skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually asked the author of the original article, which was linked in the article you posted, and got no reply.

But I managed to track it down elsewhere. I've thrown it onto my static site, so that it's easy to get to. My understanding is that it's in the public domain, so this is fine. If I get told otherwise I'll take it down.

https://riazarbi.github.io/files/Work%20simplification%20as%...
Almost 10% of eligible voters do not have access to citizenship proof at ready[0].

Trump changed voting rules to require proof of citizenship[1].

Disenfranchising 21 million voters makes sense now, no?

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/213-...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/politics/voting-proof-of-...
I replaced my 2019 Macbook Pro 13" i5 16gb/256gb, with an M4 Pro 48gb/1TB 16". It just wasn't worth it anymore, it would stall opening some large files, the fans would spin up for inexplicable reasons, the screen was mid... it was just barely serviceable for my needs and wasn't worth being so frugal about anymore. Yes technically I could use something from the 80s to write text files if I wanted to most of the time, and I'm somewhat anxious about the possibility that some component soldered to the MB will short one day and kill my SSD, but it's still quite a worthwhile upgrade.
Yeah, but the U.S. govt funds a lot of important research so it may not fall behind technologically unlike India…

Wait, what did you just say? The U.S. government has decimated its research funding?

Oh, well, at least the U.S. has a lot of high quality colleges churning out highly educated Americans, so that still may not be as much of a problem…wait, did you say Americans are increasingly turning away from college due to the high costs and the resultant loans that cannot be terminated even in bankruptcy, because the government has been cutting back significantly on funding education for years now?

Oh well, at least the U.S. is welcoming to immigrants who have founded over 50% of unicorns and usually tend to be the most dynamic and brightest slice of their country’s populations, so it may maintain its technological edge…

Wait what? Oh god.
>Doesn't everyone just use Objects::hash?

I hope they do know better, it's actually rather poor. 1st it should not be used for a single parameter - just use hashCode() directly and ensure non-null in the c-tor (or Objects.hashCode). Then, in general you need - only few fields to calc a decent high cardinality hashCode...

Last: 31 as a constant (used in most mul/add schemas by java). It's a single byte prime, so it has some benefits. It can be implemented via shift and add (x<<5 - x) but modern CPUs implement mul quite well and don't have carry flag deps so shift+add is worse in general. However, as a constant is more like to cause collisions in a general purpose hash function. It's close to being power of 2 and multiple of 10 -> 32 and 30.
It's called US companies now could increase their prices by 30% and just don't worry much, if sales are pretty good already for them.
Reminds me of another recurring idea of replacing code with flowcharts. First I've seen that idea coming from some unknown Soviet professor from 80s, and then again and again from different people from different countries in different contexts. Every time it is sold as a total breakthrough in simplicity and also every time it proves to be a bloat of complexity and a productivity killer instead.

Or weak typing. How many languages thought that simplifying strings and integers and other types into "scalar", and making any operation between any operands meaningful, would simplify the language? Yet every single one ended up becoming a total mess instead.

Or constraint-based UI layout. Looks so simple, so intuitive on simple examples, yet totally failing to scale to even a dozen of basic controls. Yet the idea keeps reappearing from time to time.

Or an attempt at dependency management by making some form of symlink to another repository e.g. git modules, or CMake's FetchContent/ExternalProject? Yeah, good luck scaling that.

Maybe software engineering should have some sort of "Hall of Ideas That Definitely Don't Work", so that young people entering the field could save their time on implementing one more incarnation of an already known not good idea.
They can only pass the extra costs if there is no competition and they can only eat the costs if their margin is big enough to absorb the cost and still remain profitable. If their us market share is important they will shift their production around to the us or somewhere that has a favorable trade agreement with the us.
It just never made any sense to me. If we're talking real production code bases, not a one off hobby script, working with these systems just didn't get me anything.

If you're in a codebase of tens or hundreds of thousands of LOC, these systems don't work well, which leaves only two options, you enter some never-ending chat in which you have to have conversations with these systems and they act like a dimwitted intern, or you just give up on being a serious software engineer and pray and commit things you don't understand.

If I have to understand everything anyway I might as well just write it myself instead of talking to a bot that yaps without end, if i went with option two I should be fired because I'd be unqualified for my job. You're just backloading your problems basically.
It's not about stopping, more about slowing down.

(numbers for presentation purposes only)

If every request goes from 10ms to 100ms - a human won't care as they'll click like 5-6 times total, while reading the output between page load, but a bot will crawl the site 10 times slower.
I'm from Pakistan, and the solution to 'it's difficult for people to get ID' was so simple even 3rd world poor illiterate country could do it: just go to them instead.

