MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by m463 | 2025-04-07 05:22:11+00:00
I think companies get entrenched dysfunction that nobody can conquer.

Apple mice have always been bad.

One button mice were "simpler", but if everybody had to also learn to press control+click it wasn't really one-button.

Ahd how did they ever ship that round mouse you could never orient? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse

By thw way, have you ever tried to use a mighty mouse with an FPS game? It doesn't really work. Most games use one button for fire, the other for zoom. But you have to lift your fire finger off the mouse to click the zoom button.

the magic mouse... even worse.

I won't even go into games and apple, they're bad at that too.

Tesla is going down the same road, removing stalks and everything on the touchscreen.
by another-dave | 2025-04-07 05:22:34+00:00
> Why should you care how much another country charges its residents to import stuff from the US?

Because tariffs hurt trade — if you charge someone an extra $4 on a $20 bottle of French wine, they _may_ still buy it, or they may buy different wine.

Or they could go, everything's gotten so expensive these days, I'll buy wine less often altogether.
by eru | 2025-04-07 05:23:45+00:00
Eh, if company wants to contribute a billion bucks to city coffers in order to put up a single billboard, that's surely worth the small amount of inconvenience.

So I hope we established that there is a finite tax that's large enough to cover the negative externalities.

Now we just need to figure out what finite amount of taxation is reasonable.

> What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?

Different municipalities (and their voters) can differ in how much they value money vs aesthetics. There's no one size fits all solution.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-07 05:24:08+00:00
Trump has two basic strategies:

1) Double down because the one with the most money/power will eventually win with that strategy.

2) Bully everyone he thinks has less money/power than him so he can use strategy #1.

The thing about the bully strategy number two though is that you have to keep using your power and keep it on display for it to work. That means he has to keep doing bully like things, over and over, no matter how dumb they are. The thing about strategy 1 is that you can never admit you were wrong/back down because then you loose all the doubling you have put in. We are seeing the result of these two simplistic strategies at play. He will only stop because it has all come crashing down and even then he will not back down. He has never had to use a different strategy because he has been rich his whole life. He has never once been 'smart', just rich and we are all paying the price of that as everyone else has his entire life.
by ggm | 2025-04-07 05:24:10+00:00
This is completely contradicted by Republican surveys which recorded the first net-negative sentiment (below 50%) of this second Trump presidency.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls-...

I don't want to do an ad hom. on the source.

They do show in the line-chart two 49% readings, perhaps this is a little uptick before an "oh nooooooo" kicks in?
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-07 05:24:34+00:00
> What is that based on? Just suspicion? (At least that honest!)

It's based on the sections of DOD I worked in, with, and had visibility into around me, along with reading GAO reports (there are too many to read them all, but grab a few and you'll see some remarkable waste and failures). At one point I had a job to help a group become more efficient (in context: delivering on time instead of late, delivering on or at least near budget instead of grossly over), what I saw looking under the hood was exactly what I suspected. A small corner of the DOD that was wasting at least 10-20% of their budget every year because of ineffective coordination across teams often over absolutely stupid things, and that was just the parts I studied relevant to my job at the time. I'm extrapolating from that experience and the other information I've seen over the years.

And, importantly, I'm talking about what can be cut before it impacts capabilities and readiness. Somewhere in this range you'll have to do reorganizations and realignments to continue reducing the DOD budget while maintaining capabilities.

If we went back in time 7 or 8 years I could give you a lot better information than that because I was more actively tracking things. Here are a couple reports though that demonstrate the kinds of things I saw at the time:

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106912

I haven't gone over it all but it's not a pretty picture. Most of the projects they examined are delayed by more than a year, some as much as three, and have had median budget increases of $163 million. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. IT procurement in DOD is fundamentally broken, and accounts for billions in wasted spending.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-106749

$1.84 billion spent on modernizing ships that will never sail.

It's possible that some efforts will start, become OBE and abandoned after spending a lot of money (maybe even billions) but this is normal in DOD, rather than extraordinary.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-07 05:25:11+00:00
A bank account is not a perpetuity. You don’t need to use DCF to value it. Most current accounts don’t even actually give interests let alone an annuity you would need to discount. It is straight debt.

> If somebody owed you the interest payments and the money, your net worth (in regard to this money) would double.

