skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That still doesn't match what Trump, DOGE/Musk or you claimed.

That organization has many employees, not 2 like Trump claimed.

It operates in countries around the world, not just Bangladesh. It's unlikely all those funds were spent in Bangladesh there like Trump was claiming.

Bangladeshi government officials can't confirm Trump's claim.

Musk/DOGE lied about what the funds were used for, and lied that they somehow saved the money by cancelling the contract - the funds were already almost entirely granted. Cancelling a contract doesn't mean those funds already spent are returned.

The org does monitor elections, but did you know that the US also has international observers during our elections?

There's no indication any funds went to election interference. A quick browse of their site shows they conducted a few surveys and held some workshops to encourage women to engage in the the political process - if you consider that election interference, I'm not sure what that says about you.

Seems like a great idea to me in a country that frequently ranks near the bottom in studies of global women's rights.

This is the problem. Trump and Musk spew out lies and make wild out-of-context claims, they get repeated thought because it fits a partisan view. But it takes effort to debunk lies so they spread faster than they can be responded to.
> Personally, I'd only trust a governmental agency to provide such services,

I can't see why you'd say that.

Governments (and private corporations) are not operated to faithfully serve the public, certainly not the public as a set of individuals and small groups of people. It's not that "government services are bad", but rather, than governments, even democratically-elected ones, are practically certain to wiggle out of the straightjacket of strict protection of individual needs and interests for legitimate or illegitimate "greater good"; specifically, they will not resist the desire and the interest to spy on you. And the potential for government abuse of private information is quite high.
Applying those practices to western employment will mean no one can afford what those grateful people make.
Then I'm happy I don't have shallow friends who judge people based on the car they drive.

Did you know VW, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche used slave labor in WW2? What do you say about the owners of those brands?
Think of it more like a “complexity distribution.”

Rarely, a function with a single line or an interface with a single element or a class hierarchy with a single parent and child is useful. Mostly, that abstraction is overhead.

Often, a function with 5-20 lines or an interface 5-20 members or a class hierarchy with 5-20 children is a useful abstraction. That’s the sweet spot between too broad (function “doStuff”) and too narrow (function “callMomOnTheLandLine”).

Sometimes, any of the above with the >20:1 complexity ratio are useful.

It’s not a hard and fast rule. If your complexity ratio falls outside that range, think twice about your abstraction.
It wouldn't be fun if Honest Achmed’s Used Cars and Certificates didn't also issue EV and OV certificates. It wouldn't be on brand to miss out on entire segments of the certificate market.
I don't know if that's entirely fair. France is staunchly secular, more so than most of its European counterparts. I could be wrong, but I don't think you can wear a crucifix or other religious symbol in French schools either.
Agree. But the crypto racket seems to be on a roll as never before nonetheless.
Or, for that matter, analog correspondence or notes can absolutely be subpoened in many sorts of court proceedings, including civil.
Well personally, I think that'd be a terrible position for them to take. Honoring the TRO is, as far as I can tell, not the issue that is being raised.
> "I'm tired of the fact that you don't fix the problems in your code" is really good, direct, honest feedback.

I disagree. I don't see why Linus being tired or not is technically relevant at all. Leading with it makes it sound like he's looking for the guy to stop tiring him, rather than actually remediate his lapses in self-review.

Being courteous is not about avoiding a negative experience at all costs, it's about being considerate of it, keeping in mind that it exists. If you know you're going to tell the guy they're causing issues, then not making that about how fucking tired that makes you feel shows that you're not trying to mess with their head, but trying to actually address the issue. It's specifically to avoid the ambiguity on whether he has a problem with the person or what they're doing, since when insulted, people tend to reasonably assume they're being found to be problematic.

I really don't think this is all that culture specific, and that this is just some freak cultural mismatch having been ongoing for decades. Not ethnic cultural at least.
The two are the same as far as my computation of my household’s reduction in energy usage is concerned. That is why I converted to the same units.

As for needing 41MWh of heat, that is incorrect as my boiler was only 86% efficient and the one it replaced was even less efficient. It is also incorrect as the efficiency gains had reduced oil usage to 18MWh. Heat wise, I only need around 15MWh per year (although I likely needed more this year since it was particularly cold).

I have a suspicion that the ducted method of heat delivery used by my heat pump has more losses than the hot water system previously used to deliver heat. I had been sealing the central AC ducts in the winter to save a few hundred gallons of oil usage. I can no longer do that as heat is delivered via those ducts now.
I’m more than happy to start laying brick myself if it means holding the wealthy accountable by the legal system.

