skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've drawn this argument from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. There are a few problems with the theory:

1) Diamond's argument rests on the idea that world historical developments are effectively determined by geography (and implicitly, by factors which precede the existence of a civilization). While I can't make a strong argument against historical determinism, the conclusions Diamond draws are strange. The chief problem is that Diamond is trying to make the case that the exceptional prosperity of Northern Europe and all of its colonies was effectively a fluke of geography. The problem for Diamond is that this pattern repeats over the course of about four hundred years all over the world, not just in the places where Europeans had the advantage of small pox on their side.

2) Native Americans had access to pack animals by way of the llama.

3) The Aztecs lacked access to pack animals. They still had specialized tradesmen and constituted a civilization.

The germs argument is the only one of Diamond's that I think holds any water with regards to the European conquest of North America, and perhaps I was being too brash in my original assertion (these civilizations existed, but were decimated by small pox). The issue with this argument is that it doesn't address European colonialism in Asia (where the disease factor is absent) and Subsaharan Africa (where the disease factor actually worked against Europeans).

The fact of the matter is that Europeans (and specifically Northern Europeans) happened upon a method of conquest that worked. This could have been an accident of geography, biology, or ideology, but it's absurd to pretend that the model didn't exist when it was the basis of a successful campaign to conquer the world. It had nothing to do with having access to pack animals.
"You can't possibly defeat me, why do you even try?"

Come on. You have fallen for cartoon-villain level smack talk. Chew it up, spit it out. We've done this before and we can do it again.
Similar discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197131 (1175 points | 1 day ago | 304 comments)
Nobody gamed the electoral college this election. Trump won the popular vote too.

Many voters are voting for the lesser of two evils; they don't like either candidate. Non-voters are simply taking that to the next level: they can't decide between two evils strongly enough to value casting a vote.

Bikeshedding over the difference between active vs passive votes in a single-winner first-past-the-post election is fruitless.
It is a fallacy in a strictly formal sense.

But frankly in today's world where we've got people making serious decisions in government who are avowed segregationists I think it is rather important to mention when people oppose the Civil Rights Act when considering their opinion on political news.

Hanania's opinions here are not one weird quirk. They are central to the modern GOP's project.
How are they similar? One is taking a picture, one is a permanent installation recording every movement in a public area.

What country allows citizens to mount private surveillance cameras in public places without a license?
Firebase let's anyone get started in 30 seconds.

Details like proper usage, security, etc. Those are often overlooked. Google isn't to blame if you ship a paid product without running a security audit.

I use firebase essentially for hobbyist projects for me and my friends.

If I had to guess these issues come about because developers are rushing to market. Not Google's fault ... What works for a prototype isn't production ready.
there are reasonable policies between "give ukraine everything she possibly wants to protract a war of attrition that risks backing a nuclear power into a corner" and "tell ukraine to pound sand and kiss putin's ring."

for instance, EU states were repeatedly warned about their reliance on russian energy. the EU preferred to empower putin and constrain future actions in exchange for cheap power. perhaps, rather than passing the next massive aid bill, the EU could focus on hurting the aggressor state by literally just not sending her more money on a regular basis. eurocrats continue to, thanks to their reckless energy policy, literal billions of dollars straight to the Kremlin with which she can finance her expansionist war. stopping that would be a great first place to start.

or perhaps EU states could have gotten their act together faster and sent more than busted old helmets (cough Germany cough). trump says a lot of dumb stuff but he's entirely correct that europe has repeatedly failed to adequately invest in her own defense, particular since she has an aggressive, expansionist, would-be-again superpower on her eastern border. then when America doesn't pony up what europe thinks is enough, she goes on a whining tour and asks why the evil Americans won't spend enough money and lives to fight fascism.
Question/idea: can't GitHub use LLMs to periodically scan the code for vulnerabilities like this and inform the repo owner?

They can even charge for it ;)
Jerry A Has always been a loud mouth, although I suppose a lot of the old heads are. I find it amusing how he laments bands just being xerox copies of each other today (copying and imitating has been at the heart of punk since its inception, that was sort of the point) and then goes on to regale us with how they just wanted to cop a shtick like Merciful Fate.
Everything you're saying about the international trust American voters have betrayed and thrown away is pretty reasonable. But this:

> The Democrats allowed 'radical' social change to dictate the party platform and didn't implement enough reforms to please the average citizen.

is false.

Democratic policy has done plenty to benefit average citizens, in a long tradition (at one point bipartisan) going back to WW2.

And it's never been centered around any idea more "radical" than taking seriously the words of the declaration of independence about equality, inalienable rights, and life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even for people who are doing something others think is weird.

It's even pretty clear that Democratic policies have strong electoral popularity:

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...

https://www.dataforprogress.org/insights/2024/8/22/harris-ca...

