MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthk | 2025-04-07 13:36:39+00:00
>Because all PowerShell objects are .NET objects, they share a .ToString() method,

Congrats, PSH, you did what TCL did ~30 years ago, but worse. With TCL everything it's a string, even numbers. Yes, it sucks you need to [ eval ] math operations, but well, the advantages outnumber the quirks.

If you came from Lisp, you will be at home in the spot. Use the l* functions as you were doing the same with Lisp lists, but without juggling with car, cdr, caar, cddr and so on.

And there's Expect which is utterly underrated.

Yes, I hate upvar sometimes, but with namespaces you can almost avoid that issue.

On TCL done for serious stuff... if people have been using Excel with millions of rows for covid patients and census, TCL/Tk with SQLite would outperform these by a huge margin.
by bell-cot | 2025-04-07 13:36:43+00:00
That is perfectly reasonable, when it is literally your house.

But within the metaphor - elected leaders need to balance the short-term approval of voters who are angry/xenophobic, against the longer-term disapproval of voters who don't like losing "their" cuts of withering travel/tourism-related revenues ...and can figure out who is mostly to blame for that.
by cbeach | 2025-04-07 13:37:06+00:00
I shut down a couple of my websites that provided a service for free (streetlend.com and cointouch.com) because the GDPR was too ambiguous for me to be 100% sure I complied with - and in the past online I have encountered vexatious people who have to tried to damage my reputation. On one of my other websites, those people used GDPR privileges (eg making vexatious SAR requests) simply to make my life more difficult.

At the end of the day, I create helpful and fun websites for free in my spare time because I enjoy it.

EU regulation created jeopardy and friction that meant I couldn't justify doing this anymore.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-07 13:37:21+00:00
Because tariffs aren’t actually a good thing. If you hurt my producers by $1, I should hurt yours by $1 to maintain some level of credibility in our repeated game. If I don’t punish foreigners for tariffing my guys they have no incentive to reduce or remove those tariffs.

I don’t actually care about t-shirts being made in china. That’s not an industry that matters at all. I do care about china closing her entire market to American tech, for instance.
by bcye | 2025-04-07 13:37:26+00:00
GDPR is not complex because it is hard to comply with but because seemingly no one wants to.

EU-US data transfers have been declared illegal numerous times [1], but instead of supporting European cloud providers those decisions are barely enforced and quickly circumvented by a new data transfer act.

Cookie banners are not hard to implement if you don't try to share user data with your "864 most trusted partners", there are clear guidelines [2] now on how they need to be designed, but instead of criticising these not being properly enforced, the requirement for them itself is criticised.

How is it that Meta can regular break the law, with 7 of the 10 highest fines (or probably around a third of all fines) going against them [3] with seemingly no action taken to prevent this from continuing onwards.

noyb has managed to achieve more than a billion euro in fines with only 6 million euros in funding, we could be focusing on supporting NGOs doing incredible work for their budget and getting our DPAs to probably enforce the law.

The issue with GDPR is not the law but the seeming unwillingness to enforce it leading to unclarity what is expected and what not. [4]

[1]: https://noyb.eu/en/23-years-illegal-data-transfers-due-inact... [2]: https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-consent-banner-report-how-authoriti... [3]: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights [4]: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-day-only-13-cases-eu-dpas...
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 13:37:29+00:00
LLMs are more miss than hit for me in the coding work I do. Yet I still try to use them as much as possible because they are a helpful accelerator when it works. It’s easy to review the code and either try again with some more prompting or just write it myself.

Currently I start writing myself while Claude is thinking through the result, like we’re both racing.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about juniors shipping code they don’t understand, but that doesn’t logically make sense for why experienced people are avoiding it. It’s another tool in the toolbox. Use it like one. If your coworkers are shipping code they don’t understand then deal with that problem regardless of where it came from.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-04-07 13:37:32+00:00
I’m by no means an expert on this, but I never assumed “startup” implies VC-backed. I thought “VC-backed startup” meant that and “bootstrapped startup” meant not.

That “startup” was an indicator of not being an incumbent in the space and using technology to disrupt things.

But in an increasingly tech-first world, it does beg the question what separates a tech first SMB from a startup.
by gbuk2013 | 2025-04-07 13:39:15+00:00
Network controlled PDUs are a thing. I’ve used APC switched rack PDUs several jobs ago to control lab equipment - we had a checkout page and if a unit was not checked out it would be powered off at the end of the day and powered back on if someone checked it out. It was as easy as an API call - could be sent by health check script.

