skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cash is my last lifeline if current trends continue.

This is my life now: asking ChatGPT why a payment app or bank rejected my application or closed my account:

--

Given your circumstances, the most likely reason {exchange} closed your account is that they viewed your birthplace—Iran—as an indicator of elevated compliance risk. Financial institutions (especially those regulated by U.S. authorities) often interpret OFAC sanctions conservatively. In recent years, due to intensified regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions involving Iran, these institutions have increasingly adopted strict internal compliance policies. Even though nationality (citizenship) and actual financial ties—not birthplace alone—should determine sanction risk under law, many compliance departments default to overly cautious interpretations, categorizing anyone born in a sanctioned country as higher-risk clients. In your specific case, repeated experiences with other financial services indicate that institutions systematically flag or deny applications upon seeing "Iran" listed as your birthplace. Your Canadian citizenship, residency in the Philippines, and lack of substantial ties to Iran should theoretically mitigate this risk, but automated or conservative compliance processes often fail to adequately account for nuance.

The result is a compliance-driven bias against any potential sanction-related risk, no matter how minimal. This cautiousness leads to overly restrictive decisions, even in borderline cases like yours.

In short, the issue isn't you personally—it's institutional risk aversion and strict regulatory interpretations that have recently intensified, affecting anyone born in sanctioned countries, irrespective of actual risk.
Common misunderstanding but the fed does not set rates on treasuries (bills, notes, etc) the primary instrument the government uses to finance its debts.

Those rates are set via auctions driven by the demand for safe haven returns on investments, particularly returns when equities are risky. As demand for treasuries (safety) goes up, the rates on those same treasuries go down.

The fed sets the interbank exchange rates, these influence treasury rates but are a very different thing.
Donald J. Trump lost an auction in 1988 for a 58-key piano used in the classic film “Casablanca” to a Japanese trading company representing a collector. While he brushed off being outbid, it was a firsthand reminder of Japan’s growing wealth, and the following year, Mr. Trump went on television to call for a 15 percent to 20 percent tax on imports from Japan.

“I believe very strongly in tariffs,” Mr. Trump, at the time a Manhattan real estate developer with fledgling political instincts, told the journalist Diane Sawyer, before criticizing Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea for their trade practices. “America is being ripped off,” he said. “We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.” [1]

We're in an Emperor With No Clothes situation and all of his aids have no clothes either.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/politics/china-trade-d...
I mean, most of international law and deals are basically pinky promises. But grown-ups are supposed to keep those pinky promises
We have repeatedly seen Trump say something that sounds ridiculous, and his supporters say "that won't actually happen, and if it does I won't support it", and then he does it and his supporters support it. He has recently said he may try for another term as president, and confirmed "No, no I'm not joking".

If you don't take his threats seriously by now, and the willingness of the GOP to get behind whatever he wants, then you are not paying attention - it has happened over, and over, and over.
You’re right about all you say. But the US has struggled to implement even the simplest forms of industrial policy because other countries are so extremely price-competitive, and our markets so unbridled, that our “elites” have eroded our industrial base to drive shareholder returns.

If not through tariffs, how else do you force reindustrialization? Industrial policy will always fail if it’s driven by a chimeric political system where both sides are incentivized to grow “The Economy” by eroding domestic capacity.

The CHIPS Act is too little, too late (when you’re competing with a fast-accelerating rival that is simultaneously your largest debt-holder and main industrial base).
X-Com: Enemy Known, where you're forced to play with a certain squad leader who is always either out of Time Units, panicking, or mind-controlled, and a 99% hit chance is not really 99%.
For context, I work as a QA tester who (currently) does exclusively manual testing. I'm trying very hard to get into automated testing, or possibly move over to Web Development.

At the moment, I've been doing very little. I had been hyperfixated on going "above and beyond" at work, doing close to 60 hours per week when I was only getting paid for 40 since January. I had been hoping that if I had been putting in an excessive amount of effort in terms of productivity, I would get some recognition for it, and more importantly: be given the opportunity to work on professional development things, in terms of, say, classes or training so I could learn more about automated testing. I really want to move towards something more intellectually stimulating the grinding manual process we have - I see so much room to improve. I really just want to learn more things, so I can become a better asset to the my employer, and so I don't feel like I'm just "treading water" in terms of industry knowledge.

Instead of things going that way, I was basically told that doing what I had been doing is... appreciated... but doesn't really change anything, because no one had asked or expected me to do it.

