MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CPLX | 2025-06-10 08:56:32+00:00
This article has good advice but it’s not really AI advice that’s the important tip.

The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.

Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.
by 9rx | 2025-06-10 08:56:35+00:00
> enums are just sad.

There isn't much more you can do with them. Literally all an enum can produce is a number.

In increasingly common use in a number of languages, enums are being coupled with discriminated unions, using the enum value as the discriminant. This is probably what you're really thinking of, noticing Go's lack of unions.

But where you might use a discriminated union if it were available, you would currently use an interface, where the type name, rather than an enum, is what differentiates the different types. If Go were to gain something like a discriminated union, it is likely it would want to extend upon that idea. Most especially given that generics already introduced syntax that would lend itself fairly well to it:

type Foo interface { Bar | Baz }

Where enums are used to act as a discriminant in other languages, that is largely just an implementation detail that nobody really cares about. In fact, since you mentioned Rust, there are only 8,000 results on Github for `std::mem::discriminant` in Rust code, which is basically nothing. That is quite indicative that wanting to use an enum (in Rust, at least) is a rare edge case. Funny, given how concerned Rust users seem to be about enums. Talk is cheap, I suppose.
by NexRebular | 2025-06-10 08:56:40+00:00
> I've always wondered why only Linux can do 'true' containers without VMs.

Solaris/illumos has been able to do actual "containers" since 2004[0] and FreeBSD has had jails even before that[1].

[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/... [1] https://papers.freebsd.org/2000/phk-jails.files/sane2000-jai...
by KronisLV | 2025-06-10 08:57:29+00:00
If you wanted accurate statistics for each language, you'd probably have to go closer to the source:

- How many downloads for the compiler/runtime/toolchains have? - How many downloads do the packages on the package manager (if any) have? - How many downloads do base containers have? How popular are the SaSS/PaSS offerings geared towards the languages?

But of course, doing that for a bunch of stacks would be quite difficult and time consuming, so people feel confident in just looking at Google Trends or an equivalent (or aggregating similar surface level data from a bunch of providers) and just calling it a day.
Show HN: Mejiro-CLI – Tiny CLI for personal blog management
by tsugumi-sys | 2025-06-10 08:57:46+00:00
A command-line tool to manage a small, personal blog. mejiro-cli helps you create and compile Markdown posts into static HTML files, and manage images as well. It also includes a built-in client-side search feature for your static blog.

Example site: https://blog.tsugumisys.com/

I created mejiro-cli because I wanted a no-fuss way to manage a small blog without relying on a CMS or heavy static site generator.

Looking forward to your feedback!
by graemep | 2025-06-10 08:58:17+00:00
> Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years.

What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS. Obviously a Linux desktop is not going to be identical to whatever you use so there is a learning curve, but the same is true, and to a much greater extent, for moving from Windows to MacOS.

> layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems

> or the average person

The "layman" or "average person" does not develop software.

The average person has plenty of problems dealing with Windows. They are just used to putting up with being unable to get things to work. Ran into that (a multi-function printer/scanner not working fully) with someone just yesterday.

If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software (at any rate not developing software that matters to anyone).

I have switched a lot of people to Linux (my late dad, my ex-wife, my daughter's primary school principal) who preferred it to Windows and my kids grew up using it. No problems.
by tallanvor | 2025-06-10 08:58:23+00:00
The problem is that at some point you're always going to be subject to at least one country's laws, and at some point those laws will conflict with those of another country, even within the EU.

Going on-prem is probably the safest, but you're still at risk of physical search and seizure as well as being subject to pressure placed on your ISP to cut you off if someone really wants it done.
by ricardobeat | 2025-06-10 08:58:25+00:00
What are "most other devices"? I can't think of any electronics I own that are still usable after 10-15 years besides Apple hardware.

Your average PC build will be completely outdated after ~5 years, suffer some type of hardware failure, or have nearly all of it's software (BIOS, OS, drivers) dead and unsupported by then. It is then only usable by enthusiasts / developers, and ends up in a landfill otherwise.
by hparadiz | 2025-06-10 08:58:57+00:00
This concept hinges on everyone walking around with ID at all times. If you don't have it on you we'll throw you into a concrete box for 8 hours while we sort it out. Cool? Oh you were a home birth in Wisconsin you say? Sounds vaguely Canadian.

This is why the 4th amendment exists. It is my favorite amendment. I wish people would take it more seriously.
by monegator | 2025-06-10 09:00:01+00:00
I have Debian Trixie on my Mid 2012, and it's much more responsive, lightweight, and easy on battery than OSX 10.14 (which i had been using until last year.)

