skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don't do the post-mortem of "how did we end up here", no project, no plan makes a change.

* First understand every point on the curve between a healthy democratic society and autocracy is slippery, not stable.

* Next, understand how autocracy rises. If you want to look at the drivers toward autocracy, you will find them invariably in the same places.

* The US problems

- Braunhemde, already before WOII, then imported more of them afterwards. No press coverage, they are real. Even the "Sieg Heil"s on CPAC did not draw media coverage.

- Cultism. Serious, deep cultism.

- As a specialization: Christian nationalism + conservatism, replay of the '30s

- https://xcancel.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1910179753430299043
- https://xcancel.com/sola_chad/status/1802398272293581272#m1

- Incredible concentrations of (inherited) wealth, deformed perspectives of the other 99% cultivated over generational spans

- No real journalism, instead, career in media house depend on commercial ownership. Narratives tailored to segment, but no deep and critical impact of analysis.

- "Let us talk about the tariffs today, they make zero economic sense"
- "I think what he meant is..."
- "Of course this is not entirely correct, but..."
- "President Trump has said.."
- "Rubio did a press conference today"

- Only drama, never the Big Picture.

- Elections? According to the press, those are just
- The latest polls!
- Repeat marketing from spin doctors at affiliated media houses
- "Debate" = Reality TV, scores are given on wit and emotional play

- Fake news is allowed as a business model.

- Rigidity => distorted beliefs. See rigidity about "free speech" via decades of pushed narratives. Now look at all the book banning, canceling of research based on keyword match.

- Rigidity about free markets. Now you pay 5 million for a dinner with The Suppreme Sovite to get your business free. Tariffs, because, you know?

- No concept of "Paradox of Tolerance". Parties that don't want to participate in a democratic society with rule of law and separation of powers CANNOT be part of the system. Period.

- Overall corruption by oligarchy. The GOP has been killed, but the Dems have the problems too, making it difficult to make any postmortem

- Exceptionalism

- Vast information deserts (there are states where information cannot reach people at all ), where nothing is served but right-wing reality distortion as commercial fast-food

- Normalization of personal retaliation against political enemies (that is why everybody is obeying in advance, people are used to be abused by power). Americans are frightened.

- No concept of common good, everyone hustling. Also: competition means *killing* the competitor. That playbook is deeply normalized, see Big Tech. Microsoft, Intel->AMD, Google etc

- Regulatory capture, rules for thee, exceptions for me

- "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" Deep cultural programming

- State capture, this is reaching the critical stage now.

- Normalisation of sado-populism. "I don't care, I want the other suffer".

- Class-based society

This was my TED talk.
Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over. Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our system there is positive selection (in the 'natural selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.

This should give you pause.

Without claiming that any given administration is taking any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is net positive.

I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground. Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of reproducibility right now.
Awww, thank you. As a Clojurian, I aspire to be kind and helpful. The Clojure community is renowned for its friendly, coaching-oriented attitude. Anyone with questions (even those unrelated to Clojure) should absolutely reach out to Clojuristas — just go to http://clojurians.net and don't be shy.

I'm forever thankful for Clojure for reigniting my passion for programming, but particularly, I'm indebted to the many individuals in the Clojure community. Whenever I pose a question expecting just straightforward guidance or documentation links, I consistently receive profound, thought-provoking answers that surpass my expectations. Virtually every discussion I initiate with them ends up being incredibly educational, teaching me far more than I initially sought. I can confidently admit - yes, learning Clojure has made a better programmer out of me, but most importantly, it made me a better person.
"By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its
competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for
viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually
viewpoint diverse."

They are calling for Republican commissars in universities and accusing you of being the one who wants to enforce a single viewpoint and call you the enemy of pluralism. Not surprised, but I continue to be infuriated to witness such shameless insincerity from Republicans.
I like the code editor style preview on the right. Enough to forgive the slightly clunky scroll.
Well the bigger question is how big does the system have to be to warrant breaking out a new technique, much less adding a new runtime or other large dependency.

Now, I have no direct experience with any of the common logical programming systems. I have familiarity.

But anytime I came upon anything that might justify such a system, the need just didn’t seem to justify it.

Talking less than 100 rules. Most likely less than a couple dozen. Stacking some IFs and a bit of math, strategically grouped in a couple aptly named wrapper methods to help reduce the cognitive load, and it’s all worked pretty well.

And, granted, if I had solid experience using these systems, onboarding cost would be lower.

