MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bwestergard | 2026-03-14 18:25:40+00:00
"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.

The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.

What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".

Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.

"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."

With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-14 18:26:08+00:00
So there are two basic versions of UBI:

1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and

2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation.

As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that.

A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is.

So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing. That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy.

If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY
by specproc | 2026-03-14 18:26:20+00:00
I spent a fair bit of time in the former Soviet Union, what happened there is instructive for what comes next.

I think we will see, across the West broadly, to varying extents:

- peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)

- widespread looting of public assets, a new oligarchal class minted

- total destruction of the middle class, particularly those with ties to government and NGOs (I'm in this camp and miserable for it)

- at least one civil war, lots of territorial disputes kicking off, separatism

- breakdown of law and order, local gangsters as local authorities

- mass ex-migration, ethnic cleansing

- weak governments, coups, demagogues, vassalage

- hyperinflation and scammy get rich quick scams (watch crypto)
by jmward01 | 2026-03-14 18:27:01+00:00
I totally missed/muddled the 'clarity' and 'unity' arguments in my response. It would have been a great final point. There is a big difference between being direct and being clear. When there is an issue, what I am often trying to communicate is my goal to get information and to get the rest of the team on the same page. I am seeking clarity and unity and the tool I am using is communication. But there is a difference between seeking clarity/unity and being direct. My points stand about the process of thought and the style of communication there. You can be clear without being direct and being direct is often not the right answer and not even possible.

In a previous life I was a pilot. Communication in aviation is exceptionally clear and direct. It is that way because time matters and understanding matters but also because the vast majority of situations have been clearly identified, thought out and formalized well before you are in the air. I suspect other environments have this too, like an operating room. In training we had a system of 'shacks' where if you messed up on the radio in the pattern the day before you owed a 'shack' (a beer to the common fridge) by the next day. The comms there were ridiculously direct and clear but also incredibly formalized. There were exact words for exact situations and the tree of possible interactions, and the communication required, were almost 100% memorized. However, as soon as things got a little out of the norm so did the comms. You really can't have perfect 'direct' communication with dynamic systems. The shack system was great because it shows both sides of the communication world. It emphasized the incredibly direct communication world but then when your mistakes came to light there generally was a lot of indirect communication involved discussing the shack.

I would hate to think that software design is so well thought out that all communication could be formalized like aviation or an operating room. It would mean the age of the code assistant really is going to take engineering away because anything so perfectly formalized can also easily be learned by an LLM.
by righthand | 2026-03-14 18:27:04+00:00
This is overly optimistic and a "it hasn't happened to me yet so who cares" view. World War 3 has started and DHS is killing Americans and rounding up people in the street because one side was able to convince the country that the only thing to do was destroy and hurt a lot of people including themselves. That's not better than my past and it is significantly worse in a lot of ways. I haven't even received a cost of living increase in my salary in the last 5 years, let alone watch things and places I enjoy in life be dismantled so someone can make money off the attainment of bread.
by autoexec | 2026-03-14 18:27:07+00:00
How is this not fraud, or at least false advertising? If I'm paying money to chat with a specific sex worker how is it even legal to let some random dude in a third world country pretend to be the person I'm supposed to be talking to? I've never personally engaged in these types of systems, but I don't think there's a problem with them as long as they are run honestly. It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
by baniii | 2026-03-14 18:28:10+00:00
Windows to-do list app that lives in your system tray. It lets you quickly add, manage, and track tasks without interrupting your workflow. Krisp keeps your task list always within reach, just a click away from the taskbar. With a minimal, distraction-free interface, Krisp stays out of your way so you can stay focused on what matters.

Fully open source C++ & WinUi project
by input_sh | 2026-03-14 18:28:23+00:00
I would argue the empire already collapsed, about a year ago when DOGE was tasked with killing every form of soft power that were put in place to present the country in the best possible light across the world.

Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
Ask HN: How do you enforce least-privilege when an API token has full access?
by ricberw | 2026-03-14 18:28:25+00:00
Curious how people handle least-privilege access when integrating third-party APIs that only offer a single coarse permission scope (or limited scopes that are still over-provisioned for a specific use case).

A lot of services expose APIs where the token basically grants everything the integration can do (read/write/delete across the entire account), making it hard to enforce the principle of least privilege internally when multiple internal services or agents are calling the same API.

In those cases, do you...

Put an API proxy/gateway in front of the third-party API to enforce granular permissions?

Use RBAC/ABAC rules in a proxy layer to filter which endpoints/actions can be called?

Just accept the coarse permissions and risk associated?

Something else?

Would love to hear real architectures people are using in production, especially when the upstream API itself doesn’t support fine-grained scopes.
by clsh_dev | 2026-03-14 18:28:40+00:00
Nice. The "suppress notification if you're already focused on that pane" is a good detail, that's the kind of thing that separates useful from annoying.

