MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-09-16 06:03:30+00:00
> What does the fact that we can do something has to do with its morality?

The philosophy (and also practical issues as well) are not always so simple, so sometimes it might have something to do with its morality.

> Would you find it moral, if your mother had killed you?

No, especially after I am born. If it was before I am born, then I am a part of her body and she has the right to do so, although that still does not make it moral.

> Yeah I guess the Romans killed some non-physical ghosts.

They might not mean them as historical real people (which they probably were, although it is not 100% certain). (I cannot think of how to explain it better, but there is a difference.)
by chubs | 2025-09-16 06:04:39+00:00
I largely agree with you. I used to work at Cochlear (hearing aid implants) - their "headphone" equivalents actually had neatly replaceable batteries 10 years ago, it's doable! Larger than airpods, to be sure, however i'm sure Apple could shrink them nicely. But... would anyone want the ability to replace batteries? I wouldn't know. I suspect most people misplace them before the batteries go bad.
by solatic | 2025-09-16 06:04:45+00:00
I think you'd be surprised. Especially for restaurants - there are mom-and-pop operations with smart kids who want to put together a project to make their parents' lives easier. Money isn't the only motivator in life and I'm not convinced you couldn't find someone to donate the capex needed to get an MVP off the ground. https://github.com/topics/food-ordering-system has 537 repositories, I don't have the time deep dive into them and whether any of them are any good, but I think it's evidence enough that FOSS can provide an MVP at least.

Yes, that's a different question from whether the opex is sustainable without a business selling support. And I think the question there is how much can be offloaded to utility-style SaaS like Stripe (i.e. handle changes in taxes) and serverless infrastructure to keep the opex of the FOSS solution itself low. I get the impression that it's hypothetically doable, but the proverbial kids of mom-and-pop store parents don't have the experience or guidance to know how to set that up.
by derefr | 2025-09-16 06:06:00+00:00
> The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.

If I had this need, it wouldn’t even occur to me to solve it with Launchpad; I would just go to /Applications in Finder and sort by “Date Added”. (Which is a non-default column, but a very helpful one, so the series of gestures to enable it for a given folder is almost reflexive to me now.)
by kelnos | 2025-09-16 06:08:12+00:00
Agree, for the most part, but I think records and pattern matching are essential. I started using Scala (2.x) in 2014 or so, and case classes and pattern matching completely blew my mind. if/else trees and switch statements felt so archaic, limited, and verbose after that. I used to joke that Java would eventually adopt enough of Scala to be a pleasant language to work in, and I don't think I was that far off.

(I'll ignore Kotlin... I don't get why people like it.)
by flowerthoughts | 2025-09-16 06:08:34+00:00
The unnamed class approach to global variables sounds nice. You can do hot-reload, but still have unencumbered syntax.

OTOH, since Java files are named after their public class, it would have made more sense to just say the `public class X { }` wrapper is optional and only needed for attributes and inheritance. I don't quite understand why they need an anonymous class.

> The Java compiler will compile that file to the launchable class file HelloWorld.class. In this case the compiler chooses HelloWorld for the class name as an implementation detail, but that name still cannot be used directly in Java source code.

https://openjdk.org/jeps/445
by hdjrudni | 2025-09-16 06:08:37+00:00
> Most people already aware of the meaning of their work though, it's not something you can deliver updates on.

It isn't always. I did use to write health care software. It was used by "SLPs" and dozens of other acronyms I barely understood what they meant. Their clients had "FASD" and abuse victims and all sorts of things.

I was given a spec, we need this, it needs to have these fields, and these words, and I made it happen.

I never saw our software used in the wild. I never spoke with the clients that used our software, I never saw the difference that they made in childrens lives.

The more time we could save the clinicians and therapists and others, the more time they could spend helping their clients.

It was meaningful, but I never saw any of that. Maybe once or twice a year our boss would come in and explain some of that stuff to us. It was nice to hear.
by feoren | 2025-09-16 06:09:00+00:00
> basically what you are suggesting is that some group of volunteers spend their time and effort to build out a substantial part of the business's infrastructure for free.

I don't buy this. How many businesses are we talking about? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? So each business commits $200 to $400 and you have a multi-million dollar OSS enterprise solution. For a few million, a small team could easily build a much better ordering system than the utter garbage that's out there now, including setting menus and prices, handling payment, route planning, etc. Ordering online is often completely broken. A bit of collective action solves lots of problems. Yes, each business still has to cover some infra costs, unless that's also collectivized.

Or -- and I know this is absolute blasphemy to say -- the government could create this software. We could call it, I don't know, say, the "U.S. Digital Service" and it could use a tiny amount of tax money to make software that benefits entire industries or huge swaths of people and give it out for free. We could be greasing the wheels of commerce across the entire United States with just a little investment in "greater good" software, but the fucking billionaire psychopath asshole caste wouldn't be able to get their rent from it, so we have to burn it to the fucking ground.

