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It’s more than that, I think. I read through the various government statements as I was curious about rationale and precedent: the other two groups impacted by the order are rather unambiguous extremists, so understandable. In the extended justification for this a/I group, the US gov lists a large number of US and EU “Antifa” groups that variously leverage their services, including one that the individual recently arrested for wiping his phone is meant to be connected to. It suggests to me this was the result of some considerable network analysis and that the intent is to now have stronger legal tools to go after those groups.

I think that second (speculative, of course) step would be the more worrying precedent: if the use of technical infrastructure also used by designated groups was formally made to be incriminating/right-waiving. Why wouldn’t that apply to Signal, for example? The OP suggests the dividing line should be between true infrastructure open to all, including unsavory actors, versus tools that advertise services to a particular faction. It’s not an entirely disagreeable distinction, but I think in practice it’s rather fuzzy (Moxie of signal is/was rather far left himself, if I recall).

EDIT: Re-reading the document, the state department emphasizes that a/I “manually vets all potential users.” OP’s distinction stands for now.


I share most HN'ers priors about this administration and its motives and am commenting positively, not normatively, and only about the specific claim the Treasury Department made.

Signal doesn't knowingly and deliberately provide services to any organization, let alone one formally designated by the US and the EU. The whole point of Signal is to eliminate all pretenses of the service knowing who its users are or what they're doing. To the extent that's also true of Autistici Inventati, the OFAC designation is invalid.


Yes, I originally only meant to note that in the extended statement on a/I the PKK isn’t mentioned and the focus is rather on a network of “antifa” groups [0]. With respect to your legal point, I reread the document and we’re in agreement: the state department goes to lengths to demonstrate that a/I “manually vets all potential users.”

[0] https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...


I feel much more confident saying that regardless of the validity of the underlying legal argument, this administration's messaging (on everything) is unhinged and partisan. I'm purposefully not reading into or out of what they're saying.


I don’t think the effects on the hardware market of open weight models triumphing has been reflected upon enough. It’s not clear that it will be less impactful if every enterprise decides to build for predominantly on-premise inference. In fact, before the question is ultimately decided, we’re probably heading towards a few years where hobbyists, enterprises and ‘hyper scalers’ are all competing for certain parts in common. Ram booked through 2027 sounds about right.


Companies are avoid risks, and at this stage, sometimes, I feel that all cloud providers are just buying RAM that they would have bought anyway. Now it's ensure that no company will be willing to pay x digits just for cards. One of my clients is stuck in "we are doing things on premise but we are too cheap to spend a few 100k in cards but we don't want to go on clouds.


Professionally, Scala was always my favorite language to work in and I was lucky to get to use it most of my career. It is, however, probably the worst language I’ve experienced using with LLMs. Next worst is any dynamic language: it’s just so hard to not introduce strange bugs after iterating on a large-ish project across multiple agent sessions.

I’ve had good enough experiences with Rust, but actually OCaml has been hands down the language I’ve seen best results with. The quality (and performance) of code is just phenomenal — and the main issue when working as a solo human with the language, namely smaller pool of community libraries, just isn’t an issue any more. Jane Street has really done tremendous work modernizing the language and tooling.


I've experience severe problems with Scala in teams with different skill levels or programming styles. Sometimes Scala code was very cryptic. As much as I like the elegance of the language as such, I've given up on it completely because it is not a good fit for industrial software development in my opinion.


having claude to work with has actually been pushing me from ocaml to rust for some of my personal projects. the LLM makes up for the fact that rust is less ergonomic, and being able to pull parts of my project out into libraries that can be called from any language is a rust superpower that is hard to turn down.


This is fascinating. I haven't really kept up with SEO for years, but was recently helping an academic publisher setup their web presence and ran into exactly this issue: Google was/is refusing to index the actual journal articles on the new site and they were moved into this liminal "Crawled, not indexed" state before vanishing entirely. Comically, it's now easier to get your content indexed and served with a visible link by ChatGPT than it is Google...


If I recall correctly, the film actually had Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 and Kevin Mitnick as consultants, so despite the hollywood treatment you have moments of accuracy like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE. Probably the only time Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools made it to the big screen. At the yearly 2600 conference, they used to always do a big group rollerblade through NYC.


