skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reagan or not, what you can see clearly in the comments here and many other places is that what would be considered fairly extreme libertarian talking points have become common parlance these days. Taxation as "theft", the necessity of the threat of termination and other economic deprivation in order to coerce people to doing good work, the assumption that profit inevitably produces more efficiency, and that efficiency (as defined monetarily) is the ultimate goal.

These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact."

This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream.

The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either.

I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.
Interesting how things have changed in the past 17 years!
Google of today, would rather own one's thoughts if they could, let alone things we write in their address bar.
Has Germany had one of two major parties spending decades trying to undermine government to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that government is bad by definition? We are 45 years into an intentional effort to sabotage public services to convince people they don't work, to cut taxes for the wealthiest people who don't want to fund them
Good stuff. No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented. I agree with this author after my own experiments with AI tools over the last three years. They're here to help people execute more work, faster. The human work will become deciding and controlling what they do.
18F was created by Obama because the way government was contracting private companies wasn't working.

Before 18F the government would pay $5 million to a private company for a basic website and they wouldn't even get it on time.

And it was ignored until Obama's most important legislation, health care, was threatened by a website, written by a private company for a lot of money, didn't work.

So Obama created 18F to fix it and then they expanded 18F mandate to do more fixing.

Clearly, the model of contracting private companies didn't work.

DOGE is literally the same thing. 18F was part of government agency that got renamed with executive order and had their mandate expanded to looking for wasteful government spending.

They just fired a small number of programmers aligned with previous democratic admin (18F) and hired small number of programmers aligned with current republican admin.
I just assume all reviews are lying unless I know the reviewer or have validated their past reviews. I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance. This certainly doesn't mean you have to HIDE the public reviews by unknown people.... just give an incentive to give input at what sort of reviews you want.
The linked article reads more like a hit piece with a narrative and omits significant context. Features gems like these:

government employment is a blight upon the economy

government employment is terrible for society as a whole

A more balanced review from the Congressional Budget Office. [0]

TLDR;

1. Wages tend to be lower for government employees, but benefits are better, making total compensation more competitive

2. Even with this effect, the higher you go in education, the more likely wages and total comp are lower for government employees

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235
D+ grade headline. His full offer and message:

“If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company,” wrote Cuban. “It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help.”
> Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.

"Forgotten" is too generous. That's like chalking up a corrupt government to "incompetence."

They sold out. The sooner we recognize them as a permanently corrupt entity, the better we will be.

The Ladybird browser and similar efforts are the only hope at this point.
I key difference and qualifier is a private company CAN have the same amount of waste but not necessarily and like modeless mentioned, private companies can fail and we can move the services to another.

It's guaranteed the federal government is going to have waste and be very difficult to change because you cannot let it fail.
Is retrochronic yours? Nice project, if so. So much of his work is scattered across defunct blogs.
Fortunately someone decided to archive all of the flash games so we can play them today:

https://flashpointarchive.org/
It's already well-known that crippling the government and destroying things is the point. To have ever entertained anything else is to have been naive, morally defective, and stupid.
I wish I could try a more visual-only psychedelic. They are too heady for me these days so I have avoided them all for over a decade.
Even if that were true, by definition not every company reaches monopoly status, so all others can fail too, unlike the government, so this argument against the GP's claim does not hold.
Having spent many years at government at different levels and in
large companies as a consultant I disagree with a lot of that.

Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem
nearly like startups.

Some are nearly all deadweight.
A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state
governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch,
and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home.
I was rather shocked.

I was less so when I encountered it in other places.

The government is an enormous group of entities.
Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors.
(from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective)

There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector.
The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king.
Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time.
Especially with strong unions¹,

But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to
clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only
ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people
are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.
You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put back," if it was a government service important to you, like water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use pubmed.
Agreed I really don't mind the interface, if anything, I hate the new stuff they've aded
> that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses and either

Not exactly. Ideally, you want to use market and persona segmentation to develop a partial oligopoly.