Our ID department has buses with computers and cameras/fingerprint machines on them, they go to remote villages and stuff and take everyone's bio data, then return a few weeks later and give everyone their cards.

There is literally NO valid excuse for NOT implementing voter ID.

NONE.

If we can do it, the richest country in the world can do it.

Such a pathetic hill for American Democratic party to die on.
I recall the actual emissions figures for AI usage are much lower than commonly touted in the media. And if one really cares, efficient local models exist, but I doubt the average Photoshop user thinks about their emissions in their usage of the application while simultaneously fear-mongering about AI art, which I've seen happen before.
Any city would be better without cars. My city has barely any public transport, the sidewalks are for cars to park and most of the people you meet on streets are immigrants or poor who can't afford a car. This is so wrong.
Services aren't traditionally part of tariffs; tariffs apply only to physical stuff moving across borders.

That being said: I work in a services-oriented business right now "exporting" services to the U.S. and the leadership of that company is seemingly getting very worried, trying to diversify their customer base out of the U.S.

If, in the cycle of retaliatory action, they run out of ammunition with tariffs on stuff, who knows what other crazy ideas will come to the surface: Tariffs on services do come to mind, maybe restrictions around recognition/enforcement of foreign-owned intellectual property,...
for the author, only the centrists, his own group, can display independent thinking.

he assigns all virtues of the world to his group while others seems to be barely more than glorified barbarians.

this is, at best, laughable... and honestly quite reductive and insulting.

this seems to stem from the classic idea of "if everybody was informed and intelligent as i am we would all agree", which i thought had already been disproven long ago. people have different base assumptions. cultures are real things... individual differences matter too.

he also treats ideologies as unified things which is historically false, meanwhile his personal particular set of idea is not an ideology but something akin to objective truth (for which he explicitly argues) or something adjacent to it. any semi-consistent (if that) set of ideas instantly becomes an ideology as soon as you share that set to a group. there are myriads of ideologies that pop-up and die every day... the ones with staying power obviously have accumulated some following but they are rarely all compassing; we have a word for those, cults.

but first thing first, change country and you will get entirely different "centrists" with an entirely different set of ideas. there is no reason there would not be (in his own terms) "accidental" leftists and "accidental" right--ists???

in a locked 2 party system like what you get in the united states, stuff will probably have a tendency to degenerate though. things are way more fluid in countries where you have more democratic choice. there is a lot of fear in the american mix, that doesn't work well with free-thinking.
We're talking about businesses who have hired a software engineer to advise them on how to set things up correctly. I don't personally have any experience with WordPress, but I assume that it is possible to set up correctly, right? If you hire an expert and pay them to do it, I mean.
My computer is about that age as well, didn't know that was abnormal or special.
I don't have a real opinion of the value at this point but, to the degree that there are significant productivity enhancement tools available for developers (or many other functions), and they refuse to use them, companies should properly mark those folks down as low performers with the associated consequences.

"I don't want to use the web."
Can you summarize or point to a summary you might know of?
Why? Clearly AI tools make life easier.

I could drive a manual car, but why? Automatic transmission is so much more convenient. Furthermore, for some use-cases FSD is even more convenient.

Another example: I don't want to think about gait movement of my robots, I just want it move, from A to B.

With programming, same thing: I don't want to waste time typing `if err != nil {}`, I want to think about the real problem. Ditto on happy-case unit tests. I don't want to waste my carpal tunnel prone wrists on those.

So on and so forth. Technology exists to make life more convenient. So why reject technology?
You don't see those articles because they get flagged instantly by users. You'll see plenty of comments on it though.
Its not efficient to write low level code. Its like trying to build a web application with C.

CUDA is basically the equivalent of "hey you wanna do matrix multiply fast? just use this and we handle the rest". And its standardized, and when Nvidia comes out with new cards, all the old shit still works.
No tariffs on Russia, interestingly enough.

All actions by this administration point to Trump working in cahoots with Putin, which we were told was "a hoax".

The White House dressing down of Zelensky, and this week Russias investment chief in the US, and just scads of obvious daily reminders that Trump has no bad words for his pal.
Odd.

Tariffs on our friends and allies while he speaks of dropping sanctions on Russia and meanwhile levies no tariffs upon goods from Russia, zero.
Odd.
I have found that unless your job is making simple CRUD apps and you really don't care about quality at all, yes, you will be less productive. The amount of tiny problems slipping through is immense, and it is known that code reviews are ineffective at noticing all the bugs, as well as it not having any idea of the general code style or conventions, inability to learn if I tell it, and so forth. In the end I spend at least as much time as I would spend coding the thing myself just massaging the AI to make a somewhat working thing, and that at the expense of much, much worse quality. And, I myself am also miserable, since I'm basically spending my entire day communicating to a kindergarten child and teaching it, over and over again, except that a child eventually learns, AI doesn't. That's horrible. I don't want to spend my days doing that.