But "swing" voters (assuming they really exist in any form as popularly understood) among others are often not really clear on who supports the policies they prefer. My suspicion is that this comes from Democratic underinvestment and poor investments in media and culture while their opposition has been doing this aggressively, which allows others to define them as radical.
What if Mondrian's last painting was a traffic simulator?
Piet Stop!
One of my favorite paintings in the whole world is Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian's last painting (well, the last one he finished). In my head it always depicted an overhead map of Manhattan with cars driving down the streets, and I wanted to turn it into a traffic simulator.
This code creates possible Broadway Boogie Woogies, then lets the little cars run.
It's related because you said "you can't rule out luck" which is basically casting doubt on the whole idea of hard work having an impact on success. Well, no reasonable person would say hard work guarantees success, or that all success is luck. The truth is luck and serendipity affect all outcomes, but to use that to question the impact of a human's agency on their own life outcomes is an insidiously disempowering perspective.
If DeepSeek could perform a million iterations in 1 seconds, then?

I think what they should be saying is - from a software stack standpoint, current tech unlocks AGI if it can be sped up significantly. So what we’re really waiting for are more software and hardware breakthroughs that make their performance many orders of magnitude quicker.
> Developing a new commercial aircraft is another example in this category, as is building a cheap, reusable rocket.

Cheap rockets can be vastly simpler than turbojet engines. Reusability (I'm talking about reusability of an orbital rocket, suborbital reusable rockets can be rather simple, as e.g. Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space achievements show) adds a lot to the order, but increasing the size the square-cube law improves things to an extent.
China sided with Russia from the very beginning of the war, including notifying Putin as soon as the US revealed their intelligence in a meeting with Xi before the invasion. Interesting how quickly you forget this inconvenient detail in the narrative you've constructed in your head.
Believe it or not, yes, the US wishes NATO paid for more of it's defense.
Medicaid cuts are going to be the real nightmare fuel. People think Medicaid is for the poor (which some Americans are always happy to screw over) but Medicaid is what makes it possible for many working folks’ parents to afford geriatric care. God knows what happens when the GOP succeeds in slashing it.
The nukes are to help with the Second Coming of Jesus. No, really:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Orthodoxy
There does look to be some malicious code.

I uploaded the code to pastebin.

https://pastebin.com/H5QjS4Bt
I follow a lot of Ukrainian commentary, it's hard for me to conclude Ukraine is doing well.
They're having to conscript younger and younger people every day.
No business is insane enough to invest in Ukraine at the moment.
Some companies are crazy enough to try to ship goods in and out of Odesa, but its significantly less than pre-war.
Every time the Ukrainian army tries to take back territory in the Donbas, the Russian army repels their forward strikes, and usually takes a few more feet of the Donbas in the process.
It's really hard to win a war of attrition against the largest country in the world.
The Russian army occupies some of the largest energy sources of Ukraine. I haven't investigated recently but I suspect Russia is still Ukraine's largest LNG provider.
We are not far off from trillionaires. Saying billionaires shouldn’t exist at this point sounds pretty radical to spin in positively
A Civil War in the USA? Where would the battle lines even be drawn? There is no consensus, and there are hardly even blue or red states anymore beyond 60/40 splits. Even racially we are seeing a lot less polarization.
WebShield shows up as multiple extensions, 1 content blocker for each category, and 1 for advanced blocking (a webextension). This is because each content blocker, I believe IIRC, has a limit of 150k rules.
It's Putin's plan to isolate Ukraine, and what a stroke of luck Trump and Vance are completely on board with Putin's rhetoric. Soon he can affect Ukraine elections and retake it. The war angle didn't work as he wanted.
Thanks!

> I'd love to hear how this project differs from Bearer, which is also written in Go and based on tree-sitter? https://github.com/Bearer/bearer

The primary difference is that we're optimizing for users to write their custom rules easily. We do plan to ship built-in checkers [1] so we cover at least OWASP Top 10 across all major programming languages. We're also truly open-source using the MIT license.

> Regardless, considering there is a large existing open-source collection of Semgrep rules, is there a way they can be adapted or transpiled to tree-sitter S-expressions so that they may be reused with Globstar?

I'm pretty sure there should be a way to make that work. We believe writing checkers (and having a long list of built-in checkers) will be a commodity in a world where AI can generate S-expressions (or tree-sitter node queries in Go) for any language with very high accuracy (which is where we have an advantage as compared to tools that use a custom DSL). To that extent, we're focused on improving the runtime itself so we can support complex use cases from our YAML and Go interfaces. If the community can help us port rules from other sources to our built-in checkers, we'd love that!