This isn’t the strong argument you think it is.
I really wish they'd update the default config once there's consensus that something new is optimal. I'm wary of even adding the config settings in this article in case things change in the future and I continue oblivious with a now dated setup.
Despite what they say, this is "spyware".
First they install it without your consent, but they say that it is just optional, to "detect nudity in messages", then governments and related entity could request that it is silently enabled in your back to report everything to them... UK or US style.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/10/5-new-protections-on...

If it is really optional, why was it forced pushed to all android owners?

Btw, the shitty thing just requires 2Gb or RAM for usage, so this will also cripple the performance of android devices that were performing well.
Show HN: AI Assistant That Can Do Anything on the Internet Just Like a Human
Hire an AI assistant that can automate any task on the internet by navigating the web just like a human. Use cases include web app testing, marketing research & more
I'm not making any argument, just stating your position.
lol.

There are plenty of cases of people who rose through the ranks to become powerful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Adolf Hitler, maybe the most famous example.
Yes, the United States does have obligations to Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

In exchange for them giving up nuclear weapons, the US, the UK, and Russia guaranteed its security and borders.
I received an email from OSI on February 14 that clearly indicates UTC. It looks like the message was sent to all OSI members. Did Luke not get this email?

Details: https://openpath.quest/2025/luke-missed-the-memo/

---

Update from OSI: https://bsky.app/profile/opensource.org/post/3liz24zxtfk2i
But the lack of the practices shouldn't give the owners free reign to better themselves more while depleting others in the name of "wanting to help".
Show HN: Progzee – open-source proxy management for ethical scraping (Python)
> It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy.

It very much can. In a battle between human force and physics, physics win every time. If I send an encrypted email to you, you have the choice to not give up the key, even if you'll be in jail. With physical letters, you don't have this option. Technology gives you the ironclad ability to keep a secret, only limited by the fortitude of your character.
Here's the downside of being an experimental particle physicist, while our theorist colleagues famously just need paper, pencil and a trash can (and perhaps not even the latter), it is hard to be a gentleman experimentalist without very involved lab equipment.
If you never ask you will end up thinking highly productive employees are the same as those not doing any work at all. It means the productive ones should quit asap.
Now that you mention it, I will!

* ETA: done
It will be waring factions within government (which is never unitary in any country) --- here these laws/proposals/etc. probably come from domestic spying agencies and police forces in most countries. I suspect that signals intelligence agencies and offensive forces have probably mostly moved to "encryption is good" stance given the number of foreign attacks upon domestic assets (gov, biz, etc.).

However, we shouldn't underestimate the desire for foreign intelligence agencies to bait one's own domestic agencies into "spying for them". So i imagine there's some pressure from, eg., the US sigint agencies to have the EU compromise EU citizens in ways that even those very agencies may today not wish to compromise their own.

At a complete guess, I wouldnt be supried if, eg., the NSA (, CIA, et al.) were goading EUROPOL which was demanding domestic anti-encryption laws.

As an empirical matter, encryption makes agencies like EUROPOL's jobs extremely difficult -- i imagine also because they probably struggle to get coop from domestic police forces, so cannot easily do "the physical police work necessary" to get device access.

In the end, I imagine we'll have china to thank for the end to this nonesense -- since any backdoor will immediately be a means of mass corp/gov espionage.
No, some of them don't even bother pretending they care about your privacy.
Ceausescu also had that insane forced-birth policy where women under 45 (later relaxed to 40, but then raised back to 45) who had not yet had 4 (later 5) children were not only banned from using birth control or getting abortions, they were regularly pregnancy tested.

Sure, it resulted in a baby boom, but it also ended up creating those infamous orphanages full of neglected children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
An HP15C or HP12C app is the perfect companion for your mobile phone.
Turn the phone on its side, and it's even about the right size.

Here is a relatively recent review of the main Android options: https://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-22091.html
Great! Let’s build the white collar prisons, then.
There are other ways to punish people other than putting them in prison.
But the WSJ is an independent, for-profit newspaper. It's not part of the "state" at all.
Distributive Bargaining in an Integrative World [2018]
Do you mean commits to the project like this crap: https://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse/commit/d6034080a04c740c...

This level of pointless obfuscation would not survive a code review at any sane dev team.
The fact that different cases play out differently, some possibly unwise and unjust is no surprise to me.
Government and charity can be corrupted (and usually are, to at least a small degree). Private industry is corrupt bt default: to the extent possible, it will intentionally serve owners at the expense of other stakeholders.

This is not a knock against private industry in general. Capitalism's greatest strength is precisely that it harnesses corruption toward productive ends through private industry.

Nonetheless, it's unsurprising that people would take a chance at less-corrupt versions of key infrastructure. My preference would be to do this through charity, which worked pretty well for e.g. Mozilla for a while - but I wouldn't call other directions naive.
Did a Court Really Authorize Internet Service Providers to Block Cloudflare?
Ah nice; they got rid of that explicit warning - instead though we have the entire section about "bundlePlayProdRelease" including an externally sourced binary blob.

