MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derefr | 2025-07-24 15:56:08+00:00
> or if you open issues

I feel like there should be an exception carved out to this policy, if the submitter of an issue is offering to create (or, as a corporation, dedicate their own engineers' time to creating) a PR to resolve the problem the issue describes.

As a maintainer of a few OSS projects myself, I see my fair share of "choosing beggars" (i.e. people who don't mentally model others' motivations, and so use github issues to essentially say "I got this for free, but it's not perfect for me, so can you please improve it in ways X/Y/Z to better suit my needs?" — without any consideration of whether their suggested improvement would ever benefit anyone else.)

But if an issue's submitter offers to create a PR, then this makes it very clear that they're not operating in this mindset; and in fact, they're being quite considerate! By describing a real problem, and then offering to create a solution to that problem, they:

1. make sure that we actually want to solve this problem (i.e. that we don't think of their problem as a WONTFIX / something that doesn't belong upstream)

2. give us the opportunity to take over solving the problem ourselves, if we think it's some kind of highly-critical and finicky work

3. give us the opportunity to participate in / constrain / steer the design of a solution, before it gets developed (rather than just having code dropped in our laps and having to fight it into an entirely different shape)

And it often doesn't even matter if the developer in question really has the skill and experience to develop the proposed solution entirely on their own. To me, a dev who creates a half-baked PR that we can then help shepherd over the line over the course of weeks/months of back-and-forth with them in the PR thread, is someone clearly in the process of developing that skill and experience, and potentially becoming an active contributor to the project — or maybe even a future maintainer. This sort of willingness to engage in a non-drive-by way is incredibly valuable.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-24 15:57:02+00:00
Some additions:

- No drug addicts

- No homeless people

- No drunks

- If you throw your trash anywhere except the bin you get punished

- If you shout into your phone you get punished

- If you intentionally break or deface anything you get punished

If your city is full of drug addicts and anti-social people not a single thing you are going to do about zoneing will make it more "walkable". This stuff is so completely delusional. People use cars to get away from the total dysfunction and danger of cities.
by scotty79 | 2025-07-24 15:57:03+00:00
Training data should be open. Time to abolish copyright.

Using any data for the purposes of training neural net and publishing data that was used for this purpose should be exempted from copyright protections. If you want beef with people consuming your content without license you should go after them individually or after people who sell them your content. But hands off the modern engine of progress.

The entire reason for copyright was to promote progress. The moment it becomes obstacle it should go away. No one is entitled to their legacy business model.
by salawat | 2025-07-24 15:57:03+00:00
As someone with experience I. The PBM world, they are the only actors in a position to do the "responsible" thing. The problem though, is spread. Which is the foundational profit taking mechanism of most PBM's. Their profit is the difference between the amount of money they estimate they'll need to cover the group, and what they actually pay out based on the gray area between their benefit schedule. That money is investable as float. This means that the higher drug prices are, the more money they have to manage. This, combined with things like pharmaceutical manufacturer rebates, disincents actual downward pressure on drug prices.

If you want to get to the bottom of problem of the medical supply chain in the U.S., crack open, investigate with a fine toothed comb, and regulate PBM's. Preferably sacking everyone working there who utters the phrase "we want to be responsible financial stewards by making sure it's harder for people to get the care they need".
by pdabbadabba | 2025-07-24 15:57:05+00:00
> They are looking at lightweight EVs at lower speeds. But Americans drive heavier EVs at highway speeds. The rotors & pads are huge.

Perhaps other EV drivers can chime in but, if anything, I think I use my friction brakes less at highway speeds where, in general, you're not really supposed to do a lot of braking. I'd say, overall and regardless of speed, my friction brakes are really used only to bring the car to a complete stop or for emergency braking to avoid a potential accident.
Customer Service in 2025 Sucks (Cellphones)
by morpheos137 | 2025-07-24 15:57:06+00:00
Go to pay my cell phone (pay per month plan).

"Pay" button on website doesn't work with no discernible error message.

Website provides a chat.

Go through chat bot to get customer service.

Get to human agent.

Get asked to repeat the same information I already reported to the bot (he can't see the full chat log?).

Get asked for my email address and phone number (while I am logged into the account associated with that email address and phone number (why can't he see it?).

This is a typical experience for me when I go to pay for a service online but it is particularly bad with cellphones.

Why are companies paying human customer support to ask questions that the customer has already answered for their bot or that should be autopopulated from customer details they should have in their database?

Why have a stupid bot if it can't do anything useful (like make a payment), and then require the customer to enter the same information twice.

I see this in brick and mortar stores too. I live in a rural area. There is a gas station / convenience store chain. Any hour of the day there is a line at the register and three clerks employed behind the counter but only one register open. It is a frustrating customer experience. The other two are fiddling with the hotdogs or whatever. Does the gas station really sell so many hotdogs to employ a third clerk? Wouldn't it be better to serve the customers by having both registers open?

