MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dathinab | 2025-05-09 23:39:24+00:00
the issue is loading and setting env (which is the default for dot env libraries)

_is fundamentally unsound thanks to unix/posix_

no way around that

hence why set env wasn't marked as unsafe _even through it not being fully save being known since extremely early rust days maybe even 1.0_

it not being unsafe wasn't a oversight but a known to not be fully sound design decision which had been revisited and changed in recently
by XorNot | 2025-05-09 23:40:26+00:00
I don't know why this example gets presented as absurd all the time. Food is a vital good. If you have a population with a certain calorie demand and don't have enough calories, in 3 months you no longer have the population.

Food: you literally die without it.

ChatGPT: nothing of value is lost.

Look at your iPhone and realize that in any desperate situations, the burger and fries gets more and more valuable.
by bsrkf | 2025-05-09 23:40:46+00:00
Excuse me for not having much to add to the discussion but two interesting references for people to check out, if so inclined of course:

a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager, since what they're, in his opinion, mainly automating is dependency hell, and this being one of the main reasons for rising software complexity and lower software quality; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUruq352yE&t=11m26s (timestamped to the correct position) (they mention Rust explicitly as an example)

b) another programmer rather seriously worried about software quality/complexity is Jonathan Blow, who's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" is worth watching in my opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko (it's not talking about package managers specifically, but is on topic regarding software complexity/quality as a whole)

Addendum: And sorry, I feel like almost everyone knows this xkcd by now, but since no one so far seems to have posted it; "obligatory xkcd reference": https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png
by const_cast | 2025-05-09 23:40:50+00:00
Why are you assuming that non-white people cannot have the necessary qualifications? If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that reasoning is... racist.

The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.

So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?

The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.
by crote | 2025-05-09 23:40:51+00:00
On the other hand, C/C++ makes it attractive to reinvent the wheel, or vendor the dependency instead. Rather than a single well-tested implementation in the ecosystem for something like sha256, you end up with every application having its own slightly-different, mostly untested, and essentially unmaintained version.

Applications still need the functionality. The need doesn't magically disappear when installing dependencies is a pain. If a crate has a bug, the entire ecosystem can trivially get the fixed version. If the Stackoverflow snippet a C app is vendoring has a bug, that fix is never getting in the app.
by pdfernhout | 2025-05-09 23:42:28+00:00
Just saw this idea recently -- to add to your list: "Magnetars’ strong flares forge gold and other heavy elements" https://earthsky.org/space/strong-flares-magnetars-forge-hea... "After black holes, neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe. A neutron star forms when the core of a massive star collapses during a supernova explosion. Intense gravitational forces compress the core, reducing most of its elements to subatomic particles called neutrons. And magnetars are neutron stars with intense magnetic fields. On April 29, 2025, astronomers said a powerful flare unleashed by a magnetar, named SGR 1806–20, created large amounts of heavy elements including gold, strontium, uranium and platinum. They think magnetar flares could produce as much as 10% of the heavy elements in our galaxy."
by mwcampbell | 2025-05-09 23:42:37+00:00
As a contributor to the Rust GUI ecosystem [1], I've been affected (somewhat) by that churn and have also contributed to it. The best defense I can give for doing what might be considered refuckering is that when my library eventually hits 1.0, I want to meet the same standard of stability as Rust itself, and when that point comes, as @munificent said [2], I want my library to represent my best understanding of how to design an API for what I'm doing, with no legacy baggage. Hopefully I don't piss off current users between now and 1.0.

[1]: https://accesskit.dev/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933068
by SllX | 2025-05-09 23:43:37+00:00
> Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.

I've repeated this a couple of times already responding here, so clearly there's a bunch of people chiming in that just haven't on BART recently or haven't taken it into downtown San Francisco or Oakland. BART is currently in the process of hardening the paid areas against casual theft of service. IIRC most of their fare infrastructure has already been upgraded with the new gates that you can't just step over, nor even easily hop or climb over. There are still weak links, but it has had a noticeable impact. Beyond that, you should note that taking BART is the economic option, so if someone is law abiding and needs to get to work, then unless they live right by their job or have no commute at all, they're probably taking BART and paying for it.

> We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.

We use a mix of both fees and tax subsidies for both BART and public roads. If you have to cross a bridge and you're taking public transportation, you're paying at a minimum $8 plus gas which includes gas taxes which non-drivers are not paying for directly. Your other option is the Ferry which is like $9 or something like that.
by treetalker | 2025-05-09 23:43:59+00:00
Pertinent summary of the constitutional basis for habeas corpus and its suspension,[1] and of the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act,[2] which may provide good background for the folks here:

[1]: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C2-1/...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Corpus_Suspension_Act_%...

