MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aatd86 | 2025-09-05 17:10:06+00:00
The problem doesn't seem to be typed errors the way you describe it, but using an enum or a finite union. Go has solved this by having the error interface as the default common error supertype across the type system and ecosystem for instance. That doesn't preclude having finite subsets where it matters. Now if for some reason you have to add new failure modes, probably that the library should bump its version.

Java's checked exception issue is probably another problem altogether. I'd tend to say control flow issue perhaps?
by ksec | 2025-09-05 17:10:24+00:00
* “We care very deeply about games,” he said. “Not just the Arcade team, it’s across the company.”*

>But the idea that Apple cares “very deeply” about games? It’s pretty hard to stomach that after all these years.

Apple cares very deeply about gaming revenue. Which represent anywhere from 70% to 80% of App Store income.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-05 17:10:30+00:00
It might be kind of interesting to see a well-done usability study around animations. I tend to assume they are pretty useless, but I guess I can see some point in drawing the eye from a button you press, to some UI component that it generates.

OTOH, it isn’t clear what the baseline should be. The easy way to do an incorrect study would just be to toggle off animations and have the very dynamic design with components popping into existence without any hints. But, that’s flawed, a UI made from the ground up with the assumption of “no animations” should just be less dynamic, rendering the whole concern moot…
by defen | 2025-09-05 17:10:35+00:00
I want to make it clear that we're not having an object-level discussion about this. This is not about "the actual stated policy" of the Democratic party. This is also not about "are those policies good or bad". It is not about my own views on those topics. So when I tell you my perception of other people's perception, please don't come back and say the equivalent "that's not actually what they said" or "yeah but that's a good policy." You might think that my perception of the electorate at large is inaccurate, and that's fine - it's purely based on vibes and anecdotal conversations with people.

The issue is trust. Why should voters trust that Kamala Harris will implement immigration policies they want? Why should they expect her not to yield to the most extreme elements in her party, which believe that borders are a fiction and should not exist? Look at Barack Obama's "evolution" on gay marriage over the course of his political career. Now take an issue that is far more important than gay marriage - how is she going to stop unlimited unskilled immigration? How is she going to stop fraudulent claims of refugee status? How is the whole immigration problem itself going to be solved, if you posit that every one of the 10 million "unauthorized immigrants", and every one of the refugee claimants, needs multiple appearances in court to resolve their situation?
by xmddmx | 2025-09-05 17:10:37+00:00
Good points this wasn't entirely a protobuf-specific issue, so much as it was a (likely hierarchical and historical set of) bad decisions to use it at all.

Using Protobuffers for a few KB of metadata, when the photo library otherwise is taking multiple GB of data, is just pennywise pound foolish.

Of course, even my preference for a simple JSON string would be problematic: data in a database really should be stored properly normalized to a separate table and fields.

My guess is that protobuffers did play a role here in causing this poor design. I imagine this scenario:

- Photos.app wants to look up location data

- the server returns structured data in a ProtoBuffer

- there's no easy or reasonable way to map a protobuf to database fields (one point of TFA)

- Surrender! just store the binary blob in SQLITE and let the next poor sod deal with it
by glenstein | 2025-09-05 17:10:39+00:00
> It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."

Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.

So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.

So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
by MattGrommes | 2025-09-05 17:10:58+00:00
"confused" is a pretty generous reading of the situation. They just don't want anyone here from outside the US. Or anyone who isn't white, really. If they don't have a justification for kicking someone out they'll make one up or just use it as a way of scaring other people. Too many hispanic people are being picked up outside their immigration court hearings or lawyer's offices while trying to immigrate "the right way" for it to be confusion or coincidence.
by keybored | 2025-09-05 17:11:09+00:00
In my experience people who at the same time, “no I don’t [care], actually”, and who squash their PRs as a matter of policy do not care and cannot be convinced to care.

Like the GP said

> > If not, it doesn’t matter.

You might as well just conclude that it’s subjective since there’s no progress to be made.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-09-05 17:11:24+00:00
When the history of the end of the U.S. is written,

You and people like You who are carrying so much water for Dear Leader will be held responsible.

Even Dear Leader doesn’t deserve the opprobrium you and your fellow fluffers deserve given that he is doing exactly what he said he would do before you said “Sir, with tears in my eyes, give it to me harder please”.
by BoredPositron | 2025-09-05 17:11:36+00:00
We certainly have different opinions. You still have 100 API calls every 24 hours. Sorry but I would see it as abusive if my API would be hammered with over 300-1000 requests per day for the status of a damn car like some in the GitHub comments were doing.

It probably was someone else in the so sorry for the misunderstanding about the no idea stuff.

tbh I am over it there is no reasoning with people that actively want to abuse systems so they can rice their home assistant dashboard and cry about getting rate limited so they can only update their car status every 15 minutes if they want 24 hours coverage. It's not normal use. hf gl
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-05 17:12:11+00:00
The threshold of supervision keeps rising - and it's going to keep rising.

GPT-2 was barely capable of writing two lines of code. GPT-3.5 could write a simple code snippet, and be right more often than it was wrong. GPT-4 was a leap over that, enabling things like "vibe coding" for small simple projects, and GPT-5 is yet another advancement in the same direction. Each AI upgrade brings forth more capabilities - with every upgrade, the AI can go further before it needs supervision.

I can totally see the amount of supervision an AI needs collapsing to zero within our lifetimes.
by flail | 2025-09-05 17:12:31+00:00
Oh, I agree that in many companies, internally, we create perceptions that development is, indeed, THE bottleneck.

VP of Product put all the pressure on dev teams to deliver all the features against the specs. Then they release the new product/new version with plenty of fanfare.