This doesn't have to be an actual problem. We could easily solve it, but we have to have the balls to tell billionaires they're no longer allowed to loot the entire country. Everyone -- yes, you too, reader -- everyone vastly under-estimates how good society could be if it weren't for those fucking little parasites that have to loot and extract rent from everything.
by bubblyworld | 2025-09-16 06:09:02+00:00
Ask a biologist or ML enthusiast; complexity is the natural outcome of a period of mutation/selection. It's a mistake to criticise the result on the grounds of said complexity, I think - rather ask what environment the complexity evolved to "survive" in.

It's boring common sense but don't take a bromeliad into the desert.

My belief is that all codebases that live long enough will develop this level of complexity with time. The only exceptions imo are where the codebase solves a very particular, fixed problem, e.g. a library for A* pathfinding or whatever. But maybe not even then.
by sixtyj | 2025-09-16 06:09:04+00:00
I love boring stack. No nodejs and its dependence hell, no compilation, no frameworks that need reading encyclopedia to make a simple form :)

PHP or blazing fast PHP-fpm, MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres, json for config, jQuery… it is good enough for most cases.

For Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, Waze, and other heavily used sites with millions users… it is a different game.
by ripped_britches | 2025-09-16 06:09:33+00:00
You’ll have to come up with a better counter factual than “I would have sent a notification to all Apple customers to gain political support.”

You would alienate so many customers by being political.

Jobs’ Apple was not political except in narrow issues. It sold a product for everybody, not just one party.

Cook leaned into the least political possible way to handle this very delicate situation: made in the USA is positive for everyone (in the US) without alienating any group directly.

And if he really screwed the pooch and got worse tariff outcomes, I definitely think his job could be on the line. You know their stock lost $300b in value when tariffs were announced right? That was the entire market cap of Apple when jobs died.

I agree it looks very pathetic, but honestly it’s a tough situation too
by troupo | 2025-09-16 06:10:53+00:00
It's not a terrible language, but it's not too good either.

For a very long time it completely stagnated and all the features we see added now should've been there 10 years ago, at least, and a bunch of other improvements on top. All because "our goal isn't to adopt the strategy of less successful products, but to forge our own" which now turned into busily adopting all the features that the "less successful products" have had for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28985688
by pi-err | 2025-09-16 06:11:32+00:00
Clickbait built on 2 fantasy notions:

1- that Jobs would somehow be the hero of a mythical arab/syrian culture and diversity politics who would have behaved differently than Cook towards Trump.

If anything, Jobs cherished the white working suburban middle class of the west coast that has been destroyed in the last generations. He _never_ behaved as a white knight and nobody knows what he would have done (and nobody knows how hard Cook's political equation is)

2- that Apple is due for perfect, idealized products that fill 100% of people's void. This guy explains that iPhones make too many compromise and the OS is just "good enough".

Would be curious to hear of _one single_ previous or current OS platform or hardware at that scale that matches Apple's 2026 line up.
by Uptrenda | 2025-09-16 06:12:16+00:00
In the early days of Bitcoin (like 2013 and earlier) there were soo many entrepreneurs that tried to use Paypal for their fiat on-ramps. There even used to be a service that let you buy Bitcoins with credit cards and used Paypal to process payments. They did their own KYC and everything, with very low fraud rates despite the double-spend risk. Even with an interesting result: Paypal caused them nothing but misery. Every single merchant, trading system, wallet, or platform that tried to rely on Paypal came to regret it.

Paypals reputation in the FinTech space is that of creating a service that restricts as much as possible what can be done with your own money. All in the name of "security." Even though they seem to offer the worst security of any platform, coupled with the now infamous risk of having your funds "frozen" for any arbitrary reason. In short: I literally cannot think of a company I would trust less with digital currencies than Paypal. And seeing them support any of them just makes me think "wow, you fucking phonies."
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-16 06:14:16+00:00
PSPSes? I lived in Paradise until 2020 and had to do the generator-filling and extension cords dance while not having internet for a week or 2 at a time several times per summer. Comcast/Xfinity's gear would last about 24 hours without power and then internet would go out. Contemplated off grid power, but it wouldn't been pointless and futile to sink any more money into an area that was fundamentally unsuitable for long-term occupation.

So, instead of living in a desertifying moonscape with jacked-up insurance costs, we bailed for around the 100th meridian west where there aren't forest fires or earthquakes. And no hurricanes or floods either. The most concerning things are hail and wind which can be more-or-less mitigated and/or insured for, while tornado risk here is on the order of 0.0001%/structure/year.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-16 06:14:27+00:00
In the old days Apple were super expensive and hardly present in Iberian Penisula, Portugal only had Interlog in Lisbon, we saw adds on magazines, no one bought them.

First time I actually managed to see some LC in person, I was already attending the university, and there were only used in two places, a single room on the computer lab building, and the administrative assistants on the IT department, no one else across the whole campus had them.

I got to use and learn NeXTSTEP, because my thesis was to port a visualization software away from it into Windows, as my supervisor was the only owner of one, and they were getting rid of it, as NeXT wasn't having a great future on those years, already having pivoted to software only.

So the turn around with OS X felt interesting, and kind of revigorating, given how close Apple and NeXT were to be gone.

That Apple is long gone.
by drak0n1c | 2025-09-16 06:15:00+00:00
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
by motorest | 2025-09-16 06:15:54+00:00
> Yeah, except that a sprinkle becomes a dusting, and then a dusting becomes a coating, and then a coating becomes a clog of dust bunnies, and it's often hard to tell when you need to stop and do it a better way when the business side is pressuring you with deadlines for changes on "what already works".

The ultimate step into irony is reaching a point where, to justify their approach, they claim that it's ok to spend all this time reinventing JavaScript wheels because all this "sprinkle-on" JavaScript can be packaged and reused in other projects.
by derefr | 2025-09-16 06:16:15+00:00
Still for the better, because each token you don’t have to type when first learning programming is a token you can’t mistype.

(Though the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking is that programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible, giving the learner as few opportunities to screw up the input as possible. I’m a fan of teaching programming in Ruby, personally. Not theory of programming, mind you; just programming as an iterative human process.)
by vsl | 2025-09-16 06:16:31+00:00
> Apple tells you why they rejected the app, and you correct the problem and resubmit.

Such as, elsewhere in this thread, app for viewing HealthKit data “unnecessarily using HealthKit”?

App Store rejections are arbitrary bullshit most of the time. We stopped shipping through MAS because of that and went direct-only, the 30% wasn’t even part of the decision; the bullshit and broken sandbox were.
by von_lohengramm | 2025-09-16 06:17:32+00:00
I used to go through phases where I would try this. I gave Windows + WSL a shot. I gave embracing the Apple ecosystem a shot. I gave GNOME a shot. I gave KDE a shot. I was even crazy enough to give ChromeOS as my daily driver a shot. And so on and so forth.

I found every single time that it just wasn't worth it. There was always some critical failure that was either completely underlooked or a 20 year old bug/shortcoming that had every patch to fix it rejected. I genuinely don't understand how people tolerate the dogshit being forcefed to you on all of these controlled platforms. People say that everything is getting worse, and it's true, but it's also true that you're actively choosing to use the things that are getting worse.

I've eventually settled on NixOS and XFCE so I can tweak things to my particular needs while also benefiting from an army of unpaid labor continually improving nixpkgs and other flakes. This setup isn't perfect, but I've optimized for maximal comfort & utility while exerting minimal effort & time. Things really only break when they're self-updating under the hood, which thankfully is rather rare in nixpkgs.
by hulitu | 2025-09-16 06:17:34+00:00
This. The best feature ever. Microsoft might not be able to draw shadows, scrollbars, window borders but they sure know how to round corners. Wanna exit word by pressing exit in the menu (i.e. clean exit). No way. You must press the "X" on the upper right window corner and hope that the corners rounding Microsoft engineers handle the "WndClose" message gracefully.
by drewnoakes | 2025-09-16 06:18:04+00:00
C# has had top level statements since version 9.0 (Nov 2020), and it's still just a compiler trick that produces a static method behind the scenes. Top level functions work too, but in a similar way.

Decompiled example: https://lab.razor.fyi/#41rAyMUVUJSfXpSYq5dcLDSRsbQ4My9dIbiyu...

> lipstick on a pig's turd

There are several valuable compiler transformations that happen under the hood in languages like this. Closures as types, iterator/generator functions, async state machines. This is just another example.
by 18272837023 | 2025-09-16 06:18:15+00:00
In the world of Tarot, each card tells a unique story, and none is more intriguing than Major Arcana 0, also known as The Fool. Positioned at the very beginning of the Major Arcana sequence, The Fool symbolizes new beginnings, infinite possibilities, and the leap of faith we must sometimes take to move forward in life. Unlike other cards, Major Arcana 0 is numbered with a zero, representing pure potential and the absence of limitations. This makes it a deeply spiritual and philosophical card that resonates with both beginners and seasoned tarot readers.
by rob74 | 2025-09-16 06:19:04+00:00
Yup... if you're familiar with the old class-based approach, the new style raises more questions than it answers. Did they really turn "everything-is-an-object"-Java into a procedural language? What do you do if you do need command line arguments? Etc.