When have you found it to be worth cutting over?
Fantasizing in your own mind is still different from actually talking with a real LLM. I think the poor responses from an LLM can easily shatter the illusions in your mind.
Or take a blurry misaligned photo of the screen.
The fact that they deserve to be bankrupt doesn't mean the person responsible for their state of bankruptcy is innocent.
Yeah that's what I figured, but it was really really weird when I was there. It is so odd to go to a giant decorated store in a nearly empty state. I don't think Backrooms was really a meme at that point, but that's the sort of vibe it gave me.
"People don't like my opinions therefore I am going to sabotage the discussion from obscurity."
Although I understand nothing from these posts, read Raymond's posts somehow always "tranquil" my inner struggles.

Just curious, is this customer a game studio? I have never done any serious system programming but the gist feels like one.
> Go originally wanted to not have to link any system libraries, something that does not actually work

It does work on Linux, the only kernel that promises a stable binary interface to user space.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls
Ha! I name most of my shares after celestial bodies... Jupiter is the big 100 TB volume for all my archives. Mercury is an all-NVMe volume for speed, for my video editing mostly.
That's still beyond retarded
>If you take someone's work, and use it to make money, you should pay them for that work. Its really not that hard of a concept.

How many paid products are using foss software without paying the developers. 99%? I do not consider that being evil.

If there are no IP laws nobody will have the expectation to have control over what other people do with their creative output. If you are unwilling to accept that you do not get to make art, the same is true now for art as well. If you do not want someone to make a parody of your art your only option is to never publish it.
> "I don't know" is absolutely a state of acceptance.

Yes, it absolutely is acceptance that you don't know. It is belief in not knowing. But that's not what we were talking about. Context must be considered.

> Assent to a proposition or affirmation, or the acceptance of a fact...

Curious choice. The GCIDE is not among the usual 'authoritative' dictionaries, and for good reason. It takes its definitions from a publication written in 1913. It is not a modern dictionary. Unless you've invented a time machine... It is interesting from a licensing perspective, but little more.

Of course you are absolutely right that anyone can make up a random definition for a word on the spot. They can even publish it in a book if they so choose. But you know that wasn't what you were talking about when you brought up "definition" and you know that didn't change going forward. Context must be considered.

> The second way this argument is flawed is that dictionaries are descriptive tools, not prescriptive.

Hence the poking fun of your "By definition, any update of beliefs is changing one's mind." comment. It even prefaced with "_If_ we want to lean on definitions" to highlight that it could not be taken in a serious way. Did you not read the thread in full before landing here? Context must be considered.

I, for one, thought the discussion we were having was rather interesting. I have no idea why you thought anyone would want to read this blatantly obvious, horribly off-topic slop.
There were way cheaper and more-effective ways to achieve that. And that's not why the administration says they're doing this, anyway. It's because we have trade deficits, period. Or it's because of fentanyl, since that was the justification for the invocation of emergency powers that're letting the executive impose tariffs at all.
I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
The world seems to be chock-full of bags of every conceivable size.
110%, people can be braindead assholes in their replies, and fail to substantially engage with comments.

Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.

Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.
I am against all IP. There is zero difference to me. Any use is acceptable to me.
The irony of you citing a work that critiques placing "subjective emotion over objective moral truths" and attempting to apply it to the "modern left" is almost physically painful.

You and everyone like you owe so much of your current life to the modern left that your ingratitude is astounding. The very computer you're using to send your words to me is a product of science and rational thinking that you seem to abhor.
They are resold in Korea for insane prices. No explanation why they are so coveted over there but they are. I have one but no desire to sell it - I just like it.
Bravely following behind Harvard's broad shoulders. Way to go Columbia.
FYI - to see this you need to have your browser at least 1435px wide.
The Def Con security conference has open wifi, and people make a game of trying to capture packets of others trying to log into non-SSL websites. If successful, they post the credentials on the “Wall of Sheep”.

One year I got the idea to try to exploit the Wall. I didn't succeed but had great fun trying!
Not a technical question, just want to say I really appreciate your projects! I work with a group of radar engineers and they were absolutely floored by your €800 C-band polarimetric SAR drone.

Any tips for working on hobby RF/microwave projects and staying motivated while doing them? I am an EE and have a long list of projects I want to do at home, but I can never seem to find the time to do them.
No idea how many are first-party or vetted by Microsoft. Probably none of them. But I really, really doubt you can only run software that ticks one of those two boxes.

Certify The Web has a 'Microsoft Partner' badge. If that's something your org values, then they seem worth looking into for IIS.

