Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
If we can't talk about the government's use of technology
The same goes for technology's use of government, be that in the form of subsidies to tech firms or golden presents for politicians. This has to be talked about since the intersection with product lines or tech pricing etc. is converging on 100% (hyperbole, but still).
The biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political.
I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
You must also understand this is hacker news, not politics news. Sure, this may be a comfortable area for many users and one of the only forum/news sites they browse, but nonetheless it's not a politics site. I, for one, would rather not see politics on this site. If I want to partake in that discussion, I'll go elsewhere to a place more "built" for it
But the definition of what counts as "politics" is entirely arbitrary. A thread complaining about, say, homeless people in SF will remain just fine. We'd all be better off with meaningful guidelines.
Different caliber, but same thing happens with Grok.
New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.
Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.
Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!
Something I've been trying to work out the last couple years is how much is this a nazi site now, that we are reputation laundering by continuing to participate here in good faith. These moderation policies may not have been intended to create this outcome but they have, and they are not being changed in light of that.
An enormous part of safe driving is maintaining a mental map of the vehicles around you and what your options are if you need to make sudden changes. If you are not able to react to changing conditions without being unsafe, you are driving unsafely already.
That's laughable. Any human who couldn't avoid a large, clearly-visible object in the middle of an empty, well-lit road should not be operating a vehicle.
That's not to say that there aren't many drivers who shouldn't be driving, so both can be true at once, but this is certainly not a bar against which to gauge autonomous driving.
Agreed. I work for a tiny startup where I wear multiple hats, and one of them is DevOps. I manage our cloud infra with Terraform, and anyone who's scaled cloud infrastructure out of the <10 head count company to a successful 500+ company knows how critical it can be to get a wrangle on the infrastructure early. It's basically now or never.
It used to take me days or even multiple sprints to complete large-scale infrastructure projects, largely because of having to repeatedly reference Terraform cloud provider docs for every step along the way.
Now I use Claude Code daily. I use an .md to describe what I want in as much detail as possible and with whatever idiosyncrasies or caveats I know are important from a career of doing this stuff, and then I go make coffee and come back to 99% working code (sometimes there are syntax errors due to provider / API updates).
I love learning, and I love coding. But I am hired to get things done, and to succeed (both personally and in my role, which is directly tied to our organization's security, compliance, and scalability) I can't spend two weeks on my pet projects for self-edification. I also have to worry about the million things that Claude CAN'T do for me yet, so whatever it can take off of my plate is priceless.
I say the same things to my non-tech friends: don't worry about it 'coming for your job' yet - just consider that your output and perceived worth as an employee could benefit greatly from it. If it comes down to two awesome people but one can produce even 2x the amount of work using AI, the choice is obvious.
> In most cities at the airport I just walk outside and get an old fashioned taxi at the rank vs dealing with all the nonsense
Not the primary point of your post, but I am always evangelizing to my friends about this 'hack.' I can't believe that people are willing to walk half a mile and queue up in the rain/sun/snow to be driven by some random person who will probably make them listen to their demo tape, instead of just taking the myriad taxis that are sitting right there.
Takes probably 20-30 minutes off of my airport commute.
This is a far-right talking point that ignores the other concerns of progressives that are bundled up in the argument.
Progressives (in the US at least) generally support immigration with protections and fair wages. They also recognize, rightfully, that systems built for decades upon exploitative practices (low wages, no protections) if removed overnight will cause mass disruption of those systems.
Neither of these is in any way supportive of slavery, modern or otherwise. The first - suggesting that immigrants be treated civilly and paid a living wage - has been fought tooth and nail by 'free market' literalists. The second - that there will be disruptions in social and economic systems when an entire workforce is suddenly removed from the systems that it has propped up for decades - is common sense and historically founded.
You're conflating these things to try to justify a talking point that was just created three months ago.
The fact remains that UK (or US) is well below the replacement rate. If your progressive society can continue to exist only because oppressed women elsewhere keep supplying the human material, then it's not that progressive after all.
Nothing in this talking point is remotely „far right“. Words have lost all meaning. You also haven‘t answered his argument one bit. In the end, all you say with your smart words is that indeed, someone has to pick the cotton and it won‘t be you.
The "far-right" propaganda comes in when we try to argue that actually the right cares about immigrants, and they want to deport them because they just care so damn much.