Not sure how healthy that is for the circuits vs reset button though - we didn’t have any problems but some consumer hardware might be more delicate.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 13:39:37+00:00
Thank you for the feedback! It is certainly not too harsh :)

The problem is that for any given problem, there might be some solution out there that does something like it. Except that there is no solution anywhere in which you can do all of these. So, we are showing Moldable Development because that is the goal and that is the proposition of the technology. I believe that masking it as something else would not be particularly useful.

We understand that at this point in time, most people do not look for Moldable Development. Most people will consider it once others have taken it and create large value with it. So, right now, we are interested in finding those people because they will convince everyone else :).

If you want to learn more about Moldable Development, take a look at the book I am writing in the open with Simon Wardley: https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c...
by jmkr | 2025-04-07 13:40:02+00:00
I really hate that companies are allowed to use "natural flavors" and I refuse to buy any products that say that unless they are able to specifically tell me what's not in it.

Lots of people don't realize that "natural" can mean pretty much anything that's not produced in a lab.

There is a trend though where some companies include in the nutrition facts the sources of their ingredients. That's how it should be.

In the US you can write "modified food starch" and that can mean a million different things. In Europe they have specific numbers for different types of "modified food starch."
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-07 13:40:06+00:00
> If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power

What if the workforce is never fired, and government jobs acquire a reputation for ingrained incompetence, promotion from within for the unqualified, and a management so frustrated by their inability to turn over poorly-performing workers that nearly nothing productive gets done anymore?

What if the workforce is full of appointments by the Old-Boy network, and jobs are personal favors or quid pro quo rather than based on qualifications or education?

What about that sort of workforce?
by Hojojo | 2025-04-07 13:41:46+00:00
This pretty much. I've had a lot to do with GDPR in the projects I'm involved with. It's largely trivial if you aren't already doing terribly risky things, in which case yeah, it's a pain, but it doesn't change the necessity of fixing issues that put user private data at risk (with or without the GDPR existing). GDPR just puts more incentive on solving issues in regards to privacy instead of just letting companies shrug and move on because it's not their problem if data is stolen or leaked or letting them do what they want with the data without permission.
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-07 13:41:47+00:00
That story starts with her being refused entry to Canada. So, there's more than just "US border guards mean" going on here.

Then it turns out that she was using Workaway, which is like AirBnB or Uber but for foreign labor on tourist visas. They don't tell you that you need a work visa to work in another country [1], but you almost certainly do anywhere you go, not just the US. The woman in the story was working in exchange for accommodation, which is legal for citizens but not for aliens: work permits and visas exist to deter illegal immigration. She didn't have intent to immigrate illegally, but the scheme under which she entered the country was illegal, and she confessed to it in her statement to the border guards.

The real bad actor in this story was Workaway, and I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. They offer an alien labor arrangement that is almost certain to get you detained if caught with the wrong visa, don't give you advice on visas, and aren't there to help if something does go wrong at the border. I doubt there are many countries who welcome their alien labor arrangements, either.

[1] "Workaway is a listing site that enables contact between members, we are unfortunately unable to arrange or advise on visas. There are so many countries with different regulations or laws for different types of volunteering activity, so we would suggest directly getting in touch with the relevant embassy of your destination. It is the responsibility of the host and/or volunteer to make sure they are within the law." https://www.workaway.info/en/stories/workaway-for-newbies-co...
by neogodless | 2025-04-07 13:42:22+00:00
Yes, if you click through to the substack, that article links to this axios article. But as far as Hacker News submissions, the other one was submitted earlier, and has over 300 comments.