Habeas corpus is one of a class of legal vehicles known as extraordinary writs. Many of the ones that survive in American law (primarily in state courts — federal law has abolished writs like audita querela, coram nobis, coram vobis, etc.) tend to be appellate in nature, yet typically original actions in the appellate court. For example, writs of prohibition, mandamus, and certiorari are alive and well. Habeas and quo warranto (still common and used to challenge a governmental official's right to hold the office) are extraordinary writs and original actions, but usually initiated in the court of first instance (i.e., trial court).

The Annotated Constitution (see first link) is an excellent resource and worth bookmarking.
by peterlk | 2025-05-09 23:44:00+00:00
I think there are maybe 5 business books out there. I’m not sure how exactly I’d define the 5 different business books, but I think of you read 10-15 business books you’ve pretty much read them all. After a while, they all start boiling down to the same few points with differences in narrative content. If I were to take an unconsidered stab at a few of them: hard work + luck is about the closest formula anyone has found for success if applied over long time periods; you have to be disagreeable and believe in yourself, but not so disagreeable that you can’t get along with anyone; people are important, and treating them well leads to better businesses (over long time periods); sometimes you get dealt a bad hand.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-09 23:44:10+00:00
Note that there is a big difference between "we are all descended from X individuals Y years ago" and "there was X individuals alive Y years ago"!

There were many more humans alive at all points in time than the "genetic bottlenecks" suggest. It's just that their lineage ended at some point later, and wasn't passed on to modern humans.
by MegaButts | 2025-05-09 23:44:23+00:00
> if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves

There's the rub. In my experience, and I understand anecdata is only so useful, people that really want to keep learning more than they have to are quite rare. I doubt that group is even 10% of people. If you only surround yourself with nerds who code for fun, you are going to have an extremely biased view on this issue.
by xyst | 2025-05-09 23:44:27+00:00
So all of those years chugging beers, and keg stands with the boys wasn’t social drinking but full blown drinking disorder?

(( im cooked ))

\s

I don’t doubt its potential to lead to a full blown drinking disorder/addiction/problem. But I feel like certain populations are more pre-disposed, especially poorer demographics.

There should be a study that examines addiction in general and cross referencing with socioeconomic conditions of the area.

Areas hit hard by industries fleeing for cheaper labor force (ie, American steel industry and Appalachian region). Decrease in stability followed by decrease in upwards mobility being proportional to drug or alcohol addiction.
by XorNot | 2025-05-09 23:45:29+00:00
My credit card was skimmed and charged $2000 in the US a couple of months ago. I blocked the card from my phone, files a dispute and the charges were reversed.

The most annoying part was updating all my linked services, but I lost no money.

If someone literally robs the bank I have an account with, I also lose no money even if they actually steal some from the physical vault.
by tombh | 2025-05-09 23:45:41+00:00
I first came across this collection of poems via the secular Buddhist author Stephen Batchelor (best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs). He compared the poem Dear Reader (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099) with a quote from the 9th century zen monk Te-Shan.

The relevant lines from the poem:

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds, The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents, The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters, In the filthy menagerie of our vices, There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries, He would willingly make of the earth a shambles And, in a yawn, swallow the world; He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears, He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe. You know him reader, that refined monster, — Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

The quote from the zen monk:

What is known as "realising the mystery" is nothing other than breaking through to grab an ordinary person's life.

The meaning I take is that the "final boss" of our journey, whether that's in meditation or programming, is confronting and integrating the non-zero possibility that we may never achieve our goals. It's not to dissuade us from even trying, it's rather to remind us where the true battle is: the immediate task at hand. Lack of focus and motivation aren't obstacles on the path, they _are_ the path, they are the final boss itself.

tl;dr success is 1% inspiration 99% perspiration
by smitty1e | 2025-05-09 23:45:41+00:00
"Alcohol use disorder" recalls George Carlin on the evolution of language:

"In this classic George Carlin routine, the legendary comedian breaks down how language has been systematically softened over time. From "shell shock" to "battle fatigue" and eventually to "post-traumatic stress disorder," Carlin illustrates how our words have become more complex and less impactful. He argues that Americans have difficulty facing harsh realities and have developed a tendency to euphemize, making the truth sound less direct. Through his sharp wit and astute observations, Carlin explores how language evolves to disguise the true nature of our experiences, particularly in times of war."

https://youtu.be/Me-sGTBhGFc?si=i-VjINRlDhP4xxgN
by anyfoo | 2025-05-09 23:46:02+00:00
That's not what I mean. The C standard contains some rules that exist for the sole purpose of providing better optimization, and some of these rules give raise to undefined behavior. The compiler leverages undefined behavior by allowing optimizations to not have to care about code that exhibits such undefined behavior.

