skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.

That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.

What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891557463377490431

If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/new-social-security-chie...

I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.

The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.

So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.

Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.

Oh yeah, agencies for state governments deal with that data too. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/sves_solq_manual....

But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.

In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".

Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.

Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?

My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
> being vegetarian doesn't exclude you from the necessity of killing in order to live. You're just killing forms of life that you emphasize with less, which is very reasonable and rational but also not materially different.

That’s like saying you kill chickens to eat eggs. You don’t kill a plant to eat its fruit. In fact, plants benefit from animals eating what they produce, be it oranges or tomatoes or something else and crapping the seeds somewhere else for proliferation.
> Android supports alphanumeric passwords, which offer significantly more security than numeric-only PINs or patterns.

Ironic, coming from Google. As Android is THE only OS where usage of alphanumeric passwords is nearly impossible, as Android limits the length of a password to arbitrary 16 characters, preventing usage of passphrases.
Got it. I’m talking about this President’s EO and the implications it makes about independent agencies. Which are effectively his officers, so they are exercising his powers.
NY governor:

>“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she said in a written statement. “We’ll see you in court.”

We shall see.
> refused to pause spending when Trump lawfully asked all agencies to stop spending

How do you imagine any agency to "stop spending"? Are salaries not to be paid? Are contracts not to be fulfilled? Are rents not to be paid?
The person you respond to explicitly said the US wasn't the only one (and didn't suggest they were the worst either). Seems likely that they would agree that Russia and China are amongst these "very few" indeed. Don't be so aggressive please.
> But it's not madness based on the intended structure of government? The EO isn't saying "ignore Constitutional violations". It wouldn't be valid if it did.

If all executive actors must bend for the president’s orders, regardless of previous orders, laws and precedent, then nobody’s views in the executive branch matter, any time the President chooses.

They are now effectively sworn to a particular human, not the Constitution.

The President is now the “Constitution” for the executive branch.

(You might counter with the argument that they are sworn to the President’s Office first, but who actually gets to decide what that means? The human in that role.)

It is madness because a president whose will is unassailable within their own branch is also unassailable across all three branches.

The President has all the levers of practical coercive power.

Neither Congress can put any law into effect, or the Judiciary put any ruling into effect, without the cooperation of the executive branch. Without that, their existence is decorative.
Google Doesn't Want You to Search
Which country and what law are you referring to?

Laws rarely include technical language like SQL joins.
But they could... Its just not made yet.
This is dangerous sanewashing.

When Trump attacks USAID (or the CIA or the FBI) from the nationalist authoritarian right, it in no way counterbalances people criticizing it from the left.

In particular, the left criticism of USAID were always "think of the children" because they wanted it to do that more and better. They have remained consistent in that.
I don't think anyone is telling you what your opinions should be. The GP post just presents the GP's opinion. You're free to agree or disagree with it as you choose.

If you read a comment that you're unhappy with, downvote it and move on.
You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.
Is Google's MMM platform Meridian a gift to marketers or another dead end?
Battery offers six months of standby
The "traditional right wing" has been vocal about many things over the years. Nearly every single one has bent their knee.
Well, in Italy the "IRS" (Agenzia delle Entrate) is not allowed to cross-check banking statements with its own data from Tax Returns.

Whenever anyone proposes to allow it, the members of the informal "Party for Tax Evasion" scream and denounce the descent towards "Taxation Fascism". It's so pathetically cheeky, that it feels a bit endearing (how dare them, what rascals!)
Maybe the battery. I’m typing this on my 13 mini and it’s as fast as it’s ever been.

I still have apple care+ on mine. I knew they will probably never make a new one again. I use it without a case, so when I drop it break the screen or something, I just get an express replacement. There is a small fee ($100 or something) and I basically get a brand new iPhone mini. Hopefully their replacement stock last for a while.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn !" It's the correct cryptographic fingerprint. However, you don't have any gouvernement issued ID on you Mr Cthulhu ?
Also a Brit and I've also come to see that value more over time. It helps keep elected would be dictators in check.
They obviously didn't mean the laws prevent sql joins directly. Those prevent data aggregation, which in practice prevent various technical implementations of that.
PRC considers Taiwan hence TSMC to be part of China. Whilst it is easy to disagree with this politically; if push came to shove, it would be much harder to disagree practically.
> They are unelected,
So are 2.5 million other employees and advisors in government.

