MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway390209 | 2025-06-25 12:30:08+00:00
It's an example of an incremental improvement that could be made, by itself the change would be lost in the noise, but a series of them would make a difference.

The problem I highlighted, although a seemingly minor one, is actually a symptom of a problem within the automotive industry and their attempts to solve problems around complexity. Even minor things are not locked down, what endianess is used? Why not allow both, What CRC is used? Don't specify, allow some random engineer to decide! Let's make things "generic", because making things generic is good right?

Instead you could specify "This is an X ECU, all X ECUs have the following messages, each message has these signals, we use this CRC, we use this endianess, this is how we handle errors, etcetera". Instead if you get an brake ECU from one vendor or another, they have completely different interfaces and behaviors around error handling. This is just one facet of the software engineering problems in the automotive industry.

It is as if they do not know that other software projects exist. Take for example Linux, they use it but they do not understand it. Here we have something that has been ported to a dozen different CPU architecture, targets god knows many different systems, and can be configured with thousands of different drivers. It works, and it might not be appropriate for a safety critical system, but you can learn by how it does things, what its build system looks like, and so on.

The re-usability that has actually worked is done by reusing Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Libraries / Modules at language ecosystem level, and at a more fine level Objects / Interfaces / Generics. It is also done by locking down the behavior of systems and standardizing them, either by an external body, or preferably by a standard that has won out in the market by virtue of being better. It is not done by making a standard in which everything can happen, nothing is actually agreed upon, and oh, by the way you have to use these incredibly expensive code generation tools that just don't work correctly.
by em-bee | 2025-06-25 12:30:34+00:00
SEPA is nice, except until recently my bank charged me money to use it (fortunately they changed that now). but i don't want to use my bank account for micro payments. i do want a separate wallet for that. my bank account has a credit card that works like that. if i want to use the credit card i have to actively load up money from my bank account before i can use it. i want the same for a digital wallet. i do not want to use my banking app where i receive my income for that. in my case i don't use the phone for online banking at all for the same reason.

simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.
by throwanem | 2025-06-25 12:31:01+00:00
So this all started when you replied to me opining thusly:

> I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word about their baby, they always make a fuss.

I quote my own initial comment here, unabridged and verbatim, for the sake of adjacency with the following question: Where in this do you find a complaint?

That's a substantive question, not merely a rhetorical one. I would characterize my tone in that quote accurately as dismissive and uncharitably as contemptuous. But for the way you've talked about it now at such length, I can conclude only that I gave a mistaken impression of uncomprehending dismay. I don't understand how that could be so, given I literally do proffer an explanation for the behavior I'm meant not to comprehend; that explanation might be inaccurate and attract criticism accordingly, but to behave as though required to piece things together de novo is unwarranted. It's inconsistent to argue both that I must not understand the effect I create and that I must set out to create it, don't you think? Yet that's pretty much where you seem to end up.

You having concluded otherwise, ie that there is some essential ignorance here on my part requiring your effort to redress, I therefore ask on what basis you so conclude - the better to avoid again wasting my time, and incidentally also someone else's, in such fashion as this. Good grief, if I could've corrected that misapprehension right up front, we could've dispensed with everything after, to no doubt mutual preference.

And if you'll forgive myself quoting myself from earlier in the conversation, one more time:

> Meanwhile detailed and substantive technical critiques provided by other users - critiques of the sort I learned a decade ago not to bother making - go totally ignored as I knew that they would.
by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | 2025-06-25 12:31:34+00:00
I cannot place a file in my profile directory and have firefox execute it without having it approved by mozilla. I booted my old PC to check on something recently, opened firefox by opening an html file, and discovered that it had disabled all my extensions making it less secure by allowing every webpage to do RCE had I changed tabs.

Then there is secure boot which requires MSFT permission to use an OS, cell phones on which you cannot run your own code without manufacturer permission.

I hope you don't still think the R in DRM stands for rights.
by prmoustache | 2025-06-25 12:31:40+00:00
I've seen people doing trip comparisons with Tesla, Peugeot, VW, BMW and chinese EV crossing France between various cities.

All in all experience and complete trip time was more or less equal on all of them except for those who choose to use the cheapest charging network which host all its charging stations outside of highways.

Non-Tesla EV can charge on Tesla charging stations in EU [2] and Tesla charging stations are often located in unfriendly places with no commodities available such as toilets and take away food so very often non-Tesla networks offer a better experience.