It was demoralizing to get the brush off in that way, but I've decided the best course of action then, is to forge my own way. Do the hours I'm required to do (and do them sincerely well), but put that creative hunger into building a website, building some repos, and finding my own way forward.

At this point, I've already bought a domain. Now I just need to figure out how to build one, and start making some cool stuff.

Its hard to set tone through text... I'm not bitter about what happened, everything they said was technically true. Heck, I'm not even angry about it. It was naive of me to get my hopes up thinking I would get my way, if I put in the effort up front. It just feels... bad to not really feel any kind of positive reinforcement for professional development, or even for working as hard as I’ve been working for the past 3-ish months. In fairness, what they said isn't unreasonable, but it sucks they don't want to invest into me, the way I invested into them.
To lay out my own biases

- I voted for Trump but do not consider myself a strong supporter (I saw it much more of a vote for who you dislike less sort of situation)
- I don't understand and am not supportive of the approach on Tariffs
- I am an active participate in what most here would consider right wing politics although I don't find myself aligning on every topic (e.g. I am supportive of the abortion laws in California) so I tend to hear a lot of the chatter "from the other side"

Some arguments that I have heard (which I mostly do not agree with) are

- When manufacturing moved out of the US to low cost of living countries, this hurt towns which relied on manufacturing (e.g. the rust belt). Cost is the primary reason why manufacturing moved. Raising the cost on overseas manufacturing may make domestic manufacturing cost competitive. Although economics tells us this will still be a net loss there may be externalities which are not priced into the trade (e.g. the towns falling apart and people becoming despondent / drug addicted might not be factored into corporate profit models)
- Being overly dependent on China or more broadly "foreign powers" for manufacturing represents a national security risk.
- In theory this could be posturing to provide an opening for the US to negotiate more favorable trade agreements. For example Israel, Vietnam, and Argentina have made some statements about reducing trade barriers on US companies.
- In theory it could be beneficial to shift the revenue model of the US towards raising revenue with tariffs while reducing interest rates and other tax rates (e.g. "no taxes on overtime and tips")
The other side of it is the lost trust in American tech. That’s most prominent in the military debates around whether other countries can rely on their expensive hardware working if they run afoul of American policy, or if the president is looking for leverage to extort a mineral deal, but it’s also highly relevant for the civilian side. For pretty much as long as we’ve had computers, most other countries have trusted hardware made by American companies running operating systems and applications made by American companies. Now everyone has to wonder what kind of espionage or sabotage would be possible if those companies were pressured – or whether the guys standing on stage would even need to be pressured. Suddenly, giving Google the ability to push code onto most of the devices in the world looks less like a security win and more like a risk - and it’s famously hard to establish trust without the rule of law as the foundation. Snowden started it but most allied governments were confident that there were limits in a way which is a lot harder to believe now.

I am expecting that 2024 will be seen as the peak for American tech companies: the longer this goes on, the more competition they’ll have with advantages they can’t match in foreign markets – especially if many of the immigrants who worked at those companies decide to start companies after leaving.
all structs are namespaces (there no classes). namespaces may contain declarations (consts and functions) or fields ("fields" are slightly different for unions or certain builtins like arrays and slices)

unions and enums also create namespaces. any @import creates a namespace that is a struct.

If a function's first argument is the type of the function's namespace or a pointer to the type of the namespace, you may (and by convention are encouraged to) use dot dereferencing (like python firso parameter self) as a lexical sugar to call the function with the "implicitly rearranged" first parameter ("oop style caling, but not really oop")

modules are somewhat different, in zig these are collections of code you can map to a non-filepath import string using the command line or build tool (in particular you may map something out of code root path), but these too ultimately become a namespace struct
Interest rates are lowered when inflation is low. Inflation is low when supply is high. Tariffs cause supply shortages. Inflation expectations are up. Interest rates will be up.

You're crazy if you think that the trade barriers are over _thirty percent globally_.

Net FDI = trade deficit is an accounting identity. Reshoring and the trade deficit aren't necessarily complementary.

Who cares what Bernie was advocating?
Especially if you hit the RMD threshold in retirement. Even more important is how RMDs affect Medicare premiums(1). The best advice I have is to avoid RMDs as much as possible since they can/will affect other parts of your retirement strategy. Thus, converting to ROTH today may save you lots of cash in the future.

