skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can that class of scams be foiled with consumption tax ?
Ukraine didn't release casualty figures for a long time (though to be fair, Russia government doesn't exactly post daily casualty figures either, the Russian casualty figure is divined by infering what we can from Russian media), the Western press released a figure for the Ukrainian forces, which is probably quite low, and the figure hasn't increased in almost a year.

It's sort of like how Western press has been claiming for over a year that 20,000 people have perished in Gaza, and the figure never goes up.
> What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it.

A home is where people feel safe and secure with their family, or by themselves.

I reject the premise of your re-definition of owning a home.
I've watched it. I disagree. Zelensky calmly and reasonably asked JD Vance a question regarding his answer to the reporter. It was all fine until Vance started with the "frankly I think it's very disrespectful" line. HE decided to escalate. What Zelensky asked was reasonable and pretty in character for him. They know he's uncompromising with dealing with Putin. The _diplomatic_ position is to understand both sides and mediate, not to try to get one of the sides to bow down to their aggressor.
Starting in May 2025, Skype will no longer be available
It looks like a very interesting class, I would certainly take it given the opportunity. Looking over the syllabus has prompted some questions, though.

1. Is morality the only foundation of capitalism? Does the course attempt to prove that all of the features of capitalism ultimately come from moral principles?

2. If somebody is a capitalist, are they ipso factor moral?

3. If somebody is not a capitalist, are they ipso factor immoral?

4. Can capitalism be (ab)used for immoral purposes, and yet still be capitalism?

5. How about a mixed-econommy like ours? Is it impossible to be fully moral in our society? Is there a bright line between a moral economic system and an immoral economic system? What, exactly, IS capitalism?

6. Concrete case study: Education. Taxing people to fund somebody else's kid's education does not sound very compatible with capitalism (or is it?) It sounds rather like socialism. How about mandatory school attendence? Is it immoral to take children out of the work force? Should we let economic/capitalistic considerations decide these issues?

Anyrate, thanks for a fascinating post.
If they're truly both evils, there's always the option to do a write-in vote for someone else. Futile? Sure. But hopefully headlines like "X won the election with 30% of the vote" would start to raise eyebrows in ways that "X won the election with 49% of the vote" doesn't.
> It might provide a big boost for China's efforts to get the world off the dollar standard.

At this point who cares about US dollars? I'm sure Europeans care more about Euros.
So long as rich-get-richer mechanics play out inside of a single generation they are unquestionably OK? What even is this argument?
Last I tried to use Azure; it did not even offer domain registration. This was many years after launch - and not too long ago.

Not sure if this was an Australia/Oceania limitation - or just an ongoing product limitation.

My requirements weren’t complex. I needed to manage my domains (not AD), spin up virtual machines, and associate the two.

I also found the UI, overall; tedious. Finding the right offering under their ambiguously named services was difficult. And this comes from an AWS user.

I wanted to like Azure, but for very least reasons above; it’s not the product for me.
Mere speculations: they might have been contemplating the integration of their Orbit add-on into the browser. For that, they might need some extra legal fluffs.
It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.
I wouldn't hold owning a Tesla against anyone, especially if they bought it before 2024. Lots of people bought their Teslas before Elon Musk became full-on red-pill woke.

Now that Cybertruck is another story, there's no excuse for that monstrosity.
Hm not my experience at all. No idea what the difference was. I gave it my API endpoint and told it the response shape. As far as the key was concerned, I told Claude to look at a given envar I defined and place that in a header. Claude did all the rest. Are you using 3.7? I don't think I used the Extended Thinking mode in the UI for it.
Get a LUT from Any Edited Image
Whether or not you're really outliers, it would be very surprising if "my friends and I" were representative of the general population.
One of the main benefits of Semgrep is its unified DSL that works across all supported languages. In contrast, using the Go module "smacker/go-tree-sitter" can expose you to differences in s-expression outputs due to variations and changes in independent grammars.

I've seen grammars that are part of "smacker/go-tree-sitter" change their syntax between versions, which can lead to broken S-expressions. Semgrep solves that with their DSL, because it's also an abstraction away from those kind of grammar changes.

I'm a bit concerned that tree-sitter s-expressions can become "write-only" and rely on the reader to also understand the grammar for which they've been generated.