Arguably @dang or @tomhow might ultimately combine them, but for anyone curious you'll find better (or at least a lot more) discussion on the other article.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-07 13:42:31+00:00
You make a great point about values. It's potentially the biggest issue with the linked article. You got a weirdly large number of dissenting replies, so I just wanted to say that. I think it's irrelevant whether or not there are "two mutually exclusive" sets of values. What's relevant is that one's values can point you more in one direction than the other.
by virtualcharles | 2025-04-07 13:42:34+00:00
These days yeah, lots of home automation gizmos for instance like the SwitchBot line. Plus it wouldn’t take nearly the amount of engineering know-how it once did to rig up something with an Arduino and a little hobby motor, probably like a $20 project from Adafruit. AI for the code these days, or just a bit of googling. Crazy to think about how easy to get that sort of thing has become in just a couple of decades.
by techpineapple | 2025-04-07 13:42:58+00:00
I feel like all CEO edicts, by nature of the fact that they are a blunt instrument have weird side effects. The general sentiment here is the right one, but it will also lead to strange behavior, goodhart’s law, and maybe in certain corners have the opposite effect intended (I think we’re going to start talking about “AI-think”, a similar effect to “group-think” as teams start to coalesce around an AI’s way of thinking.
by lxgr | 2025-04-07 13:43:07+00:00
That's a common way of doing it, but Apple devices actively amplify the signal in card emulation mode as well, which gives them longer range than physical cards or "purely passive" devices.

But it also means they can't do the neat trick of paying with a completely dead (i.e. not even reserve battery power) phone that some early Android and Windows Phone devices could do.
by justinrubek | 2025-04-07 13:43:39+00:00
I can't speak for a modern subaru, but I've not owned a single ICE vehicle that would work in this scenario. The battery would be dead. An electric one has the option to be plugged in and avoid the problem. Just because we haven't put the infrastructure in place for it doesn't mean we can't. We should do so, just like we did for gasoline.
by nowandlater | 2025-04-07 13:43:51+00:00
I feel like I'm spinning, hitting the spiral of the drain where civilization is to inevitably pass through, gone. The many who suffered and continue to suffer from iniquities of the human race carry the tonnage of likewise experiences, know a truth that is so impossible to know:

"It was useless to close one's eyes or turn one's back to it because it was all around, in every direction, all the way to the horizon. It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame, and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an infinite enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act."

- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
by shsachdev | 2025-04-07 13:44:09+00:00
I don’t know whether it would be legal, but I 100% agree with your suggestion - a more active form of learning would be more effective. Professor Molesworth (the expert I interviewed for the article) actually suggested that airlines should make passengers count how many seats away from the emergency exit they’re sitting - again, making that a more active process.

There’s also the argument that to improve retention, the regulatory body should decrease the amount of “key safety messages” that need to be included in the videos (which ends up being around 35-45). If you decrease that number, retention of the info you do mention should go up.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 13:44:27+00:00
My "why not" had a smiley next to it because it was meant as a joke. I am not sure what you mean by downvoting, but I did not mean to discourage your curiosity. I am sorry if it came out like that.

p.s. I learnt in the meantime that it's possible to downvote somehow (I still do not know how). But in this case, I actually upvoted you.
by the_bear | 2025-04-07 13:44:33+00:00
I think there are two common definitions of startup, and neither require VCs to be involved.

One (seen elsewhere in these comments) is any small business. I personally don't like that definition because there is a pretty big difference between a local coffee shop and the thing we all mean when we say "startup".

The other one which is more common here is a company that is currently small, but the business model involves getting much much larger. There's a blurry line between a small business and a startup with this definition, but it seems to be a "you know it when you see it" type of thing.

Companies like Mailchimp and Atlassian (in their early days) clearly qualified as startups even though they hadn't raised VC. You might say they're outliers, but so are the VC-backed companies that reach that level of success. If a small company is growing quickly and on pace to become a multi-billion dollar company, it seems weird to say they're not a startup just because they didn't raise money from the right people.
by meristohm | 2025-04-07 13:44:44+00:00
Restructuring culture/society/government so that our basic needs are more-easily met, freeing us to do what we each feel is meaningful. That's way oversimplifying, and perhaps not a useful answer. I wouldn't get into OSS for the money. Do it because it matters to you, and maybe do some bs job to pay the bills. If the open-source software is a for-profit venture rather than a for-public-benefit venture, there might be a risk of making decisions based on money rather than public good.

OpenAI might be an example? I'd far rather humans help other humans directly[0] than farm it out to robots.

[0] Mutual Aid, book by Dean Spade
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-04-07 13:45:09+00:00
Those affected weren't from the third world though.

I have travelled for conferences in the US several times, now I'd be worried they'd argue you need a B-1 visa instead of ESTA waiver if you visit the company office after the conference, etc.

And detain you for weeks when you don't have it.

The USA is supposed to be the land of the free.
by stephen_g | 2025-04-07 13:45:38+00:00
That’s basically the system we have in Australia - customs and immigration handled by officers of the Federal Government, and generally Federal police patrol airports (one of the only places you will normally see them if you don’t live in Canberra), and then the airports have private security companies do the security screening.