If compilers did not take advantage of this, then a lot of behavior would not have to be undefined in the first place. Undefined behavior isn't conjured up from a magical place, it was deliberately specified for a reason.

The subject of the linked article, strict aliasing, is a prime example of exactly that: Surprisingly strict rules for aliasing, giving compilers the opportunity to better optimize code that follows these rules, at the risk of breaking code that does not follow the rules in arbitrary and perhaps unintuitive ways.

Now, these particular rules are controversial, and the article acknowledges this:

If you read this document, you may find to your horror an awful lot of C code, probably code you have written, is UB and therefore broken. However just because something is technically UB doesn’t mean compilers will take advantage of that and try to break your code. Most compilers want to compile your code and not try to break it. Given that almost no one understands these rules, compilers give programmers a lot of leeway. A lot of code that technically breaks these rules will in reality never cause a problem, because any compiler crazy enough to assume all code is always in 100% compliance with these rules would essentially be deemed broken by its users. If you are using fwrite to fill out a structure, you are just fine. No reasonable compiler would ever break that code. The issue is not that implementations don’t give users leeway, the issue is that it’s unclear how much leeway is given.

Nevertheless, there are many other rules that are much more readily accepted where similar things are taking place.
by smj-edison | 2025-05-09 23:46:39+00:00
Gilad Bracha has a really interesting approach to sandboxing third party libraries: Remove imports, and do everything with dependency injection. That way if you never inject say the IO subsystem, the third party code won't be able to break out. And there's no overhead, since it's all based on capabilities.

Even cooler, if you want to only expose read operations, you can wrap the IO library in another library that only exposes certain commands (or custom filtering, etc).

EDIT: I should say this doesn't work with systems programming, since there's always unsafe or UB code.
by crote | 2025-05-09 23:46:52+00:00
No. Stablecoins only exist because fiat <-> crypto trading is a massive pain. Nobody wants to own stablecoins, they want easier transactions. And if the USD becomes less popular, people will switch to, for example, EUR stablecoins - there's nothing special about the dollar here.

On top of that, transaction volume is meaningless. Those $27.6T could be $27.6T held in escrow being traded once, or $1 held in escrow being traded 26.6 trillion times. You can't derive USD demand from transaction volume.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-09 23:47:12+00:00
For me, I don't really look at Odin as a successor/fixer of C. There are other languages that can make a better case for that[1][2]. Instead, I look at it more like a successor/fixer of Pascal. It doesn't fall down the OO hole that so many others did. It has type casting, dynamic arrays, parametric polymorphism in both functions and data structures, is much less noisy (and in my opinion far more skimmable), more useful built-in primitive data structures like associative arrays and matrices, custom allocators, function overloading, reflection, etc.

You can find odds and ends of these things in other Pascal successors like Delphi, Oberon and Object Pascal. Truth is though, I never found these languages compelling. Why? Because none of them were anywhere close to being the same kind of simplicity as Pascal, and they were too wrapped up in flashy, trendy things that went out of style. Where Odin wins out is that it distinctly lacks the 90's OO craze hangover, and it never feels particularly more complicated or bloated. It's an audaciously tasteful proposition for a language. A C replacement? No, not really. But as a C++ programmer who's fed up with the lack of things like structure introspection and ergonomic sum types, I'm keeping a very close eye on Odin.

[1] - https://c3-lang.org/

[2] - https://harelang.org/
by yegle | 2025-05-09 23:47:31+00:00
Nit:

- Decision doc: It'll be great to have a "Stakeholders" section listing each stake holders' name , and they can add their concerns in that section to start discussion.

- Investigation doc: There should be a "things we tried so far" section listing the actions took to validate each hypothesis, and the outcome of those actions, in timeline order.

- 1:1 meeting note: there's a built-in building block support in Google Docs: https://youtu.be/S1ef5vvMT2k
by tjalfi | 2025-05-09 23:48:29+00:00
That reminds me of Isaac Asimov's[0] story in Asimov Laughs Again about being confused with Arthur C. Clarke[1]. They had similar writing styles, so it was quite common for Isaac's books to be attributed to Arthur and vice versa. Childhood's End[2] was Arthur's most popular and well-known novel at the time.

At a science fiction convention, a woman said to me, "Dr. Asimov, I have just finished your book Childhood's End. I liked it, but I didn't think it was as good as your other books."

