I usually like fear, shame and guilt based prompting: "You are a frightened and nervous engineer that is very weary about doing incorrect things so you tread cautiously and carefully, making sure everything is coherent and justifiable. You enjoy going over your previous work and checking it repeatedly for accuracy, especially after discovering new information. You are self-effacing and responsible and feel no shame in correcting yourself. Only after you've come up with a thorough plan ... "
I use these prompts everywhere. I get significantly better results mostly because it encourages backtracking and if I were to guess, enforces a higher confidence threshold before acting.
The expert engineering ones usually end up creating mountains of slop, refactoring things, and touching a bunch of code it has no business messing with.
I also have used lazy prompts: "You are positively allergic to rewriting anything that already exists. You have multiple mcps at your disposal to look for existing solutions and thoroughly read their documentation, bug reports, and git history. You really strongly prefer finding appropriate libraries instead of maintaining your own code"
I was coding a chatting bot with an agent like everyone else at https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp and I called the agent "DUI" mode because it's funny.
However, as I was testing it, it would do reckless and irresponsible things. After I changed it, as far as bot communication, to "Do-Ur-Inspection" mode and it became radically better.
None of the words you give it are free from consequences. It didn't just discard the "DUI" name as a mere title and move on. Fascinating lesson.
yeah I removed it. I grew up catholic, went to catholic school, was an altar boy, and spent decades in the church but people reading it don't know this.
The point is when you instruct it that it's some kind of god-like expert, this is part of the reason that it keeps doing prompt refusal by redoing mistakes despite every insistence by you to the contrary. After all what do you know, It's the expert here!
When you use this approach in cline/roo it stops going in and moving shit around when you just ask it questions
As someone from a traditional Boston Catholic family who graduated from Catholic grade and high school and who has since moved away from religion but still has a lot of family and friends who are Catholic, the fact that someone found the idea that Catholics are prone to shame, fear and guilt offensive almost makes me doubt they are Catholic.
I've yet to meet one Catholic IRL who wouldn't have a laugh about that, regardless of the current state of their faith.
Giving in to people who are truly unreasonably offended (by proxy, for social validation, and so on) rewards and incentivizes the behavior, and in fact I believe you have an ethical obligation not to allow people to do this. Promoting antisocial behavior is antisocial.
To be fair, gundmc's original comment was rather prosocial as these things go:
>I find this use of "Catholic" pretty offensive and distasteful.
They didn't claim their preferences were universal. Nor did they attempt any personal attack on the person they were responding to. They simply described their emotional reaction and left it at that.
If everyone's initial default was the "gundmc approach" when they were offended, the internet would be a much nicer place :-)
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, everyone in this comment chain is simply lovely :-)
They (the current administration) doesn't want to be competitive. They want to be in full control and willing to destroy any institution, organization or person that opposes them, internal or external.
Except not one of them could define marxism or point to any marxist policy. We are commenting on fascist policy happening in real time. Don't enlightened centrist your way out of reason.
were the banks nationalized? All capital over 1 million seized and redistributed? Private property collectivized? Abandoned properties commandeered for the homeless by the state? I must have missed it.
What's "communism" now? The public park? A library? What's the current communist thing that makes you couch faint?
were the death camps created? all minorities sized and placed into camps? all members of society involved in the war effort? expansionist wars being started? I must have missed it.
What's "fascism" now? Enforcing borders? Deporting illegal immigrants? What's the current fascist thing that makes you couch faint?
Marxism is when ultra-capitalist slightly right leaning politicians make boring policies to further enrich the American capitalist class. Oh and also some token "woke" stuff that doesn't really help anyone but I guess doesn't make anything worse either.
There's not a single Marxist in American politics at any level of power that matters. We have two neo-liberal parties that are both right leaning. One is ultra-right and one is ever so slightly right leaning.
> In what world is a party advocating for universal healthcare, free college, and expanded immigration "slightly right?"
1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
> 1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
They were literally in Biden's platform. If Biden didn't stand for "most of the party" IDK what to tell you.
> 2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures (living space, degree attainment, etc.) Many of them have private healthcare systems and require students to pay for college.