I can find documentation online from Microsoft where they use YARP w/ LettuceEncrypt, Caddy, and cert-manager. Clearly Microsoft is not afraid to tell customers about how to use third party solutions.

Yes, these are not fully endorsed by Microsoft, so it's much harder to get approval for. If an organisation really makes it impossible, then they deserve the consequences of that. They're going to have problems with 397 day certificates as well. That shouldn't hold the rest of the industry back. We'd still be on 5 year certs by that logic.
Not OP, but I'm seeking foreign citizenship through prior family history as a mechanism for legally escaping the US should it come to that.
Seems cool, but overloading the term agentic development is a risky play. I almost clicked away when I saw that because, my opinions about LLMs for development aside, I do not want them anywhere near my blog, because that's where I want my own voice to come through strongest.

That aside, this looks really cool and I wish you all the best!

(addressing erlend_sh because I saw them in the thread)
Can confirm. Finally got the GPU for my new PC in 2020 by (first) showing up at Microcenter on days when deliveries were expected, then eventually joining a discord where people posted daily updates when stock actually showed up (once I got tired of driving a half hour there and back a few times).

In the end, a helpful discord member was already at the store, purchased a GPU for me, and held it until I could get there and buy it off him. Due to the shortage there was no risk of him stuck holding the "bag" but it was a huge favor from my end. Wasn't scalping but I still threw in an extra $20 just for helping out.
Cool, so no PID Eins. I have no shares in systemd, so fine. What do you propose?
Still does.
> It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that.

Just FYI: Trump's border czar Tom Homan literally said he plans to "eradicate" supposed "foreign threats" on Fox News [1].

I seriously don't know how many more masks have to fall before people finally take this administration and its actors beyond Trump serious. There is no way to downplay, deny or otherwise misinterpret Project 2025. It is happening right in front of your eyes.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmuqfzef7l22
> CMake gets a lot of hate because a lot of large projects use it poorly and the syntax is strange

Sounds like a ”you’re holding it wrong”[0] defense. In my experience, it’s exciting to start using it, then you start pushing it and it’s annoying or simply falls down. I’ll admit I’ve avoided it for years now (maybe it needs a revisit), but I bought the book, I drank the koolaid, and I tried to like it. But imo it really is problematic, and I’m one of those people who’s since settled on basic (BSD) Makefiles.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/25/iphone.problems.r...
I do not think I like this author...

> A critical piece of history here is to understand the really stupid way in which GCC does cross compiling. Traditionally, each GCC binary would be built for one target triple. [...] Nobody with a brain does this ^2

You're doing GCC a great disservice by ignoring its storied and essential history. It's over 40 years old, and was created at a time where there were no free/libre compilers. Computers were small and slow. Of course you wouldn't bundle multiple targets in one distribution.

LLVM benefitted from a completely different architecture and starting from a blank slate when computers were already faster and much larger, and was heavily sponsored by a vendor that was innately interested in cross-compiling: Apple. (Guess where LLVM's creator worked for years and lead the development tools team)
From their unwillingness to tax people. American tax revenue as a fraction of GDP is 6-7 percentage points lower than in the average OECD country. That gap is over $1.5 trillion/year.
I think you're equivocating between the value of the actual goal itself and the value of the actions they're taking in the context of fulfilling that goal. Blowing up the economy to maximize your personal power is short-sighted, I agree, but once you accept that as Trump's goal you'll see that arbitrary tariffs (and other financial manipulation, look at how he's using federal funding to thought police universities and punish dissident state governors) is a ruthlessly effective strategy. If you don't do what he wants, he'll starve out you and your underlings until either you give up or the people beneath you revolt and replace you with someone who'll do what he says.

Do not, my friends, become addicted to [federal funding]. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.
I wonder how much random noise (or other randomness) would have to be added to the pixelated version to make this method unusable.
> What shouldn't be ignored? Some small subset of foreign workers decided to take security seriously?

That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
This is similar to how I censor images on a cellphone. I use an editor to cover what I want to censor with a black spot, then take a screenshot of that edited image and delete the original.
Amongst our weaponry are such elements as graft, narcotics, money laundering, fraud… I’ll come in again.
IIRC in the late 80's it was said that a F1 car could create so much downforce that it could travel upside down.

This video shows something, something in very controlled conditions. It is impressive.

I am sure many here will have played Sonic the Hedgehog with it's looping and corkscrewing tracks. The latter would bring challenges.