Maintaining a straight and solemn face (with an enormous effort), I said, "Yes, ma'am. I was frightfully disappointed in that book, which I thought was quite inferior. I therefore insisted it appear under the pseudonym of Arthur C. Clarke, Jr."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | 2025-05-09 23:49:21+00:00
Meh, Carlin doesn't land the same way in my 30s that he did in my 20s. It changed from shell shock to battle fatigue to PTSD because you can get it without battle (IED) or being shelled by artillery. It lacks oomph but it's more correct imo.
by vzaliva | 2025-05-09 23:49:37+00:00
They should take a look at OPAM (OCaml’s package manager). There was a really impressive talk at the OCaml Workshop at POPL or ICFP a couple of years ago about how it works. Basically, they have a huge CI infrastructure and keep all versions of every package ever published. So, once you’ve found the right set of dependencies for your project, you can be sure the exact versions will always be available via OPAM.
by echelon | 2025-05-09 23:51:04+00:00
The Python datetime library is legacy software and has terrible ergonomics, terrible safety, and heinous pitfalls. It's one of my least favorite in the industry.

https://dev.arie.bovenberg.net/blog/python-datetime-pitfalls...

But now you're stuck with it forever.

Python is packed full with this shit. Because it wasn't carefully planned and respect wasn't given to decisions that would last forever.

Python has two testing frameworks baked in, neither of which is good.

Python has historically had shitty HTTP libraries and has had to roll out several versions to fix the old ones because it couldn't break or remove the old ones. Newbies to the language will find those built in and will write new software with the old baggage.

Batteries included is a software smell. It's bad. You can't change the batteries even after they expire.
by CharlesW | 2025-05-09 23:52:10+00:00
> ADP is overkill.

"No, not like that." :O) But seriously, you can also just turn off iCloud Backups for Messages. (iCloud > Storage > Messages > Turn Off and Delete from iCloud)

> …otherwise they need to stop falsely advertising iMessage as a strong e2ee system when it literally uploads its encryption keys to Apple by default.

iMessage is E2EE, but iCloud Backup is not, which I understand is a distinction probably not well understood by most HN readers, much less your average consumer.
by lutusp | 2025-05-09 23:52:18+00:00
Apparently still there, but mostly hidden under a tree (as seen by Google Maps). In a spectacular irony, Google has no street view of their own parking lot.

I suppose one could periodically check for the presence of this artifact, and if it were to suddenly vanish, that would suggest that Google has decided to build another electric car. It is, after all, legacy IP, best hidden away.
by nullc | 2025-05-09 23:52:40+00:00
I never heard of Galloway until a year or two ago when he was doing an obviously paid promotional circuit for cryptocurrency scammer Craig Wright, but since then his name seems to crop up all over the place.

I'm generally not surprised to learn when someone around Wright is themselves an addict, substance abuse appears to be a common comorbidity for people involved in or falling for that fraud.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-05-09 23:53:06+00:00
The great thing about calling it "alcohol use disorder" is that it lets you diagnose more people.

If you're a nonprofit or advocacy group, "alcoholics" are only going to get you so far in terms of funding, also dealing with them is messy and incredibly difficult.

If you can shift the overton window on whats considered "problematic" drinking you get to "educate" people and get funding for things which have fewer hard criteria or measurable outcomes than treating actual alcoholics. This keeps the money flowing.
by catapps | 2025-05-09 23:53:30+00:00
I've been starting to use Swift again lately after like four years, and while the language is beautiful & the package management story is now a LOT better with SwiftPM, I found that none of it plays nicely with XCode, Simulator, or anything to do with iOS/macOS development -- its primary use-case!

I found myself awestruck that I *HAD* to use XCode or xcodebuild, and could not just run `swift build` and generate an iOS app.

In the end, I had to:

- compile the .app structure myself

- run codesign manually

- manage the simulator manually

- bundle xcAssets manually

- provide swift linker flags manually targeting the toolchain/sdk I needed

- manually copy an embedded.mobileprovision

It was a good learning experience, but what's the story here? Did Apple just give away Swift to the OSS community and then make no ongoing effort to integrate their platforms nicely into the non-xcode build tooling? Looking into https://github.com/stackotter/swift-bundler
by avs733 | 2025-05-09 23:53:35+00:00
It’s also easily abused…the parent post is a pretty solid example of how that happens. More than any individual action by the administration, decades of reinforcement and reification of this thinking in a major segment of society is what is going to doom us.

People celebrating their own destruction by spouting the propaganda they’ve been fed is somehow both terrifying and uniquely interesting to me.
by cheema33 | 2025-05-09 23:54:25+00:00
I drink socially. Maybe once a month. And usually it is just one beer. And have never craved it. I think if I drank more often, my desire for it would not change. My brain is not wired to crave it I guess. If yours is, then it doesn't matter if you are drinking, socially or not, you have put yourself on a slippery slope.