(1) https://www.fedsmith.com/2024/10/23/rmds-are-silently-increa...
Sometimes your best mates go a bit mad. Cut them some slack.

They will need a shoulder to cry on when they re-discover how well a trade war works out. The last ones seem to have happened at roughly 50 year intervals.

The US seems to be incapable of learning from the past. The worrying thing is that Mr Trump is old enough to remember directly or what his parents told him about the last fucked up trade shit storm or trade war.

You do not get to dictate how the world as a whole works ... ever. It has its own ideas about that.

Even Britain at its most imperious could not do that and the US can't even stop itself from trying to impose tariffs on its own air base in .io!

The best we can do from outside is to hope that the US does not collapse completely and that the downward trend stops at some point. If, somehow this all pans out that we will all benefit or even that just the US benefits then fine. Let's pick up the pieces and crack on.

I do not hate Americans nor their rather odd President. We are seeing change happening. It might be for the good eventually but I doubt it but I'm not an expert. In the meantime I suggest we continue to act as friends towards an old friend. When you go barking mad, you might need your mates to stand beside you whilst you dribble and widdle.
i have an eye-fi SD card that has wifi built in. So you don't even need the serial port!
You skipped the bit at the front:

> Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/21

Which nation is invading us? All of them? It's extremely obvious ordinary crime wasn't what this was intended for.
Here is the link. Its just a silly TikTok video discussing the point in an over the top way. The only thing important about it is that Trump reposted it.

https://x.com/americapapabear/status/1907947224090423367?s=1...
Yes, that's exactly what a liability is! US currency is an IOU. The more of it out in the world the less value there is in America's domestic assets.
Sure, it's just that though, a belief. The vast majority of the poor have prospered from free trade; indeed, the costs they complain the most about (health, education, housing) are the biggest categories of things that _can't_ be traded.
In German it's the only possible meaning, unfortunately... ("Mongo" is short for "mongoloid")
https://www.retailcouncil.org/u-s-hits-185-nations-with-tari...

> No new tariffs were announced for Canada. Canada and Mexico’s exemption for USMCA/CUSMA qualifying goods was maintained. However, 25% tariffs on non-USMCA compliant Canadian goods, Canadian steel and aluminum, Canadian autos and parts, and the 10% tariff on Canadian energy exports remain in place.. there are signs that negotiators on both sides are trying to steer Canada-US trade to a more productive process of an expedited renegotiation of the Canada-US-Mexico Trade Agreement (CUSMA).

More context on US trade policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43589350
Humans get fat when eating a grain based diet.

Do you know how many animals are killed farming a wheat field? We used to have to purge colonies of prairie dogs each spring in order to plant. Then there are the birds that get caught in the harvesters and the insects killed by the pesticides. It’s a horror show either way.
I had a lot of fun overengineering the hell out of the status bar in Sway recently. It was something that I got working in fifteen minutes in Bash, and then ended up rewriting in Clojure, then figuring out how to get working with GraalVM, and then just kept adding features and making it more customizable.

None of this was that hard (outside of making it async-friendly, that was a little tricky), but it also wasn't trivial. I had Law and Order on in the background, and I hacked on it for a few days, and it did kind of get me into a "zen state". Figuring out how to make the code more flexible and figuring out which features I can feasibly add was relaxing.

I think part of it was that there's really no consequences to this. If I screw something up, no one is going to be mad at me, no one is going to yell at me, I'm not going to get fired, and I'm allowed to go off onto any tangents that I would like because I'm just doing this for fun. It doesn't feel like "work" because "work" often involves me working on stuff I don't want to work on. If something is too frustrating, I don't have to go through approvals and legal to import a library that does it for me. I can spend as much or as little time as I'd like writing documentation. I can micro-optimize or not-optimize however I'd like.

And fundamentally, if I screw something up, it's the text on the Swaybar, it's really not the end of the world.

It can be tough to find a project that holds my interest enough to get into this. I tend to have the most fun working on stuff that is completely unimportant, because if I'm not trying to change the world, then I can be as creative as I like.
> Brazilian hyperinflation lasted from 1985 (the year when the military dictatorship ended) to 1994, with prices rising by 184,901,570,954.39% (or 1.849×1011 percent; equivalent to a tenfold increase on average a year)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Notable_hyperin...
Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFi...
ROTH conversions.
I think it’s hilarious and pathetic that you, and our government, advocating for the Alien and Sedition Acts in 2025.