Yeah it's a whole lot better than the usual Hollywood depiction of hacking which brought us gems like creating a GUI in visual basic to trace and IP address. And more importantly it doesn't take itself too seriously which I think makes the ridiculous parts work just like much sci-fi takes liberties with the science part when required for the story.


Cereal Killers name was Emmanuel Goldstein, too.

That movie still gives me wardialing and 2600 meetups and “voice bridging from a Dennys payphone bank at silly hours” memories.


Interesting, yeah I thought there must have been some consultation there. Especially because there's a couple instances where the hackers rely on social engineering over the phone first, and faking the "coin added" noise on the payphone. I guess a hollywood suit could have come up with that, but I doubt it


In finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have been basically unbeatable in this regard, hence the state of the market (and our salaries) for the past few decades. Industrial firms have to use metrics like "EBITDA" to show how much cash they'd have to potentially pay to investors if they didn't have to pay so much in interest on their debt, taxes, and fixing up decaying equipment...


I used to work in this field myself long ago (academically and practically). The difficulty that OP didn't suggest much appreciation for is that the interesting spaces for automated verification -- especially of distributed systems, say -- require exploring the space of formalisms between the trivial proofs of propositional logic (SAT solvers) and the undecidable proofs of first or second-order logic (interactive theorem proving environments such as Isabelle and Lean). This is the incredibly large space occupied most importantly by the various modal logics, which allow for quantification over graph traversals. There are remarkably expressive logics where the decision problem remains tractable, such as the modal mu-calculus.

That is, precisely if one wants automated tools for verification the seemingly obtuse work on novel formal systems is necessary.


Generally continental Europe -- except the Scandinavian countries -- makes it relatively easy to get long-term residency and even a passport. The UK is considerably more difficult, but very easy to work in for an extended period of time (intra-company transfer visas etc).


Scandinavia had Sweden until yesterday's vote in Riksdagen, I moved here 10+ years ago, got my permanent residence after 4 years, citizenship after 5.

Rules have been changed now, citizenship in 8 years will become law on June 6th, also requiring language and cultural tests which weren't required before.

Continental Europe used to vary, Germany was stricter with 8 years to citizenship but permanent residence would vary depending on work skill and language skills.


Can you give some specific examples? I would say that, unless you have some additional qualifications (European ancestors, EU spouse and similar), the majority of EU countries actually don't make it that easy. Of course, it depends on your definition of "relatively easy".


Yes, it's never a trivial process, so a lot of work is certainly being performed by that "relatively": I have extensive personal experience with the UK immigration process and know of the US equivalent through the experiences of former colleagues back home. France, for example, is five years to a passport/naturalization. Germany is three years of skilled work to indefinite leave to remain. The Netherlands is five years to indefinite leave to remain. None of those examples require European ancestors, EU spouse etc, but generally it's easier if you have a university degree and work in the various fields most readers of hacker news do.


Well, naturalisation in most EU countries would involve some other requirements: language knowledge (you'd have to pass an exam) + civic/constitutional exam or integration test + naturally, no criminal record, etc + some countries are quite restrictive on dual-citizenship (i.e. they don't allow it for foreigners, meaning that you would need to renounce your original citizenship).

Visas and residence permits are, of course, easier.


If you're living and working in California or New York, as I suspect a large number of hacker news readers are, EU taxes on income are generally not prohibitively more expensive, especially relative to increase in quality of life. 'Native' salaries are considerably lower, however, and tax treatment of equity-based compensation is very much not in favor of employees...


In my niece's (relatively rural) US high school class several students decided to attend university in Europe with no family ties to the countries in question. It was pretty common in my generation to see, as you note, kids moving to Berlin etc after their studies, but this strikes me as relatively new. Anecdata that seems supported in some of the public numbers [0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/07/21/reco...


Many countries in Europe have free universities: avoiding a few hundred thousands in debt maybe be worth moving in the long run.


Yeah, it's been a relatively rational decision for a while now, but one I personally hadn't really seen taken until recently. Again, all anecdata, but I am curious to track how much of a trend it really is.


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