All in all on lpng trips the choice of the vehicle doesn't seem to make a major difference past a minimal viable range. It is more about the charging network you choose to stick with and the potential app gymnastic you might be doing if you aren't sticking to one in particular. And the Tesla network doesn't seem to have in Europe the superiority it might have in th USA.
by welterde | 2025-06-25 12:31:46+00:00
For applications that were written with X11 in mind it works much much better than that. One example was the controlling a telescope. The computers in the control room were thin clients pretty much and displayed various windows from various machines across the mountain - even across multiple different operating systems! Some machines were running Solaris and some linux. The different machines belonged to different aspects of the telescope: some controlled the telescope itself and some machines belonged to the different scientifc instruments on the telescope. And it all worked quite well with no real noticeable lag.
by anovikov | 2025-06-25 12:32:51+00:00
I really can't imagine how it could probably ever work. So one goes into Starbucks and start bugging other random people sitting there (with whatever topic, not just pushing their "elevator pitch" onto them)? If that happened people will start avoiding them just like they avoid places frequented by bums or beggars. No one wants that. People won't go where it is possible.
by alexpotato | 2025-06-25 12:32:52+00:00
A few years back, inspired by Derek Sivers [0], I decided to just make my own filterable book review list [1].

It was both a fun challenge (using vanilla JS to render) and has been fun to share with friends, Twitter mutuals etc.

Plus, people know it's MY reviews so if they like my suggestions/tweeting/poasting/etc, they know the review is from me and not some bot.

0 - https://sive.rs/book

1 - https://alexpotato.com/books/?xl=hn
by bartread | 2025-06-25 12:33:07+00:00
> that is something that actually did improve in 2025

Aye, but the old skool way fits the overall aesthetic better. They've even got a few animated GIFs.

I actually really love the way this site looks - I miss the days when most websites looking something like this, especially where they've avoided going full Christmas tree with the design. And look at how fast it loads.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-25 12:33:18+00:00
I wouldn't be too surprised. Peter Ajak [0] (the Belfer Center fellow indicted by the DoJ for attempting the coup) is a fairly slick and well spoken guy.

Westerners seem to underestimate how mercenary and brass knuckled politics in the developing world is (no, politics in insert_OECD_country_here is not to the same degree), and assume every bleeding heart activist will become the next Gandhi. Ironically this is how Orban's political career got started as well as an pro-Democracy campaigner in the 1980s and 1990s.

This isn't to undermine activists and NGOs working in these countries, but the default assumption in due dilligence should be that everyone is a crook and then validate.

That said, I definetly saw plenty of glazing of questionable developing country politicians during my time when I was much more HKS adjacent, but this is common for just about every pmajor policy program - it's the only way you can attract big names, and non-Westerners know how to take advantage of that Western naivete (I've definitely used it on occasion despite being raised in North America).

[0] - https://www.belfercenter.org/person/peter-ajak
by pluc | 2025-06-25 12:34:19+00:00
Operating a failed job board is a lot like operating a failed casino. If you can't make it work in today's market, it's largely your fault. Especially when they were so dominant a few years ago. Monster.com was a pop culture icon, even featured on The Office! I'm guessing that they failed to keep up with the market and kept developing features nobody wanted, until competition overwhelmed them.
by mingus88 | 2025-06-25 12:34:29+00:00
For a long time, Amazon reviews could be somewhat useful if you ignored all the 5 and 1 star reviews and only looked at verified buyers.

But Amazon allows sellers to swap different products in under an existing listing so you don’t even know anymore if the review is for what you are buying. This allows sellers to cheat. It’s insanity.

It reminds me of the phone network. It’s so riddled with bad actors that entire generations now have been trained to never pick up the phone.

Why would a network operator allow caller ID to be so easily spoofed? For abusive callers to operate unrestricted? Even the audio quality of the calls seems to have gotten so bad in my parents rural backwater.

I don’t get it. Is engagement the only metric that matters?
by aristofun | 2025-06-25 12:35:13+00:00
No amount of reading or watching will make any meaningful difference in terms of skills.

Only work, i.e. producing, creating something, getting your hands dirty.

Beware also about the simple fact that most of so called youtube experts are only experts in youtube. By design.

Real experts are busy engineering things. You can’t be both because each area is extremely time and energy consuming.

> I’m not learning any new skills and maybe falling behind the industry

Welcome to reality. You are not falling behind. Majority of work “in the industry” is like this - boring, repetitive, not challenging.

Only challenging goal will push you to raise the skill bar.

Challenging software engineering goal == complex problem that you think is _almost_ beyond your current abilities.
by alganet | 2025-06-25 12:35:30+00:00
You're missing the point and taking it to an extreme.

Let's say I write a toy project to log all sites I visit to a text file. The goal is to learn browser extensions, not learn kernel cache. There's a clear boundary, and anyone asking me about kernel cache would sound very weird. It's obviously a lot of layers of knowledge deep into the stuff I'm learning.

If my toy project is a beautiful web app, then CSS is _not_ several layers deep. It is in the front of it. It's a dependency I _need to learn_ in order to own my project.

If my toy project is a web app, and doesn't matter if it looks beautiful or not, then I want to spend my time away from CSS (either writing it by hand or interacting with an AI). I am fine with having it ugly.

Understanding these dependencies and layers of knowledge is part of the learning as well.

Again, this works for teams as well. There are certain things, at a certain level, that if you don't have someone in the team that knows it, leads to a precarious situation.

The fact that people don't recognize this, and mistake it for not made here syndrome and other nonsense, is actually scary. It means those recipes (don't reinvent the wheel, good is better than perfect, etc) became mantras that people repeat without actually understand why they exist, and those boundaries have become arbitrary and meaningless.
by sylware | 2025-06-25 12:36:29+00:00
Compile a minimal python interpreter with tinycc &| cproc &| scc, run this pydyf and you should be good to go :)

Hopefully, its API a C API bridge for interop.

But pydyf pretends to go up to PDF 1.7: this is kind of arrogant due to the file format complexity.

That's why such tools are not enough: what's important is to evaluate and to assess a subset of the PDF format, that to reduce significantly the technical cost of ownership and exit cost, and maybe use such tools to write also validation tools in order to enforce the usage of that subset of PDF.

Very often, complex file formats (open or not) end up being generated and consumed by one program.

A warning: big tech and its minions will fight super hard everything that is simple, stable in table and does a good enough job (like noscript/basic (x)html for nearly all online services as they were working a few years back).
by encom | 2025-06-25 12:37:03+00:00
I think at this point, any sort of online review aggregators have been ruined for good - from Amazon to Imdb to Google. All of them. Find a professional reviewer you trust, whose taste aligns with your own. For me, I like The Critical Drinker. Most of what he recommends, I like. Except Arcane, that was horrible.
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-06-25 12:37:05+00:00
The dude lambasts the US because he has tattoos on his face and implanted metal in his body and was singled out by security. Security's job is to look for people who are out of the ordinary. Since most security people are not very bright, they're going to go after the shiny lure. But somehow, this becomes about sexualizing women? WT actual F??

People who put tattoos on their face are looking for attention. Attention is exactly what he got.

Obviously the guy has never traveled to Asia. He'd be singled out in every port and every station. Sounds like he lives a tidy life in No Europe. Where bald white guys with face tattoos and body armor are normal and only brown people are singled out in security lines...
by suddenlybananas | 2025-06-25 12:37:58+00:00
Yes, and a calculator can add 104123412341235+243524352435 much faster than I can.

>Check the results and reconsider your 'calculator' straw man and 'misanthrope' ad hominem.

How is the calculator a strawman? What is the argument that I am attributing to you that you do not hold?

As for the ad-hominem: I'm glad you don't dispute your misanthropy.
by tucnak | 2025-06-25 12:38:14+00:00
Vertex is a GCP service, and it's completely in line with how any other GCP service account would work; there's multiple auth flows, some taking credentials from the environment, and others from a file. From zero-trust POV, you could make an argument that long-lived "API keys" are effectively an anti-pattern. You may like this position, or you may dislike it, but it works. These are the guys that created Zanzibar[1] after all.

Also, AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Studio are similarly set up; the big cloud providers are big on security.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-glo...
Show HN: I made reverse Google Analytics at a hackathon last weekend
by herzo175 | 2025-06-25 12:38:26+00:00
I was at a hackathon last weekend and made a neat tool to help online store owners see what websites were showing up in chatbot responses.

The theme was 'agentic commerce'. I realize this has nothing to do with giving an agent my credit card but I was inspired to build this because there was a lot of discussion about how people were using ChatGPT and the like to recommend stuff to buy.

It's totally free to use, but I got some feedback from the judges that this was genuinely useful, so I added a sign up link at the bottom. If anyone ends up pre-ordering it, I'll build out the functionality to track prompts over time and crawl those webpages to see how often the citations link back to target domains.
by rurban | 2025-06-25 12:38:55+00:00
I left macOS for Fedora when they removed the 32bit libs. Had to run lots of simulations on 32bit for embedded arm32, which I didn't wanted to run under qemu. (Tried debian first, but this was a clusterfuck. worse than windows)

Well, let's see what I can do now. linux is not as locked down as macOS, and providing my own multilib gcc and libs should be trivial.
by Gormo | 2025-06-25 12:39:27+00:00
But your brain was the clipboard. That simple process of transcription was something that you couldn't avoid learning from even if you wanted to. You'd notice the connections between the commands you typed and things that happened when you ran the program even if you weren't trying to.

Things would start to click, and then you'd have those moments of curiosity about how the program might behave differently if you adjusted one particular line of code or changed a parameter, and you'd try it, which would usually provoke the next moment of curiosity.

This was how many of us learned how to write code in the first place. Pasting the output from an LLM into your source tree bypasses that process entirely -- it's not the same thing at all.
by smokel | 2025-06-25 12:39:30+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to answer. I think it is valuable to know that some people like this kind of game. Similarly, some people like "making money".

Several people on this forum are confused on why they do not make money, even though they like making products. To an extent, I think the product (and most of its qualities) is irrelevant when you want to make money.
by yxhuvud | 2025-06-25 12:40:08+00:00
So you install an outdated system and dislike that the system very clearly tells you it is outdated and that there is an upgrade?

There can also be updates on fresh systems, if said updates are released after the installer image was built.

> Suspiciously like Windows.

No, windows would start the upgrade without you telling it to and then forcefully restart while you were running programs.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-06-25 12:40:26+00:00
Haydari is a type of yogurt dish similar to a thick cacık, made from certain herbs and spices, combined with garlic and yogurt.[1] It differs from cacık in that the recipe contains no cucumber and calls for strained yogurt or labne.[2]

it is in the second sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haydari
by mingus88 | 2025-06-25 12:40:38+00:00
Goodreads was a useful tool to track the books I’d read to my kids every night. Nice to have a log book of what I’d already read backed by a real database of ISBNs

Feels similar to calorie tracking apps now. Having a database of food UPCs with nutritional data is actually useful. Then capitalism comes along and juices it for social media engagement until the site is riddled with junk features and paywalls

I guess there will always be market for a hobbies to make their own trackers.
by brk | 2025-06-25 12:40:39+00:00
Monster.com literally owned this space, and had so much potential. I worked in a few startups at the Clocktower in Maynard, MA, where Monster was also based. Their offices had all the SV amenities and vibe, and for the longest time they were the default job search/resume database. Now, I can't recall hearing anyone mention Monster, or seeing anything about them online in over a decade. They're like the 3Com of job search.
by hackrmn | 2025-06-25 12:41:42+00:00
To be fair (pun intended), I am still on Fairphone 4, and I've gotta say it has lasted me very well, and the battery is still in good condition so the selling point of being able to swap the battery (something I actually _have_ practically missed in the phones I have owned before the Fairphone) hasn't really even come up yet. Ironically, I have been mildly itching to replace the 4 with the 6, just because. But I am not going to -- not until current phone becomes unusable.
by lmm | 2025-06-25 12:41:46+00:00
LARP has given me some of the most intense experiences of my life (the only thing that rivals it is some SM scenes, which is probably not so far away in what you're doing), and yet in many years I haven't felt the need to return to it. Certainly this "New Italian" tradition sounds like it goes against the parts I liked best - if the players aren't driving the plot then the whole experience becomes a lot weaker, shading into megagames (which I found a very disappointing experience). I was also pretty surprised by the rigid statement that "The purpose of larp is to experience different points of view, then reflect seriously and critically upon them afterwards." - I'm pretty sure that wasn't the purpose of some of the best LARPs I've taken part in. What if that's not my purpose?

It's hard for one experience to serve two masters - I find there's always a tension between competitive and roleplay experiences, and the best games clearly prioritise one over the other. The idea that there's something important that people are supposed to learn from an experience like this sits awkwardly with the fact that it's an undeniably niche activity - I see a lot more downside than upside in the prospect of rehashing colonialism debates with a group that's going to be inherently very unrepresentative of wider human society, to say the least.

But, yeah, I've had some really magical experiences that had nothing like this level of material support, that were just a few nerds standing in a field with a couple of props. It doesn't always hit, but the highs are high. The prospect of a multi-day event that doesn't require camping is very appealing, even at the cost of eating vegan for that time.
by upghost | 2025-06-25 12:43:14+00:00
> We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them[1]

Good video essay. Learned the origins of the term "cargo cult", and to my surprise, has nothing to do with rust...

[1]: https://youtu.be/zKCynxiV_8I?t=26m04s
by patcon | 2025-06-25 12:43:37+00:00
He's been trying to participate in opposition politics in South Sudan and imprisoned for it, likely because he's a real threat to power. I think it's too much to label him a crook, he's just fighting corruption by actual crooks with tactics others will obviously disagree with. He's definitely a radical activist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Biar_Ajak
by mroche | 2025-06-25 12:43:43+00:00
Though from 2017, check out this blog post explaining Flatpak's architecture.

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/10/02/on-application-size...

I can't speak for the others, but Flatpak is a layered solution, so files are deduped and shared across the layers (runtimes, applications) that need them.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-25 12:43:53+00:00
I don't see how that makes sense.

Instead of a freight train lets consider the slightly aged (god I'm old) electric train I would once have caught when I worked in London. As you say, each set of wheels can be braked independently and they're all using regenerative electric motors, so that's maybe 40 wheel sets on the train I'm thinking of. But, traction current is supplied at only a maximum of four points on that train, I'd guess only one is actually ever in use for simplicity.

So instead of "electrical havoc" it's a pretty simple local problem for the engineers designing the train.