(I somehow mostly avoided learning Java, and my last passing contact with it was 20+ years ago, so these are honest questions).
by ozim | 2025-09-16 06:19:28+00:00
I think this covers nicely discussion about the HTML, CSS, JS and browsers complexity from other thread.

We have a bit of messy complex system that we can run cross platform applications including mobile.

But it was only one that could survive corporate greed and shenanigans where all other UI toolkits and frameworks are limited in one way or the other or entirely dead.

People nag about the complexity and messiness but there is no other surviving alternative.
by kristopolous | 2025-09-16 06:19:47+00:00
This is crazy. I was having a conversation earlier where I divided the use cases and my taxonomy was almost identical: I didn't include "writing help" but everything else. Then I guessed the trends trends and nailed it with respect to the other of usage.

I mean how often to you make fairly speculative claims and then an hour later see a just published report on it and get it validated? Nuts.

I personally hate chatgpt's voice (writing style) but I guess that's a minority position.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-16 06:20:38+00:00
Yeah I misremembered. I also only brought it up because of recency bias, and didn't put the time or thought into the point I really wanted to make.

I brought up a case of where LLMs can automate tedious work that people do poorly and improve services for the public, and you responded with an assumption that someone will rip out the work to employ their own company (corruption).

This seemed absurdly negative to me. You are in a place where the comment you decide to leave is based on an assumption that all (or at least the majority) of people leading municipalities have corrupt motives.

Maybe where you live that's what it's like, but that level of corruption is unheard of where I live, and I'm sure that's not what it's like in most of the world.

So I can't help but assume that you're negatively biased, especially because of how the objections in your comments evolved.

Time spent thinking about things in one's own control, especially what one wants, will have more positive impact on one's life than time spent thinking about things outside ones control.

I wish for you the courage to act on what's in your control and the grace to accept what's not.

Else you're likely to suffer more than you need to.
by locallost | 2025-09-16 06:21:49+00:00
The better analogy to pyramids was made by Alan Kay. In lack of an arch we get things done with brute force and thousands of slaves. Sprinkling JavaScript will not help with this issue.

If there was one reason people gravitate towards complexity this author is talking about, it's probably because they want to see if they can do it. In some contexts it's annoying, but it's also what moves the needle from time to time.
by WolfOliver | 2025-09-16 06:22:21+00:00
React has a history of solid backwards compatibility. IMO one of the top reasons to choose React. You do not have to worry that much if the framework is still around in two years.

Also - as the article mentioned - everybody knows react.

This are two reasons why picking react is almost every time the right choice.

How the internal rendering works and if it is a little faster or slower is just an implementation detail.
by derefr | 2025-09-16 06:22:36+00:00
I mean, the IDE can totally write out the import statements for you as you type and choose resolutions for identifiers; but if you paste in a random code snippet that references ambiguous identifiers from a third-party lib, no IDE can magically generate the import statements required to discriminate the correct resolutions. You have to go through and resolve the symbols yourself (or advance through them as error sites to get the class to compile.)

Or, to put that another way: import statements aren’t pure boilerplate that should be thrown away; they encode real information (ambiguous symbol resolutions); and so, by eliding them from code examples, you’re discarding that information and forcing the learner to re-derive it.

Which is especially bad when your code examples are referencing ambiguous undocumented static inner classes nested deep inside your library’s package namespace, where all the potential resolutions differ only by the particular package they exist in (since they’re all e.g. essentially batteries-included extensions of the base library implementing the same interface.) And where all this structure is as ugly as it is precisely because you didn’t expect the end-user of the library to need to understand it / interact with it. Yet your own [usually “advanced” or “feature demonstrating”] code examples force exactly that.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-09-16 06:22:39+00:00
That's for honey-bees, though I've wondered about if Wasps, Bumblebees, or Hornets do similar things.

Anyway, there were no other Hornets in sight, and I got no other visits, or a nest.

Phew! Lucky me! :-)

Thinking about it, I remember sitting outside an Ice cream parlor with friends, having had a bowl of amarena cherry ice. A Wasp flew into it, and almost drowned in the molten residue at the bottom, and couldn't escape the steep and smooth glass walls. I slowly put a spoon into it, to give her a 'ladder'. That worked somehow, but not instantly.

She stayed on the spoon for while, also doing that selfgrooming thing, then lifted off rather uncoordinated, almost crashing into an ashtray, making miniature tornadoes there for a few seconds :-)

Then flying away finally. Also got no 'follow ups', for maybe 15 to 20 minutes, after which we left.

Maybe too exhausted to do that dance-thing, at home?
by Pinus | 2025-09-16 06:23:00+00:00
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?

French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...