The 2.5 million you speak of operate within agencies whose mandates have been given by Congress and their actions are subject to judicial reciew. There is no Comgressional mandate for DOGE. They are the rogue agency people like you spent years worrying about.
Oh c'mon, that's just silly. That statement is so clearly rhetorical hyperbole that it doesn't need to pass any standard of truth. Trump lies. A lot. That is provably true. "Trump lies through his teeth with every word" is a reasonable hyperbolic expression of that truth.
Definitely cheaper than American top tier talent
yes, exactly, no need for any fusion reactors in space. Collect space solar energy and beam it back to earth via microwave radiation.

Space solar is an old idea and the Soviets/Russians have worked on it since the 70's; and nowadays, like most other Russian inventions the Chinese are commercializing it.
https://www.ft.com/content/2d43ed21-9f9d-4e90-a18b-ad46f0a47...
> does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people

Look at the accounts of OnlyFans models, crypto influencers, etc. They follow thousands or even tens of thousands of accounts in the hope that we will follow them in return.
On the other hand, I'm 6 weeks on from 3 fractured ribs, and still no exercise. I'm sure there are a few medical people on here that will tell you that ribs are a special case.

If I were to breathe too deeply during the first few weeks, there was a good chance that I'd re-fracture them; sneezing is known to do this. And for what it's worth, despite what you might see on the TV, broken ribs are no joke.

Recovery time is, apparently anything between 6 and 12 weeks. The first 3 weeks were the absolute worst. I'm finally at the 'it feels like a bruise' stage. As a sporty person I know that if I 'feel fine', I need to add at least 2 weeks on that before I actually start any sports again.
That's not really how it works. We do know SOME ways to reach fusion, but they are not on the level we need. We haven't mastered fusion yet, we still need to research the foundations. We don't even know if scaling is all we need, and we don't know how to scale it to the level we seek.

Technology usually has a range of performance, what it can do and what not. And our technology for fusion-process is not in the range for a commercial reactor, so we still need a breakthrough in our understanding.
I think the advantages of this in a digital age are vastly overblown. If an extremist government comes to power they won't care and they can just do the SQL join. Let it go to court, the extremist government will decide anyway so the outcome is already predetermined.

Compare this to a physical storage of paper documents that need to be SQL joined, the effort required is several magnitudes more.

What it is good for is data breaches, it effectively limits the data that can be leaked at once.
I never had safari crash on mine except that one website from here a while back. Not sure what it was .
Noone suggested cheapness, efficiency, and a lack of repetitive tasks were goals, this is a bad-faith take on what I wrote. I said if you want to play those titles a) right now without all the months of wait and uncertainty of a Kickstarter campaign, b) you get them as Steam license-key games not books, c) the artwork is at least in color and d) as a bonus, it happens to be cheaper; e) s a downside, Steam license keys are not ideal since Steam recently tried to claim keys were revocable when it retires a title for a large group of people (e.g. all subscribers resident in a specific country, or on a specific platform).

Choose-your-own-adventure and idle-incremental games are two very different genres (and the latter can only exist with lots of compute power, which was not available to the choose-your-own-adventure genres in the 1980s, which is why they have simplified mechanics compared to D&D and RPGs).
IANAL, but there are other laws governing what DOGE is doing that they are violating, such as transparency laws.
Easiest? Lock the office door when the last person goes home each evening.
>The CCP through the NPC enacts unified leadership, which requires that all state organs, from the Supreme People's Court to the president of China, are elected by, answerable to, and have no separate powers than those granted to them by the NPC

This is the situation in China. In theory NPC is their governing body.