You should read about the obvious problems with a circa 1798 law that was as odious and abusive then as it is today.
silkscreen "555" onto at least one of the ICs, if you do this
The connections between the abstract entities are the connections between the source code elements. That thing goes to `match` which gives me either this or that. It's more that the program is sort of graph-shaped (all about connections) than that I have linear grammar sentences in my head.

I could "serialize" the same mental model into various alternate syntaxes, e.g. assign to temporary variables or not, based on what feels right and has a good amount of things to think of at once (the good old no more than 7 rule).

I could write it out in multiple different orders, as long as data dependencies are fulfilled.

I definitely don't write programs as sentences like how I am writing this text right now. For example, I might first decide that I assign a placeholder `todo!()` to a local variable of a specific type (I know the "shape" it will be, no more), then use that value and return from the function, and then go back and figure out where that "something" could come from. Sometimes I have a couple of such sections and I "search" for the connections between them. My prose is much more linear.

I don't think I have much better means of expressing what goes inside my head than what that gives me. After all, language is the tool we're learned to communicate with. IDE-level helpers like rename all instances of this variable (now that I understand how I intend to use it) are useful, so I can literally name things a, b, c to describe a chain of processing and once I understand what I need to do, go back and easily rename them to something more descriptive.

Better code navigation and on-screen layout would be great. Like, what if functions aren't just sequentially in a file, but each one lives separately and can be opened in neighboring panes easily, to pick what you're looking at, instead of jumping around a "file". IDE "jump to definition" and API doc hints are related but not quite the same.

Outside of programming, being able to point at things to manipulate things and make connections is really powerful, but very hard to invent great UX for. I could see that sort of stuff being useful. Even in a text editor, I often wonder why exactly can't I drag a paragraph or a Markdown section (heading+everything under it) to move it. In gg the VCS GUI, you can drag commits between histories and changes between commits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD9L3Mi1Vy4 . In general, structural editing can be a great way to munge source code, there's definitely ways to improve over emacs paredit. I feel like there's some sort of untapped power in the combo of structural editing and a touchpad with haptic feedback, but maybe it'll take AR to make it intuitive enough. Think "gesture intents" popping up from the trackpad like long press pops up character variants on phone keyboards. Think swipe left/right and more for blocks of content, with UI feedback to confirm the action before release.
Economically and diplomatically? No, it doesn't.
Reminds me of this: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jonathan-m-metzl-dying...

> Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. “I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.”

> At the most basic level, Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. Yet Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma that told him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma that, as he made abundantly clear, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy that overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and nonwhite others. Dogma suggesting to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.
They used to work that way in the US! Then came the labor protections.

Labor conditions are a prisoners dilemma. Individuals in a location can’t really choose to opt out of poor labor conditions if that is what exists there. That is why it took a lot of activism in America to change the labor conditions.

So right now we are exploiting people in places that don’t have the same protections. The comparative advantage of those places is in allowing suffering, not in the people actually being more okay with the conditions.
Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich (1973) [pdf]
because that's the way he likes to do things?
It's Tcl now not TCL. No longer an acronym. It hasn't been TCL for years.
No, we didn't label them as war crimes. None of the WWII Allied military commanders or political leaders were charged with war crimes. They are still revered as heroes today. And if we faced an existential threat we would do the same to enemy civilians again, or even more.

"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."

-Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, Jr. 1941

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but his was quite a popular opinion at the time.
But... they can? If Ukraine can fight Russia to a standstill, a fully mobilized Europe clearly at least has a shot. Unless it escalates to nuclear weapons and everyone loses... But you need at least an argument if you want to say that is less likely without any initial US involvement, it's not obvious.
> Imagine what the vibes would be on the West Coast if there was a huge set of policy changes that decimated and liquidated the high tech industries

We had large inflation caused by Joe Biden's industrial revival acts (spurring a massive increase in factory construction (see https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/unpacking-th...) that led to interest rate rises and a TON of tech layoffs! People on this forum should be aware that the chain of causality runs in that direction.

And are you saying that the US media doesn't pillory Californa as a liberal hellhole? I actually don't even know what distribution of media you consume that doesn't handwring over the morality of liberals.
Rebuy equities/reinvest dividends at reduced prices, pay taxes now, enjoy tax-free growth. If the current admin is serious about trying to get rid of income tax, then that would eliminate a major advantage of trad vs roth.