Or you go to Walmart. The cashier can not figure out how to bag items. The customer in line in front is invariably trying to pay with an non valid / inactive / overdrawn credit card and rather than directing them to the customer service desk the cashier spends 5 minutes trying to figure it out while they swipe their crap card half a dozen times. They finally take another card out and pay for their order meanwhile there are a bunch people in line by now and only two registers open.

Brick and mortar could better compete with online if they trained people better in the apparently lost art of customer service.

Or you go to a store to get something quick 5-10 minutes before closing and the employees have already locked the doors. This was never a problem for me before covid. It used to be businesses wanted business!

I was able to type this whole post while the braindead customer service processed my cellphone payment.
by cedws | 2025-07-24 15:57:13+00:00
Thanks for your reply. We use BuildKit's cache + SSH socket mounts in most of our Dockerfiles so this was a blocker I came up against immediately when trying Dagger. I'd rather not share my username here but there's a conversation on Discord last month you can dig up (search buildkit in:general) to see what was discussed and proposed solutions.

RE the part about not supporting Dockerfiles - sorry, that was incorrect, I misremembered.
by ajross | 2025-07-24 15:57:13+00:00
Beware! That's the DSL trap.

It works here so well because it's limited to 20 lines and each macro does exactly what it needs to for the problem at hand.

Take that DSL and use it over a year to write a bunch of code to do normal things as your app grows into its problem domain and spills over into a few more, and it melts. New developers will show up to onboard to your and be like "WTF is this 'on()' thing I'm looking at all over the place, and why isn't it used over here?!". Some enterprising developer will introduce "map2()" to indirect based on keysym and not keycode, etc...

Domain Specific Languages are a mistake, almost every time they're used. And the only exceptions are the ones that grow into first class languages for well-defined problem areas (I'm thinking about things like VHDL or Mathematica here), and even there they tend not to be that much better than well-crafted domain-specific APIs in true programming languages (think numpy, pytorch, et. al.)

DSLs: Just say no.
by bevr1337 | 2025-07-24 15:57:13+00:00
Anecdotally, every car I've been in where the driver talks about engine braking is rode hard and put up wet. Humans seem pretty bad at downshifting/engine braking outside of vehicles designed for that purpose like big rigs. Cars have much fewer gears so it's harder to align the downshift.

Of course there's little use in having this conversation since we all think ourselves above average drivers. I've had acquaintances reply "I don't even need a clutch I can shift so smooth!" (Do not attempt.)
by abraxas | 2025-07-24 15:57:28+00:00
An adjacent point is to use checked exceptions and to handle them appropriate to their type. I don't get why Java checked exceptions were so maligned. They saved me so many headaches on a project where I forced their use as I was the tech lead for it. Everyone hated me for a while because it forced them to deal with more than just the happy path but they loved it once they got in the rhythm of thinking about all the exceptional cases in the code flow. And the project was extremely robustness even though we were not particularly disciplined about unit testing
by dathinab | 2025-07-24 15:57:31+00:00
the bible also has a long history of

- being intentionally miss-translated to push political believes

- a lot of violent actions most western people would call barbaric and not acceptable today

and especially for the first point it's also not just the bible, many other religious texts have that problem, too

and neither change that today the word alien has not the annotation of "foreigner", but one which inherently de-humanizes the described group of people

Connotations of words change over time, that is normal, and it is possible that in the past alien really just meant foreigner.

But like I said elsewhere pretending that the connotation just means that today seems to me very hypocritical, at least close to no one under 40 will think about foreign people when hearing the word alien. Instead they will think of aliens, like extra terrestrial live.
by rafram | 2025-07-24 15:57:31+00:00
And if the site loads 100 iframes, it can figure out the distribution of values that your browser returns, which doesn’t change, and is likely to be close to unique until many people are using the same setup as you.

(Or it can just use properties of the extension like monkey-patched function toString() outputs to identify its users, which, again, narrows it down to a very small group.)
by cjbarber | 2025-07-24 15:57:33+00:00
Me too. Do you mean USA cities or worldwide? I'm told that some of the most walkable cities worldwide are: Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Barcelona. Which other ones should be on there and which ones from USA?

Devon also made this list: https://airtable.com/appcoaCeTbl22Few2/shrWJYzc04FQZIkP5
by xyzelement | 2025-07-24 15:57:37+00:00
I went to Dubai and other Emirates around 2018 as part of a work related Mid-East trip. There are definitely problems but this woman has an ax to grind that's so large it makes her commentary unreliable.