[insert random ad hominem attack here]
> I think people hate musk, if they do, for the things he does and has done.

No, they hate Musk for the things he says and has said (And things he allows other people to say on his platform).

Some people treat actions more seriously than words. Others choose to treat words more seriously than actions.
Seems nobody's mentioning that this model drops the sim slot completely.

It's a bummer, because it means that in case of need (broken phone) i cannot buy any new phone, drop my sim in and go.

It's a HUGE step back.
That's referring to people literally posting selfies online (with the result of giving away their location by either metadata or geo-guessing).

Which is a process and procedure issue, more then a security issue on the phones themselves (except in so far as it's really obvious there's a solid need for an OS for a battlefield device which strips all that stuff out by default).
Animal shelter software is a specialized management system designed to help animal shelters and rescue organizations track and manage animals, adoptions, medical records, and volunteers. It streamlines operations by organizing pet profiles, vaccination records, and adoption applications in a centralized database.
Wouldn't be a DOGE thread without scarab92 carrying water for this nonsense.
The navy backdoor claims are unsubstantiated FUD unless you can point them out in the freely available and accessible code. Not to mention that they created the tool to also use themselves.

They also haven't had any influence or control in the development of todays tor project that has existed for over 20 years and despite a massive amount of attacks and research there has never been found anything.

That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.
Oh hahahaha! :) that was quite a few levels of indirection
Meta has Project Aria for research, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066927, but no public SDK. Devices dedicated to vision-impaired users are north of $2000. Hopefully Envision Companion (https://www.letsenvision.com/companion) software can be ported to $300 Meta smart glasses or the growing list of open glass hardware that is compatible with OSS AugmentOS.

This thread lead me to Mentra's MIT-licensed https://github.com/AugmentOS-Community/AugmentOS & https://augmentos.org/ for Android and (soon) iOS:

> Smart glasses OS, with dozens of built-in apps. Users get AI assistant, notifications, translation, screen mirror, captions, and more. Devs get to write 1 app that runs on any pair of smart glases.

Where "any" means this HCL:

Vuzix Z100 ($500)
Mentra.glass Mach1 ($350) or Live ($220)
Even Realities G1 ($600)
(future) Meizu StarV

Apple iPhones have state-of-the-art hardware (lidar, UWB precise positioning) that could help millions of visually impaired humans, but iPhone hardware has been limited by amberware (software frozen with minimal updates). Apple poured billions into now-cancelled money pits like Apple Car and VisionOS, while teams failed forward into AI, smart glasses and humanoid robots. Meanwhile, Meta smart glasses are S-curving from 2M to 10M nodes of data acquisition, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088369

On paper, Apple Magnifier with Live Descriptions audio could justify the purchase of an iPhone Pro for dedicated single-app usage, https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/live-descriptions-vis.... But while it works for short demos, the software is not reliable for continuous use. UWB AirTags and Lidar 3D imaging could enable precise indoor navigation for vision impaired users, but 5+ years of shipping hardware has not lead to usable software workflows.

The economic tragedy is that 95% of the technology for helping vision/cognition impaired humans could be repurposed for humanoid robots, with R&D bonus that humans can provide more real-world feedback (RLHF!) than silent lab robots. Until Apple breaks vision stasis with new technical leadership, or Apple/Meta are regulated by the EU to unlock reluctant open-glass-platform innovation, the only hackable option is open glass hardware for future BigTech sherlocking or acquisition.
So, how is it possible for the virus to get into a high-tech barn? Simple: the birds still need to breathe, which requires a ventilation system of some kind, which allows an entry point for the virus. Phillip Clauer, a professor emeritus of poultry science at Penn State, explains: “In the Midwest, they are working the fields in the fall, and you’ll see dust coming up from the fields, and the geese will land there to glean the extra corn, and they crap in the field. The dust goes aerosol, and that dust travels a long distance. We had one infected layer house in Pennsylvania, and they could tell you exactly what air vent the virus came in from. And then it spread through the whole flock.”

