MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by instig007 | 2025-09-07 19:50:39+00:00
Ok, "some of the most senior engineers ever to work at Google" don't seem to know that static bounds checking don't require dependent types: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150008

> You don't get to play the "ad hominem" card while calling them names

The entire article explains it at length why there's the impression, it's not ad-hominem.
by chasil | 2025-09-07 19:51:57+00:00
Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?

"I had this crazy idea that I’m going to build a database engine that does not have a server, that talks directly to disk, and ignores the data types, and if you asked any of the experts of the day, they would say, “That’s impossible. That will never work. That’s a stupid idea.” Fortunately, I didn’t know any experts and so I did it anyway, so this sort of thing happens. I think, maybe, just don’t listen to the experts too much and do what makes sense. Solve your problem."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
by mandarwagh | 2025-09-07 19:52:05+00:00
It sounds optimistic, but exponential adoption curves show otherwise. In just 18 months since ChatGPT, AI has already displaced coding, design, research, and support roles. Once businesses see it can fully replace repetitive work at near-zero cost, adoption compresses fast. The real barrier is not tech but social and regulatory adaptation.

and even i get this wrong its just an thought experiment and has a 50% chance
by FluGameAce007 | 2025-09-07 19:52:59+00:00
If debug logic is still active, attackers with physical access can dump firmware, extract secrets, or bypass protections that should be fused off.

Think: stolen phones, shady repair shops, or border checks — cases where physical access + this flaw = real risk.

That’s why a hardware recall may be necessary... fuses are meant to be irreversible. If they fail, there's no patch.
by adityaathalye | 2025-09-07 19:53:09+00:00
Well, I tried to walk back from MVC, to the smallest possible generally composable abstraction for web app architecture, and I kept coming back to X/Y shaped tables. They're everywhere at all levels of composition; dependency injection, routing tables, joining any two modules arbitrarily, laying out source code on disk etc. etc. etc.

So I built my own web app system (not a monolithic framework) to test out the opinion. And, I'd say it's working quite well---for me, at any rate.

Have a gander: https://github.com/adityaathalye/clojure-multiproject-exampl...

See also, Polylith application architecture; a far more sophisticated and generalised form of what I'm doing in my system. https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

---

The term "Expression Problem" was coined in context of statically typed languages, but the formulation has nothing to do with static typing per se. Its general form is polymorphic multiple dispatch (not Objects versus Functions, but Objects and Functions).

See: Philip Wadler's explanation (where he coins the term): https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/expression/expr...

> The Expression Problem is a new name for an old problem. The goal is > to define a datatype by cases, where one can add new cases to the > datatype and new functions over the datatype, without recompiling > existing code, and while retaining static type safety (e.g., no

casts).

i.e. He was trying to bring the solution from the dynamic / interpreted language space, to the difficult case of statically typed languages.

---

Anyway, I picture it as an "X/Y" problem. Something like this:

https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

7.2. Solve The Expression Problem

Playtime:

- What if we frame everything in terms of the Expression Problem?

- Add a new Y, extend all Xs to it? Without cooperation of existing Xs?

- Add new X, extend all Ys to it? Without cooperation of existing Ys?

| X * Y | y1 | y2 | y3 | ... | |-------+----+----+----+-----| | x1 | | | | | | x2 | | | | | | x3 | | | | | | ... | | | | |

(edit: formatting)
by Amorymeltzer | 2025-09-07 19:53:26+00:00
Previous discussions of note:

- 6 Oct 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33110478> (175pts, 62 comments

- 7 Nov 2020: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25020431> (235pts, 135 comments
by ModernMech | 2025-09-07 19:54:24+00:00
I guess it depends on why the outrage. But if you are outraged about issues that are caused by the recent political shift, then the best thing you can possibly do is work, as in make it your actual job, to elect the political opposition.

A lot of people don't like that option. They find it distasteful, they don't have the time, or they think it will not change much at all. But that's the truth -- Democrats taking control of Congress in 2027 is the fastest way to improve the current situation.
by keeganpoppen | 2025-09-07 19:55:46+00:00
wait, associated types are amazing! i have spent more time than is healthy goofing around with doing more things than is probably sane via metaclasses, and this concept would actually make life SO much cleaner… i was already predisposed to liking this post because i feel strongly that algebraic effects (and delimited continuations) are amazing and being slept on, but having poked around the docs and blog a bit i am beyond impressed. baasically every “choice” made with this project is one that i either agree with or i’ve never seen before and is quite clever. for example, putting polls in the middle of blog posts to ask the reader what kinds of things would be most relevant for them to touch on in future posts. maybe others have done it before— i don’t know— but what a great way to run a programming language project, where i can only imagine that trying to get in the minds of actual or prospective users is one of the hardest tasks— probably more so than the implementation and development of the language itself! will be watching this project for sure!
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-07 19:56:08+00:00
That might be true, for very specific market dominating companies, but these wouldn't really need any new advertisement. I'm not going to forget anytime soon, that CocaCola exists.

For all the other companies its exactly the other way around. I will see products of a company, I know bothers me when I want to do something else, and a bunch of products I have no (negative) opinion yet. Guess which products I will evaluate?

For an ad to leave a good impression it must be actually good, otherwise it achieves exactly the opposite. People used to buy advertisements, the ad industry destroyed this, by forcing people to look at ads. People don't like being forced.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-07 19:56:19+00:00
> I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.

Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.

This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
by evanelias | 2025-09-07 19:56:59+00:00
> the article does outline a strategy that maximizes upside for project author: make outsider contributors sign CLAs

I wouldn't really consider that a separate strategy. When using AGPL and accepting outside contributions in this for-profit scenario, having a CLA (or stronger e.g. CAA) is essentially mandatory. Ditto when using some non-OSI source-available / Fair Source licenses with similar protections against competing SaaS use.

Otherwise, without a CLA, even the project creator effectively can't sell access to an improved/modified hosted SaaS version: each third-party contributor is licensing their code contribution under AGPL, and they are afforded the exact same anti-SaaS protections. So with third-party contributions and no CLA, even the project creator would need to provide the full source code of their SaaS to users, which typically makes the business non-viable.

But meanwhile many folks in the industry are extremely hostile to CLAs, for whatever reason. There are several examples on this page, including one commenter claiming AGPL + CLA is "open-washing". And folks are even more hostile to Fair Source and other non-OSI source available licenses, again several examples on this page, or any time this topic comes up here.

> You have to pick a poison: AGPL or a custom license will prevent hyperscalers hosting your service, but will slow adoption.

IMO the issue is more severe than just slowing adoption; in many cases, using a non-permissive license from day 1 outright kills adoption. And that's really unfortunate, because a few decades ago there was a robust market for software written by bootstrapped independent software vendors, without widespread dogmatic demands for specific license terms. The current status quo is going to lead to a lot less independent software creation, because there's no obvious path to financial self-sufficiency (let alone profit) for such projects.

So with that context in mind, I think the commenter at the top of this subthread is 100% correct. There's currently no way to thread the needle between community licensing demands, and the risk of larger companies capturing all the profits. Logically the only solutions would be to convince users to lessen their dogmatic licensing expectations, and/or to shame cloud vendors into more sustainable behavior regarding FOSS projects, but both of those seem fairly impossible.
by kbolino | 2025-09-07 19:57:03+00:00
Yes, though I hadn't thought about it in those terms at first.

The modern, technocratic government controls policy through many means, but monetary policy is a major one. The switch to fully fiat currency was an important transition point, and I do not believe it is a coincidence that wage gains divorced from productivity gains not long after the end of Bretton Woods. Businesses have always chased profit, but how they do it, what other interests if any they have, and on whose behalf they do it, have changed over time in accordance with (para-)governmental policy, including everything from "intended policy goals" to "unintended consequences" and "regulatory capture".

Though, the simpler point I was driving at about gold and BTC is just that when they are relegated to mere savings, they lose most of their potency. Assets are like potential energy to money's kinetic energy. However, the government accepting anything other than its own currency for payment of taxes would destabilize that currency. Only countries in dire straits would even consider such a policy. Hence, real money is what matters.
by contingencies | 2025-09-07 19:57:04+00:00
It's even theorized that the genesis of the entire Eukaryota domain and many of its organnelles (notably mitochondria and chloroplasts) are the results of repeated cellular endosymbiosis where a unicellular organism consumed a prokaryote that eventually becomes a useful part of the host cell instead of its food.

A parallel could be drawn with CVCs acquiring startups. Or tiger penis soup. Neither being generally palatable dinner table conversation, but both similarly unlikely consumptive cultural concepts!
by ghaff | 2025-09-07 19:57:04+00:00
I never found selling cheapish knicknacks on Ebay very attractive financially but it seems like it's less of Ebay's business these days and just not something I'm willing to devote a lot of time and energy to.

More generally, I do think it used to be more of a flea market even if I never found it a great selling platform for cheap items.
by eszed | 2025-09-07 19:57:44+00:00
Funnily enough, my brain went there, too - only to derive opposite lesson. When I was a teenager I spent a summer in central America, living in mostly un-air conditioned spaces. The first few weeks were hellish, but I became gradually used to it. Then I came home, and remember 80° F, with no humidity, feeling distinctly chilly!

I think the lesson there is that subjective / comparative judgments are, well, always and irremediably subjective. It's never possible to impose an alternative frame of reference and get to a "true" answer. That's frustrating for those of us who prefer to live in the objective realm - but it's maybe comforting to recognize that these matters are objectively subjective!
by dangus | 2025-09-07 19:57:56+00:00
1. You're going off-topic, we weren't talking about societal happiness, we were talking about whether productivity and the ease of developing for the Internet has increased. E.g. if you are trying to claim that Kubernetes doesn't work better for companies than previous solutions wrestling with Chef or Puppet with dependency hell in some VMs I am just going to assume you've never touched a backend and think Terraform is something you do in Sim City 2000.

2. Like it or not, the customers of the tech industry include a lot of large enterprises that do find value in improving velocity and reliability for complex workflows. I am not some kind of corporate sellout for pointing out this plain factual reality.

3. I totally agree with your points about income inequality and happiness metrics among our population but they are not relevant to the topic at hand.

4. If Dreamweaver and FTP is your barometer, recall that Dreamweaver was an expensive paid product. There still are plenty of FTP-based web hosts and you can totally throw up a website with a tool like https://trix-editor.org/, which as I mentioned is a tool that did not exist 15 years ago. You can also just pay for a website service like SquareSpace or Wix (or not, they have free tiers).

The fact that specific individual tools do not exist/are not supported anymore is irrelevant, as there are dozens of often-better tools for throwing a website up that are definitely friendly to novices. Let's not forget the plethora of no-code application development tools that are mostly a recent development.

Mobile users prefer apps 60% over websites. So the real modern barometer is: could your Grandma put up an iPhone app in 2008 following the developer tutorials using Objective-C or would she have a much better time using Swift and/or a no-code app development solution?
by ajross | 2025-09-07 19:57:56+00:00
That is simply not true. Automatic/assumed visa waivers has been the way international professionals do temporary work in the US for many decades. Yes, the state department and DHS after it have always had the ability to revoke this waiver when abused. But there is simply no abuse alleged here. They showed up to build a factory, made no attempt to hide that fact, and that's exactly what they were "caught" doing.

This "Yooz Brok Duh Lah" absolutism is a transparently political excuse for what is very obviously a norm-breaking and unjust enforcement of a law that was working very well.
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-07 19:58:14+00:00
A lot of software from the Linux/UNIX world will have macros to support Windows even without cygwin.

For example with tcpdump:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Athe-tcpdump-group%2Ftcpdu...

So it’s not quite the same thing as what we were discussing further up the thread. Though it’s still an interesting anecdote in its own right.
by nippoo | 2025-09-07 19:58:35+00:00
There's a couple of factors at play here. One is that AC suffers from capacitive losses over long distances (high power multi-megawatt underground/undersea cables are often HVDC for this and other reasons).

The other more interesting one is that the repeaters in this kind of fibre optic cable are usually powered from both ends, from completely separate electrical grids (so one side sends -5000V and the other sends +5000V, for example). This allows for some level of redundancy as well as thinner insulation. With AC, keeping the phases on both sides aligned would be impractical, as well as the inherent inefficiencies of AC transmission.
by lazide | 2025-09-07 19:58:41+00:00
Just because air pollution is bad, doesn’t mean it is bad in this way. It could just as easily be that some other lifestyle thing is causing dementia AND leading to living in areas with worse pm2.5.

Especially since pm2.5 tends to be higher in areas with higher population densities, near roads, industrial areas, etc.

Hell, maybe the underlying major risk factor is actually time spent in the car. Or repeated viral exposures of a specific type. Or a specific type of air pollution.

Either way, it’s not like everyone is going to be moving out of high pm2.5 areas anytime soon, or that we’ll be able to just solve the sources of pollution right now even if it is the cause.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-07 19:59:27+00:00
Again, this is about outsourcing knowledge work and labor, not goods you can tariff. With regards to your Walmart assertion, more than two-thirds of Walmart U.S. total product spend in FY2024 was on items their suppliers reported were made, grown, or assembled in the United States [1] (per Walmart).

[1] https://corporate.walmart.com/suppliers/investing-in-america...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-07 20:00:43+00:00
> Operating overloading has nothing to do with the problem

You've got T types (some new), and O operators (some new) and want to implement all operators for all types ... This is the exact definition of operator overloading.

There is no magic (other than inheritance or generics, if applicable) that will remove the need to individually implement all those O x T cases, and while that is obviously necessary, it is also all that you need to do.