Even for deposits, the way this works is that you discount future cash flow on top of your principal to get to your net present value. The NPV of a saving accounts above inflation viewed as a perpetuity is infinite thanks to the magic of compounding interests. Sadly, “in the long run, we are all dead”.
by larsiusprime | 2025-04-07 05:25:30+00:00
Author here. I’ll grant “gray mirrors” without a fight. (Ideologies that admit to the same facts but one side just doesn’t care; multiply by zero instead of negative one).

Also note in the article I cop to at least one salient example being real

My main point is not to say dark/gray mirrors don’t exist, just that it should never be your first explanation. Your opponent tends to want things for their reasons, not yours, and the better you understand them the better you can oppose them. That’s it.
by motorest | 2025-04-07 05:25:40+00:00
> (...) the capital is going to pile back in if something like tariff deals start getting announced.

What leads you to believe that scenario is realistic?

I mean, the list of US trading partners is dominated by less than a dozen trading blocks: EU, Mexico, Canada, ASEAN, China. That's it. Trade with India is as significant as trade with Italy alone, and a massive deal with them would barely move the needle in this trade war.

Unless the US somehow makes it's own trade war go away with the likes of Canada and the EU, there is no bright outlook for the market and economy. Trump's administration is repeatedly threatening both with annexation.

To make matters worse, do you really believe any trading block will move back to preserve economic ties with the US after this mess? Not a chance in hell.

The EU, which thanks to the Trump administration is already scrambling to prepare for a war with Russia, is excluding the US from supplying them arms. This is the extent to which these trading blocks are going to shed ties with the US.

Do you think things will just go back to how things were 6 months ago? The Trump administration ensured this is impossible.
by strogonoff | 2025-04-07 05:26:12+00:00
A slightly less obvious problem with trimming fat is that an amount of fat within any system is good to have if you think long-term.

1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times.

2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It has much fewer degrees of freedom and is harder to steer to a new course if necessary.
by bcoates | 2025-04-07 05:26:44+00:00
The system works? The original bill was a going-nowhere, feel-good sop for chumps, the chumps were placated, the bill served its purpose, everyone moved on.

Imagine a world where random crusading busybodies were actually given the power to interfere with every random business deal that made them feel sad, like some sort of HOA for the economy.
by eru | 2025-04-07 05:27:33+00:00
> Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising.

I'm a bit confused.

When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?

Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)
by tame3902 | 2025-04-07 05:27:36+00:00
unzip is a special case: upstream development has basically stopped. The last release was in 2009[0]. (That's the version 6.0.) Since then there were multiple issues discovered and it lacks some features. So everybody patches the hell out of that release[1]. The end result is that you have very different executables with the same version number.

[0]: https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html

[1]: here the build recipe from Arch, where you can see the number of patches that are applied: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/un...
by roenxi | 2025-04-07 05:27:41+00:00
In the sense that members of the human race will survive, sure. That Woodward book out recently was suggesting a double-digit chance for a nuke to get used in Ukraine. Hopefully he is prone to making things up - seems possible that life would not have been going on in at least some regions.

I simultaneously take comfort from the fact that no-one else seems as worried as me and dread from the fact that it'd be the 3rd world war that people just walked into because they weren't taking the threat seriously enough. We appear to have been watching insane policy come out of the US diplomatic establishment for a good decade now. And the crisis is still escalating.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-07 05:29:39+00:00
I think that the examples are not something most users fight with maintainers about.

- Does open source mean that the maintainers are free to ignore single line security fixes PR and refuse to handover it to well trusted and willing contributors.

- Does open source mean that maintainers could plant crypto miner or malware in the project or sell to someone who might do that?

- Does open source mean that companies could change the license and keep the product name same or remove a core functionality and migrate it to paid version?

I have seen multiple instances of all of these.
by bad_user | 2025-04-07 05:29:53+00:00
Eh, no, Open-Source means Open-Source and I hate it when people try overloading words due to market-appeal or ignorance.

https://opensource.org/definition-annotated

I agree partly with the article about entitlement, but you need to define what "open" means, and "access to source code" doesn't cut it due to IP laws. It can't be "open" if it's a legal landmine.

And yes, Open-Source does mean "FOSS", always. The definitions of Open-Source and Free Software being very much equivalent.

Stop overloading terms for your own gain.
by kolanos | 2025-04-07 05:29:55+00:00
In other news....