Like, come on now. Give me a break. This type of reasoning is so caked with bullshit I don't think anyone on the right even buys it.
Sure, we can say maybe the left is arguing for exploitation, but certainly the right aren't champions of human rights. I mean, what's the big picture here? "Don't exploit the immigrants! Instead, violate their rights and force them into camps!"
We can solve the immigration problem overnight, if anyone cares. Just say that if you're found hiring undocumented people, you go to prison. I garauntee you, the problem will solve itself with such expedition it will leave you in awe.
But nobody on the right actually proposes this. Because they don't actually care about immigration. They care about populist messaging. They want you to believe there's an enemy within causing all your problems, and they they alone are the solution.
But no - they, too, directly rely on the exploitation. They won't ever patch it. It will always be lip-service, propaganda, and populist messaging.
The right doesn't give a shit about the livelihood of the immigrants, but they have accurately observed the line that goes from "heavily increase low skill immigration" to "emergence of a low trust society" to "implement authoritarian surveillance state to manage the low trust". The left has no answer for this, because it requires them to admit that high levels of immigration have negative qualitative impacts on society that don't show up in GDP figures. They can't do that, because immigration itself is part of the ideology.
No, the right just loves surveillance and authoritarianism. That's just what they trend towards if you leave them unchecked over time.
Immigrants are the populist scapegoat needed to get the authoritarianism. They're an easy to blame demographic that are physically marginalized - you can literally see them with your eyes.
Without immigrants, this populist messaging problem isn't solved. In the US, we just used black people before. Chinese people for a while too. Japanese people. We increased surveillance, built camps, required registries, you name it.
That's just how the right operates and how their populist messaging works. You need to convince poor "incumbents" (usually white people) that there's some other demographic coming for their money and they're dangerous. Don't let them into your neighborhood!
But don't worry, we can clean it up! Just give us unilateral power and a surveillance state, and we promise these pesky brown folk will be gone. And then, somehow that will magically improve the quality of your life!
It's the same story again and again, over and over. If we haven't already done this a bunch, I might be inclined to believe you. But we have. So when I hear about some new dangerous, untrustworthy, mostly brown demographic taking over your country I just yawn.
Yeah yeah been there, done that. Just give the authoritarian's what they want at this point, they're not even being slick.
>Without immigrants, this populist messaging problem isn't solved.
This conflicts with basically everything else you wrote. Not sure if you meant to do that, or meant to say something else, but the immigration issue is definitely driving the messaging from Reform and, to a lesser extent, the Conservatives. If suddenly the boats stopped, the Afghans were beamed away back to Afghanistan, and ~30 years of mismanaged immigration policy was reversed overnight I don't see how a) reform exists, b) the election at the end of this 5 year term isn't just about funding NHS and Labour holds a majority with the rest split between the Tories and the Lib Dems.
>So when I hear about some new dangerous, untrustworthy, mostly brown demographic taking over your country I just yawn.
People say things like this as a cryptic way to imply the person they're talking to is just a racist bad person and therefore anything else that person said is wrong and "bad", and then they get to sidestep any meaningful discussion about policy.
Honestly that's pretty much how we got to the place where Reform is leading in the polls by 10 points, so bravo for a very meta comment.
> but the immigration issue is definitely driving the messaging from Reform
Yes, my point is that we've already done this countless times.
The messaging doesn't go away if you get rid of these particular brown people. They just shift to some other demographic, because that's how right-wing populist messaging works.
Nobody would actually be satisfied if the immigrants were beamed away.
> People say things like this as a cryptic way to imply the person they're talking to is just a racist bad person
No, it's not, and I don't think you're racist.
To be clear, I'm from the US, so I'm speaking from the perspective of what we've done and we keep having this same thing happen again. And again. And again. For literally hundreds of years at this point.
That's the meaningful discussion. I yawn not because you are racist, but because you are unoriginal.
All those other right-wing populist dilemmas turned out to be hot bullshit. Looking back, I don't know how people were stupid enough to fall for them, but evidently they were and we implemented a lot of surveillance and authoritarian laws. Luckily, many repealed.
But, I have no reason to believe this particular demographic panic isn't bullshit. They've always been bullshit. Just based off of track record it's not looking good.