First - Dubai is notable having grown from a fishing village to making money on oil to - wisely - finding a way to move beyond oil into something that's sustainable and beneficial. That's admirable even on its own.

It is notable that very few people you see in Dubai are "natives." Most people you see are either foreigners there on business/vacation, or imported labor. The author takes issue with something related to that in a weird way - the more straight forward story would be that without the opportunities created in Dubai, both the business folks and the laborers would be doing something else - in both case less appealing to them. So whatever judgement you have on it, in practice everyone involved is better off than they would have been.

The author then can't avoid but take a dig at Israel and Zionism - her point/connection is a bit hard to understand but also feels warped. The Emirates being part of the Abraham accords was one of the greatest signs of the possibility of cross-religious existence and cooperation in the region - symbolic that mutual benefit can be a stronger motivator than historical division. This should be celebrated.
by matula | 2025-07-24 15:58:05+00:00
The Beatles spent YEARS only playing other people's music. Five/six hours a night performing covers. It seems self-evident that gaining such an intimate understanding of chord structures and melodies and harmonies from OTHERS helped them when they eventually created their own songs.

I think the same ideas can be applied to any hobby/job/industry. Picasso first learned how to paint a realistic apple... Wozniak spent years making calculators ... and I'm sure there are modern plumbing techniques created by someone who spent years learning the traditional techniques and decided to try something better. (Are there any famous, non-video game plumbers? There should be.)

Ignore the haters and copy other people's stuff.
by eagleal | 2025-07-24 15:58:22+00:00
Force removal from Mobile App Stores, make EU companies avoid implementing their Pixels or Services or face fines, etc.

2022-2023 for example a lot of companies removed their Analytics and Pixels js, because some EU members agencies (Spain and Italy to be precise) started making pilot cases against domestic companies.

It did work though, EU companies could either take an enourmous cost to properly implement these (ie. by local proxy sending only minimized data) or remove them in favor of EU tracking companies. A lot of similar suits followed with cases against Meta.

By 2023 it was clear the EU would make a political deal with the US so companies restored the defaults, without making the necessary anonymization changes.
by jerf | 2025-07-24 15:58:24+00:00
In addition to the other fine replies, it helps to remember that Erlang/BEAM, and by extension Elixir, comes from the telephony world. If something crashes in that world, you'd far rather terminate a phone call spuriously than bring the whole system down. (And in the 1990s, when the main alternative was C, and not just C as it may be today but 1990s C specifically, that was a reasonable concern.) Erlang is optimized for a world where that's a reasonable response to a failure. I've also used it in a context where a system makes a persistent connection up to a controller, and if either side crashes they automatically reconnect. "Let it crash" is a reasonable response to a lot of issues that can arise.

The farther you get from that being an issue, the less useful the "let it crash" philosophy becomes, e.g., if I hit "bold" in my word processor and it fails for some reason, "let it crash" is probably not going to be all that helpful overall.

I have seen systems that "should" have been failures in the field be held together by Erlang's restart methodology. We still had to fix the bugs, but it bought us time to do it and prevented the bad deployments from being immediate problems. But it doesn't apply to everything equally by any means.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-24 15:58:44+00:00
The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount.

If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.

And then we're worse off in several different ways.
by jhot | 2025-07-24 15:59:03+00:00
I've been out of the windows world for about 10 years or so, but before that I was the one tasked at my company with streamlining our installers from a CI/CD perspective. I do agree that WiX is complicated and you really have to dig through the docs and do a lot of trial and error, but at the time I couldn't find any alternatives that allowed for the automation that I could achieve with WiX.

That said it was still somewhat ugly: msbuild the application, potentially copy in some dll's that weren't included in the output, use WiX's "heat" tool to generate installer files from the build output, use a xslt to transform that output to match how we installed shared libraries and such, build the installer with generated files, run automated ui tests and filesystem validations.

At the time installshield, advanced installer, and a few other tools I tried did not have the same flexibility to generate installers and automatically pick up file changes like WiX (without opening up a UI).

I'm so glad I haven't had to think about the nightmare that is MSI in over a decade.
by Velorivox | 2025-07-24 15:59:30+00:00
I don’t know. I searched for how many chapters a popular manga has on Google and it gave me the wrong answer (by an order of magnitude). I only found out later and it did really piss me off because I made a trek to buy something that never existed. I should’ve known better.

I don’t think this is substantively different from cooking temperature, so I’m not trusting that either.
by sczi | 2025-07-24 16:00:08+00:00
A funny thing is I once had a type bug while coding elixir, that bash or perl would've prevented, but rust or haskell wouldn't have caught. I forgot to convert some strings to numbers and sorted them, so they were wrongly sorted by string order rather than numerical order.

In haskell (typeclasses), rust (traits), and elixir comparison is polymorphic so code you write intending to work on numbers will run but give a wrong output when passed strings. In perl and bash < is just numeric comparison, you need to use a different operator to compare strings.

In the case of comparison elixir is more polymorphic than even python and ruby, as at least in those languages if you do 3 < "a" you get a runtime error, but in general elixir is less polymorphic, ie + just works on numbers, not also on strings and lists and Dates and other objects like python or js.

I also experienced more type errors in clojure compared to common lisp, as clojure code is much more generic by default. Of course noone would want to code in rust without traits, obviously there are tradeoffs here, as you're one of the minority in this thread recognizing. There is one axis where the more bugs a type system can catch the less expressive and generic code can be. Then another axis where advanced type systems with stuff like GADT can type check some expressive code, but at the cost of increasing complexity. You can spend a lot more time trying to understand a codebase doing advanced typesystem stuff than it would take to just fix the occasional runtime error without it.

A lot of people in this thread are promoting gleam as if its strictly better than elixir because statically typed, when that just means they chose a different set of tradeoffs. Gleam can never have a web framework like Phoenix and Ash in elixir, as they've rejected metaprogramming and even traits/typeclasses.
by vidarh | 2025-07-24 16:00:43+00:00
For some uses, sure. But for plenty of uses that can be provided in context, RAG, or via tool use, or doesn't matter.

Even for the uses where it does matter, unless providers get squeezed down to zero margin, it's not that new models will never happen, but that the speed at which they can afford to produce large new models will slow.
by adolph | 2025-07-24 16:00:55+00:00
Same but less instead of cat so my fingers stay in the keyboard.

Vet, vite, etc are kind of like kitchen single-taskers like avocado slicer-scoopers. Surely some people get great value out of them but a table-knife works just fine for me and useful in many task flows.

I'd get more value out of a cross-platform copy-paster so I'm not skip-stepping in my mind between pbpaste and xclip.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-07-24 16:01:18+00:00
Not to pick on you, but you stared your pay with a series of trivia steak arguments - but all examples of things I see repeated with little consideration.

> Yes, but companies run for investors will always have to pay investors, so it would have either been a buyback or dividends.

Your argument here is that the pivot two things companies can spend money on is dividends or stock buybacks? An incredibly false choice. They can also clearly invest in staying competitive.

> When interest rates go up, companies end up competing with government bonds, and they must give dividends that keep them competitive,

Why do you think they must do this? These aren't bonds - people aren't looking to park money at a risk free rate. They are stocks - different investments with different expectations. Setting the expectation of one based on the other is false. They should be ensuring the can keep with with short term growth of more than 4% per year non adjusted, which should be easy in an inflationary environment.

And let's dig further into what you said about this "must". Must implies no other reasonable option - the consequences of anything else would be to negative. So when you say they must do buy backs or higher dividends, I ask "or else what?". Simply put, what hairband is they don't? The company doesn't fold. Consumers don't suddenly stop buying their products. What actually happens that they need to avoid?

Not much really much of note really. They say/signal "instead of giving you this money right now, we're going to invest it to remain competitive and more productive in the future".

If some investors don't believe them or doubt want to wait the stock price dips for some period of time and then rebounds as those investments become realized with increased efficiency and superior products.

> For investing in the future to be possible interest rates must essentially be low.

Finally this is wrong. It doesn't require low interest rates is you're flush with cash. If you've given away all of your cash then yes you need to borrow to invest. But if you have tons of cash you don't need to borrow to have cash.
by tyleo | 2025-07-24 16:01:21+00:00
In C#, I often use a type like:

readonly struct Id32<M> { public readonly int Value { get; } }

Then you can do:

public sealed class MFoo { } public sealed class MBar { }

And:

Id32<MFoo> x; Id32<MBar> y;

This gives you integer ids that can’t be confused with each other. It can be extended to IdGuid and IdString and supports new unique use cases simply by creating new M-prefixed “marker” types which is done in a single line.

I’ve also done variations of this in TypeScript and Rust.
by MantisShrimp90 | 2025-07-24 16:01:25+00:00
Im on the opposite extreme here in that I believe typing obsession is the root of much of our problems as an industry.

I think Rich Hickey was completely right, this is all information and we just need to get better at managing information like we are supposed to.

The downside of this approach is that these systems are tremendously brittle as changing requirements make you comfort your original data model to fit the new requirements.

Most OOP devs have seen atleast 1 library with over 1000 classes. Rust doesn't solve this problem no matter how much I love it. Its the same problem of now comparing two things that are the same but are just different types require a bunch of glue code which can itself lead to new bugs.

Data as code seems to be the right abstraction. Schemas give validation a-la cart while still allowing information to be passed, merged, and managed using generic tools rather than needing to build a whole api for every new type you define in your mega monolith.