Vietnam Offers to Remove Tariffs on US After Trump’s Action [0] Taiwan eyes zero tariffs with US, pledges more investment [1]

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-06/vietnam-o... [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/taiwan-wont-take-reciprocal-ta...
by ggm | 2025-04-07 05:29:59+00:00
A british TV light entertainment program of the end of the 20th century was "the wheel tappers and shunters club" which was a mythical working-mans club in the north of england. Like the music hall series "the good old days" did for pre-ww1 music-hall entertainment, it traded on a certain cliché of what a working mans club was like. They were pretty robust, a dive bar with cheap beer, darts and a pool table mostly. Groups like the Beatles would have toured them before they became famous. As did comedians, strippers, magicians, you-name-it. In my personal opinion, the entertainment was usually awful. But as a student, I drank in them because the beer was cheap (in York in the 80s)

The point being that "wheel tappers" really existed: they hit the wheels of wagons in the shunting yard with a hammer, to see if the tone of the cast iron wheel betrayed a crack developing. So I guess the MTA is just carrying on the tradition (ultrasound imaging and X Rays do this on aircraft)
by setopt | 2025-04-07 05:30:13+00:00
> Related to that, the Unix philosophy of simple tools that do one job and do it well, also applies here a bit. More typical workflow would be a utility to tarball something, then another utility to gzip it, then finally another to encrypt it. Leading to file extensions like .tar.gz.pgp, all from piping commands together.

I do this for my own files, but half of the time I zip something, it’s to send it to a Windows user, in which case zip is king.
by uecker | 2025-04-07 05:30:25+00:00
If I try to read between the lines, I think the vibe comes from feeling / being pressured to use Rust without really seeing the point and it causing frustration in this context.

I think your vibe is more weird. If people have issues with Rust, it is a "shitty attitude". While, of course, C/C++ just objectively suck, right?
by aisenik | 2025-04-07 05:30:59+00:00
It's mostly just "Golden Dome," Trump's plan to give Musk a global constellation of (potentially nuclear-armed) "anti-ballistic missile" weaponized satellites. I'm sure there's other facets of orbital warfare fantasies involved (X-37B's capabilities for instance) but Golden Dome is Musk's attempt to "disrupt" global defense by implementing the SDI plans of the 80s and 90s (aka SpaceX).

Admittedly, it's a dangerous plan for all of humanity. I've considered it Musk's win-condition for this whole insane, destructive wager he's made with his reputation, businesses, and wealth on the table.

I think it's why the neonazi regime aren't afraid of plunging the world into economic catastrophe and setting the conditions for WW3. They believe their plan can't fail. Regrettably, it seems like we'll get to find out.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-07 05:31:03+00:00
>> The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

True, in the sense that some (not Open Source) things are distributed as source code. (I do so myself.)

But the title of the article references Open Source. Capital O, capital S. If something ships under an Open Source (OSS not necessarily FOSS) then you fo have those rights.

The bulk of the article is around support though, and I completely agree with the sentiments there.
by cayley_graph | 2025-04-07 05:31:25+00:00
Yes, agree with the rest of the article but "open source" most certainly does _not_ include "source-available". This is true regardless of which side of the permissive-vs-copyleft issue you fall on. Being obtuse about things like this dilutes the term, which I suspect is the desired outcome. To be clear, there's nothing particularly wrong with source-available programs; they simply do not rise to the level of benefits offered by open source programs.
by motorest | 2025-04-07 05:32:04+00:00
> To be honest, “buy the dip” is generally cope that people tell themselves.

I don't think so. "Buy the dip" is a call to action to third parties to irrationally invest their resources in a way that benefits you personally. It's a call to not believe what they are seeing, and that doing the opposite of what would be prudent or reasonable is somehow something that is in their best interests.

You already hear fantastic claims like "buying the dip is what rich people do to get rich". Yeah, buy low-sell high is good business. But that only works when you actually buy low. If you buy in when the freefall starts, aren't you buying high? How is that good business?
by phyzix5761 | 2025-04-07 05:32:13+00:00
The government has proven to be extremely inefficient at managing our money. Look at how little they care about the trails. If we want actual money to go places we care about we have to do it ourselves.

We can hold non profits accountable in ways that we can't with the government. Accountability in government takes 4-6 years when we get an election cycle. If a non profit is mismanaging funds it takes 4-6 minutes for me to give my money to a different non profit.
by schoen | 2025-04-07 05:32:29+00:00
The other points make sense to me, but I have to disagree with this one.

> It does not mean it is free and open-source (FOSS).