As long as we can install linux on it, they can drop support. I don't care a single bit

- Not being able to install debian on M3/M4 has been the only thing that keeps me from retiring that machine, I'd rather keep changing broken components and batteries, because even though moving away from x86 is the right thing to do from an efficiency point of view, we don't have an open standard between manufacturers so their ARM chip, and every other ARM chip, are effectively a proprietary architecture in which the customer ultimately lose because he has no control on its own hardware
by LightHugger | 2025-06-10 09:00:18+00:00
First of all, chill out, for someone tooting their own horn, your own perspective is very one dimensional. What's really interesting about the democratic party's position is how they've utterly failed to embrace the popular parts of "left" policy (universal healthcare and etc, basically look at bernie sanders for what policy is actually widely popular on the left). And yet, they embrace incredibly unpopular parts of "extreme left". Being pro-illegal immigration is incredibly stupid and unpopular. DEI discrimination on the basis of race is also incredibly stupid and unpopular. I suppose i could also mention transitions for children. Need i mention free speech? It's a travesty that republicans have become the free speech party, but it's something the left has ceded.

So we're in a situation where the democratic party is utterly failing to actually implement any of the good or popular left policies that would help the masses, even the pretty moderate ones, but is pushing incredibly unpopular extreme left policies that don't actually help the citizenry. In that context it's honestly a very reasonable thing for someone on the right to point to the dems call the party far left. And yet for those of us that want these policies for the people, the dems appear right-leaning. Very odd how this has worked out, but both are true in a way.

I think the reason behind this is mainly due to them being controlled by their corporate donors who dictate focusing on the unpopular policies which are cheaper for the corporations to contend with. Universal healthcare would be a huge blow to corporate control in this country, as right now healthcare is tied to employment and that gives large corporate employers incredibly excessive power.
by BryantD | 2025-06-10 09:01:03+00:00
Huh. The most recent Democratic Presidential nominee was clear that she supported comprehensive immigration reform, seeking pathways to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. without legal status, with a faster track for people living in the country illegally who arrived as children. So sort of not without legal status at all.

And as one might not realize given the rhetoric, border crossings in 2024 plummeted (although not reaching pre-pandemic levels) thanks to increased arrests on the US side of the border and more efforts from Mexico to control the flow of refugees.
by JimDabell | 2025-06-10 09:01:33+00:00
> Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks.

This is already happening. The European Commission funds thousands of open-source projects:

https://ngi.eu/about/

For instance, Stalwart is an open-source, Rust-based mail server and collaboration suite that has received grants from the EC:

https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-stalwart/

https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-collaboration/
by DanielHB | 2025-06-10 09:02:41+00:00
> What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.

I had this realization when I last changed jobs. What I hate is not necessarily to have a boss. It is working with a large group of people.

Large projects with a lot of devs and dedicated support people (PMs, designers, usability researchers, data analysts, etc, etc) just drain the life out of me. To get anything done and agreed becomes a nightmare, changes come from other parts of the org that you disagree and/or don't understand and/or don't see coming (and now affects your work). Lack of ownership of your own stuff and having someone else having ownership of the stuff you need to use is another huge problem.

It is not at all the size of the company (although this usually is tied hand-in-hand). It is about the size of the _project_ (including any dependencies to external systems, people or other parts of the org). Anything beyond 5 devs one designer and one PM already starts to feel soul-crushing.

Unfortunately the golden age of software is over and now anything of note eventually needs a huge team. Out of curiosity I checked Linear (the project management tool) Linkedin which I consider the apex of good, focused software. They employ 135 people, of which 40 are developers.
by ageitgey | 2025-06-10 09:03:27+00:00
I have several services on Heroku, and they are up and down randomly. So it's definitely not just the Heroku admin layer that is down.

Access to check logs or perform other Heroku CLI functions is very intermittent. Some of our services work sometimes. Others don't. When I can occasionally access the logs, it seems like there are issues pinging other services. The apps aren't able to push their logs to DataDog.

It's a mess, and there's not much we can do right now, which is frustrating. And the fact that the Heroku status page itself is broken is embarrassing.
by j0057 | 2025-06-10 09:03:38+00:00
"Would Europe ever hand over control of its national power grids to foreign companies bound by non-European law? Would we trust a foreign supplier’s guarantee for 99.999% uptime (which is the standard uptime SLA agreement of cloud providers) while at the same time a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? Of course not."