For example, here's a semgrep rule for detecting a Jinja2 environment with autoescaping disabled:

rules:
- id: incorrect-autoescape-disabled
patterns:
- pattern: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=$VAL, ...)
- pattern-not: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=True, ...)
- pattern-not: jinja2.Environment(... , autoescape=jinja2.select_autoescape(...), ...)
- focus-metavariable: $VAL

Now, compare it to the corresponding tree-sitter S-expression (generated by o3-mini-high):

(
call
function: (attribute
object: (identifier) @module (#eq? @module "jinja2")
attribute: (identifier) @func (#eq? @func "Environment"))
arguments: (argument_list
(_)*
(keyword_argument
name: (identifier) @key (#eq? @key "autoescape")
value: (_) @val
(#not-match @val "^True$")
(#not-match @val "^jinja2\\.select_autoescape\\("))
(_)*)
) @incorrect_autoescape

People can disagree, but I'm not sure that tree-sitter S-expressions as an upgrade over a DSL. I'm hoping I'm proven wrong ;-)
Unlike WebMD, Healthline doesn't seem to be losing traffic: https://www.semrush.com/website/healthline.com/overview/

I don't know what differentiates them since the content is apparently similar but I suspect a lot of websites like this will diversify their distribution channels and pivot accordingly.
Also the US counts support as like, the original sticker price value of bone-yards hardware we have shipped them.

And it's such old old stock. Such as the m1a1 tanks we gave them. This is a 1970's design we made up until 1992. The US would never field such ancient tanks ourselves, not without massive overhaul & refurbishment. They also drink fuel like crazy & have demanding-to-maintain old old old gas turbine engines.

We've shipped countless pallets of ammo that is either expiring or expired. We gave them the ancient old stock of 1980's ATACMS that were rotting in place.

Yet we keep saying we give them $X dollars of aid. As if this ancient surplus equipment is as valuable today as what we paid for two three or four decades ago. Equipment we had just lying around, that we were going to have to dispose of somehow, at significant cost to us.
Go Bills!
Ukraine is in this war partially (largely? primarily?) due to United States foreign policy in the years since the "end" of the Cold War. No surprise Trump screws them over and doesn't honor our geopolitical debts tho.
Did you want domain registration, or just DNS management? Those are two very different services. They offer the latter but not the former. So while you (generally) have to buy domains elsewhere, you can then manage them entirely within Azure after doing so.
I never see regulatory bodies demand money or powers. That's private companies and law enforcement, respectively. Regulators seem to be staffed by skeleton crews allowing them to take on one case a year, and the Google-tier customer support that entails.
>there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar

Mozilla should commit to stop doing anything like that. Then we can have a nice clear Terms of Use that promises to not sell data. I think that would alleviate community concerns.
Half the country isn't "compromised." We simply woke up to the fact that a continent of people that do nothing but mock and sneer at us refused to pay for their own defense, and we get nothing from it in return, other than having our exports tariffed at higher levels than EU exports to the US.

For the US, NATO is an obligation, of which the EU nations (with their lavish social spending and anemic defense spending) benefited from.

In 2014, the EU did NOTHING to help when Crimea was invaded. You continued to buy gas, and even bult new pipelines like Nordstream to continue to hand Putin money. I'm all for the EU to take on it's own protection and investing in militaries. World War II ended 80 years ago. Move on and grow up and pay for your own defense.
Two points here:

1. Gary’s arguments for taxing the rich aren’t about taxing income. It’s about taxing wealth.

2. By his argument, most of the wealth are immovable: the rich disproportionately owns actual, physical real estates, and stocks of actual companies. As these assets are based in the country, you could tax right at the source.
what is Ukraine's path to victory and why do you think war is better than peace or even a ceasefire?
The lack of capitalization made it difficult for me to quickly read sentences. I had to be much more intentful when scanning the text.
That's just a technicality. There is no "EU" tax so the institutions does not have the billions to give away. They can however secure loans so that is the method being used. But make no mistake what is happening here.

Look at the backing countries and how they are spending on Ukraine. There you will see the direct donations.

No EU member country has yet to make a billion dollar repayment claim post facto. Certainly not five hundred billion.
My thoughts on this is it appears the 2nd Trump administration is obviously better for everyone _outside_ of the US (with the exception of Ukraine, Syria, Palestinians), and is lowering outcomes for groups _inside_ the US.

I think the current administration's actions are backed by the desire to kick out all immigrants, build a fortress wall around the US, and I guess wait out the end times.

Us lefties often say the best way to lower immigration rates is make other countries a more desirable place to live. I'm not sure if this has ever been put into practice though.

Regarding China, the European and American financial relationship is the largest in the world. Chinese trade with Europe is tiny. Sounds like that is all about to change.
One example: I had to send a report to a slack webhook, showing how many oban jobs were completed in the last 24 hours for specific uses cases based on oban job params.