Are we yet at the Men in Black tunnel congestion solution? And if we are, wow to how the road markings work.
This. Never give the original file, always take a screenshot of it. If it’s text being blacked out, it can be guessed from the length of words.
A lot of people can't actually say what kind of movie they want, until they see it. And even if there are 100,000 releases every year in every genre, virality will probably still exist where even if random, one of those movies is going to get more popular than the rest and then everyone will "need" to see it.
You are thinking of John Meacham’s winning entry in the 2008 underhanded C contest https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html
Seems to have a decent amount of knowledge in this domain in education and professional work. Author is from MIT so maybe professors had a lot of influence here.

also, gcc is relatively old and comes with a lot of baggage. LLVM is sort of the defacto standard now with improvements in performance
typically

Pure science may not be a typical case, though, because the people who control the funds don't really have any idea whether the work they are funding is ultimately going to turn out productive or not. The work involved is far from routine and basically a jump into the unknown.

I get the risk of fraud and nepotism, but in some other situations (Bell Labs etc.), "choose very good people and let them improvise within certain limits of a budget" turned out to be very efficient. The devil is in the "choose very good people" detail.
The authors of Guesstimate are now working on https://www.squiggle-language.com/

Someone also turned it into the https://github.com/rethinkpriorities/squigglepy python library
Well, the evidence is that when males and females compete against each other in sport, the males tend to win, so if you think womens' sport should exist, then you need to define who is included and who is excluded from that category.
Maybe you're referring to "aCropalypse". Also there was an issue once where sections with overpainted solid black color still retained the information in the alpha channel.

https://www.wired.com/story/acropalyse-google-markup-windows...

https://www.lifewire.com/acropalypse-vulnerability-shows-why...
In a first for Uber since becoming a public company, an annual profit. - https://apnews.com/article/uber-ride-sharing-drizly-pandemic... - February 7th, 2024
I personally dont think his extreme position is realistic. It would take too long. Foundations are too big, public schools pose a major challenge, and the public is mixed on the topic

I think a much more interesting idea is breaking the Council for Higher Education Accreditation monopoly on accreditation, and replacing it with some standard metrics.

Letting incumbent universities decide if new universities can exist causes the same problems as giving hospitals a veto over new competition, and education is ripe for disruption.

I would love to see accreditation to any program that produces students that could pass some standard tests or metrics.
An excellent text about engaging with extremists... (I don't agree with the authors simplification as toddlers) is the book "Subversive Denken, wie man Fundamentalismus diskutiert" (Unfortunately it's only available in German). The author distinguishes between different types of fundamentalists and makes the point that discussions with the convinced fundamentalist is often not possible, because even agreeing on facts is impossible as denying some facts is a proof of faith in the fundamentalist ideology. The discussion is then about convincing listeners instead via different techniques. Despite the title it is not primarily about religious fundamentalism but also political (quite timely at the moment) and the author gives historical examples of the type of techniques employed against fundamentalists.
The underhanded C contest: https://www.underhanded-c.org/
> If I hadn't moved around my Finder window in the video, I don't think it would've worked. You might get a couple letters right, but it would be very low confidence.

> Moving forward, if I do have sensitive data to hide, I'll place a pure-color mask over the area, instead of a blur or pixelation effect.

Alternately - don't pixelate on a stationary grid when the window moves.

If you want it to look nicer than a color box but without giving away all the extra info when data moves between pixels, pixelate it once and overlay with a static screenshot of that.

For bonus points, you could automate scrambling the pixelation with fake-but-real-looking pixelation. Would be nice if video editing tools had that built in for censoring, knowing that pixelation doesn't work but people will keep thinking it does.
I was looking for this. Seen it (or a similar tool) ages ago.

Want to use it every 3 months or so to pretend that we know what we can squeeze in the roadmap for the quarter.
Hopefully. Though I wonder if that can be gamed if you pick the denominator and the value is rounded. Eg a large prime.
Dude, background checks are brutal. You can be denied because your parents (not you) struggled to pay taxes. You could have acedemic dishonesty that disqualifies you (that one small area where "permanent record" in school may actually cost you something). There are so many little things that no other kind of high paying job cares about in background checks that are suddenly red flags for clearance.

There's a reason Musk especially kept dodging trying to get proper clearance. He isn't even fully cleared to see all aspects of SpaceX. Some of his employees he brought in probably aren't better off.
Curated content has the built in problem of ”by whom” and ”with what incentive”. A large part of the problem with ”the algorithm” (whether manual by a human or an AI) is that someone is doing it for money. Unless the curation creates some exceptional and immense value, there is really no current viable business model.