Why not use HEPA filters in the ventilation system?
What a shitty world when we now have paywalled content on medium.
Same here, I just had to stop reading.
Why is that the question? I think it's clear that some of them work for the president, and the president (perhaps filtered through cabinet members and others) tells them what to do. But that doesn't mean that Congress can't put limits on when and how the president can fire them.

That isn't necessarily the case for all officials. For example, I believe Congress can't prevent the president from firing a member of the cabinet. But that doesn't mean the president can do whatever he wants to anyone.
I'm assuming this is what they're betting on.
Germany: Far-right political bias ahead of federal elections in X and TikTok
Put the theory aside and look at the loop I showed you. Surely you can see that its CFG is trivial? You can track all the variables across the basic block and it's really easy to prove (yes, prove) what I claimed. And compilers can of course do more advanced forms of this, here are some more examples: https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-llvm-optimizes-geo.... I'm confused why you think this is hard because major compilers have been doing it for decades now. I assure you they can do this efficiently.
MSVC C++ Code Analysis: Updates in Visual Studio 2022 version 17.13
US president has a lot of powers, I’m not aware of any elected official in Europe with the same amount of powers (ignore Russia).

President of France is probably the most comparable, but in France you also have the prime minister, selected by the president but supported by the parliament.

In Sweden we have a separation of powers within the executive branch. Government agencies are independent of the cabinet.

DOGE’s audit wouldn’t be possible in Sweden, that would have required legislation or even constitutional changes.

Sweden has already an independent government agency that audits the rest of the government, but it has support in the constitution for that and it is technically administered by the parliament and not the cabinet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_National_Audit_Offic...

My personal opinion is that the US system of government is vastly inferior to Sweden’s.
> If Congress passes a law that say "tobacco is banned", and the US President says "I will direct my agencies to follow this new law" and you have agencies saying "I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like this law is unconstitutional so my agency is not going to follow it!"?

Now if Congress passes a law that say "tobacco is banned", the president can say "This law means that tobacco isn't banned and has to be sold in schools, and I will direct my agencies to follow this new law". Before, the president had the option to refuse to enforce the laws as written (and risk getting thrown out on his ass) and now the president has the option to rewrite laws according to his whim and enforce that instead. He also has immunity too so he can't even get into trouble for just doing whatever he wants.
IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines.

Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuable as currently possible.
I mean, this comes from the same platform that’s had no problem hosting Breitbart and other far right and neo-Nazi storefronts.

Hell, wasn’t the COO’s wife running True North Media?

https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...

The only reason they pulled Kanye’s storefront was because they considered it to be “unauthentic”, not because he was selling swastikas.
In the USA, both are true. Civil servants can (and should) refuse to follow an order they think is unconstitutional, illegal, or simply unwise. But this won't stop them from being fired for insubordination. I don't think the courts will attempt to force the president to retain subordinates that are actively opposing him on the job.
You do have a point. However, if I'm allowed to move the goalposts a little: not all changes in semantics are equal. If you take a program that crashes for certain inputs and turn it into one that is semantically equivalent except that in some of those crashing cases, it actually continues running (as if on a machine with infinite time and/or memory), then that is not quite as bad as one that changes a non-crashing result into a different non-crashing result, or one that turns a non-crashing result into a crash.

With this kind of "benign" change, all programs that worked before still work, and some that didn't work before now work. I would argue this is a good thing.
What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.

Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow).

So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled.

Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it.

I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.
All the court cases being brought is going to end up in the SCOTUS over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory . There is a pretty good chance that this will be confirmed.
Admittedly this is pedantry on my part, but isn’t this only true for fruits? GP’s argument seems perfectly valid for e.g. carrots or mushrooms.
Imagine if Obama had given Bill Gates a similar role.
This aligns with my own experience, though it seems to be one extreme or the other. Either the interviewer is fascinated and wants to know how it was done (rather than anything to do with implementation), or they don't care.

I don't have any overseas adventures though (: