MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lelanthran | 2025-07-19 07:02:32+00:00
FTFA

> Don't use unique_together, use UniqueConstraint instead

> Always explicitly set db_index and add a comment

> Always check the SQL generated by migrations before applying them

> Provide reverse migration operations whenever possible

> Use concurrent index operations in busy systems

> Indexes on foreign keys are used indirectly by deletes

> Use partial indexes when possible

> Adjust the order of migration operations to reduce impact on live systems

> Explicitly state tables to lock when using select_for_update

> Use no_key=True when selecting a row for update to allow referencing objects to be created

This seems like you need much more non-essential knowledge than simply knowing SQL. Just not using an ORM bypasses so many footguns!

TBH, looking at the code to do this, it seems simpler to just bypass the ORM and use a thin wrapper to the DB.

Since the language in use here supports reflection, every query can automagically return a proper object with typed fields, at which point you gotta ask yourself "what value am I getting out of the ORM in exchange for all these footguns?"
by cranberryturkey | 2025-07-19 07:03:53+00:00
The post is essentially reminding people that XML doesn’t magically equal openness. A schema can be “unnecessarily complex, bloated, convoluted and difficult to implement”, and in the case of Office 365 the spec runs to “over 8 000 pages” and uses deeply nested tags, overloaded elements and wildcards. The result is that only the vendor can feasibly implement it, which eliminates third‑party implementations and lets the vendor dictate terms. The rail‑control analogy in the article makes the point well.

What isn’t acknowledged is that a lot of that complexity isn’t purely malicious. OOXML had to capture decades of WordPerfect/Office binary formats, include every oddball feature ever shipped, and satisfy both backwards‑compatibility and ISO standardisation. A comprehensive schema will inevitably have “dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements” and long type hierarchies. That’s one reason why the spec is huge. Likewise, there’s a difference between a complicated but documented standard and a closed format—OOXML is published (you can go and download those 8 000 pages), and the parts of it that matter for basic interoperability are quite small compared with the full kitchen‑sink spec.

That doesn’t mean the criticism is wrong. The sheer size and complexity of OOXML mean that few free‑software developers can afford to implement more than a tiny subset. When the bar is that high, the practical effect is the same as lock‑in. For simple document exchange, OpenDocument is significantly leaner and easier to work with, and interoperability bodies like the EU have been encouraging governments to use it for years. The takeaway for anyone designing document formats today should be the same as the article’s closing line: complexity imprisons people; simplicity and clarity set them free.
by triknomeister | 2025-07-19 07:06:23+00:00
Germany has the same fundamental problems. Just the symptoms are different. Look at debt brake etc. And the banning at this point is just not politically possible. It is just a legal fantasy. Over a long term, laws can only reflect the politics.

Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-19 07:07:27+00:00
Yep. R are using every dirty trick by treating politics like love and war, and D are treating it like a purity contest. Ultimately, though both are serving, as Gore Vidal put it, the Property party. I want fair and equal accountability, no one to be above the law, and no politician to engage in even the appearance of inappropriate, unethical behavior, or corrupt behavior; and them to get things done that advance the collective good without steamrolling over groups with sudden, huge surprises. But I want more of the good parts of a culture like Japan where people are decent and conscientious and Europe where other people are cared for besides oneself. The US is currently far, far away from anything remotely resembling healthy, long-term sustainable socioeconomic attitudes, policies, and actions.
by thomascountz | 2025-07-19 07:07:30+00:00
During the next administration, it will surely be a priority to restore the functions of government dissolved throughout these years. However, these functions will be filled by private companies and will come with a large bill to U.S. taxpayers. There's a large vacuum being left, with a talent pool of government-wage workers, and a new cohort of politicians whose campaigns will need funded.
by noduerme | 2025-07-19 07:08:08+00:00
I'm not sure about that. Late stage capitalism would involve the government bailing out credit card companies if there were fraud. I kind of prefer for them to deal with it themselves. And whether they deal with fraud themselves or the government does, they're going to classify certain types of transactions as riskier than others. My point was that this is probably not a "moral" decision, just a business decision. It would be a lot worse if it were the government mandating it, and worse still if they were mandating it because it conflicted with the moral code of some plurality of voters. That's not the case here, and I'm glad it's not. I wouldn't want the government to control consumer protection to the degree that voters in Texas could decide whether to protect certain consumers or not.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-19 07:09:16+00:00
Cats all do the same things. But they have very clearly defined unique personalities, with big variations in intelligence and other qualities.

Also, relaxing. Having a dependent of any kind sleeping soundly close to you implies safety and reassurance in a very primal and satisfying way.

And cats sleep far more than humans do. Even when they're not active they're nice to have around.

I'm not convinced by the "tamed predator" hypothesis. I think if it were true we'd consider them exciting but stressful - like crime fiction.

Clearly we don't. No one sleeps next to a violent crime novel for relaxation.

In fact cat owners often get cognitive dissonance when Furry McPurrFace goes out and eviscerates a bird for breakfast. We feel sorry for the bird, but we don't seriously think "That could have been me. Or one of the kids."
Ask HN: Should I Pivot to Data Engineering/MLOps from Senior SDE?
by febed | 2025-07-19 07:09:27+00:00
I'm a senior software dev with 15+ years of experience. I recently received an offer for a senior data engineer role. With AI/ML so hyped —I'm wondering if this pivot makes sense long-term. Is data engineering/MLOps still a good growth path, or is it oversaturated?
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-07-19 07:09:29+00:00
I haven't, I will definitely explore it. Quick read on it seems very promising.

Have you or anyone here any API in EU for getting payments directly to your bank account? I have started a discussion on this on OPH[1], I welcome any information on direct banking API in Europe in that discussion.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host/discussi...
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-07-19 07:09:57+00:00
All the bond buyers have a strategic interest that the US keeps its position of power but since this comes with unrealistic growth expectations, i cant imagine them all holding on to it. And then comes the panic selling...

Trump is kind of the perfect storm, it looks almost deliberate. I wonder if right wing media will still be able control the narrative and place the blame on some other minority in all the down trend -- wether the US might recover or stay on that trajectory.
by colordrops | 2025-07-19 07:10:40+00:00
Hi! Really excited by your work! I'm working on a similar project built on NixOS and curious what you thing.

My goal is to have a small nearly zero-conf apple-device-like box that anyone can install by just plugging it into their modem then going through a web-based installation. It's still very nascent but I'm already running it at home. It is a hybrid router (think OPNSense/PFSense) + app server (nextcloud, synology, yunohost etc). All config is handled through a single Nix module. It automatically configures dynamic DNS, Letsencrypt TLS certs, and subdomains for each app. It's got built in ad blocking and headscale.

I'm working on SSO at the moment. I'll take a look at your work and maybe steal some ideas.

The project is currently self-hosted in my closet:

https://homefree.host
by eichin | 2025-07-19 07:11:06+00:00
No problem calling it parsing, but yeah, "compilation" feels like a huge stretch. And they didn't do recursive descent - just tokenizing for compactness (when you only have 4k or 16k of RAM you do things like that) - you could still get syntax errors at runtime. In some interpreters it also served to normalize abbreviations to save typing.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-19 07:11:40+00:00
The opinion in the article misses something fundamental.

The complexity is not artificial, it is completely organic and natural.

It is incidental complexity born of decades of history, backwards compatibility, lip-service to openness, and regulatory compliance checkbox ticking. It wasn't purposefully added, it just happened.

Every large document-based application's file format is like this, no exceptions.

As a random example, Adobe Photoshop PSD files are famously horrific to parse, let alone interpret in any useful way. There are many, many other examples, I don't aim to single out any particular vendor.

All of this boils down to the simple fact that these file formats have no independent existence apart from their editor programs.

They're simply serialised application state, little better than memory-dumps. They encode every single feature the application has, directly. They must! Otherwise the feature states couldn't be saved. It's tautological. If it's in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or any other Office app somewhere, it has to go into the files too.

There are layers and layers of this history and complex internal state that has to be represented in the file. Everything from compatibility flags, OLE embedding, macros, external data source, incremental saves, the support for quirks of legacy printers that no longer exist, CYMK, external data, document signing, document review notes, and on and on.

No extra complexity had to be added to the OOXML file formats, that's just a reflection of the complexity of Microsoft Office applications.

Simplicity was never engineered into these file formats. If it had been, it would have been a tremendous extra effort for zero gain to Microsoft.

Don't blame Microsoft for this either, because other vendors did the exact same thing, for the exact same pragmatic reasons.
by devjab | 2025-07-19 07:11:52+00:00
Not necessarily, you can task the AI Agent with writing your tool without the use of external dependencies. Often the tool itself will be absolutely horrible, but this doesn't matter if the output of the tool is fine. As in the case of OpenAPI documentation, you basically get the LLM to write the equivalent of C#'s Swashbuckle (or whatever it's called these days) for your language. What it produces is horrible in comparison to the third party dependencies you would have pulled 5 years ago, but the output is the same.

You can also let it use outside dependencies, but then you're right, then it would make little difference in regards to security.

We figured this out because Go didn't have a "Swashbuckle", and nobody wanted to write the documentation or use codegens to go in the opposite direction. When it turned out to be so easy to use LLM's for these things, it grew into it's own thing in regards to replacing a lot of dependencies. Obviously the LLM is still the dependency, but you can replace all other external dependencies for a lot of things like this. Which means you won't acidentially pull something malicious.

I imagine we're going to see more and more of these in-house dependency replacement tools. Coming from Go, I obviously use SQLC (which is run inside it's own isolated container that is only available for requests from developers and is only updated by hand). If we couldn't run SQLC in total isolation then I imagine we would have had to build our own "SQLC". I haven't tried but I'm pretty confident that you could use LLM's to build a similar (but much worse in quality) tool. In an ideal world, we would have been allocated the resources we needed, but in reality, it would have just made us slower as "IT" is still viewed as a cost center on par with HR except that we aren't even "IT".
by motorest | 2025-07-19 07:12:58+00:00
That's an absurd argument to make considering how pyrrhic Trump's terms have been. It implies both are somehow equivalent in the utter destruction of people's interests and support infrastructure. They are not equivalent. There ain't a comparison possible. Framing Trump's trainwreck of an administration to any president's reads like a desperate attempt to normalize the damage he's doing.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-19 07:13:12+00:00
telcos lay fibers for free up to basement electrical closets, from closets to each units are on landlords, and to each units to actual wall outlets needs arrangements with tenants. Sometimes ISPs subsidizes that cost, but lots of arrangements still needs to be made.

For one entire rented or owned house, it's just a call and a drill away.
by jzwinck | 2025-07-19 07:13:34+00:00
Not about smoking but I recently stayed at a W hotel and was woken in the middle of the night by the room lights turning on. They used electronic push buttons and I turned them off. Seconds later they turned on again. This repeated several times until I was fully awake and called the front desk.

"We can come put tape on the sensors."

"What sensors?"

"There are sensors under the bed."

"Oh, so you already know about this problem but haven't fixed it. Thanks, please don't send anyone."

I then looked under the bed and sure enough there was a motion detector on each side. I removed these from their brackets and let them dangle facing the floor instead of outward. This blinded them and solved the problem. I guess they were malfunctioning or they were able to detect motion above the bed via reflections.

The next day I reported this to the front desk, who were unsympathetic and unhelpful. They told me it was for my own safety. Apparently at other hotels I have just been incredibly lucky not to have fallen down when getting out of bed.

I will not stay at a W hotel again unless I can confirm in advance that they do not have motion detectors under the bed which spuriously turn the lights on at night. Maybe I'll add Hyatt to the no-go list.
by masa331 | 2025-07-19 07:13:39+00:00
Can you be more specific here? HTML and CSS can't be described like that in my opinion.

It is complex but not complicated. You can start with just a few small parts and get to a usable and clean document within hours from the first contact with the languages. The tags and rules are usually quite self-describing while consice and there are tons and tons of good docs and tools. The development of the standards is also open and you can peek there if you want to understand decisions and rationals.
by l5870uoo9y | 2025-07-19 07:14:27+00:00
It's basically micromanaging an industry that European countries have not been able to cultivate themselves. It's legislation for legislation's sake. If you had a naive hope that Mario Draghi's gloomy report on the EU's competitiveness would pave the way for a political breakthrough in the EU - one is tempted to say something along the lines of communist China's market reforms in the 70s - then you have to conclude that the EU is continuing in exactly the same direction. I have actually lost faith in the EU.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-19 07:16:45+00:00
This is a comical perspective to me. I've been ass-deep in core banking APIs where we generate service references from WSDL/XSDs. Some of the resulting codegen measures in the tens of megabytes for some files. I wouldn't even attempt to quantify the number of pages of documentation. And this is just for mid size US banking domain. Microsoft Office has to work literally everywhere for everything. The fact that it's only 8000 pages of documentation is likely a miracle.

If you're working with an XML schema that is served up in XSD format, using code gen is the best (only) path. I understand it's old and confusing to the new generation, but if you just do it the boomer way you can have the whole job done in like 15 minutes. Hand-coding to an XML interface would be like cutting a board with an unplugged circular saw.
by zettabomb | 2025-07-19 07:16:55+00:00
>Because of all these supplies work with transistors they do not act as a load to the other.

This is utter nonsense, Ohm's law doesn't magically stop working with a transistor. I do know about this, I've designed power supplies and USB devices, and I've destroyed more than a few components accidentally by connecting two switching supplies together. Yes, there will be current flowing, and yes, sometimes a fuse or breaker will trip, I have experienced this many times, and just because you haven't doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

>Is like if the 2 had a diode in the output (in fact they do have one, but not directly in the output)

Sounds like you're referring to either ESD protection diodes, or flyback diodes, neither of which do anything in the case of two similar but unmatched power supplies.

I'd advise you to get a degree in engineering (as I have), or do some serious studying, as this kind of uninformed discussion is not productive or helpful to anyone, it's just noise.
by atemerev | 2025-07-19 07:18:05+00:00
The US obsession with sex (both positive and negative) is something else.

Here in Europe, sex is a normal part of human life. Not a center of everything, nor a sin to be avoided. Sex art is normal. Sex games are fine. There are no moral crusaders here, because sex is moral. We tell sex jokes at work and nobody faints. We are constantly perplexed why American culture is so different from other Western cultures in that regard.

People keep saying "Puritans" like it answers all questions, but Puritans were hundreds of years ago. We had our own share of people with peculiar attitudes back then. Today is 2025, not 1785.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-19 07:18:13+00:00
Strange that this is getting traction again, and good on the people getting it out there. Saw something about "OOXML" make Google News the other day.

Having a debate about the quality of OOXML feels like a waste of time, though. This was all debated in public when Microsoft was making its proprietary products into national standards, and nobody on Microsoft's side debated the formats on the merits because there obviously weren't any, except a dubious backwards compatibility promise that was already being broken because MS Office couldn't even render OOXML properly. People trying to open old MS Office documents were advised to try Openoffice.

They instead did the wise thing and just named themselves after their enemy ("Open Office? Well we have Office Open!"), offered massive discounts and giveaways to budget-strapped European countries for support, and directly suborned individual politicians.

Which means to me that it's potentially a winnable battle at some point in the future, but I don't know why now would be a better outcome than then. Maybe if you could trick MS into fighting with Google about it. Or just maybe, this latest media push is some submarine attempt by Google to start a new fight about file formats?
by oblio | 2025-07-19 07:18:23+00:00
You know what the weirdest thing about that century is? The Soviets.

A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.

I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
by microtonal | 2025-07-19 07:20:13+00:00
This, when I was a student and had to live frugal (2001-2008 or so), I got a second-hand Dell, put it on top of a high cupboard in my dorm room, and installed a bunch of services (e.g. Trac was very popular in the day for hosting projects).

It won't give you 99.999% uptime, but for that stage in my life it was just stellar. I even had an open source project (Slackware fork) where I collaborated with someone else through that little machine.

Second-hand hardware is also a great way to get high-quality enterprise hardware. E.g. during the same time period I had a Dell workstation with two Xeon CPUs (not multi-core, my first SMP machine) and Rambus DRAM (very expensive, but the seller maxed it out).
by vladvasiliu | 2025-07-19 07:21:03+00:00
As OP says, I think this is the kind of thing that needs to be considered whenever the decision is made.

As another data point, my NAS runs 4x4TB drives. When I bought them new some 2-3 years ago, all at the same time, they were cheaper than buying the equivalent 2x8TB.

My situation was somewhat different, though, since I'm running raidz1. But I did consider running a mirror, specifically in order to ease upgrading the capacity. However, I didn't expect to fill them /that/ quickly and I was right: yesterday it was still less than 70% full.
by abbadadda | 2025-07-19 07:22:27+00:00
This is a microcosm for enshittification writ large. If no one cares about your individual complaint you’re fucked. Only in numbers do consumers wield any power. The 48 Laws of Power says, “what is unseen counts for nothing.” So make it seen. Make bullshit like this visible. And vote with your dollars. Better yet sue the smoke detector company. Make them demonstrate their flawless false positive rate in court. Bullshit, grifting companies keep getting away with stuff like this because there are no consequences. Make them feel it where it hurts the most: their bank account.
by another_twist | 2025-07-19 07:23:40+00:00
I really do sympathize with American students who must compete at a global level while sustaining some of the highest tuition burdens in the world. Having said that, the argument that the founders are from abroad hence the natives suffer is false dichotomy. If anything it creates more jobs here and deprives other areas of talent since the US is welcoming for businesses. But if you want to do RnD in America, you almost always have to hire locally. The only pathway for immigrants getting jobs here is to get a degree in the US. These immigrants pay full fees to universities which in turn (potentially) subsidizes education for US students. I have to really stretch it to say that European countries like France / Germany and the UK are as locked up as the US. Almost no other country has stricter immigration than the US. Tbf if the UK (eg) would fix some of their regulatory regimes, the only reason for good entrepreneurs from the UK to come to the US would be to get market share.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-07-19 07:24:04+00:00
Tbh that's quite alarming what you've just said, and I'm not saying about government. I'm saying about an additional huge sales tax. I understand that wiring money or sending them in an envelope is the thing of past, but e.g. in my country and in whole EU the digital payment is promoted as the only righteous, because "cash is only used by gangsters and human traffickers" etc. And this is really playing against us and pushing us to the duopoly you've mentioned