If you are not talking about operator overloading - supporting the same operator for multiple different custom types, then what are you talking about ?!
by jacquesm | 2025-09-07 20:01:08+00:00
> I care very little about nursing homes.

ok.

> I care a lot more about the deep culture of future citizens and voters.

Yes. The native Americans had some ideas about that too. I find it supremely hypocritical of you, child of immigrants, to start telling a good chunk of the country that you immigrated into (regardless of how they got there) that 'their culture' is not welcome.

> https://opengecko.com/geckoview/interculturalism/visualising...

Did you even read that link or any of the associated texts? It seems to argue strongly against the thing you care about in isolation. It is all about interaction.

And of course culture is more than just the surface. That's what makes it so beautiful. It is a whole interlocking complex of concepts and various cultures interacting and learning/borrowing/stealing bits of culture from each other is how we progress. If not for that you would not be where you are today, and I would be speaking Latin.

Immigrants (illegal and otherwise) are not just a part of the United States, they are the United States.
by nirava | 2025-09-07 20:01:31+00:00
In the specific context of Nepal, because it is clearly the next step in consolidation of power and move to authoritarianism.

The government is corrupt and has taken a lot of incredibly unpopular and objectively anti-people moves in the last 2-3 years. Taming social media would allow them to do more of that with less of the backlash.

It is clear they aren't even remotely concerned about the actual bad effects of social media. They didn't ban TikTok, of all things.
by advisedwang | 2025-09-07 20:01:37+00:00
Logs probably need to be exposed to support teams, oncalls for sister-teams (if you are a large org), all your devs etc. That is many MANY more people than need access to secrets. Secrets in logs therefore puts you are much wider risk of internal threats and makes it MUCH easier for an attacker who phishes someone to pivot to higher credentials.

Also if you have audit records, you want accessing a secret to be logged separately from accessing logs.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-07 20:01:48+00:00
I'd rather just drink from the hose directly, personally. I've been doing an "anti-pomodoro" timer, myself. Set 30 or 60 minutes, and just scroll around as I usually do. aggregators (including here on the rare occasion a post isn't flagged), various news feeds, etc. when the timer ends, I get out of the hypnosis and move on to whatever the day needs.

I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-07 20:02:11+00:00
I assume you have seen many casual instances of cost overrun in that time. I'm sure you've also seen instances where an extra $10k flies out the door to AWS and people think "no big deal, that one was on us." This world doesn't have to exist. Even if AWS has a policy of always refunding people for a big oopsie, the fact that you have seen so many big ones suggests that you have also seen a lot of little ones.

By the way, there is nothing stopping AWS from reversing their trend of issuing refunds for big mistakes. "It hasn't happened in the past" isn't a great way to argue "it won't happen in the future."
by abeyer | 2025-09-07 20:02:13+00:00
> UX which requires more thought and skill, but is way more powerful. Human devs are mostly too lazy to use

Really? My thinking is more that human devs are way too likely to sink time into powerful but complex tools that may end up being a yak shave with minimal/no benefit in the end. "too lazy to use" doesn't seem like a common problem from what I've seen.

Not that the speed of an agent being able to experiment with this kind of thing isn't a benefit... but not how I would have thought to pose it.
by keeganpoppen | 2025-09-07 20:02:58+00:00
in that same vein, “nothing runs before main” is actually an extremely based take. i suppose this is another take informed by my python (mis-)adventures, but it is so unfortunate that you don’t have just a liiittle more flexibility in terms of the order that code, imports, etc. are evaluated. it is hard for me to give a concise answer as to why i felt this pain, but it is an idea that immediately feels like respite, and gives programmers more leverage / lattitude in making libraries / other code simpler and ergonomic.
by zrobotics | 2025-09-07 20:03:45+00:00
If you're in north America (probably elsewhere, but I can only say for NA) then changing the thermostat is super simple to do. If your system is 24v, which is very likely, then swapping the nest device for something better isn't too complicated. I can't provide a brand recommendation, but I'd find a thermostat that supports homeassistant and has a reverse engineered API available.

Directly controlling the HVAC with a relay board would also be very doable, but is a more involved project.
by appellations | 2025-09-07 20:04:09+00:00
Apple has a history of adding sensors, security chips, etc. a few revisions before the feature they support launches. It’s a really good idea because it helps them sort out the supply chain, reliability, drivers, etc. without any customer impact. It decouples the risks of the hardware project from the risks of the software project.

If things go particularly well you get to launch the feature on multiple hardware revisions at once because the first deployment of the component worked great, which is a neat trick.