The reason I bring up brown people isn't to imply racism, it's to call into question the legitimacy of the basis for this outrage.
It seems to me that, coincidentally, just like every other right-wing panic, mostly brown people are targeted. Hm. Interesting. Look at that. So why is this panic real, and not fake like the other ones?
>Yes, my point is that we've already done this countless times.
>To be clear, I'm from the US
I'm also from the US, and am still able to discern that these immigration levels are unprecedented in history, in either country. So ... hand waving it away because it's icky isn't sufficient. Your position amounts to "immigration, in any amount, does not matter" which is a much more extreme claim than that of the "far right", either in the US or the UK.
>The reason I bring up brown people isn't to imply racism, it's to call into question the legitimacy of the basis for this outrage.
I don't know how to parse this sentence, other than for it to mean that as long as the immigration is from countries that are "brown" (your words) it's not legitimate to criticize it.
The immigration is certainly not unprecedented, we've had significant chinese, polish, and even Italian immigrantion. And they too suffered prosecution.
If the same thing keeps happening and we keep being wrong, I lose faith in the premise. I have no reason to believe the right is faithful on these issues, so I don't care. I'm just going to assume they're making a big deal out of nothing and I'm probably right.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of one side does not mean that the other is right. I still remember when the progressive pro-labour argument was against immigration to favour the increase of wages of the locals and I'm puzzled when they switched to "you know we need immigrants to work the shit jobs we don't want to do".
They are consistently on the wrong side of Chesterton's fence. Many of them were completely blind to politics until 2016 and have suddenly entered the chat with no context or background on what they're talking about. They assume, ignorantly, that everything that they can't immediately understand is a needless barrier erected for no reason and without context.
This is a very intentional worldview organized, funded, and distributed by - shocker! - powerful people who find themselves constrained by the law.
It's especially galling to me. I'm libertarian. If you communicated the Trump 2024 platform back in time to me in 2012, I'd be stoked that many of these issues were finally being talked about. I wanted to be having honest conversations about decentralizing federal power to the states, reducing monetary inflation and no longer taking being the world reserve currency for granted, dismantling the DEI-HR industrial complex, etc. But cheering to demolish the plane while you're still flying on it is just a special kind of stupid.
So really, it's the age-old political dynamic where frustrations with the current system are used as fuel for the next round of destruction, looting, and centralizing of power. It's why the Trump appointees are a menagerie of malcontents. Each has achieved popularity from criticizing the status quo on their own pet topic, but without constructive solutions. And now they don't need to actually agree on anything apart from the need to butcher our institutions.
>The name is now finally NOT centered around one nation.
'Gulf of the Americas' would make more sense in that case. But that doesn't project the intended message from the new administration.
You can justify it however you want, but the intention was not to be inclusive and I think that's pretty clear. Unless talking about annexing Greenland and absorbing Canada are also just ways of making us one big happy family, I think the intention of the name is clear, regardless of how much sense one can force it to make after the fact.
I love (read: hate) the concept that people are inherently busier in an office. When I was full-time in office, lots of people spent a good portion of their day wandering about, having convos (one thing that I do miss), browsing snacks, playing ping-pong, browsing snacks again, going out to long lunches, etc. I 100% spend more time in front of a screen when wfh, and when I do step away it's to get other "life" things done instead of killing time in-office until the clock hits 5PM. I am also far more likely to work early or late, as I no longer feel that I have to clearly delineate my time between work and home.
This is definitely an issue with lots of subjective and anecdotal evidence on all sides, but I know for a fact that a lot of my coworkers were killing 3-4h/day in the office just doing...whatever.
But if someone has access to your account information in such a way that they can make purchases in your name isn't that a you, or your bank, problem? Couldn't that same person just spend the money elsewhere?
I'm just trying to understand the scenario here: you are caught up in a fraud, and unknowingly you give the fraudster access to information that they are able to leverage to make fraudulent purchases in your name and the 'win' here is that they can't spend it on crypto?
It seems like there are multiple points at which to address this problem prior to how they're spending your money.
Edit: I guess a lot of the comments are talking about the scam being that you are scammed into purchasing crypto somehow, a different scenario than someone having control of your account. Still though: people have been successfully swindling over the phone for a century. Having someone buy Monero instead of a wire transfer is just procedural.