That's:

sql query, slack webhook api docs reading, ecto query for oban jobs with complex para filtering, oban job to run cron, cron syntax.

easily like a 2 hour job?

it took me 5 minutes with AI. then we decided to send the slack alert at 7am EST instead of 12pm PST. instead of doing all that math, I just ctrl+k and asked it to change it. 1 second change.

these gains are compounding. if you're an experienced engineer, you let go of minutae and FLY. i believe syntax memorization is dead.
This is known to be a contributing factor as to why 9/11 had such a dramatical cultural impact.
> teams is so objectively bad

What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.
Everyone who invades Afghanistan loses - the only winning move is not to play.
I'm sad and disappointed that simply charging a fair price in return for offering something of value - with no other strings attached - has become so out of fashion in tech world.

Almost everyone running tech businesses seems to assume that subscriptions or data capitalism are the only way to make any money these days. But I have paid for good software in the past and I know plenty of indie developers who still sell software like a product and do OK with that model. Copies of great software like Firefox could surely be sold - for actual money - to the kind of people who value its independence, privacy, and user focus. Offer free security updates for some reasonable period similar to an LTS release. The web moves fast enough that a lot of people will want to buy upgrades quite regularly anyway just for the new features.

Firefox appears to have close to 200M active users based on Mozilla's published data at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity. If they could get 1/20 of those users to pay them an average of $10 per year - that's less than one month of a standard subscription to a major streaming service in most Western countries - then that's $100M/year in revenues. Based on the public financial statements that's on the same scale as their subscription and advertising revenue and their annual spend on development activities.

Another possibility might be to hide some of the developer resources behind some token paywall. Almost everyone I know who works in web dev uses MDN regularly. Firefox dev tools have a lot of useful things about them. Then maybe you can even keep the main browser free and get some revenue from devs - who are mostly going to file it as a business expense anyway and whose employers benefit greatly from the continued existence and maintenance of these resources.

Sure everyone would complain - just as everyone complains about paying a few bucks for a good text or graphics editor they use for hundreds or thousands of hours per year to make 1000x the asking price. But the value is obviously there to many people. I think a lot of Firefox users in particular would probably respect the transparent attempt to keep the lights on without compromising on the USPs that make Firefox attractive to those users in the first place.
There are plenty of worlds that take security more seriously and practice defense in depth. Your response could use a little less hubris and a more genuinely inquisitive tone. Looks like others have already chimed in here but to respond to your (what feels like sarcasm) questions:

- You can have a submission process that accepts a package or downloads dependencies, and then passes it to another machine that is on an isolated network for code execution / build which then returns the built package and logs to the network facing machine for consumption.

Now sure if your build machine is still exposing everything on it to the user supplied code (instead of sandboxing the actual npm build/make/etc.. command) you could insert malicious code that zips up the whole filesystem, env vars, etc.. and exfiltrates them through your built app in this case snagging the secrets.

I don't disagree that the secrets on the build machine were the big miss, but I also think designing the build system differently could have helped.
Maybe it's just because they're anticipating fallout from an escalation over Taiwan?
Large US tech companies would be crippled because they'd suddenly loose access to top chips and manufacturing capacity over night.
New dwarf galaxy discovered in the halo of Andromeda galaxy
Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09792
Vastly underrated cloud if you’re a small company and don’t operate containers is Cloudflare. I know they get criticized for other reasons but their DX is actually really great if you’re tired of the big 3 (4?)
Just say “ownership is theft” if thats what your argument reduces to.
That said, I think the concepts around georgism and dynamic value based taxes are a bit more interesting and address the “land banking” concerns you inserted.
Consumption taxes are almost always regressive, hitting the poorest the hardest. Depends on how you structure them.
Its hard to believe people got paid to build that hot garbage fire.
All the things that came later killed Skype’s business. We might not like them, but clearly average person has made different choices.
> When Zelenskyy accuses Trump of being aligned with Putin

When was that, I haven't seen the whole thing except where it got heated, but at no point did I catch Zelenskyy saying anything that could possibly be interpreted like that.

But mostly I couldn't hear what Zelenskyy was saying because he couldn't get a word in edgewise.

Happy to be proven wrong.
My wife is doing online classes for fun, and is using Deep Research to help her find citations and sources, then using 4.5 and the edit feature to get a tone that sounds like her and not at all like ChatGPT. She says she can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days. So far the feedback has been extremely positive. We’ve decided to extend the ChatGPT Pro subscription for another month we’re liking it so much.
I think it is better than the current situation but worse than the optimal situation, that is government ownership. What's more, ignoring commercial land ignores that many commercial enterprises would benefit from the proposed solution in the same way people living in houses would, yet there is no mechanism by which you could limit one company to a single building of operation.

> how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?

This question is why I consider the solution of a limit on ownership stupid. A person can reasonably use however many houses which they can afford to rent. It isn't up to me to decide what counts as reasonable use. It is simply a question of whether other people would be willing to pay more for some other purpose. Suppose someone wishes to purchase an entire abandoned town and can do so at a relatively low rate due to it being abandoned, I see no reason to deny them them this, yet a limit on home ownership would do precisely that.