The nature of sales cycles and the fact that only a minority of organizations (F1000) represent the majority of spend, means that you essentially have 2-3 large players in an single segment, and maybe a couple smaller players that will eventually be acquired.
Term "Eastern Philosophy" is almost exclusively used for history of Asian philosophy. It looks backwards and interprets the old. Many western philosophers read it, but it's in the past. Old Greek philosophers are the same. They are referenced and studied, but western philosophy does not live in the past.

For some reason contemporary philosophy that develops it's own ideas in Asia is not considered "Eastern philosophy".
I remember 2C-T7 giving me and my buddy very uncomfortable body load.
Unfortunately Apple doesn't accept pull requests for XNU. They're more "source available", to put it under the old .NET Framework terms.
In 2011, most of what the USPS delivered was junk mail[0] and it's only gotten worse[1]. Junk mailers pay less per item than first-class mailers (actual mail). The USPS operates at a multi-billion dollar loss every year. Intuitively, we're subsidizing junk mail.

If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.

However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.

I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.

[0]https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-jun...

[1]https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/2062562/junk-mail
In the latest Ladybird update the graphs show servo is quite a bit behind Flow and Ladybird itself.

Right now ladybird is the closest to getting past the mark and has the most momentum by a long shot.

As great as having another option would be, Servo is not a browser, if people were going to build a browser on a different engine then webkit is perfectly viable right now, but people don't.
Those are now playbooks on how to build the next iteration of American society.
Never Wait to Open a Pull Request
I have so many questions. Is the model running client side? I was expecting to see webrtc used to send audio to a backend service, but instead i think i the audio waveform processing is done client side? Is it sending audio tokens over websockets to a backend service that is hosting the model? 1/16 slices are enough to accurately be able to recreate an audible sentence? Or is a speech to text model also running client side and are both text and tokens being sent to backend service? Is the backend sending audio tokens back or just text , with the text to speech running 100% client side? Is this using mimi codec or facebook's encodec?
The unfortunate thing is that there isn't this large imposing physical monument that you stand before and are just overwhelmed by its grandeur because of it. Imagine standing at the bottom of the Hoover Dam and looking up. That, but digital.
I think there was a discussion regarding this last year where linus was saying that they are already thinking of who will call shots after him so I think even though right now it's very much a linus thing, I think they are already prepared for the next person to lead it in case we ever need it
Just one data point: I’ve done government contracts (state level), worked for a private company, a public company, and a private company that went public. There was nothing more inefficient than state level government.

They were paying $300/hr for a fresh out of college grad working on their first project. The money was allocated, so they didn’t care how much it cost. Anyone with any motivation left employment by the state and became a contractor for 5-10x what their salary was when working for the state. It was disgusting.

Meanwhile in the private sector, companies or deoartments that don’t make money cease to exist after a while. The government can bankroll a failed department with negative outcomes to their purpose indefinitely (and then get more money for to fix their own broken outcomes).

I’m not proposing solutions, and I have recently worked with entrenched utility monopolies with the same segment capture behave the same way. There are, however, significantly more efficient private companies operating at larger scale than some governments.
I wonder at this rate - will they privatize IRS tax filing software?
Came here to say this - the Story Graph is fantastic and highly recommended.
We have antitrust law for that. But antitrust law today is simply overwhelmed by the huge number of monopolies and oligopolies the government has created in almost every sector. And courts don't have the power to correct the problem by reducing the regulations that protected the monopolies in the first place, making their remedies temporary.
> For those drones work you need hundreds of people to operate that, monitor, maintain, make repairs stock the warehouse with spare parts etc

Not when AI bots do all of those things. This is the point, once that is reached the working class no longer has any sway over the upper classes and can be wiped out by an autonomous drone swarm that was built by an autonomous drone factory network.
The GOP fought against AIDS interventions since its discovery.

Had they not, PEPFAR or something similar would have existed a decade or more earlier.

Lotsa people died because of that.