A significant improvement.

/s
I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.

The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.
I won't be participating in the building of prisons, but I will watch you build them.
I skimmed and didn't see that but the "apkdiff" script extracting the apk because "diff doesn't work well on zips" made my gut twitch.

Why can't I sha256sum the two apk?
There is also the fact that there can be legitimate uses for APIs which expose information by design

One of the few good ideas Google proposed is Privacy Budget [1], which now appears to be abandoned. In short the browser estimates how much information each risky API call discloses, and blocks further calls if the sum exceeds some threshold

[1] https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/protections/pr...
On MacOS `--` converts to `—` automatically in most applications/text inputs.
Absolutely I expect it to be used to micromanage and abuse. Yes those behaviours already exist that’s why I know a tool that enables them will amphifly them
There's multiple contradictory justifications being given for this and notably, all of them are shitty.

I saw someone talking about their mother recovering from cancer and going urgently into the office to respond to this email.

Which is a) shitty for her, but also b) a total failure if you think that someone else was sitting at home collecting a check and never even reading their email. Why turn it into a big news story so that they can also log into their email for the first time in 150 years and reply with some BS?

It makes no sense, yet here you are defending it.
If someone wants to claim that, given the US deficit, we shouldn't be sending billions in aid to Ukraine, I disagree, but I can at least understand the point.

But a UN vote is free.

I am appalled.
It seems so powerful, all I need is to have my browser have js with canvas enabled and I can be matched across websites? I know you can disable canvas in firefox, how does one do it in Chrome
I think if models improve (but we don't get a full singularity) then jobs will increase.

e.g. if software is 5x less cost to make, demand will go up more than 5x as supply is highly limited now. Lots of companies want better software but it costs too much.

That will create more jobs.

They'll be more product management and human interaction and edge case testing and less typing. Although I think there'll be a bunch of very technical jobs to debug things when the models fail.

So my advice is learn skills that help make software useful to people and businesses - from user research to product management. As well as engineering.
I do not accept that content should be controlled. I explicitly keep saying that, so I have no idea where you're getting that from.
Did Apple cave to UK's demands? I thought instead they removed their product from the market, like Signal.

We're talking about companies though, not technology. Something like Bitcoin or BitTorrent can be regulated, but not stopped.
Yes. This works but only if the functions are pure and using pure function composition.

Uncle bob doesn’t mention this.

createspecialString(y) =
Capitalizefirstletter .
MakealllowerCase .
AddNumberSuffix .
removeLetterA .
removeLetterB .
ConcatwithWord(x)

CapitalizeFirstLetter(a) = a[0].upper() + a[1:]
MakeAllLowercase(a) = map(a, (t) => t.lower())
Addnumbersuffix(a) a + 3.toString()
RemoveLetterA(t) = filter(t, (s) => s.lower() == “a”)
RemoveLetterB(t) = filter(t, (s) => s.lower() == “b”)
ConcatenateWithWord(x) = (y) => y + x

There see? It’s mostly doable in pure functional composition where the dot represents function composition. I program like this all the time. No way anyone can pull this off while mutating state and instantiating objects.

F . P = (x) => F(P(x))

Forgive some inconsistent formatting and naming im typing this on my phone.

People who complain about this style tend to be unfamiliar with it. If you had knowledge about procedural coding styles and a function composition approach like this then usually this style is easier as the high level function literally reads like English. You don’t need to even look at the definitions you already know what this complicated string formatting function does.

No comments needed. And neither author tells you about this super modular approach. They don’t mention the critical thing in that this style requires functions to be pure.

Thus to get most of your code following this extremely modular and readable approach… much of your code must be minimizing IO and state changes and segregating it away as much as possible.

The Haskell type system, the IO monad is pushing programmers in this direction.

Again neither author talks about this.
As Signal are doing here, they could have refused to do business (at least, with iCloud) in that country. That's a far bigger pushback than simply capitulating to removing a relatively unknown feature.

To be clear, if they did this and the UK gov called their bluff, it'd affect me personally, but I'd rather that than swinging open the backdoors
> Because the entire idea is that they bring knowledge to the institution that hires them, and proposes/implements processes to make government more effective.

No. That's the idea they sell.

What they bring is a cohort of interchangeable recent graduates, with flashy powerpoint presentations, fast talk, and "multidisciplinary skills". Which you can charitably translate to "no relevant knowledge".
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43082700
He's free to take a step back.
A lot has changed in the past 90 years. Let’s see how it goes this time.
That is a significant hurdle. They have to do it for each individual target, show up in person and each case can be contested in court.