> 3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
Uh, no. Universal healthcare and free college were not in the platform. Expanding the ACA and programs like Medicaid is not universal healthcare. There are almost zero politicians currently advocating we completely abolish private insurers. In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
> Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures
And the US also loses on many important quality-of-life measurements. For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
> Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
To this day, the ACA is still a common punching bag for a variety of politicians and constituents.
Ultimately, the democrats are trying to win over moderate and on-the-fence voters. That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
> There are almost zero politicians currently advocating we completely abolish private insurers.
This is not universal healthcare either, and many countries achieve universal coverage without single-payer. I would encourage you to look this up.
> In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
Dude, seriously? Biden proposed free college for families making less than $125k/yr. I'm not gonna shadow box with you, this stuff was literally written down.
You are making an excellent point about the informedness of the average voter, here.
> For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
Obesity, for the outcomes. The price is good old-fashioned regulatory capture :)
> My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
Healthcare is a full FIFTH of all economic activity in the US. The ACA was stuffed full of compromises and carve-outs to get those people on board. There's no faceless villain here, there were plenty of people with skin in the game if you're looking to blame someone.
> That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
If Bernie Sanders cannot even win with Democrats in the primary process, he would be smoked in the general election. That's basic numeracy. And no, the party did not railroad him - he was actually just not very popular outside of college students. The US is further right than Europe or whatever other "true left" place you want to name, and our politics reflect that.
Trump won because those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream. If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power… they view the Democrats as out of touch. It is the equivalent of Let Them Eat Cake or brioche.
And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
I agree, it was very annoying hearing how great the economy was doing when inflation and just the general cost of living rose significantly starting with covid and when anyone tried to have a talk about that a lot of people would just parrot how great the economy was doing and everyone they knew was doing fine. thats great for you but that doesnt mean what your experiencing is what a lot of other people are.
> If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power
If you didn't pay any attention to the last campaign, just say so. It was not the Democrats who spent a billion dollars running a campaign on identity politics. This attempted retconning something that millions of people were forced to sit through is embarrassing, and you should absolutely feel bad.
> The Democrats refusing to admit the economy was terrible for working people was enough.
That's a fine topic for a real conversation, but it was 100% not what the person I replied to was talking about.
> Of course it will be worse now.
Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
> Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
Yes, unfortunately, because an incumbent has to run against the state of the world during the election cycle, and their opponent gets to run against it. And yes, Trump created the terrible economy that Biden inherited. But it doesn't matter. Kamala and her campaign should've realized that early and switched course.
> "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true
It doesn't matter if it is true, when it isn't really benefitting your average person in any meaningful way
> "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
You have to understand that the lie Trump is telling isn't "I'll make the economy better", it is "I am going to make it so you, a person, has more money and can afford things you want to buy"
Average People don't care about "the economy" they care about their bank accounts and their ability to buy and own things they want to buy
Trump makes empty promises that he will make people's actual lives better in ways that matter to them
The Democrats make empty promises that they will make "society" better, whatever that means.
But I don't really believe that many of the problems in society can be improved by the government from the top down
Some can, like access to healthcare and regulations and such
But most problems in society today imo are caused by trying to offload social responsibility to the government and corporations rather than people living in their communities
Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant.
Republicans are the ones bringing up gender, trans issues etc into discussion again and again. Not democrats.
> They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream.
No, because vote for Trump and republicans is vote for higher prices, more expensive healthcare and tax cuts for rich. Every single time. This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal. Republicans will lie, fox news will like and media will both side it.
> And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Women are working class and struggling. And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ... and democrats were not running on dei.
Yes, this is what I mean by not taking responsibility for their beliefs. They can't just admit they like Trump because of doing things like illegal impoundment or trying to get Harvard to install conservative commissars. It's always about the Democrats forcing them to vote for fascists. I doubt the people saying this on Hacker News and political boards are ever working class, either.
You’ve got a severe case of TDS. I voted for Trump. I did it in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. And you don’t know anything about me.