There are still Federal standards they have to comply with but it’s more reasonable than the US (we never had to take off our shoes and liquids of any size have been allowed again for years as long as you’re only going to the domestic part of the airport, they’re separated here)
by sbuk | 2025-04-07 13:45:42+00:00
> The GUI / UX is horrible.

Coming from someone who would "prefer to be in Gnome or KDE", this is a hard criticism to take seriously. KDE is obviously designed by committee and is therefore UI elements are all over the place, and Gnome is just horrible.

> Finder is annoying as hell. The icons / layouts do not snap to resizing, proper navigation requires arcane keyboard shortcuts, it's difficult to open new instances in the expected way, tabs suck, navigation sucks. Finder is made for non-power users.

Those "arcane keyboard shortcuts" have been around for 40 years. Or is it the Emacs keybinding that you don't like? Opening a new instance of a Finder window is a Cmd N away. New tab? Cmd T - I do not understand what is hard about that. Oh, and tabs are a feature of the system, and native apps (some non-native too) automatically implement them. It seems to me that someone hasn't RTFM'ed. Some "power user" you seem to be...

The rest is rant that macOS isn't $MyFavouriteDistro and that is the only way computers should work.

> I do not want to "define" terms with the shitty built in dictionary tool, yet that option eats up context window space in every tool.

Oh no! A whole line in a context menu! The horror.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-07 13:45:43+00:00
The US, Trump, is trying to "refinance" global trade with the united states. The short of it is that the Trump wants countries to pay more to be part of the west's "protection blanket". Most of the "paying more" will come in the form of a weaker dollar, devaluing foreign held treasuries and making US industry more competitive with local manufacturers.

Trump seems to be going nuclear with this plan, and because he obviously is not particularly smart or diplomatic, I don't think he grasps the immense second and third order effects this will have on perceptions of America. American goods might get cheaper, but maybe no one will want to buy them. No one will want to travel to the US. No one will want to live in the US.

So dumb.
by lxgr | 2025-04-07 13:46:16+00:00
The second attack you linked is yet another completely different threat model. It requires running malicious software on the device to be tracked. From the paper:

The Trojan code runs on the computer to be tracked. It retrieves the advertising address, acquires the matching public key from our server, and then advertises lost messages

That's about as active as it gets!

The first one describes radio fingerprinting, which is relatively new, concerning, and might be tricky to address.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-04-07 13:46:38+00:00
You might want to read up on Edward Bernays[1] if you think modern advertising is "just telling you about a product". It most decidedly is not. It is a century of of human effort poured into exploiting human evolutionary biases in order to increase sales. It's an exercise in inducing demand, not in fulfilling preexisting demand.

>What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which means orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassured by psychodramas.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

[2]: Technopoly by Neil Postman
by tame3902 | 2025-04-07 13:47:10+00:00
I agree completely. I also know that distros patch packages.

But for unzip the situation is particularly bad because it has no maintainer. Normally, you would raise feature requests for basic functionality upstream and once added, the maintainer would cut a new release. So software with the same version number generally, but not always, behaves similarly across distros.

But for unzip, because upstream is unmaintained, distro maintainers started to add features while keeping the version number. So in the end you end up with different behavior for what looks like the same release.
by amluto | 2025-04-07 13:47:25+00:00
Barely discussed in the paper: bubbles.

Many fermentation processes produce gas, and some aerobic fermentation processes happen while fully exposed to the air. Gravity provides quite a bit of assistance separating gas bubbles from solids and liquids.

In space, how do you build a fermentation airlock? With a centrifuge? Can you safely punch down dough? How do you open a sealed, pressurized container of anything carbonated? Can you easily remove enough dissolved CO2 from your kimchi so that eating it won’t make you burp?
by hylaride | 2025-04-07 13:47:32+00:00
> First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.

It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.

But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.

Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.

> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.

You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.

As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.

I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
by kolektiv | 2025-04-07 13:47:39+00:00
Just to note that in most places at the moment (unless you turn up in that red baseball cap...) the attitude to most Americans is likely to be a kind of horrified pity (again, unless you start saying how great it all is). Most people are generally aware that Trump doesn't have universal support, and unlike your own media apparently, we do get coverage of protests and so on. Getting back into your own country though, yeah that might be a problem. Sorry.