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I know this might be hard for some people to hear, but I want to share my thoughts to promote, in a small way, a common understanding of different perspectives.

My genuine trouble with this kind of post is that I don’t know if it is true.

How do I know the guy isn’t trying to get donations for local groups? Is that an odd question to ask after the dominant lens through which we analyze action is “cui bono?”

How do I know that this didn’t come from some Russian intel group? Is that an odd question to ask after Russian interference is all over the media during our elections?

It’s the problem of our society today: we don’t share a common view of reality.


You can watch the hundreds of videos. You can judge the shared reporting about the number of federal agents deployed to MN coming from government and activist sources. You can listen to the administration's words about insurrection. You can read the front page reporting on the NYT, Fox News (both currently running front page stories). You can read the updates from the area's public schools.

There are no disagreements on the core facts: thousands of ICE agents are deployed to the Twin Cities and are aggressively arresting activists and immigrants, using chemical crowd deterrents, and presenting themselves in masks and military dress.


As an Austrian citizen I unfortunately have to tell you that the existence of masked agents in unmarked vehicles is very bad news. The last time we had this they were called Geheime Staatspolizei and we now have a memorial at the location of their head quarters in Vienna. I am not usually someone trying to manifest Godwins law but this is straight out of the facist playbook. Another super worrying fact for me as a European is that the late Dick Cheney was so worried about American democracy and he always looked like Darth Vader to me from across the pond. Suddenly we are on one side, didn’t have that on my bingo card.

Hi. I am the person who wrote the piece. I am not a bot, not Russian intel. YES I want money to go to organizations serving terrified, vulnerable people who are being hunted like dogs primarily because they LOOK like immigrants or other "undesirables."

People need help in MPLS, right now. Be skeptical of what you hear online ... definitely. But there is a limit. At some point you must accept that there is a major crisis, that people are in acute need, and that not helping is complicity.


Thanks for writing it, and thanks for stopping by. Perhaps I'm naive, but I wasn't worried at all that the article might be a Russian fake. Instead, my worry is that it felt like propaganda. Genuine heartfelt propaganda, probably from someone on the ground in Minneapolis, but throughout the piece I felt that you were likely leaving out information so as to create a more compelling call to action.

I don't know for sure that this is true, but I feel like this is a big hurdle that you'll have to overcome if you want to convince skeptical people like me who actually do care. Saying "I will not provide names, sources, etc." might feel necessary, but it makes it harder to convince people. I'm left feeling that there is definitely more to the story than you are telling.

Starting with your first example, "two teachers parked in front of the school were violently extracted from their cars and abducted by ICE officers". I'm not certain, but I'd probably be willing to bet this isn't the full story. Were they "parked in front" because they were at their jobs teaching, or were they attempting to prevent the ICE officers from doing something? Were they participating in a protest or just passing by?

I don't know--and it doesn't mean that what happened is right or proper--but I don't trust you to tell me if you think it might hurt the case you are trying to make. The result is that I feel like I need to at least partially discount the rest of what you have to say. How do we get beyond this?


I think you're right. I think that what ICE is doing is clearly a problem and speaking about it clearly and plainly is useful here.

Here are two good sources for the incident at the school (Roosevelt High School). [1] [2]

The first is from our local NPR affiliate: MPR. It has interviews with school staff members and describes their account of the day. The second is from our local NBC affiliate: KARE 11. It's a more recent article which describes the account of the day based on statements from Customs and Border Patrol. You can see some of the parallels between the two.

>“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official, who spoke to MPR News on condition of anonymity said.

versus

>[CBP Deputy Incident Commander Kyle Harvick] said a crowd began to gather as they were arresting the driver for impeding the operation. As agents investigated the area, the statement says a crowd gathered and some individuals responded with "combative shoves and pushes." Harvick says agents then attempted to arrest one of the individuals when a school staff member allegedly began pushing agents. The staff member was placed under arrest.

When you're weighing who to believe in this situation, it's worth calling out that CBP has lied before [3] and doesn't always operate within the law here [4]. That last link is particularly notable since it's a very straightforward constitutional violation where they broke into the house with a battering ram (on video, if you want to watch) to make the arrest--all without a judicial warrant. The provided an _administrative_ warrant instead, which doesn't allow forced search of private residences. The agents presumably know that and thought they could get away with it anyway.

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/08/after-border-patrol...

[2] https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/ice-in-minnesota/c...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/chicago-immigration-crackdown-wom...