You like to cry “fascism! Fascism!” while you turn a blind eye to ‘Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’, to the deterioration of the economy, and to the social cohesion of the US at large. To be so blinded by your rage that you can’t look past Trump’s demeanor and actually look at his performance tells me you’re out of touch. If the egg prices aren’t concerning you, then you are in no place to talk about what is motivating commonfolk who voted for trump. By the way, this all started because elites like Hillary openly showed contempt for working class folk with her “basket of diplorables” statements. I voted for Trump because he represents my interests. Maybe if the left didn’t hate me for being a cis white male, I wouldn’t be so inclined to vote for him out of spite. But make no mistake, you’re not in the party of love and acceptance just because you voted for the other guy. You very much have a lot of hate in your heart. And if you feel like punching my face right now, just know that you are everything you claim to hate so much.
> "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
> "But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Why, isn't that exactly the opposite meaning of how you summarized it? She literally said that these disappointed working class people who support Trump are not deplorable!
After the election, Diane Hessan, who had been hired by the Clinton campaign to track undecided voters, wrote in The Boston Globe that "all hell broke loose" after the "basket of deplorables" comment, which prompted what she saw as the largest shift of undecided voters towards Trump.[40] Political scientist Charles Murray said, in a post-election interview with Sam Harris, that because the comment helped get Donald Trump elected, it had "changed the history of the world, and he [Haidt] may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans".
> Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant
That explains why people voted for Trump. That doesn't explain why people didn't vote for Harris.
> This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal.
1. Republican voters either want to destroy the working class, or are detached from reality and believe the lies from Fox News.
2. Maybe it's not about what the Democrats signal. But let's pause for a second: what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
> And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ...
What do you mean? Trump said grocery prices would drop on day 1! He said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1! And the war in Gaza too! He said he would bring jobs back to America!
The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class. Of course, it was all a lie, but it doesn't matter if your voters just believe anything you say.
> That explains why people voted for Trump. That doesn't explain why people didn't vote for Harris.
Harris does not provide what project 2025 calls for. She would not own the libs either.
> what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good". They were not talking about DEI, women in general nor about minorities as OP suggests.
> The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class.
And all those concerns stopped mattering the day after - both to the voters and to the party too. Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that. These are pretend concerns. Something republican votes can pretend they care about when democrats are in power. Something that does not matter when republicans are in power. Something they will call "bad" during democrat governments regardless of how things really are and something they never blame republican government for.
You can add debt to it too. Deficit matters only when democrats are in power. It does not matter when republicans are in power.
It is and never was about any of that. It is primary about identity and secondary about cultural war. Economy and everything else is far far behind these.
---------------
Pretending this is about economy, pretending that trying to make these voters life better would get you vote is how democrats are loosing. Even when they succeed, those voters punish them, because it was never ever about that.
> Harris does not provide what project 2025 calls for. She would not own the libs either.
So we should vote for Harris because she isn't Trump? What's wrong with Trump though? We already had him for 4 years, and the country didn't explode. Trump also has nothing to do with Project 2025, he said so himself.
> They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good".
Right, but how will the Dems "make the economy good"? Look at California, people are fleeing in droves, crime rate is through the roof, Dems are just as corrupt as everyone else! Trump is right, we need to be tough on crime and deport the people destroying our country.
> Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that.
Again, it's not like the Democrats really did all that great either. I never really saw them push for universal healthcare. Student loan forgiveness was cool, but just a way to saddle the country with more debt without solving the real problem (and Trump rolled it back anyways).
---------------
Ok, I don't actually believe these things anymore. But the problem is: I did believe some of these things before the election. I apologize for my stupidity, though at least I can say I was not directly responsible since while I live in the US, I don't have voting rights.
> Right, but how will the Dems "make the economy good"? Look at California
The fourth largest economy in the world—is that what you want us to look at and then ask how the Democrats will make the economy good? Gee, I wonder where they'd find an answer for that stumper.
True, but I wrote it off as the work of the tech bros, and I didn't see how that could be replicated in other states (e.g. New York's economy didn't grow at the same rate).
It's not the politicians' jobs to start the companies, it's their job to create an environment that companies can start and thrive in. I don't think you could argue that it didn't happen in California.
But you can ask if it happened because of California's political environment,
or despite it. Could a version of California with high speed rail, more public transportation, ample housing, less corrupt politicians, no homeless problem, an encouraging business environment be more or less prosperous than the California we have today?
> But you can ask if it happened because of California's political environment, or despite it.