I've been working on a similar problem (knowing when a terminal session needs attention) and settled on a 2-second interval comparing the last activity timestamp. If a PTY has been idle for >2s after previously being active, it probably wants input. Not perfect but surprisingly effective for Claude Code since it has distinct "working" and "waiting for input" phases.

Does the hooks approach catch all the cases? I'm thinking about things like Claude getting stuck in a confirmation prompt where it technically hasn't "stopped" but isn't making progress either.
by cptskippy | 2026-03-14 18:29:27+00:00
> ...your scenario just does not happen.

It happens to us all of the time.

My partner is on a conference call, I hop in the car to go run an errand. Suddenly I'm on a conference call.

My partner is in the kitchen listening to a podcast, I hop in our other car and suddenly I'm listening to a podcast.

My partner is sitting in the car having a driveway moment, I arrive home with the other car and now I'm having her driveway moment.

My partner is on a conference call at her desk and picks up her phone to respond to a message and then you hear "shit shit shit, hold on a moment!" and then frantic typing and clicking.
by throwaway439080 | 2026-03-14 18:29:29+00:00
Yes and no. I think the interesting thing about this story is how it's been presented: AI as a scapegoat for incompetence.

The police made an inexcusable mistake out of carelessness. They simply couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes fact-checking the facial recognition match, and it caused catastrophic harm to an innocent woman.

And what's the headline? "AI did this". It's a new and exciting way for people to shirk accountability for their actions. We're already seeing it in the reporting on the Iranian school bombed by the United States: blame AI for selecting the target, and not the humans in the loop who failed to do the most basic due diligence.
by larsiusprime | 2026-03-14 18:29:43+00:00
This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.

https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-03-14 18:30:08+00:00
I can't tell if you are serious or not. Lets assume for a moment that there was once a benefit to BLS survey methodology ( I would argue otherwise, but w/e ). Is it a good methodology today?

So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?
by HEmanZ | 2026-03-14 18:30:12+00:00
There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.

EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.

If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
by _heimdall | 2026-03-14 18:30:35+00:00
It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down. This spans back into Biden's term as well so it isn't one party either.

With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates. For a valid measure worth considering I'd also expect the stat to be released later when revisions are less likely because more actual data has been collected
by Havoc | 2026-03-14 18:30:38+00:00
Don't think I'm doing anything particularly novel.

Using a mix of models - GLM5, MinMax 2.5 and Claude Sonnet/Opus - they find different issues

Spending fair bit of time in spec'ing things out and running all three models over it to suggest improvements / flaws & iterating till all three are happy. Same at end - look at code & suggest stability improvements. The actual writing code is GLM5 - once properly spec'd out it can generally just hammer away at it till its done

And doing a lot of microservice style architecture. Think chains of containers talking to each other over APIs
by atmosx | 2026-03-14 18:30:49+00:00
In all honesty that’s not even the worst part.

He signed that “never again” letter, completely buying into the exceptionalism of one group over all others… They kind of threw the baby out of the water and moved into Heidegger territory quickly. They seemed to put “who” over “what” very, very hastily. One would expect an enlightened mind to understand the difference and maybe phrase his concerns a bit more “inclusively”. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t a mistake.

Anyway, we’ll take the good parts and move on.

RIP.
by estimator7292 | 2026-03-14 18:31:21+00:00
Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever.

Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them.

Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-14 18:31:28+00:00
> It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science.

When all they see is it being used to push narratives, they'd rather not have it at all.

Also, "There Are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" dates to the 1800s. This is nothing new.
by cwbrandsma | 2026-03-14 18:31:31+00:00
So I was part of a company that did this. They used XML as a programming language, then built apps to manage the "code". This was all done to create mobile apps for old Windows Phone devices back in the Windows Phone 5 and 6 days (before iPhone).

Because of the tooling, you weren't actually writing the XML either, you used a custom built editor (a tree view with a property panel). It all sucked. I was looking at the thing trying to figure out if I could create an intermediate language with my own "compiler" to get around the xml editors they build.

Anyway, every developer hated it. All of them. Well, everyone but the guy that created the monstrosity anyway.
by layla5alive | 2026-03-14 18:31:38+00:00
I'm getting so tired of seeing "the law doesn't allow" x thing that is good for citizens but bad for corporations. We are supposed to have a representative government by the people and for the people and by gosh what we actually have is so far from that! When will we collectively say "enough is enough!" And rewrite the laws to actually be by the people and for the people!?
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-03-14 18:32:08+00:00
> It'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.

There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be:

To Canada: Statements about Canada last year.