[4] https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-arrest-judge-orders-rel...


You can donate to churches that are organizing to help bring food and supplies to people too afraid to leave their homes. It doesn’t have to be a political group.

The underlined words in the post are links to the associated news articles.

> My genuine trouble with this kind of post is that I don’t know if it is true.

Same thought I had. I mean, it sounds pretty bad but it's also making no attempt at all to report an unbiased view. I'd like to hear from officials. What are their goals, and why are they doing it this way? I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.


What is the unbiased view of a federal agency geared up for war kidnapping and terrorizing people in the streets of American city? You have no idea what it's like here right now.

> You have no idea what it's like here right now.

I don't have any idea and I'm not trying to defend or justify.

> What is the unbiased view of a federal agency geared up for war kidnapping and terrorizing people in the streets of American city?

That's exactly what I'd like to know. The report didn't provide one. That's my point. Which is fine, they didn't intent to, they were just telling their truth. But those ICE agents have a perspective, they have motivations, they're people, and while reading the report I was curious about what they might have to say about their actions.


Here is an agent arresting a US citizen, for the expressed reason of having an accent. What is the perspective and motivation here?

https://bsky.app/profile/premthakker.bsky.social/post/3mcnjw...


> I'm not trying to defend or justify

Yes you are, when you say things like this:

> those ICE agents have a perspective, they have motivations, they're people

They are racist, fascist thugs, it's that simple. They want to terrorize immigrants and brown people. There is no need to overthink this. They are racially profiling people every day, and arresting citizens because they are minorities. They shot a mother in the head and now they are telling the rest of us "didn't you learn your lesson?", alluding to that murder. They tear-gassed a family of 6 trying to get home the other day, including a 6 month old baby that lost consciousness. The family had nothing to do with anything, they were simply trying to get home in an area ICE was attacking.

What "perspective" could possibly change anything about this shameful behavior?


Mass deportations was his signature campaign promise. It's exactly what they voted for.

They knowingly voted for a racist, a rapist, a felon ...

A man who as president sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States and members of Congress, because that VPOTUS, Mike Pence, refused Trump's illegal order to overturn an election both of them had lost.

Trump voters understood.


Stephen Miller has been extremely public about what they are doing. If you are waiting to hear from officials it is because you are closing your ears.

I'm just talking about one report. I'm not waiting to hear from anyone. I just passively consume what happens to come my way, and this is the first report about this situation that I saw on HN and took time to read.

Please educate yourself. The message is not hidden like some cryptic puzzle. Read, read, read. And from more than just one news source. Many. Recognize the bias.

Then why aren’t they speaking out against it?

That's well established human behaviour. People don't necessarily speak out against something just because they think it's wrong.

Is it? I see a lot of democrats speaking out, but few republicans. What do you think makes the difference?

> I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.

Sorry to be vulgar, but it’s about fucking time they find the fucking courage to speak up.

I am angry at the conservative people in my life, first and second connections and beyond, not because they fell for 8 years of increasingly fascist propaganda, but because now they’re too weak and scared and cowardly to stand up and recognize that they were wrong and they’ve ushered in some of the darkest days in American history.

The American right continues to be complicit. I am losing respect daily while I watch my conservative friends not speak out. It’s heartbreaking.


Then your friends are not conservative, just right-wing.

> But startups run on belief. Once you stop believing, the company is dead, even if the bank account isn’t. We had tried everything we set out to test. The data was clear: people weren’t switching. Grinding for another year hoping for a miracle wasn’t persistence; it was denial.

Big kudos to you for being honest with yourself. That kind of groundedness and self awareness is rare quality, and one I’d want in a leader of my company.


I thought the same about xAI / Grok, and was surprised to see the Grok Code Fast 1 at the top of the list for number of reasoning tokens processed in Open Router’s state of AI report that came out this month:

https://openrouter.ai/state-of-ai#reasoning-models-now-repre...


This is because Grok Code Fast is free via Kilo Code/Cline and has been for months


Thanks - I didn't know this but that makes sense!


I'm curious about Grok - is there a different version than what is used as the chatbot on X? I see a lot of ridiculous responses that people get from Grok chatbot, so it gives the impression that it isn't very good.


I applied and had the same experience you did—no confirmation and didn’t hear back.

If I recall correctly, it was explicit somewhere that they would only contact you if you were accepted. With the volume of applications they likely got, I give them some grace—I think it’s great they have a program like that at all.