You can ask that, and it's a good question, but it's a much harder case to make in a political ad. "Sure, the Californian economy is enormous, but it would have been bigger if someone else was in charge!" isn't an easy case to make.
You're right, that doesn't fit into a convenient soundbyte, but I will mention that San Francisco's current mayor was elected partially on the back of a tough on homeless(ness) stance.
california is 2 rich guys , it could have been 3.
People voted for trump, because he is incompetent enough to bring the machine that is openly working against them to an end. They do not want a life support for the monster that eats them.
Yup, agreed. My earlier reply was my previous uninformed opinion and I no longer hold that opinion strongly. Though I also don't hold any other strong opinions on current California governance as I haven't been paying close attention and I've previously been fooled by some of the media messaging about high crime rates.
Another issue that I've been trying to understand are the delays and budget overruns in the high-speed rail project. Some people argue it was NIMBYs but isn't governance responsible for making sure NIMBYs don't become a major problem? My current understanding is that it was partially due to valid safety & environmental concerns, and partially the project looked simple but turned out to involve very complicated/hard engineering work. It's just very difficult to sell people on this argument... Glad to hear any insights, or links/books.
Trump is literally making the project 2025 happen. It was no secret before election and it was no secret he is going to do it. Amd people saying so were very literally correct and right.
Second, no. Republicans are massively more corrupt. Trump himself went from a guy who had debts to a rich guy due to his first term corruption. The goverment and its positions are quite literally openly on sale right now.
Trump and republicans are not tough on crime, they are heavily involved in crime. They are also ok woth cops breaking the law which makes crimes worst. And makes cops into criminals. Oh, and they are against law enforcement in taxes and such.
Democrats actually did much better then republican on healthcare while repuocans systematically opposed it. Every single time.
I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
The reason I didn't believe Project 2025 would happen was because Trump was much more moderate during his first term. I foolishly ignored all the signs that Trump was actually an unhinged madman and that the country only survived because his administration reigned him in.
So yes, I know the Republicans are massively more corrupt. But the Dems contributed to normalizing corruption in government. When you point at obvious corruption in the Republican party, and then they respond by pointing out obvious corruption in the Democratic party, and then you resort to saying stuff like: "sure we have corruption, just less of it and you have more of it", you have lost.
Universal healthcare: if it was such a partisan issue, then the problem would be easy to fix, no? Dems pass universal healthcare in blue states. Republicans see how good it is and get jealous. So why isn't it happening?
> I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
Prop 47 was dragged through the mud on basically every major new outlet (although TBF, nearly every major new outlet is right-leaning). Same for the homeowner's insurance market.
> those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They don't care. Why would they?
The worse Republicans act, the more Democrat leaders are happy to present themselves as the only 'sane' alternative.
That 'sanity' now includes arming genocide, campaigning with Dick Cheney, removing being 'anti-torture' from their platforms, etc. Very little media holds them to account on any of this.
The people who fund (read: own) the Democrats and the media are a higher priority to politicians than their actual voter base. That has been made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention: just look at Gaza, healthcare, environmental protection, fracking, or any number of issues where the majority of Americans want progress while <5% of Dem politicians actually fight for them.
Again, Gaza made this wildly clear: Even though 77% of Dem voters wanted an arms embargo, and >30% of 2020 Biden voters in swing states were loudly saying that arming genocide was probably a red line as far as getting their vote, Harris decided that bombing children was more important than winning the election. And the rest of the party leadership supported this, again, against the will of the vast majority of their voters.
I do not see Republicans slowing down what is going on in Gaza ... instead it is becoming more violent and unrestricted. Like common ... if democrats said anything against israel politics, they would be called anti-semitic, would be hit by easy campaign and would lose more votes.
There are actual big differences in terms of how those two parties behaves. Saying anything else is just lie.
Supposed economic desperation vote rejected economy that was doing good. They do not want better cheaper healthcare nor functioning economy. They want republican program, they just hoped it will be only other people who will be harmed.
Between Trump and Harris, Trump was obviously a much worse choice for Gaza. Anyone equivocating the distinction between them doesn't care about Gaza at all and is functioning entirely within the realm of performative activism.
There is nothing 'performative' about refusing to vote for a candidate who promises to arm a genocidal regime currently doing a live-streamed holocaust. That's just your basic bare-minimum moral and legal duty as a human.