To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year

To the Middle East: Current events.
by convolvatron | 2026-03-14 18:32:25+00:00
its a measurement process of a large and complicated system. some of the things you cite are actually signs that the system was actually kind of working. CPI is a basket of indicators, there is no way that's ever going to capture the whole picture.

the best we can ask for is apolitical appointees whose goal is to improve the process and transparency about how the data was collected, publication of the raw numbers, and publication of the methodology used to synthesize it.

my understanding that the appointment process has been corrupted, but do we know to what degree transparency has?
by anigbrowl | 2026-03-14 18:32:31+00:00
The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed.

This is a Bad Thing. Sure when I do grocery shopping I keep an eye out for bargains, but I also don't want to have my buying choices overly shaped by the retailer so I end up spending money on stuff I don't really want. I especially don't want to deal with coupons and buy-this-get-that offers. Planning out what to eat and remembering to get what I need is enough mental effort without having to spend time on discountmaxxing which is really just another kind of advertising.

acceptable range [...] Cheese $3 / lb

I don't know what kind of cheese you're getting for $3/lb but I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you.
by derektank | 2026-03-14 18:32:35+00:00
COVID damaged the average American. The Biden administration (and the preceding Trump administration) did not perform perfectly by any means, but US inflation was below that of most other OECD countries. Real wages took a serious hit and I understand people being mad about that, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the supply chain disruptions don’t cause real living standards to fall at least a little bit.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-03-14 18:33:05+00:00
It was a stretch, so you're right to not take me seriously.

I imagine any large about of RAM in audio equipment would strictly be for devices/functions that buffer large amounts of data as opposed to just decoding it.

An old Akai S1000 sampler I had a long time ago had slots for memory modules (some weird proprietary slot IIRC), but that was a musical instrument, not really a player of any kind.
by 9rx | 2026-03-14 18:33:09+00:00
A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.

Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?

If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.
by Bridged7756 | 2026-03-14 18:33:15+00:00
This is notorious in platforms like reddit, with people jumping in to suggest no name products in response to questions. It doesn't help that reddit allows private profiles, thus allowing astroturfers to get away with it. Also, another case is LLM astroturfing, we're bombarded with doomerism and obituaries about programming, some of said opinions are subtler, short comments, the most dangerous ones, because little by little they jab you, though the most conspicuous ones are easy to identify. And then there's the political astroturfing. In my country smokescreens are the defacto tool, but it is suspicious of the amount of high quality edits and memes that came out about the Epstein files, essentially cementing him as a "meme" and not a monster that abused minors.
by bawolff | 2026-03-14 18:33:31+00:00
> She would be set targets to earn the model hundreds of dollars worth of sales of pictures and videos during her shift.

So lets assume $300 per shift, so with an 8 hour shift, that would be about $37.50/hour of merchandise per hour. So the workers makes about 5.3%. Google says standard for sales workers paid on comission normally get 5-10%.

So its possible this is within what would be normal for a low end non-salary commision job, but it depends on what "hundreds" really mean. Of course i think normally for commision only sales jobs you move much more expensive product to make it worth your while.

Otoh they probably deserve a lot higher than normal sales commision given the nature of the job and all the stuff they undoubtedly have to put up with.
by fhdkweig | 2026-03-14 18:33:43+00:00
And the worst part is, I don't think we will ever close this door. Even if the Democrats are in charge of the next presidency, the temptation of easy money will be too strong to resist. It wasn't done in the past, because it was assumed that the people would push back severely, but now that it is clear that they won't, it is full speed ahead.
by michaelchisari | 2026-03-14 18:33:45+00:00
The collapse of the Soviet Union was ahistorical in many ways. It's rare that collapse of an empire can be pinpointed to a single day. And what you saw was a result of shock therapy imposed from the outside. I doubt that would happen to the US.

It's unlikely collapse will be felt as a singular, apocalyptic event. More like a slow, steady loss of influence and excess wealth. Countries on the periphery stop considering the empire's perspectives before making their own decisions. Other trading partners emerge. Bridges stop getting maintained until they're no longer usable.

And soft power declines. Imagine a day when the biggest pop star in the US, someone on the scale of Michael Jackson or Madonna nationally, is virtually unknown outside of its borders.

There are reasons to believe the American empire is in decline, but I maintain this will look more like Britain. It could take 50 years before American fully realize it.

Thankfully, that means there's plenty of time to reverse or mitigate the trends, or to make a decision to strengthen the Republic over the Empire.
by pessimizer | 2026-03-14 18:34:26+00:00
> "Free speech" means you have freedom from retribution from the government.

No, it doesn't. The concept of "free speech" isn't limited to prior restraint, you're mistaking it for the dominant precedent in judicial interpretations of the the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.

> It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit,

Nobody asked you, or claimed this.

> nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone.

You should look up common carrier previsions. If we had to depend on your interpretation of law or morality, they'd be able to shut off your electricity for speech violations.

> It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.

If that's all it meant, it would be dumb and useless. What's more, it doesn't mean that, you can be arrested for screaming on the side of the road.

You're wrong in every way you could be wrong.