One should also note that a land tax is another inferior solution to the problem. It is effectively a government lease on land which doesn't allow the rent charged to be determined by market forces. What makes total government ownership of land the most practical solution is that it most closely follows market principals. Usage of land is contingent on productive revenue from that land in excess of the revenue generated from alternative usages. Any other solution will fall short of the optimal allocation of resources which the market provides.
Some of that base of support already wears lightning stripes. Many other's sport the brown shirts.
Many thanks! I will take a look!
Whoops, thank you, yes.
Not sure why Ukraine would believe any new agreement would be honored when the Budapest Memorandum turned out to be worth less than the paper it was written on.
If all of the Q&A platforms die off, how are LLM training datasets going to get new information?

You just take arbitrary data and ask the LLM to put it in Q&A format and generate the synthetic training data. Unless you are suggesting Quora is the source of new information, which I don't agree with.

Quora does not care about the user experience. Their obsession with pay-walling killed the site for me across a decade. They literally could not get me to sign up and boy did they try (I really needed an answer once too!). My soul really remembers hostile sites.
> Removal of all telemetry within the browser.

May I ask what telemetry this refers to? What telemetry is bundled with Firefox that can’t be easily disabled in prefs?
They actually regularly ask to be descoped in their annual budgets, but Congress refuses to undermine their own pork barrel. My favorite example is the Navy spending a decade to convince Congress to let them stop building the wildly useless littoral combat ships:

https://news.usni.org/2023/06/12/hasc-agrees-to-navys-plans-...

These ships are so bad the Navy actually plans to just give them to our allies to save money. Cheaper to just give them away.

I may be biased having worked in the DoD for over a decade, but the problem isn't the DoD, it's Congress. The DoD can only do what they're told, and Congress is the one who keeps telling them to burn money on useless shit no one wants. We dealt with that nonsense constantly, from ships to subs to planes, you name it.
This isnt abstract, modulo reasonable thresholds Gifts are taxed as income by value in most countries. Inheritance (in the US) _is_ the weird wealth transfer exception.
Sanctions work! But their enforcement requires attention. Russians are draining their fund to the last drop and there is not much left, they cannot easily get a credit either. Unfortunately, these last weeks give some breathing room to Russians and their evasion schemes as people who look after sanctions are being fired.
I disagree. There are lots of interesting things happening in the world, and the HN crowd does a good job talking about them. Those topics—the ones where HN has high quality conversation—are why I come to HN.

Since the inauguration the HN crowd has not done a good job talking about politics. Where we used to be able to have some of the best discussions and comments on political issues I've seen on the internet, the last month or two has consisted primarily of hot takes and aggression, and I can get my dose of that anywhere else, I don't need it here.
Thanks for the context. I scoured YouTube and couldn't find it.
Quite common in Mexico and South America more broadly. It's quite typical that a middle-aged rancher or corrupt police officer sees an opportunity to make some extra money, scales it, and then finds himself at the center of a criminal enterprise with so much money that he ends up going back into legitimate business. Hospitality and agriculture (specifically tree fruits like avocado) are the big ones in Mexico. In Colombia it's emerald mining, pharmaceuticals, and ranching.
Can't wait to be able to run containers there. [1]

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/container-platform-preview/
Well, and even the company matters. I was in IT since post-grad school (with a bit of engineering earlier). But with dot-bomb, a company that struggled through and then 2008, I was only in an "OK" position. It was really the period post 2010 that set things up a lot better.
Story time!

A couple of years back, I was working at Mojang (makers of Minecraft).

We got purchased by Microsoft, which of course meant we had to at least try to migrate away from AWS to Azure. On the surface, it made sense: our AWS bill was pretty steep, iirc into the 6 figures monthly, we could have Azure for free*.

Fast forward about a year, and an uncountable amount of hours spent by both my team, and Azure solutions specialists, kindly lent to us by the Azure org itself, we all agreed the six figure bill to one of corporate daddy's largest competitors would have to stay!

I've written off Azure as a viable cloud provider since then. I've always thought I would have to revaluate that stance sooner or later. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong!
Trump and Vance destroyed whatever credibility the US had. They handed the next century to China. China will now court Europe and if this continues, China's currency will probably replace the US Dollar as the world reserve currency.

When that happens, the US will face inflation similar to Germany in the 1920s and 30s.
Azure ≈ Klout
https://tools.docgenie.co.uk/
Yes, if this happened two years ago or next week my question applies.

Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.
> dynamic value based taxes

I hate having to explain this to people, but a tax based on the value of something is called rent. Georgism is a system where the government owns all land and leases it out, but then the call the rent a "tax" to make it more palatable to people who are afraid of public ownership.
The AI that apparently wants Elon Musk to die