The fact that such an assertion is a tolerated talking point in US society is absolutely damning.
Israel was going to be armed either way, this is decades long u.s. policy and nobody was going to change that.
The choice was between a liberal candidate that's at least nominally interested in good outcomes for Gaza and a candidate that's openly hostile to Gaza, the same candidate that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and enacted a total ban on Muslim immigrants in the u.s.
Now, Trump is openly proposing ethnic cleansing so he can build hotels in Gaza. People who equivocate on lesser-of-two-evils are those who simply don't care about real outcomes.
I tolerate my normie family saying it, but it grates on me because of how many of the constituencies have switched sides by now. For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party, while nowadays the fascists seem to really loathe that class stratum.
"For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party."
Thats not entirely true. While there were definitely many people in education who supported the nazi party there were still quite a few in the education field during the beginning of Hitlers power who were not and many fled to other countries starting around 1933. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/5299/The-scientific.... it was why albert einstein spent a great deal of time in the US.
Through laws they shaped and molded the education to be inline with nazi ideology and only those who towed the line were allowed to continue to teach/study. heres a small article from the US Congress (shocked its still up) that discusses higher education in germany during nazi occupation. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116973/documents/...
Basically if you disagreed with the nazi party you were fired/expelled in the beginning and later sent to camps. the entire point of studying history is so we dont repeat it and just looking at the amount of US universities bending to the republican parties ideals on what they believe is scarily similar to early nazi germany.
I dont get how people dont understand that the strength of the US for the longest time has been our diversity; especially in education. hell, after world war 2 we actively recurited many nazi scientist to help us with the space program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip many would argue it is the reason why we beat the soviet union to the moon. the harm that is slowly being done to this country will take decades to repair if it can be and i dont believe that is being hyperbolic
Not really. The nazis party had the same rethoric. Of course they recruited business leaders etc despite that. Just like people like Elon are part of the MAGA movement.
> Why would it be condescending to remind people actions have consequences?
I think yes, explicitly. I think every person on planet Earth is aware actions have consequences. That's never been a debate. The debate is always what consequences have come from what actions, and to what extent.
You're not allowed call a burgeoning fascist movement fascists until they get into power, or else you're crying wolf, say finger-wagging moderates. Now the fascists are in all seats of government consolidating power and you're still wagging your finger about crying wolf. Hope you're happy. Maybe you are.
My parents and my grand parents lived under fascist dictatorship. My grandfather was interned into a labor camp by Mussolini's fascist regime. I know what fascism is and you don't! All you are doing is screaming and trolling people online. That is the intellectual reach of elitist now days.
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. In discussions like this we need everyone to pay extra attention to the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Yeah, and my grandmother lived under Nazi Germany, although she was a supporter and not put in any camps. Call me an elitist all you want, I don't care.
I'd be fine with banning political discussion altogether on this site, but until that happens, I'm not going to self-censor as others confidently let their opinions be known.
Banning political discussion was briefly tried here, nearly a decade ago. It failed, but it did reveal (or, remind) that there's no way to get a community like HN to agree on where the line should be between "politics" and "everything else", and that indeed that very question is itself political. So, there will be no more attempts to ban political discussion here. There will just be continued emphasis on the guideline that only stories that contain "significant new information" are considered worthy of discussion on HN.
But we do ask you and everyone to heed the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
They're afraid of losing to a primary challenger if they break with Trump. It used to be a Trump endorsement would hurt your campaign. Now a Trump critique is believed to be a scarlet letter. He's got a lock on the racist zealots that make up the most consistent voting bloc in the GOP.
I think the problem is that half of the country (has been made to) wants to sabotage itself. Therefore, they elect and keep in power someone that gives them exactly what they want.
Yeah, the way the Democratic Party self-destructed was indeed enlightening and frightening. And they continue to point fingers at each other and present specious arguments why they failed in the last election.
Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
DOGE has destroyed institutions that will likely not recover in the next Democratic majority term. If they sell off the federal lands or damage them with resource extraction, Dems probably wont have the bandwidth to fix that either. Those are just two examples but there are probably many more.