When the campaign to describe software as "open source" kicked off in 1998, it consciously choose the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as the basis for the Open Source Definition (OSD), so that "open source" would refer to the same thing as "free software".

Clearly the connotations of the two terms have diverged quite a lot, but their denotations weren't meant to.
by CaptainFever | 2025-04-07 05:33:20+00:00
This is the whole reason why we should be using the term "free software" instead of "open source" [2].

Free software is about user freedoms; the creator is unable to stop the user from redistributing or modifying the software. By using the term "open source", these freedoms end up getting ignored, until it simply gets diluted down to source availability, as seen in this article [1].

Actually, this article goes one step further and even says that free software is not free software; that is, it can have a license that restricts fundamental user freedoms. This is obviously wrong.

[1]

From the article:

> When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence. The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

[2]

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
by robinhouston | 2025-04-07 05:35:05+00:00
This is a complaint as old as the internet, which probably bears repeating from time to time.

One part I think is unnecessarily controversial:

> It does not mean it is free and open-source (FOSS).

This is another old argument that it's pointless to re-litigate, but one should at least note that this way of using the term ‘Open Source’ contradicts the OSI definition and risks causing avoidable misunderstandings.

https://opensource.org/osd
by beefnugs | 2025-04-07 05:35:07+00:00
I feel like the reason this isn't an obvious big deal yet, is because we don't have in real life the ideal use case: which would be a really complex vehicle ( like a real world mech). Something that needs a bunch of tweakable manufacturer control systems, but also massive customization through customer code. And maybe this will never exist, because capitalism is all about vendor lock in.
by boyter | 2025-04-07 05:35:19+00:00
Ignoring the open-source vs free software discussions that are bound to come about from this well said. Large companies exploiting developers and abuse towards the maintainers is probably my biggest bugbear when it comes to this.

In fact I have a similar post https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/ which I redirect people towards if they become aggressive towards me when I am trying to help them. Thankfully I have only had to use it a handful of times.
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-04-07 05:36:29+00:00
Thank you!! It works particularly well with those. We use ColPali-style embeddings for our visual doc search. As a result, we're not limited by parsing quality the same way typical RAG systems are. Here's a link to a blog I wrote on ColPali, for reference: https://docs.morphik.ai/concepts/colpali
by greyface- | 2025-04-07 05:37:19+00:00
Trademarks are the legal framework we use to protect phrases like this. In 1999, OSI applied for, and was denied, a trademark on the phrase "Open Source".[1] Perhaps there is a moral argument to be made to this effect, but there is not a legal one.

[1]: https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
by goku12 | 2025-04-07 05:37:38+00:00
The cult that I see growing online a lot are those who are invested in attacking Rust for some reason, though their arguments often indicate that they haven't even tried it. I believe that we're focusing so much on Rust evangelists that we're neglecting the other end of the zealotry spectrum - the irrational haters.

The Rust developers I meet are more interested in showing off their creations than in evangelizing the language. Even those on dedicated Rust forums are generally very receptive to other languages - you can see that in action on topics like goreleaser or Zig's comptime.

And while you have already dismissed the other commenter's experience of finding Rust nicer than C++ to program in, I would like to add that I share their experience. I have nothing against C++, and I would like to relearn it so that I can contribute to some projects I like. But the reason why I started with Rust in 2013 was because of the memory-saftey issues I was facing with C++. There are features in Rust that I find surprisingly pleasant, even with 6 additional years of experience in Python. Your opinion that Rust is unpleasant to the programmer is not universal and its detractions are not nonsense.

I appreciate the difficulty in learning Rust - especially getting past the stage of fighting the borrow checker. That's the reason why I don't promote Rust for immediate projects. However, I feel that the knowledge required to get past that stage is essential even for correct C and C++. Rust was easy for me to get started in, because of my background in digital electronics, C and C++. But once you get past that peak, Rust is full of very elegant abstractions that are similar to what's seen in Python. I know it works because I have trained js and python developers in Rust. And their feedback corroborates those assumptions about learning Rust.
by CaptainFever | 2025-04-07 05:37:58+00:00
Sorry, this is not true. Free software simply means that the software grants the user 4 fundamental freedoms: the freedom to run, study, redistribute, and modify. It does not require virality, though it is encouraged.

From what I understand, Free Software and Open Source are largely similar, except that the former is political and moral, while the latter is mostly concerned about practical effects.