[1] https://github.com/DeepSourceCorp/globstar/pulls
i'm glad they seem to work better for you. i sometimes seem to be the only person out there who can't get the same level of utility out of these models as others.

my guess is for some applications they can, but even reasoning models (o3-mini-high, grok3, sonnet 3.7, o1, deepseek, etc.) often fail to fix logic bugs. note that this isn't necessarily a form validation logic bug I'm referring to but, say, a pretty in-the-weeds tool for cleaning and pre-processing data for ML purposes. my guess is basic business-logic-y type stuff is much more doable.

i haven't really found a good way around cases where it either just adds printfs or loops through the same, non-working fixes repeatedly. they keep getting better, they're just not yet below my epsilon for unreliability.
Magic isn't real
Yup. This is almost a year exactly after they announced a "pivot" to "privacy."

At least the most useless, overpaid person in SV is finally gone and no longer collecting her $7M salary.

Not like money has ever been a problem at Mozilla - they're sitting on over $1.5B in assets, $500M or so in cash alone. That's despite a plunging market share...
Let Ukraine attack Russia through European territory. Let them take Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. Ukraine is boxed in right now but all those other places are lightly defended
I also don't think they necessarily were subtracting from resources necessary to maintain the browser experience (which would be the key to that whole entire argument), which probably was a significant motivator for doing them. Easy enough to spin up with little to lose.
> explain more about being bamboozled

Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine in 2014, and util 2022 approx 0% of left leaning voters could tell you what are ukrainian national colors are. There was a phenomenal propaganda effort to mass market that conflict to that demographic, between social media (russian warship, ghost of kiev etc) and on the ground efforts - all those blue and yellow ribbons worn by flyover state visitors in dc circa may 2022 didn't materialize out of thin air. The amount of emotional messaging to bracket discourse - putin is a murderer, criminal, dictator blah blah - should clue you in on the fact youre being told a stance. Should we cut and run or stay the course?

You literally could see that even earlier today with Zelinskiy going outwith pure emotional framing (putin hates ukrainians), which is literally the same exact black/white good/bad device that Bush used with "they hate us for our freedom".
That's just copying from better sources, doesn't mean the ai is "smarter".
Cwise.js – component-wise operations for ndarrays
> but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years.

You’re off by at least a factor of ten.

40 years of $100/month savings at a generous 5% compounding is $148,242. And that’s in future dollars. Drop it to 4% and you’re down $116,606.

The real formula to consider is what percentage of your monthly spending you are savings. If it’s 100%, then every month worked is one month of retirement. If it’s 50% then two months of working is one month of retirement. If you live frugally and save 400% of your spend, each month counts as four retired months.

It’s a simple fraction with the numerator as your net savings and the denominator your total spending. And lowering the denominator scales things much faster.
Ugh, yes. Lack if availability of resources in whichever region i happen to need them.

Also, things that break automation, like calling back to say your sql server is up and running when in fact it’s not ready for another 20 minutes. I am half sure the terraform time_sleep was written specifically to counter azure problems.
There was no electoral college gaming in 2024.

You're right that my numbers were of the voting eligible population, though, and not the total population. Okay, so let's work that out.

244,666,890 total eligible voters
- 156,336,693 total ballots cast
= 88,330,197 passive votes for Trump

88,330,197 passive votes for Trump
+ 77,284,118 active votes for Trump
= 165,613,316 total votes for Trump
/ 331,449,281 total US population
= 49.9% of the total population figure

That is, indeed, just shy of 50%. So I'll concede that Trump did not have >50% of Americans supporting him. Just >50% of American voters.
> Putin just wants to avoid wider scale conscription/mobilization if he can help it and will take other options first

That's because a good chunk of untapped population would simply refuse.
If the developer has decided you are not allowed to, then you can’t really blame the tool he’s using…
“the US, in siding with Russia, may be betting on the wrong horse”

This is delusional. Russia would’ve bulldozed Ukraine without US support. What county is under US sanctions? What country is receiving US weapons? Which, to be sure, is the correct choice. And having public spars with Ukraine is not.

But the fact that someone just typed this out and posted it is just so delusional. The fact that people upvoted this is delusional.

On March 16, 2014, the President issued Executive Order
13661, which expanded the scope of the national emergency
declared in Executive Order 13660, and found that the actions
and policies of the Government of the Russian Federation with
respect to Ukraine undermine democratic processes and
institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security,
stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and
contribute to the misappropriation of its assets.

…Therefore… I [Trump]… am continuing… Execute Order 13660.

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-03462.pdf

https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/trump-prolongs-sancti...

I don’t know why this pisses me off so much. Ostensibly we agree broadly. It’s just, HN really used to have such good nuanced and factual discussions, even outside tech. Now it’s all just raw anger.
Sure, similar outcome, just less drama.
It's not a counter example though. From that interview:

> I think in three years AI will become useful for mathematicians. It will be a great co-pilot. You’re trying to prove a theorem, and there’s one step that you think is true, but you can’t quite see how it’s true. And you can say, “AI, can you do this stuff for me?” And it may say, “I think I can prove this.”

