:08:00+00:00
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate".

You are wilfully unaware.

> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.

The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.

Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.

Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.

When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.

If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.

> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.

In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.

The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.

> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.

You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.

ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
by achierius | 2026-02-10 17:08:02+00:00
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.

This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
by sjm-lbm | 2026-02-10 17:08:02+00:00
Also worth noting that who owns the risk is a regulatory question, not a technical or product one - and, like all regulatory questions, is different for different countries/regions.

Chip and pin and NFC transitions took off much quicker outside the US because merchants generally owned more of the chargeback risk than in the US, and therefore were willing to update their POS equipment accordingly.

Risk (like debt) is another place where a US-centric view will likely lead you to misunderstand the purpose of Visa/MC.