By 2003, it was no longer tenable to refuse to fight AIDS, plus, notable GOP family members got AIDS.

Just like Nancy Reagan’s 180 on gay people once her daughter came out.
> I'd also guess something equivalent to full native mixins would be needed to solve most technical expressive/organizational problems and I'm not sure css vars get there

You said native, but could a CSS preprocessor in the meantime fill that gap? If @layer and @scope would fix the problems pre-BEM, I think we are done then.

> Plus there's the various factors in org culture that tend to undervalue all kinds of areas of front-end design and engineering

Yes, if it is people just don't want to reuse, but want to have a quick hack for something like

<button class="class_6447823468">

then it is more a tool for an organization/skill problem I guess.

I just don't see how you can reach and enforce a consistent, maintainable styling across a medium to large website with something like Tailwind. Do people trade quality, consistency and freedom for a limited set of design tokens that might be applied inconsistently?

I have to admit I have not done much in css since a long time, and given the enthusiasm for Tailwind I wonder if my understanding is lacking.
You're absolutely right - Land's vision of technocapital is fundamentally anti-human, while Marc Andreessen's is pro-human. Mark Fisher criticized Land for underestimating the importance of the human face in keeping capitalism functional. However, I'd argue that for Land, camouflage has always been central to pre-singularity capitalism. A human face can serve as useful cover, helping technocapital advance toward its ultimately non-human ends.
Okay, this view seems perhaps more nuanced than what I expect from a typical argument. Food for thought I guess. I don't fully get how sideloading won't enable piracy and ruin solo devs but I'll look into it.

> I don't have any sympathy for Epic Games either

Maybe it was astroturfing but when this was on the news HN discussion was basically back to back people supporting Epic, one reason I feel like it's lopsided here...
Buy back the Mavericks (probably for less than he sold them for), fire Nico Harrison and trade to get Luka Dončić back.

Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.
Emotions are like waves; we can’t choose which ones appear, but we can choose which one to surf. The person you’re replying to (well, really, the person they quoted) didn’t really seem to be “attacking” anyone’s emotions to me. It seemed pretty gently advising the reader not to spend all their time riding the emotional waves that lead to depression or nihilism.

I do believe we all must face these emotions to become aware. But the depression/nihilism trap is very real for many people (myself included), and learning to walk that line and stay curious is part of our emotional/psychological development.
If you have 10m you buy a boat, 100m an airplane, with friends you spend 10m on a party which is nothing? What fun products are there if the budget is many billions? The ones in endless pursuit of simply more money are mentally ill which is hard to ignore for the rest of the club. They try some immortality but then you have to stop living the good life. May try some mars colonization but it turns out the space bicycle isn't quite ready.

They do have to do something or else the reality catches up with them. The reality that you don't need that much wealth and that it might have been better if you took less from others. This post purchase rationalization also requires training your psychopathy (you cant let peoples suffering get to you or you have to pay to help them. You need to learn to ignore it.) Witch fits perfectly with the project described in the article.
H.R.Giger – Ghost Train
It's BEEN built so the price has been paid. I'm not going to complain that someone over-engineered a useful tool and got away with it.

I will say that rust is pretty damn productive once you organize your brain around ownership. I haven't had to mark a lifetime in over a month.
And who will buy the newly privatized 18f's products? The government. It's back to square one except now there are shareholders in the middle and the government (you) doesn't own its code anymore. A strictly worse state of affairs.
Of course they did care about minerals. They cared about salt, gold, tin, copper, iron. Also about navigable seaports, sea passages, fertile land, forests, and also workforce. For these resources wars were waged all the time in the Middle ages.

Oil was not as valuable as nowadays, but it was a priced export used as lighting fuel, weapon component for Greek fire, and also as a drug for some health conditions since ~400 BC, and more so later. It was not the central fuel for the economy, but it was considered a valuable resource, though not one for which a war would be started probably.
> There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure.

Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a stronger incentive to do so - reducing salary/wage expenditure increases profit. Yes there will always be some in both, but having worked in both public and private sectors, you see more of it in the public sector.