> It’s a very exciting potential use of AI to create connections or at least point out possible connections. Right now it has a very lousy success rate. It might give you 10 suggestions of which one is interesting and nine are rubbish. It’s actually almost worse than random. But this could change in the future.

As usual the title is embellished and his actual interview is it "might" be useful.
They're certainly trying. Had you asked me before the full scale invasion, I would have answered differently. But Ukraine still stands, and it's looking more and more like a Finland-like situation. After all the repatrionization propaganda that doesn't look good for Putin. And the Russian economy absolutely suffers from this, we just don't know how much.
Why are you acting as if China is a benign bystander in this? They literally sided with Russia in the very beginning of the war, including notifying Putin of intelligence the US shared with them in the months leading up to the war.

You also seem to be yet another person predicting Russia's "collapse", which is a prediction I've been hearing since a few years after Putin took control.
Yes, this just further unites and galvanizes Europe, which is good.
This is exactly what VP Vance and President Trump has asked the EU to do. They want them to pay more for their own defense... So, yeah.
I uh, source?
See what’s missing is the ability to put your answers on the blockchain …
Flutter is 109% open source
this killed me. i dont think AWS does everything well... but Azure went hard on being different just to be different..

like region names...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHgc8Q6qTjc
It hasn’t regressed really, it’s just no longer free. Microsoft quick assist exist and allows you to connect to any pc with the users client code.
If Putin is removed from power, it won't be with somebody more friendly to the west.
Well things worked out for you and they have worked out for me as well. For a long time I have this arrogance expressed privately usually to myself or very close people that it is all due to hard work, diligence, thrift that I reached where I am today.

But lately after reading and observing around quite a bit I come to realize due to being ended up in a fast growing sector at least a minimum level of success was guaranteed. I see same thing at my company where a lot of VPs, Sr VPs and above reached to that level primarily they started a decade or two earlier than me and growth was much faster than compare to when I joined in mid 2000s.

They can talk down to me just like I can talk down to more juniors about value of hard work, drive and so on. However, joining a growing sector early was best thing career wise. No amount of hard work will help if one is starting at a middling IT job in middling company in 2025 like I did in 2005.
I'm very curious what the end game is for the US. They've basically blown up the world order, given up on being the defender of democracy... This will also hurt US soft power immensely, I can't imagine anyone feels great about doing business with any American entity any more.

Now China looks reasonable, as the main superpower that isn't perpetrating or supporting an active all-out war... They might even get Taiwan and others on their side without firing a shot.

This will unite Europe, all Macron and Merz have to do is limit migration and stay reasonably centrist and they'll both limit Russian influence and be the new leaders of the free world, along with Poland, Italy, the Nordics, etc...

It's also a strange situation for Americans I'm sure. On one hand, I can understand why Americans voted for Trump. The left ignored the working classes, pushed way too hard on extreme left social issues and didn't have coherent domestic policies. On the other hand, I really doubt anyone, even most conservatives, want to be part of a Russia-NK Axis and be enemies of the entire free world. How is the CIA and others going along with this?

We live in interesting times...
> can be

Theory != Practice. If that were the only variable, then yes. Electric would be great. But it's not. It's far from the only thing in play. Lift also suffers from thinner air. Pure electric (as-in battery/solid state energy storage) could have 100% efficiency (specifically in converting prop/turbine torque to thrust of moving air), and it'd still have a terrible efficiency problem with current day tech.

Electric's primary efficiency and efficacy issue is regarding the total operating weight of the aircraft compounded by how that weight does not meaningfully decrease as the battery banks are depleted as compared to consumable fuels. Weight is your biggest enemy in flight, not power nor mechanical efficiency.

Hybrid electric (be it consumable fuel through a generator or fuel cells) is much more promising, but rarely what people mean when discussing "electric propulsion" (without the hybrid qualifier), and still has issues of it's own.
In the US you can buy land at quantity for, say, ~$1k/acre in places where there aren't people/infrastructure/etc...

There is no shortage of land in the US. There is a shortage of land in a few high density areas. But increasing their density makes them more attractive.

I don't think it's reasonable to make the pioneer comparison-- if you want to do what pioneers did and build something from almost nothing in the middle of nowhere with great effort then there is still an analogous route open to you.
I dunno, if legal recommends wording for your TOS you should probably listen to them.
Sorry, yes. I was thinking net worth > 0.
You don't even have to go back to WWII, we let Russia take part of Ukraine in 2014 and look how that worked out. The idea that letting other countries annex parts of their neighbors is a recipe for lasting peace would be laughable if I didn't see it so often. It's like Charlie Brown and the football every time: https://imgflip.com/i/9lvwwu