First Things[0] is one of my favorite magazines. It has perspectives I rarely see anywhere else, and generally well articulated and argued for (provided you accept Christian first-principles).

New Polity Podcast[1] also regularly features smart conversations.

[0] https://firstthings.com/

[1] https://newpolity.com/podcasts


Thanks! I'm used to looking at an argument and understanding that it comes with a set of presuppositions that must be accepted for the argument to follow (my academic background is in philosophy). I suppose the position I find myself in is at least toying with those presuppositions. I am finding the arguments that stem from them to be valuable and I can adopt the first principles while thinking about it and I'll leave the question of whether they themselves are right or worth holding for another moment.


Interesting! I can see this being valuable to retailers. One question I have after looking at the landing page--how does it work? Is this something like similarweb that tracks traffic and relevance? Or, is this something you put on your server to measure traffic? Something else altogether?


Thanks for the feedback. It actually works both ways in the examples you provided, they are just different sections of the product.

So the "research" feature is similiar to similarweb in that you can look up a domain to find which search queries it ranks for in Chatgpt and the specific article it links to as a citation/source. I have a fairly small database at this stage so it mainly returns data on the big websites but I am rolling out a 10x larger database in the coming weeks.

The "analytics" feature is a script you install that tracks the traffic ai search engines send you and more in depth information such as the breakdown of traffic from the different ai search engines and which page content is performing the best. I also track page crawls but the ai engines are pretty sneaky (fake user agents etc.) so it's hard to monitor.

Hope that helps. I might update the website with a video so it's easier to see how the features work.


Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.


I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like:

  Foo Corp

  Recruiter: [Jane Smith]

  * 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown]

  * 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe]
I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like:

  # Leads

  * [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp]

  # Initial Contact

  * [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.]

  # Recruiter call

  ...


  # Phone Screen

  # Tech screen

  # Onsite

  # Rejected

  * [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies)
And then there was a separate Interviews note, which was a lot of the content from the Pipeline doc, but ordered chronologically and with more detail:

  # 2025-09-15

  * On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp]
  * Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies]

  # 2025-09-14

  * Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste]
And I replied to every recruiter I talked to, even if just to say "thanks for reaching out, but I'm looking for something more like ... right now", which often led to followups like "ooh, I have another client looking for that! Want to talk to them?"

Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.

I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.

Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.


Obsidian app with it's latest "bases" feature (or Dataview plugin) would work nicely for this.


For sure. Or Bear, or Notion, or ...

There are a lot of things to track all this. I personally didn't want to spend more than the minimum time setting up and using the system, because last think I wanted was to get nerdsniped into inventing a job application tracking systems instead of, like, applying for jobs. That would've been a real risk to me.


Thanks for the details—Its encouraging to hear how you approached it, and I’m glad it worked!


Awesome work! Really nicely built funnel. Great to hear people doing it the right way.


Thanks! I treated it as my full-time job and spent hours scrambling nearly every day. If things had worked out a little differently and I didn’t get a job in a reasonable time frame, I wanted to know it wasn’t from lack of trying.


Is this because you were talking to recruiters and they would respond? Because I've only been able to talk to ~three hiring managers this entire year. So the idea of lining up thirty interviews sounds preposterous, and not because it's hard work.

I followed up with the three of course, but was ghosted after one reply or so.


It's a little of that, and almost my particular job skills are still in demand right now. Just putting "looking for work" on my LinkedIn profile got the contacts flowing.

BTW, I did not, never, not once, apply to any jobs listed through LinkedIn this time around. I did that before and it was utterly demoralizing. Their ads were like "subscribe to LinkedIn Ultra and move to the top of the list of 9,000 people applying for this role!" I've never gotten a single hit from applying for a tech job through LinkedIn. I don't think that's actually a thing.


kpt is a package-centric toolchain that enables a WYSIWYG configuration authoring, automation, and delivery experience, which simplifies managing Kubernetes platforms and KRM-driven infrastructure at scale by manipulating declarative Configuration as Data.


Great work and I like the concept of Dashboards-as-Code. Thank you for building this.


Thank you! The SQL-first approach feels great to use so far and plan to keep betting on that with more features such as scheduled workflows, Git integration and AI code generation.


I know burnout can be extremely difficult.

Take a 2 week vacation first. Make sure it’s 2 weeks (or more, if you can swing it). One is not enough. Actually travel—it doesn’t matter where. Just get out of your normal environment and habits for a little while.

You’re not aiming to solve burnout with the vacation, but only getting some time and space to think and gain a little more perspective.


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