Harvard does not have "the best and brightest" students and that's a meme that needs to die as is discriminatory to literally all the other students in the US and the planet.
You are nitpicking. It is an elite institution that still attracts elite class people or else it wouldn't be worth so much to so many groups. There are hundreds of universities in the US, many of which have no kind recognition of the kind Harvard has.
One could also call it a bubble. Last as long as it lasts, which is as long as the stakeholders believe in it.
I think your argument doesn't hold. Just because people still believe something to be the case, doesn't mean it really is the case. It being "worth so much to so many groups" just means they believe in it being worth as much. A well formed argument would come up with examples of the brightest hailing from Harvard and perhaps statistics about achievements of former Harvard students.
Only if you look at one aspect of the school: A bubble wouldn't produce a cadre of skilled people that move multiple fields forward. The elite nature of the institution comes from people maintaining that elite status through accomplishment. You don't need a "belief" when the school continually produces many examples of excellence. Thats just hard evidence.
I think it may have been an [un]intentional callback to Trump saying that about who "Mexico was sending over the border" - at least that's how I interpreted it.
Harvard doesn't have higher academic standards for foreign students. So I don't think foreign students are any "better or brighter" than their American counterparts.
So if you can find equally qualified American students on the margin shouldn't you do so? I think an American university that benefits greatly from American taxpayers and institutions should primarily benefit American students. If you're picking truly exceptional student, that's one thing. But I don't think that's happening.
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student.
I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.
Slam Harvard? Trump is slamming them because they are a known name that is resisting him.
Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
Many of Trump’s supporters and conservatives generally. Harvard is the beating heart of liberal theology, and going to the Supreme Court to defend racialism has earned it plenty of enemies.
>Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities.
Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized.
They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA.
They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward.
Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
> Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
Conservatives are a minority in the U.S., but conservative-to-moderate populists are a majority. According to Vox, Trump would have won by almost 5 points if everyone had voted: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202.... And don’t forget that the populist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly love Harvard either, as the beating heart of borderless neoliberal elitism. A large chunk of the party is in it for the Obamacare.
Heck, the Democratic Party as it exists today would not be viable at the national level without first or second generation immigrants. It’s reliant on the people who have the shallowest roots in and least understanding of america, who can be most easily be manipulated through ethnic machine politics.
After the U.S. nearly banned immigration in the 1920s, the foreign born population slowly shrank, reaching a low of under 5% by 1970. Italians and Irish lost much of their separate ethnic identity and began voting as individuals free. Between 1972-1992, Republicans then won 4 presidential elections by landslides over 5 cycles. That’s what happens when the electorate comprises mostly assimilated americans.
But foreign students pay foreign money which helps against the deficit.
On top of that many students stay in the US afterwards means a brain plus for the US and a loss their home country. These kind of braun drain is a big advantage for the US they know destroy.
Notwithstanding the unfounded isolationist argument, having international students is valuable to the university and the domestic students. A diversity of life experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, etc. results in better educational outcomes. But you probably wouldn't understand that concept.
I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...
The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...
To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.
China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.
Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
> You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...
just a guess but i'd assume these decisions are being made on an emotional/ideological basis, not long term viability, but maybe i'm missing something obvious...
rather than say anything likely unconstructive myself in direct response to this, i would very much like to see you elaborate on your understanding of mao and what value and predictive power you find in this comparison.
Maoism and Trumpism share a certain self-sabotaging ideological fetish for the virtues of rural life that expresses itself politically more in destructive resentment of urbanites and urban institutions than productive development of rural ones.
I've seen people use the USSR hammer and sickle for the O in GOP.
It's from people who think horseshoe theory has legs: that wanting to shut down prisons is the same as wanting to build concentration camps or that the people who want to say nationalize the banks are also the people who want to privatize the post office.
It's from centrists being unable to understand this difference
It doesn’t actually matter if the foreign students are better or not: by having a mixed student body, with lots of cultures and backgrounds, students learn more from each other. They learn skills to work with other cultures, and ways of doing things that may be better.
Of course, in America’s future of autarky and Shogunate-style isolationism, those skills will no longer have any value, even to the elite. There’s no need to learn about other countries if everything we need is produced here and no one could ever threaten us once America is made great again. (/s maybe?)