Companies I work at tend to value quality and correctness over productivity, as ultimately low quality and incorrect software makes for unhappy clients who we have to service out of our own pockets later on anyway as part of the warranty we provide for our software, ending up costing us a lot more in money and reputation. But, like I said, I'm also not seeing any productivity gain, not unless you throw every good practice out of the window and pretend to be the only dev in the team as the AI will willfully rewrite large chunks of the app and destroy your colleagues work in the process.

And for what? So that you can be a manager? What is your moat in the end of this? Will you advertise on your resume the ability to manipulate AI via text prompts as your skill? I suppose if you want to be a manager, maybe that's appealing. I don't. I want to actually make things, and be an active and intellectual part at making those things, not just a manager monitoring butts in (virtual) seats.
> This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.

Not the big China exporters, not any more. They all include taxes in the price on your country specific web site, ship to their warehouses inside the EU, handle taxes and your local courier just delivers.

Now if you're talking DHL yes, they have you fill forms upon forms and charge you for the forms you didn't ask for. But if that happens, no one will have time to process all the forms so private imports from China will simply ... halt for a while. Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.

If in the US, I'd hold on any direct purchases from China for 3-6 months.

> So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.

Hah. That's DHL commission territory :) Definitely hold from direct purchases until Temu sorts it out for you.
> I got an x220 jumping onto the hype but it was too small and too slow to use. ven though I'd maxed out the RAM, replaced the solder paste and was running a lightweight i3 environment.

That's my only personal laptop, to the last detail. What are you doing that makes it feel slow?

I might upgrade to a x270 for the USB-C charging and a full-HD display, but only when this one dies. Which might take another decade...
Capitalism has become as much of a thought-terminating argument as 'the gods'. Most '-ism' words I think.
Noyb takes Swedish tax authority to court for selling people's personal data
How to structure GitHub Actions workflows that deploy to multiple environments
91% of adults have a driver's license, leaving 9% of potential voters without a DL.

In a properly functioning democracy barring 9% of your voting population from voting because they lack an unrelated document (why should a driver's license be linked to ability to vote?) would be considered a major flaw.
Tory party did this in the uk. Old people bus pass is allowed. Student id card isn’t.
The one thing I hope Americans think about is to believe in democracy, and discuss with others on the other side of the aisle. Really, most have voted the way they did for real, valid reasons. And recognizing them is the path to heal your country. Only through understanding will democracy prevail.

Do not spiral into dividing your own country. That is the real goal of authoritarian regimes.
Some do not want/have a fixed IP address or anything listening on their home network.

Tailscale or having Headscale hosted somewhere else allows you to do that.
RealID documentation requirements are a PITA. I have a birth certificate and passport and valid DL and it still was a nuisance the accumulate the required point allocation. People without those golden documents can be very hard pressed to meet the bar.
It looks too complex, IMO. As someone living in Trump's beloved country (Russia), I'd say you should ask, "Cui prodest?" If some oligarchs (currently called billionaires, but we'll see) surrounding Trump benefit financially from these tariffs, then the plan isn't about state debt—it's about their personal wealth.
I like your take.

The only issue I have with trusting a computer to do so much is that it doesn't necessarily have the long term vision or intuition some humans might have for the direction of the software product. There's so much nuance to the connection between a business need and getting it into software, or maybe I am overthinking it :D
> but I remember reading something about an aboriginal fire ritual that had been practised by indigenous people in Australia for something like 12000 years

In Australia they're very proud of asserting things like that, but obviously there is no evidence it's true. On the other hand, there's lots of evidence that that doesn't happen.

> Because these traditions were passed down orally or through generational practice they have gradually been lost which is sad.

The fact that this mechanism of loss exists is already sufficient to prove that a tradition can't last 10,000 years.
How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
> I know very few adult Americans

Do you think there's a chance there's a selection bias to your random sampling of the population?
> All the rest is tech debt that can be solved once product market fit is solved.

Even then, it's mostly never.
Oh man, the MNT Reform looks _so_ awesome!
Exactly. Calculation for actual figures is based on trade deficit, everything else is just a fat lie. "White House officials said its levies were reciprocal to countries, such as China, which it said charge higher tariffs on US goods, impose "non-tariff" barriers to US trade or have otherwise acted in ways the government feels undermine American economic goals" (from BBC)
Non-tariff barrier usually means regulation US exporters don't like, including data protection, EU not wanting to buy junk food from the US, most of which apply to EU companies the same way anyway... There is no point in asking for a reduction of these tariffs, and will probably never happen.
> The 1st (because the actual basis was often protected speech unrelated to the asserted premise of removal)

This sounds like you are talking about the students who were detained and deported. Were any of them sent to El Salvador? My understanding is that they had their student visas revoked on the basis of 8 USC 1182(a)(3)(C)(i):

> An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.