A few days ago I was talking to the employees of a homelessness charity at a social event, one of whom was telling me he felt NGOs waste money more than for-profit businesses, but not as much as the public sector. The reason he said it, was his employer was still paying rent on an office building despite it being uninhabitable due to mould and water damage - my question was if the building was uninhabitable why not cancel the lease, surely that would give justifiable grounds to do so, and then they’d have more money to spend on the homeless (or, he added, pay their employees more)
I think it's disingenuous to see what Cuban is doing as the thing that anyone would do because I would assume most would prefer to have more wealth if they could.

My issue comes from the fact that Cuban is then directly aiding and abetting the process that Musk is putting in place with DOGE, thus my concern.

With that in mind, asking "Well what would you do?" to justify the actions of putting a generally well regarded and good service into the hands of the private sector is a fundamental lack of scope on what's continuing to happen.
I think you're right, but I think there's a deeper connective tissue here.

Nobody likes bureaucracy, waste, pointless meetings, layers of management, etc. so why does this happen? I think the answer is people create these things to protect something, to feel safe.

So I think these things are inevitable with any large group of people with scarcity. The capitalist/libertarian solution is to remove protections so people cannot create inefficient systems as they will be destroyed through marketplace competition. At least that's what they hope for.

The first problem with this solution is people will always find a way to suppress competition, especially if the guardrails are removed. And secondly, this actually doubles down on the source of the problem. It makes people feel less safe.

Personally, I find inspiration in open source. Is it perfectly free of bureaucracy? No. But because the profit motive is de-emphasized in open source people actually do walk away when faced with BS which is exactly what the capitalists are trying to achieve. In other words, when people's safety isn't dependent on something they are more likely to not put up with corporate/government style bureaucratic BS.

That's why I'm a fan of safety nets and why I think a safe society where people are provided for is the future, not doubling down on this darwinian, survival of the fittest type environment that the USA (at least the people in power here) seem to be pushing for.
Yeah, reviews are inherently social. I’m waiting for someone to build a review platform on top of ATProto (bluesky).
I did the same for the projects I created or were fun for me. However, there is a limit and at some point you just hurt your body, some of it can be irreparable. You may not notice it when being younger but you will need to pay for that later.
What if that 10% of aid that gets to the actual people prevents something like a multi-trillion dollar ebola pandemic?
I could see "proportion of 10s" vs "proportion of 5s" (the max score in either case) being meaningful.
Funny how it's a month-old post referring to Skype being dead, with Microsoft announcing it's killing Skype just a few days ago.
Do you have any examples of unions improving deadweight organizations?
The same test on my saved articles would show [A] for just about everything.

I don't think Pocket ever built itself with intended use cases being such things as looking at tables of server logs showing IP addresses (jimbojones) or Microsoft support pages, and I believe those are probably exactly the instances where switching to a web view exists to account for that.

If your deal-breaking use case is that you need an offline only archived web view of Microsoft support for a note about how "OpLock" means the same as "opportunistic lock" I think they're well within their rights to say that that's outside of their intended use cases, and that's what Web View (built into pocket) is for.

Certainly room for improvement, but they're just very idiosyncratic use cases. Do you get more success with those same pages on InstaPaper?
Last I heard they are targeting an alpha this year all things going well.

> https://youtu.be/xuf1mcYuCaI?si=-RGFmUkrNLTz-7GR
Your site is down. What is the starter kit for sharing your website here with it exploding?
I disagree the reason is as simple as racism, as Van Norden said. I think the issue is that, at least to my knowledge, there is scant separation of religious, cultural and social influence in other philosophical traditions or works. As soon as something becomes mystical or spiritual, I disagree that it’s philosophy.

I could be wrong because I am basing my judgement on what I’ve been exposed to in non-Western philosophical tradition, so feel free to let me know otherwise. The best thing to come out of Western philosophy are frameworks for objective analysis, the goal of which is to understand reality and seek truth. The rest is a game.