Scalable surveillance is different, just as scalable weapons are different.
As somebody who wears a mask almost all day long I am glad that fingerprint unlocking is an option
"Android System Key Verifier" https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... "is included with your device to provide system services"
> technology can't beat politics and policy.

It often only can't in a world of mandatory centralized app stores. That's not the only possible world.
Reading the comments here gives me PTSD and a wish to go deep down the forest chopping woods
Muggers disagree.
No, it's not. That's just the standard model of peano arithmetic. You can map the successor function to many different operations and objects that aren't even numbers.
There's also Bell Labs IL - Internet Link - used to speed up 9P links for Plan 9 over LANs. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/il/

And this brings me to why I love networking on Plan 9. First off the dial string, net!address!service, passes the network along with the address and service port letting you easily switch protocols as needed. e.g. a program could listen on IL port 666 using the dial string il!*!666 and the client dials il!10.1.1.1!666. Second, that lets you dial and listen on any protocol from any program. If one wanted to use raw Ethernet you use the dial string ether0!aabbccddeeff. If I wanted to add a protocol like quic or a dead one like ipx/spx I just need to mount it to /net and keep the semantics the same as other services in net and any program can dial that protocol - ezpz user space networking stacks. Powerful abstraction.
I’m throwing that term at Swedish police, not at you.

Gangs would find another communication channel before the law is put into effect. Yet backdoor would be there forever.
What is the state of peer to peer messengers with E2EE? Over ten years ago, Bittorrent Inc. (now Rainberry and Resilio) made a serverless chat client (Bleep IIRC). But I don't think there is anything new that is also user-friendly? (Drop-in replacement of WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.)
Doesn't seem to deter YC calling them the 2025 intake.
I wonder if there is some connection between the more-spying direction of policy to Sweden's recent entry into NATO ("after 200 years of non-alignment"):

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_223446.htm
[dupe] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170626
You should watch office space, specifically the 2 Bobs. Now replace them with a fraternity bro or an "AI system".

How would you feel if your startup got bought by a new PE firm and they decided if you stayed or went based on "justify your existence in a text message no longer than 200 characters"?

It would be far more humane to do this how corporations do it, which is tell departments "you need to cut by X% - go do it". I've never seen or heard of the new CEO deciding on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on what each person puts into a status update email"
TOR was sort of famously contributed to by a dude in US Naval research early on, right?

They are militaries, not police or intelligence forces. The job is to be ready to do war, not nanny and snoop on civilians (Some of that might be a necessary side effect but it isn’t their reason for being).
> I don't really care about what he does in American politics.

You should. Whether you like it or not, what he is doing in the US is going to affect you one way or another, irrespective of his meddling in UK politics. Even if he focused his attention solely on US, the world is connected and particularly the US/European relationship has been one of the defining features of geopolitics over the last 70 years. Musk and company are basically dismantling this relationship.

The current US administration will profoundly alter the relationships between countries and power blocks for the foreseeable future. The US will cease being a reliable partner for it's old allies the UK included.

Musk was doing many cool things, but currently his focus seems to be to dismantle democracy, and this should definitely worry you if you value freedom.
There are a lot of pragmatic pro-government people here, holding tightly to the
"51% > 49%" core principle of democracy, which sadly turns into a mess at the scale of humanity, just like any other model we've invented so far. There isn't a real alternative for us collectively now but to submit to power – so any even slightly anarchistic views are not welcome here most of the time...
> like all things, it boils down to the owner/managers of said factory not the tool.

Tools are created and optimised for a purpose. If you gouge someone’s eye out with chopsticks or a spoon, their inventors are hardly at fault. If you kill a bunch of people with an AK-47, its inventor doesn’t get a free pass.¹

These guys clearly built this tool to crack down on factory workers. They aren’t excused when managers use their tool for the thing it was made for.

¹ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...
Having to build local alternatives probably had a positive impact on China's software industry. We're at a point today that major Chinese software/tech companies are routinely talked about on nightly news.
Russia has completely dominated and laid low the United States without firing a single shot. Astonishing.
And with respect to function behavior, I’d view it through the lens of cyclomatic complexity.

Do I need 5-20 non-trivial test cases to cover the range of inputs this function accepts?

If yes, function is probably about the right level of behavioral complexity to add value and not overhead.

If I need only 1 test or if I need 200 tests it’s probably doing too much or too little.
> The pricing for Veo 2 has raised eyebrows but Google Deepmind researcher Jon Barron defended it by pointing out that the Avengers: Endgame, a comic book blockbuster, costs roughly $32,000 per second to make using traditional methods.

If an AI model can cut costs even by a few percent, it would be well worth $0.50 per second of output.