I don't know the specifics of the cases pertaining to the students, but from a plain reading this doesn't seem altogether unreasonable. I think it's obvious that this is being done at the behest of Israel, but it doesn't seem explicitly illegal.

> 5th (because of denial of due process) [...] 8th (because of conditions in the prison where they are sent) [...] and 13th (because the prison involves involuntary servitude, and they were condemned to it without a criminal conviction)

I couldn't find clarification as to what section of the prison the deportees are being held in. I understand that the prison is set up such that lower-level offenders are required to work or study almost every waking hour of the day, whereas gang members are segregated and not permitted to leave their cells at all. The key issue here seems to be due process, which is in turn dependent on a court ruling on the application of the Alien Sedition acts being improper.
I mean isn't what happened to Google leading people to use generative ai tools instead of searching that web searches started filling with generative AI garbage, both in terms of web content as in terms of Google itself generating it
Sam Altman's Firing from OpenAI
It's great if you want to be self-sufficient pending a great war. The way things are going, it may be the only thing to justify such blatant self-sabotage, and hence necessary to start one.
As a 13 owner (only thinkpad 13, nobody talks about it but I think is one of the best pieces of hardware I have ever owned) this would be fantastic. I would love to have my 13 for life. I don't know if my 13 is able to be upgraded like a desktop PC like other thinkpads, but adding a carbon fiber chassis would be like fresh air.
Very cool. Though might want to increase contrast on diagrams, for example here https://pico.sh/tuns
> steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself

> to filter out the non-fighters

This is bullying and hazing.
My wife was denied the opportunity to vote last year in the local elections due to not having ID in her when we popped in on a whim.

The voting booth refused to even register this, yet the apologists claim only 1 in 400 were denied.
Guess: If properly stored (physically), good-quality paper documents and photographs will last for centuries. But as soon as you digitize them - you're now chained to the treadmill of maintaining/upgrading/migrating digital archiving systems. Compared to keeping the old-fashioned Archive Storage Room dry (and fire-free), that's 100X the labor and expense. Forever.
>They pay like crap.

Then raise the wages. Yes that means products get more expensive, but so be it. The economy will find a new equilibrium. White collar workers will see their purchasing power decrease, but factory workers will see it increase.

>No American sees their kid growing up and thinks, "I hope my child will one day work long hours at a factory."

Maybe its just me, but I think theres something seriously wrong with society if people have existential dread over the thought of having to produce the things they consume. If the production of it is so unethical, it shouldn't be consumed at all.
> Is the critical difference here that the array access happens outside of the "for" expression?

Precisely: this means that `d[k]` is guaranteed to execute before the check that `k < 16`. In general, if you have some access like `d[k]` where `k` is some integer and `d` is some array of size `N`, you can assume that `k < N` on all paths which are dominated by the statement containing `d[k]`. In simpler terms, the optimizer will assume that `k < N` is true on every path after the access to `d[k]` occurs.

To make this clearer, consider an equivalent, slightly-transformed version of the original code:

int d[16];
int SATD (void)
{
int satd = 0, dd, k;
dd = d[k=0];
do {
satd += (dd < 0 ? -dd : dd);
k = k + 1;
dd=d[k]; // At this point, k must be < 16.
} while (k < 16); // The value of `k` has not changed, thus our previous
// assumption that `k < 16` must still hold. Thus `k < 16`
// can be simplified to `true`.
return satd;
}

Now consider a slightly-transformed version of the correct code:

int d[16];
int SATD (void)
{
int satd = 0, k = 0;
k = 0;
do
{
satd += d[k] < 0 ? -d[k] : d[k]; // At this point, k must be < 16
k = k + 1;
} while (k < 16); // The value of `k` has changed -- at best, we can assert
// that `k < 17` since its value increased by 1 since we
// last assumed it was less than 16. But the assumption
// that `k < 16` doesn't hold, and this check cannot be
// simplified.
return satd;
}

It's important that this is understood in terms of dominance (in the graph-theoretical sense), because statements like "k < 16 can never be false because it's used in d[k] where k == 16" or "the compiler will delete checks for k < 16 if it knows that d[16] occurs" which seem equivalent to the previously-stated dominance criterion simply are not. It's not that the compiler is detecting UB, thus deleting your checks -- it's that it assumes UB never occurs in the first place.
My only objection to the 51nb FrankenPads is that to the best of my knowledge, they take out the ExpressPort. As a bit of a data-hoarder, I use my ExpressPort for an M2 drive, and don't particularly want to give that up.