skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't expect people to learn how a piece table, line array, rope, or gap buffer work in order to use a text editor built around one. If you had to understand some editor's core data structure in order to use it effectively, we'd say that editor had a terrible UI and warn people away from it.

We don't expect people to learn what a VFS is and how it works before plugging in a thumb drive. If some OS expected its users to master such arcana as a matter of course, we'd think of it as a mere curiosity - not suitable for practical use.

You don't have to know how HTTP or HTML work to use a browser. You can just click on things, and that's OK! If some browser made you learn what the DOM is and how to manipulate it before letting you into google.com, wouldn't we say "that browser is crap"?

Only git receives this special pleading: "its interface isn't terrible! You just have to learn all about how its internal implementation works, and then you will be able to use it effectively" - as though that isn't just a description of what a terrible interface is.
Regarding housing the problems are the same everywhere where the same "housing is an investment" policies have been propped up by lending. What an insane idea. We can all get wealthy by buying houses from each other with ever increasing prices. In reality the only winners in this game are a) banks b) early buyers who can cash out, liquidate and move somewhere cheaper.

In my country of origin housing is now so expensive that it takes 2 median income lifetimes to pay for it. Of course you can find cheaper housing in rural countryside or in some deadbeat towns but then there's basically no work either, so at minimum you need a car to commute. For someone making a below median income operating a vehicle is easily -300€ / mo cost.

And the funny thing the country is 93% forest. Unzoned land is plentiful and costs nothing but after zoning the price goes up to 20k € per each m². The townships and counties have a monopoly on zoning and use that to milk the constituents for money. Of course that money is all away from other spending so local communities and small time businesses (such as restaurants, hair dressers etc) are all taking a hit since (with the recent greedflation) people simply have no more purchasing power left over.

In my current country Germany, here in Bayern the situation is exactly the same. In Munich a small unit in is at minimum 1-1.5m € and it'll be bare bones. The cost is insane. At the same time there's a shortage of all kinds of laborers. How does a "bus driver" afford to live here. Well, they don't.

The whole economic system is biased against younger generations and while the older generations live longer they accumulate all the wealth. They are a large representative of the population (due to the upside down age pyramid) and active voters so they of course vote for politicians who will not topple this order.

In the past all empires have fallen when the middle class has fallen. When there's a critical mass of people with nothing to lose and who feel like the system has failed them the heads will roll and revolutions will begin.
American English is shifting strongly in the direction of always using "is" when the subject is dummy "there".

It's also shifting to using schwa rather than FLEECE in "the" when it is followed by a vowel.

On the internet, the -en form of verbs seems to be disappearing entirely, with constructions like "I should have went [wherever]".
As a non American, I've always struggled to understand the "American Dream".

It is about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and going from poor to wealthy by using the opportunities that the US provides. Is that a correct assessment?

The problem I have with that is that it doesn't in any way include bringing your community up with you or letting your wealth be reinvested back into the environment in which you were poor. It solves the issue only for that single person without addressing why the issue existed in the first place. It seems to be inherently "selfish", no?
Yes I’d agree.
Just to add: inverse of ribbon microphone is ribbon speaker [1].

[1] https://www.psaudio.com/blogs/pauls-posts/how-a-ribbon-speak...
Sad to see it getting flagged here, especially given the context of my post. I do appreciate that it got shared here and all the comments so far. I put a lot of work into this and I really appreciate that people are sharing it around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_photography
Yes, why don’t you “just” get a job at BigTech?

The chances of that are approximately 0%, despite being a much better than average developer/IT person.
Being on the left, but specifying on social issues suggests you want someone else to pay to solve those social issues.
Which is all different from “running a forum mocking drug enforcement capability” which makes it sound like he was a satirist.
Consider this too next time you read about a billionaire supporting charity (besides their motives likely being tax breaks). For example Zuckerberg donated $75 million to a San Francisco hospital, which was plastered all over the news. Proportionally it's less than what the average person spends on charity a year.

Even Bill Gates who donated tens of billions still sits on an unimaginable amount of money. And unlike your grandpa leaving $10k to charity and getting a honorable mention plaque, Gates's donation buys him and his heirs significant influence over entire nations.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-philant...
How? the problem is the same: a need for rapid industrial development to grow the economy. The solutions are the same: government picks winners, which is how an upstart like OpenAI can be paired with a dinosaur like Oracle. The latter's CEO of course being a long time friend of Trump.
Give the stock to the government. Maybe to destroy some USD if you want you could make companies pay tax half in stock and half in cash.
Pleading to emotion works only if the target audience is not ideologically possessed, and by ideologically, I mean that they hate the mere thought of voting democrat even if they support the democrat’s agenda.

The Democrat agenda has far far higher approval ratings than Democrats, and that says a lot about the current state of affairs.
I went through similar time sinks of micro-optimizing my devices to try to game myself into not getting distracted. What finally worked for me:

- realizing I traded one waste-of-time activity (doom scrolling) for another (device/app fiddling to prevent the former)

- realizing that the clock is ticking towards ultimate death and therefore time is precious

- recognizing when I'm looking for a distraction and, rather than automatically giving into it, asking myself one question:

"Do I want to be thoughtful and disciplined with how I spend my time, or not?"

And then being honest with myself, listening to my answer, and respecting the outcome of my choice.

For me, I want to be a disciplined person. When I'm not, I let myself down. Happiness for me is not letting myself down.
he promised to free Ross at the libertarian national convention. promises made, promises kept.
https://x.com/CroissantEth/status/1856551964156342303
Just to be clear, a pardon does not expunge or erase one's criminal record.

> life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.

I think you should compare it as: life in prison was too harsh, but 10 years is too lenient.
hE's HiTlEr!!

Every time. I lived in Austin in the early 2000s and have no idea how many "BUSH=HITLER" bumper stickers I saw. It was stupid then, it's stupid now.
The Internet is (once again) awash with IoT botnets delivering record DDoSes
Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Is this word being used correctly?

au·tar·ky
/ˈôˌtärkē/
noun
economic independence or self-sufficiency.
"rural community autarchy is a Utopian dream"
a country, state, or society which is economically independent.
plural noun: autarkies; plural noun: autarchies
8k-year-old bone powder cooking practice in ancient China
Ross Ulbricht is the top level drug dealer GP is referring to.
yup. it basically becomes a ulysses pact with myself to attempt to make it so i can't just undo the restrictions i set up. what good are the blocking attempts if you can disable them when you get bored? you have to set them up with the intention and foresight that you will try to disable them
Roughly speaking, when I've looked into this comparison, for near-median earners, they're better off in the UK, because of things like healthcare. But when you look at the higher-earning roles, especially engineering or software, then the different in pay more than makes up for the increased cost of living (i.e. a higher percentage of your pay may go towards cost of living, but the smaller percentage of money left over is still larger in absolute terms). There's other tradeoffs in terms of work culture and so on, though (e.g. you get much more holiday in the UK).
I've created Austen [0] to generate relationships between book characters using Mermaid.

[0] https://github.com/herol3oy/austen
I intend to! And to wrap it in a gem; I’ve got it partly there, but it’s a currently a mess as I ran into a bunch of “oh that didn’t actually work” problems at various points. I’ll post a link later…

Edit: Ach, sorry - it's going to be awhile, when I went to roll my own I did it inside my project, so it's not even close to being available as a gem :/
AI Verticals – A Footnote in History
This was a key insight Alexander Hamilton had after growing up in the West Indies seeing the worst of slavery and then moving to the American colonies and receiving a classical education.

The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.
Is AI going to physically check your breathing, check diabetics skin and feet, do surgery, robots are nowhere near good enough to do complex surgery.
I'm curious how much of the answer to this is simply because it sounds nicer? That is, the search is largely for technical reasons for something to be so. But, couldn't it just as realistically be that it is an aesthetic path that leads to this?

I see one of the comments says it rolls off the tongue nicely. I feel that that is far far more of the reason than people are opting for in the rest of the discussions.
Pretty much yes!
No, this is true for most random people. My net worth is largely tied up in assets like my car and house - if everybody else decides these are worthless, because I live in a "bad neighborhood", or if they decide that they prefer new cars way more, I stand to lose huge proportions of my net worth.
Unless you're already minted beyond measure, selling anything at any time for $1.8B is a great deal, you and everyone you ever cared about are set for life.
> Again, just look at opioid addiction for very clear evidence of the opposite effect.