EU already does this:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018
by n4r9 | 2025-06-10 09:03:45+00:00
Yeah, that's definitely a factor in the attempt to "undercut and outlast". I guess I have two defenses: firstly, network effects might not be crucial, it might be enough for there to be a small cost to changing provider; secondly, I imagine the providers are finding ways to use network effects to bolster adoption - e.g. "Find me a party date when all my friends are free, book the catering and message them with invites".
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-06-10 09:03:47+00:00
In Portugal, the Guarda Civil are cops in rural areas. I have no special insight into their training or hierarchy, but I can tell you that in practice they interact with the population like cops, not like soldiers. E.g. you wouldn't report shoplifting to the army, but you can report to the Guarda Civil.

So I don't think your comment makes any sense, at least in Portugal.
by close04 | 2025-06-10 09:05:41+00:00
> plenty of Gendarmeries who are soldiers first

Fair enough, but Wikipedia confirms that they all have civilian law enforcement and police duties so clearly their training, tactics, and experience revolve heavily around dealing with civilians.

I'll still take that over "soldiers only", even more with US's very active military where the soldiers routinely see active combat. Both the theory and practice shapes their "soldier vs. enemy combatant" world view. That's a hammer if I've ever seen one.
by cess11 | 2025-06-10 09:06:16+00:00
I don't understand all of what you wrote but a lot of it is very old news and usually done with deterministic tooling you don't have to wait for, some of which you should have built or configured yourself to get it tailored to the type of work you do.

And some of it we've had under the RAD umbrella, basically using configuration files and tools to generate those that are used to generate large portions of systems.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-10 09:06:27+00:00
That look like my kind of book, I'll definitely be checking it out. Overall I'm still pretty pessimistic about hypertext making a true return, there's too much money in the web as an app-delivery mechanism, plus we have an entire generation of adults who are younger than Facebook, and now companies are trying to gatekeep the content itself because they want to be able to charge for LLM training on their text (I've noticed a significant increase in how many CAPTCHA challenges I get and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with DDOS).

But I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who misses the old web when it really was all about exchanging ideas and information over open protocols. I will never get over this massive sense of nostalgia whenever I remember browsing through weird groceries fan sites and seeing people just documenting their love for whatever hobbies they had and the platforms weren't always pushing political BS to "drive engagement" by making me angry.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-06-10 09:08:25+00:00
> Their tiers aren't as generous but they're still free free

Certainly Claude's free tier is not generous, I basically ended up subscribing the first day I used it.

But, assuming that the losses are from the free tier, it's odd to me that Anthropic wouldn't be showing some kind of cash generation at this point.

Granted training is super expensive and they're hiring loads of people ahead of revenue, but if they were unit-cost profitable, one would have expected this to be leaked during one of (the many) funding rounds they've engaged in.

I'm mostly unconvinced by the author's analysis because of the above, but it's certainly food for thought to shift my prior that LLM modelling and service providing is a bad business.
by curtisblaine | 2025-06-10 09:08:54+00:00
As far as I understand, people are ID'd all the time in US. If police stops you, they will ask for an identification document; if you don't have it, they will ask for your SSN and if you can't remember it, they will run your name and address until they match you with a photo id on their systems. In the meanwhile, you're detained and you're not free to leave. Immigration aside, how are they supposed to identify you?
by stereolambda | 2025-06-10 09:09:07+00:00
Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow.

Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
by hermitcrab | 2025-06-10 09:09:32+00:00
Fun fact:

Robert Hooke was rather short of stature. His great rival, Isaac Newton, was petty and vindictive. So when Newton said:

"if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Rather than being humble, he may have actually been having a sly dig at Hooke.
by hyperman1 | 2025-06-10 09:10:08+00:00
Not saying that Thunderbird is great, but ms Outlook has serious problems finding mails even for very specific keywords if it is older than a few months. They seem to hyper index recent mails and forget all else.

Ironically, I have set up thunderbird as a client for my exchange email just for archival, and it does much better finding them.
by miotts | 2025-06-10 09:11:24+00:00
Interesting article. But I think the author is implicitly considering an agentic individual who does something, because 'total inaction' is a valid solution for a constraint-oriented approach (unless we are assuming constraints that force you to do action like "do X every day"). Otherwise, you can be perfectly aware of the limits of your situation while not doing anything.