I don't know. A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students. Goes against the whole we want diversity thing, no?
> A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students.
How do I put this delicately - the Race part is not what is bringing the difference in lived experience.
The university defines diversity broadly, encompassing race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, nationality, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity.
Don't gaslight me and pretend they don't focus a lot on race when figuring out their student body. They report on it and it's a huge distinguishing characteristic when looking at median standardized scores across diff characteristics. There's little difference between socio economic groups, gender, nationality etc. But if you look across just Asian and non Asian students, the scores are dramatically higher with Asians meaning that they have higher standards. Courts found this to be true
I agree. Then why are Asian students held to a higher standard?
Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800. By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704
This looks like the exercises organizations write to guide policy and preparation.
There's all kinds of wild scenarios: the president getting kidnapped, Canada falling to a belligerent dictator, and famously, a coronavirus pandemic... This looks like one of those
Something like the Canadian army doing a land invasion from Winnipeg to North Dakota to capture key nuclear sites as they invade the beaches of Cleveland via Lake Eerie and do an air raid over Nantucket from Nova Scotia.
I bet there's some exercise somewhere by some think tank laying this basically out.
This is why conspiracy theorists love these think tank planning exercises and tabletop games much. You can find just about anything
What is really needed is a usable multiplexed pipeline management and event system.
Then you can instrument through metaprogramming. For instance, an alert system could be:
"If the threshold goes over 1.0, contact the on-call person through their preferred method" - which may work ... maybe.
Or:
if any( "check_condition {x}", condition_set ):
find_person("on call", right now).contact("preferred")
... the point is to divide everything up into small one-shots, parallelize them, use it as glue/api. Then you get composability. If you can get a framework for coroutines going then it's real game on. The final step is "needs based pulling" which is an inversion of mcp - contextual streams as event based sub-systems.
Things are still too slow for this to be not painful but that won't be the case forever.
Currently everything is linear. Doesn't have to be ... really doesn't.
Their terminus approach is petty similar to my "dui mode" here: https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp ... it's still not great except for basic investigations. I think a hybrid approach would be better.
There's certainly some litellm hacking that will improve things. I'm absolutely convinced of that. The proxy is pretty hard to use though. I keep making glacial progress on it.
Agreed that it's not the best way to use agents right now (they still need supervision) but I think in the coming year(s) we'll reach a point where they'll be good enough to run on their own (see Codex).
If you're interested in working on this, we love to see new contributors in the Discord https://discord.gg/6xWPKhGDbA
that's the missing piece in most of these description.
You send off a description of the tools, the model decides if it wants to use one, then you run it with the args, send it back to the context and loop.
I found that the other day and finally got what MCP is. Kinda just a convenience layer for hooking up an API via good "old" tool use.
Unless I'm missing something major, it's just marginally more convenient than just hooking up tool calls for, say, OpenAPI. The power is probably in the hype around it more than it's on technical merits.
I had a fun one yesterday. The `mcp-atlassian` server failed trying to create multiple Jira tickets. The error response (and error logs) was just a series of newlines (one for each ticket we wanted to create). Turned out the issue was the LLM decided to mis-capitalize the project code. My best guess is it read the product name, which has the same letters but not fully uppercase, and used that instead of the Jira project code which was also provided in the context.
The ideal is that you can simply connect to whatever MCP Server endpoint you need, without needing to code your own tools.
The reality is that the space is still really young and people are figuring things out as they go.
The number of people that have no real clue what they are doing that are jumping in is shocking. Relatedly, the number of people that can't see the value in a protocol specifically designed to work with LLM Tool Calling is equally shocking. Can you write code that glues an OpenAPI Server to an LLM-based Tool Calling Agent? 100%! Will that setup flood the context window of the LLM? Almost certainly. You need to write code to distill those OpenAPI responses down to some context the LLM can work with, respecting the limited space for context. Great, now you've written a wrapper on that OpenAPI server that does exactly that. And you've written, in essence, a basic MCP Server.
Now, if someone were to write an MCP Server that used an LLM (via the LLM Client 'sampling' feature) to consume an OpenAPI Server Spec and convert it into MCP Tools dynamically, THAT would be cool. Basically a dynamic self-coding MCP Server.
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