I was playing devil's advocate, but agree there is more culpability to a seller if the drug overwhelms your ability to make the choice in the first place- however a lot of very illegal drugs do not do this. More so if you're using emotionally manipulative ads and selling methods as the alcohol and pharma industry do.
These all seem to reference the same model, the actual studies are all pay walled, and there’s no way to get access to the model. Priesthood vibes
> you don't realize how awful the ones in big box stores are until someone makes you a proper one

Every time I find myself stocking another kitchen I'm reminded how 99% of what's sold in American stores now is trash, esp. when it comes to the can opener and pepper mill. Just finding a mill that doesn't litter microplastics on everything is an endless treasure hunt, before even considering aesthetics and capacity.
I think you just nailed why I have been having a hard time with my photo set. It's the lighting. Well crap, because I don't have access to the statue or studio again. Thanks for the tip.
it’s also turbocharged by the number of people that are descendants of immigrants
I've been waiting for https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824 ("Revert commit that removed Russian providers") to be resolved, but it seems to have stalled.

Open source does not work as I envisioned, I guess.
I don't have any social media and don't travel that often. When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these short form videos at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events, I definitely felt existential doom.

Couldn't help but look at everyone the same as all the people on the space ships in Wall-E.
Yeah this was one of the things about terraform that I never liked. After spending all day writing my imperative code, I’m going to write some declarative JSON to deploy it? Why?

There’s a good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42663231
Thanks for pointing that out, I missed the username change.
Just to include this in the discussion, here's some major features that have been added over the last year (but there's a huge amount of small ones too):

- End-to-End State Encryption - lets you encrypt your state-file end-to-end, either with a key management system like AWS KMS, or static keys.

- Early Evaluation - the ability to parameterize initialiation-time values, like module versions and sources, backend configuration parameters, etc. and keep them DRY.

- Provider Iteration - lets you use for_each with providers, e.g. create one provider per region, something that currently requires a bunch of copy-paste, or tools like Terragrunt

- -exclude flag - the opposite of the -target flag, letting you skip planning/applying certain resources.

Probably the best way to see a summary is to check out the release blog posts for 1.7[0], 1.8[1], and 1.9[2], as well as TFA itself. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend taking a look at the related docs, too.

[0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-7-0/

[1]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-8-0/

[2]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-9-0/

Disclaimer: involved in opentofu
Like every other country. You exchange good or services for currencies from the other countries, and then you can use that currency to buy things from anybody that would take that currency.

There is nothing saying a socialist country can't produce goods and services, and sell them.
Yep, and now the "heretics" are running the show, or at least a large piece of it, so they pardoned him.

The law means less than it used to.
Are you the maintainer of it? Amazing :) switched to it few months ago
“People who get to work in the highly coveted, rather small, highest revenue-per-employee sector in human history should be just fine!”

Uhh yeah…
A cool hack to be minimally invasive to the skull tissues
Person who was right a few times, despite others naysaying, assumes they're right on new things, especially as they get older...

That's certainly not a thing that's ever happened before. /s
> The US printing money doesn't allow it to export its inflation, but rather exporting inflation allows the US to print far more money than other countries without comparable consequences.

I didn't see this dynamic outlined in the link OP provided, can you point it out or explain it? Are you just saying when the USD strengthens we have more ability to print money and thus weaken it? If that's case, from a monetary policy point of view, isn't that just avoiding deflation? Or from a trade policy point of view, don't our trading partners want us to print money to weaken the dollar and thus stop exporting inflation?

This line of argument is untethered from reality. Please explain why the US exported inflation pre-Bretton Woods (we totally did) and what you'd do to stop it (nothing, because this is the natural consequence of a currency strengthening, which occurs with or without a fiat system). Please explain why currencies fluctuate even when pegged to commodities (they totally did, deflation was a huge problem in the Great Depression).

> This is why countries with comparable debt to GDP ratios are generally in relatively poor economic shape while the US is near its economic peak in most typical measurements.

Here's a list of countries around the US' ratio:

- Singapore: 1.75

- Greece: 1.59

- Italy: 1.36

- Bahrain: 1.26

- Maldives: 1.21

- US: 1.21

- Laos: 1.15

- Cape Verde: 1.12

- France: 1.11

- Bhutan: 1.11

- Barbados: 1.07

- Spain: 1.06

- Belgium: 1.05

- Canada: 1.04

- UK: 1.01

Is your argument that France, Canada, the UK, Japan, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Singapore are all some of the best places on Earth to live despite some deep economic dysfunction (that--again--has produced absolutely no ill effects)? Or are you gonna argue that Bahrain's major problem is their debt-to-GDP ratio?

> the US is near its economic peak in most typical measurements.

> But this superpower is fading in ways you presumably now understand

You can't have it both ways: either 1971 was the beginning of the end or we're currently at peak because of our unique (to be clear it's not at all unique) ability to export inflation. The only argument you (any anyone else on your side) has left is that an unspecified reckoning will come at an unspecified time.