Having a direction (or goals) has the side effect of being a strategy that is biased towards action. Theory of Change, I think, is kind of an intersection between the two. You have an idea of what you want and then proceed backward to your current situation, address the limits, and try to increase the probability of making it happen. It is planning and "plans are scripts. And reality is improvisation" but if you act randomly and you constantly improvise without a direction, you are in a brownian motion with an average displacement of 0.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-10 09:12:00+00:00
Linux has not won on the desktop and probably never will, granted. But linux has won for running server-side / headless software, and has done so for years.

That said, counterpoint to my own, Android is Linux and has billions of installations, and SteamOS is Linux. I think the next logical step for SteamOS is desktop PCs, since (anecdotally) gaming PCs only really play games and use a browser or web-tech-based software like Discord. If that does happen, it'll be a huge boost to Linux on the consumer desktop.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-06-10 09:12:35+00:00
I think what that young guy actually did was practice for the next job application as "vibe programmer / Claude". Joke.

I think he did "vibe" coding, but (may be) on a piece of code that doesn't throw errors. Code assistance then doesn't know/understand what went wrong - more context would help. BUT!

I have had an logical problem once that I couldn't resolve with my quarter-pounder only. So I used cgpt and asked to give it to me. And, you guessed, it didn't work out.

I did not really expect it to work out, but at least give me the logical structure as the worst case. So I asked and got garbage. So I asked again, again, again - more context than the context I gave was out of reach, as I needed the logical structure firstly to be able to comprehend it myself and to add further context.

Then, at some point, I got something delivered that looked promising from the perspective of logical structure. So I took this and formulated a new prompt - and. Yes! You guessed it. It didn't work out in code.

So, I did a quick truth table of expectations, formulated the prompt with the given logical structure and truth table and told assistant to check on the given code... AAA AND! You guessed it. I sent 10 times the same prompt "here truth table, here code, ....".

I noticed, the code changed more or less each time, with introduction of newish loops and methods and and and..

And somewhen then, it worked flawless out of nothing.

Sometimes it makes sense just to write "it doesn't work out":

- in case one doesn't know how to formulate the actual problem, because it's out of scope. It's not the same as not being able to program, but it may be just to difficult to grasp the logic/algorithms with own brain (even own/custom one)

- to get alternative suggestions which may even be better than earlier suggested ones.

So, as long I don't know why this young guy did what he did, as long I can't judge what he did. May be he is like me - is able to code, but has big problems to sustain that knowledge and skill, because of Claude!!!!!
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-10 09:12:42+00:00
It's not just about the academics but the expectations from higher ups and funding agencies in order to keep your job and have a chance at continuing your career. Over the last few decades the expected amount of papers at good and even mediocre institutions has exploded. Profs who want to be seen as productive and who want good funding publish 30-50 papers per year and sometimes "supervise" dozens of PhD students at the same time (who agree to the deal to get the brand name of the big prof, not for any real supervision).

Funding agencies can't evaluate the research itself, so they look at numbers, metrics, impact factors, citations, h-index, publication count etc. They can't simply say "we pay this academic whether he publishes or not because we trust he is still deep in important work when he is not at a work stage to publish" because people will suspect fraud and nepotism and bias, and often the funding is taxpayer money. Not that the metrics prevent that of course. But it seems that way. So metrics it is, so gaming the metrics via Goodhart's law it is.

I don't think it's super bad, but it increases administrative work and busywork overhead on top of the actual research. The progress slows somewhat per person, as the same work has to be salami sliced and marketed in chunks, but there's also way more people in it, but of course most of them produce vary low quality stuff but it's not a big loss because these people would not even have published anything some decades ago, they would just have some teaching professorship and publish every few years perhaps just in their national language. It increases the noise but there are ways to find the signal among it, and academics figure out ways to cut through the noise. It's not great, not super easy, and it pushes a lot of people out who dislike the grind but there are plenty who see it as a relatively good deal to move to a richer country and do this.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-10 09:13:20+00:00
Well, we value the lives of our citizens and aren't willing to sacrifice them to further the development of hype technology. Tesla's "autopilot" alone is linked to at least fifty one fatalities [1].

It's fine for me if y'all decide that's the course to take, y'all voted for this after all, but here in Europe, we prefer doing things the right way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
by drentost | 2025-06-10 09:13:55+00:00
>Socioeconomic systems have been freeloading off of uncompensated labor of women

What an extraordinarily perverse view of recent history. Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children? You could even more easily twist your perceptions such that men have been forced to work hard and short lives serving the whims of women who have enjoyed the luxury of sitting around making babies, singing nursery rhymes, and gossiping over afternoon tea with their friends.

Women have stopped making babies. So men have stopped wanting to make civilisation. We are indeed seeing the consequences of the collapse of this social contract.