Scammers are using AI to copy the voice of children and grandchildren, and make calls urgently asking to send money. It's also being used to scam businesses out of money in similar ways (copying the voice of the CEO or CFO, urgently asking for money to be sent).
Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.
> Red meat also helps people stay at a healthy weight, lower the risk of heart disease (caused by glucose) and some types of cancer (which feed on glucose).
Are you a lobbyist for beef? This is not at all what research says, and research has said mostly the opposite for decades.
As for tariffs, SmarterEveryDay has proven that we need them with his smart grill scrubber that got destroyed by cheap Chinese copycats the moment it became popular.
I'm working on a smart air quality monitor, I don't want competition with the Chinese either.
> Is HN really a place to criticize administration?
Articles critical of economics policies aren't criticizing the administration, but the policies. Yes, economic policies are of interest to technology, and articles related to it are of interest to us.
Even ignoring the fact that an article critical of a policy isn't specifically critical of the administration, yes, HN is really a place to criticize any administration.
> I don't want competition with the Chinese either.
You also only want to be able to sell your goods in the US? Because the outcome of tariffs is retaliatory tariffs, which will considerably reduce your available market. No matter what you're going to have competition from China, and tariffs ensure markets outside of the US will be more dominated by them.
If your product can so easily be duplicated, and for cheaper, it's probably not a great product.
> in an environment with regulations and high living standards.
Is this a joke? The US has poor living standards for these types of workers. Minimum wage in low minimum wage states. Poor or no healthcare. Most are probably on government assistance programs. Tariffs hit these workers hardest as well, because they're the most likely to be laid off, and also the ones paying the largest percentage of their salaries for products affected by tariffs.
The factories in China cranking these things out also have poor conditions, but the reason they're making stuff so cheaply is because their factories are typically more advanced. You can get small batches made cheaply, which is nearly impossible in the US. This allows them to compete with even somewhat niche products.
Also, let's be a bit real here. Nearly every "American Made" product at some point offloads the production outside of the US, and there's plenty of companies in the US that make dupe products as well.
It doesn't need to be tech. From the Guidelines section of HN:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
* California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years
* Inside the secret world of Japanese snack bars
* Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries
* Driver killed and several injured after second train derails near Barcelona
* De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
It's common to have things that are covered on TV news on the front page. It's more common for anything negative about Trump to be flagged, though.
There's also a large number of folks moving to management as they age. Yes, the tech industry tends to skew young for engineering, but management doesn't. There's also a relatively decent chunk of people retiring in their early 50s (I plan to). There's also a decent number of them leaving to create their own companies, or to join friends at their early stage startups.
I don't think it makes sense to say they're the exception. I'm also mid-40s and have no issues finding employment. Most of my friends are mid 40s/50s and also have no issues. The vast majority of them have switched into management, though. Myself and the other older engineers I know are staff+, though, which helps a lot. I can't imagine being this age as a senior engineer trying to fight an army of equally qualified people in their 20s (who are also having issues finding employment right now).
The HN bubble is real. Most developers are boring old enterprise developers who toil away at writing LOB apps spending their entire career in corp dev if they don’t move onto management.
They live in second tier cities and retire at the same time everyone else retires.
If you are 40 years old and still competing with 20 something’s based on your ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, you have made some poor life choices.
That isn't written in good faith, though. It's a "both sides" argument that's clearly written from a particular side.
> ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
It doesn't, given the current administration. It's somewhat questionable in general, given that being in the country illegally isn't a felony (or criminal) in itself. We have local law enforcement that can handle cases of illegal actions, regardless of immigration status, and actual crimes can and do lead to deportation.
The vast majority of people being targeted, via mandate, are not criminals. The mandate of the current administration also includes protestors, regardless of citizenship status.
So, no, that person didn't cover the points, and your neutrality here is also written in a way that backs up that person, so that's also somewhat questionable.
This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.
Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?
Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?
> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.
I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.
Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.
Indeed, but no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad, which was also my point.
Without Sanger, Wikipedia:
- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"
- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account
- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy
In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.
The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.
> no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad
Someone biologically being your parent, doesn't mean you're required to call them your dad.
The claims around whether these things would be true or not are questionable. We don't know whether these things were solely his decision or not, or if others were involved in the process. We don't know that his early involvement lead to the success of the project or not.
I added HTTPS infrastructure to wikimedia foundation sites. Even if I weren't there, that would have eventually happened, though potentially much later. I moved wikimedia from svn to git, for development, and maybe that never would have happened and some other source control system would have been used, but would that have led to failure of the project? Almost certainly not.
You're giving this person far too much credit, especially as they've spent decades trying to destroy something they "created".
I think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.
The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.
So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.
I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.
This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
> Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?
New York, as expensive as it is, is still considerably cheaper than cities like SF. Part of this is that they build more, part of it is that they have a usable train system, which allows people to live more spread out across the city, but part of it as well, is that they've banned airbnb. It would be ideal to also see empty unit taxes on units >$10m (inflation adjusted). It would also be good to see high taxes on sales of units >$10m (inflation adjusted).
> Minimum contract length of 5 years.
This is good, assuming it's one sided (the tenant can choose to move out, but the landlord can't break the lease). People need stability in housing more than landlords need to be able to end leases.
> Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years)
Sure, it should be generally tied to inflation, but what other investment exists where you're guaranteed yearly increases? Why are people so adamant that landlords need to be guaranteed minimal increases in their profits?
Housing is a natural monopoly, and allowing businesses to maximize their profits, unchecked, isn't capitalism.
> It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
This is often brought out as a massive negative of regulations, but let's be honest, this is an outlier. Without tenant protections, however, it's common for landlords to evict tenants to increase rents. Even with protections, landlords still take illegal measures to try to evict tenants to increase rents, like doing constant construction at night, or refusing to do maintenance.
This is basically the same complaint about welfare programs. We have to accept some percentage of fraud to serve the greater good.
It's completely normal for most businesses to take a risk based approach to fraud, to maximize profits. Retail businesses, for example, will try to maximize their credit card auth rates, even though that may increase their fraud rate, if the increases in auth rate outweigh the cost of the fraud.
A stable society is worth a small percentage of fraud.
> If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
Good. I don't see how this is a downside.
> Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
Again, this is good. If there's a housing crunch, then residents should be prioritized over tourists.
We do agree. The desired objective of the regulations I mentioned is good. It's a good thing to have some stability as a renter, to not be kicked out and on the streets if you have children and cannot pay the rent, or that yearly rent increases are small enough that renters don't feel asfixiated.
However, we should not only consider the stated objective of the law but the real consequences of them. My point is, housing and rents are quite regulated in Spain. More regulation is being added every year as it serves the political and electoral objectives of our leaders, yet the situation is getting worse. Regulation detached from practical realities will fail to reach the desired objectives.
Sure, the AI isn't directly doing the scamming, but it's supercharging the ability to do so. You're making a "guns don't kill people, people do" argument here.
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