To be less polemic, Piketty postulates that the kind of GDP growth we've experienced the last couple centuries is wildly unsustainable (he gets into like, galactic terms, pretty entertaining). It's likely that growth levels off, like it is in places like the EU, US, China, and Japan, and we'll need new economic policies that don't assume perpetual >5% annual growth. I would guess that means debt to GDP ratios actually start mattering, but I'm not that convinced economists know anything and I know even less than they do, so yeah.
I would be curious what others would recommend as management books or anything related to organizational psychology in this topic.

Books I can think of are

"Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_Organizations

"Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivering_Happiness

https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
> What is HCL?

It's that weird declarative language used in terraform configuration files
> sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender

First time offender?!?!? Applying that term to a guy who spent years traveling around the world under multiple fake IDs while using state-level security on his hardware and racking up law violations every single day seems like an absurd stretch.

I mean, come on. By that logic, Al Capone was a first time offender when the feds finally nailed him for the first time. Pablo Escobar was a first time offender when he finally got nabbed. Good lord.

"First time offense" applies to your _first offense_. Not relevant when you've committed thousands of offenses over years while living on the run.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.

Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
Yes, you can exit your crypto when you are deported from your local fascist regime.

Crypto is immune to this because it's not tied to the value of one sovereign currency, or any particular polity or another.

I am not talking about the utility of cryptocurrency to large financial institutions. I am talking about the utility to individuals as their nations gradually become insolvent and austerity fails to placate the robber barons, ultimately leading to currency collapse.

Look at the localbitcoins volume data for Argentina, for instance.

https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/ARS
You can definitely publish outside academia. I assume you mean in scholarly journals specifically, and are questioning whether or not you need the backing or credentials of an educational institution to get past the gatekeepers—you can. It's just that, outside academia, where publishing is kind of a job requirement, there's not as much incentive to do so, and you may not always be allowed to do so by your employer.
This looks rather extremely similar to something that Unreal already natively supports. Here is a demo video from them - https://youtube.com/watch?v=8tBNZhuWMac
Uh huh. How about we check in in about 5 years eh?

And don’t worry, I don’t think he’s literally Hitler. Hitler actually went to jail when he got convicted, after all.
Housing is a massive bomb because for so many people is is the singular investment that their net worth and retirement is held in. This idea has been so deeply entrenched for so long that a reversal will wipe out millions of people's net worth.

At some point the bomb will go off, but there's no incentive to look at the long term of 10+ years out when the explosion will destroy people's political careers in the short term.
I’ve come to appreciate power-limited DSLs. The problem is, they are very tricky to design: too simple and users will start templating, or even worse: programming in them (e.g. Yaml+Sh); too powerful and you’ve got yourself another full programming language (e.g. Dhall). I found HCL, although frequently complaining its type system is clearly designed by Go people, to be pretty close to the sweet spot. For each if-loop and other horrid workarounds I’ve had to write, someone else did not write a tower of abstractions that when interpreted, yielded the right result. Maintenance is usually an architectural task, rather than computer science. There are no frameworks to learn, there is no flashy new package manager attached, there is no need to deal with Python pacakge management and such. And, since it’s usually good enough, the effort to add this is disproportionately large, so that nobody does it.

Coming from my Haskell background, I’ll say it like Gabriella Gonzalez once put it [1]: _worst practices should be hard_, and this is where and why I think Terraform/Tofu shine and succeeded.

[1]: https://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/worst-practices-should...
This is no less true for the average person. If the real estate market in your area crashes and you own a house, your net worth would crash through other peoples collective action.

The only difference is that most of these billionaires are invested in a few specific companies, however there are plenty of people who (likely for bad reason) are also heavily invested in only a few companies.
I'm still in the land of usenet and torrents to grow a collection on a NAS that's then played with VLC, but I think the kids like streamio now.
America has a long history of promoting “rugged individualism.” Community is hardly ever part of the conversation, unfortunately.
No, I have no problem paying taxes or government requiring business to pay taxes.

I don’t agree with the over and mostly dumb regulation of tech from the left and I think they over index on the wrong issues and the reason we are where we are now is because old folks on the left wouldn’t exit the stage when they should have - Supreme Court justices and Biden specifically.

I’m pro Vax and have been shot up with every vaccine imaginable including multiple Covid boosters. But the anti-vax movement was exasperated by Democrats trying to force the Covid vaccine on people