And then literally no one measures which parts have actually delivered any value. I'd bet a big part of that code added no value, so it's a pure waste. Some other parts were actually harmful. They frustrated users, drove key metrics down, or have you. They are worse than waste.

But no one cared to check. Good product people, and there are scarcely few of them, would follow up with validation on what worked and what did not. They would argue against "major" releases whenever possible.

And seriously, if Amazon can avoid major releases, almost anyone could.

Suddenly, we might flip the script and have a VP of Product not asking "when will it be done?" but rather trying to figure out what the next most sensible experiments are.
by scottlamb | 2025-09-05 17:12:38+00:00
> The list of supported software is astounding: CPython, SQLite, OpenSSH, ICU, CMake, Perl5, and Bash, for example. There are a lot of things in that list that nobody is likely to ever rewrite in Rust.

Interestingly, I agree with your point in general that there's a lot of software that Fil-C might be a good fit for, but I hesitate to say that about any of the examples you listed:

* CPython and Perl5 are the runtimes for notoriously slow GCed languages, and adding the overhead of a second GC seems...inelegant at best, and likely to slow things down a fair bit more.

* Some of them do have reimplementations or viable alternatives in Rust (or Go or the like) underway, like Turso for SQLite.

* More generally, I'd call these foundational, widely-used, actively maintained pieces of software, so it seems plausible to me that they will decide to RiiR.

I think the best fit may be for stuff that's less actively maintained and less performance-critical. There's 50 years of C programs that people still dig out of the attic sometime but aren't putting that much investment into and are running on hardware vastly more powerful than these programs were written for.
by notahacker | 2025-09-05 17:13:15+00:00
I think the flip side is that whilst Trump's personal quirks and appeal might be unique, half the American polity unquestioningly does his bidding and endorses his insanity and it's not like his positions on the rest of the world are particularly unpopular or institutional trust and credible business-friendly conservatives are going to magically appear out of the ether when he's gone. The long view might not look like "Trump's boot trying to stomp on you forever", but it doesn't look like "America is a trustworthy ally, especially in business" either. It isn't going to stop the world from suckling on the US money teat, but it is going to make them a lot more selective about if and when they do so.
by conartist6 | 2025-09-05 17:13:23+00:00
I think most engineers know that doing everything right is reserved for toy problems. In engineering you're always making choices about what problems to deal with today and which to leave for tomorrow. Code is always some kind of simplification of reality: reality is just too damn complicated. The rules of the game of tech debt are the same as the rules of thermodynamics and the game of being alive: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even stop playing the game.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-09-05 17:13:26+00:00
But this is something you should be able to handle on a case-by-case basis. If you have a type which is stored durably as protobuf then adding required fields is much harder. But if you are just dealing with transient rpc messages then it can be done relatively easily in a two step process. First you add the field as optional and then once all producers are upgraded (and setting the new field), make it required. It's annoying for sure but still seems better than having everything optional always and needing to deal with that in application code everywhere.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-05 17:13:53+00:00
> Until you do the math and realize that the 3-4 annual trips of multiple days would end up costing thousands of dollars in rental fees per year.

First, 3-4 annual multi-day trips that go for longer than 300 km? If one has that amount of disposable income to afford that, go for whatever the biggest Tesla is and use Superchargers along the route, even drives so long they're a safety issue on its own due to fatigue don't get that much longer due to charging because kids will need to go to the toilet every so often even with an ICE.

As for the rental fees: here in Germany, I just checked - a Mercedes Benz Vito, so up to 8 people (or 6 people plus a ton of luggage), that's 50€ a day here. Crossing four digits takes 20 days of rental, that's a lot of vacation time even by European standards.
by summerlight | 2025-09-05 17:13:59+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18190005

Just FYI: an obligatory comment from the protobuf v2 designer.

Yeah, protobuf has lots of design mistakes but this article is written by someone who does not understand the problem space. Most of the complexity of serialization comes from implementation compatibility between different timepoints. This significantly limits design space.
by giardini | 2025-09-05 17:14:03+00:00
BeetleB says "The rest of the ones are where CEOs are simply using AI as an excuse to execute layoffs (i.e. the work isn't actually being done by an LLM)."

So lay people off to reduce costs, say that they have been replaced by AI now, and the stockholders love you even more!

Indeed, a model that should cascade thru American businesses quickly.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-05 17:15:09+00:00
I believe the point of this is:

1. Chaos - it’s good for kleptocracy, and is a denial-of-service attack on our attention

2. The appearance of something being done. Dems represent the status quo, people are sick of the status quo. Something appearing to happen is better than the status quo for a lot of people. Biden deported ~2x more people in 2024 than trump has so far. ICE raids are a performance.

3. Like everything else they do, it’s a shakedown. You want protection from the raids and the chaos? Come kiss the ring of your local maga don.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-09-05 17:15:29+00:00
>It is possible to do leetcode without practicing, even before AI

Back when people did in person interviews, people were writing psuedocode on whiteboards, so knowing the right algorithm and being a strong programmer was necessary, and I can see how one might not need to practice.

However, with the move to online interviews where people are expecting running and debugging some complex solutions (so you cannot hand wave trivial but potentially time consuming helper methods), coding speed can easily become the bottleneck.

> 2) give a lot of preparation to candidates beforehand, even for non-leetcode interviews, as it helps filter who can efficiently and diligently use provided information to increase their performance.

Yes, this reminds me of the netflix interview process where they told me to read the culture packet thoroughly, then quizzed me on it! It was quite easy, but you can bet that a lof candidates don't take that seriously.
by kayxspre | 2025-09-05 17:16:27+00:00
Discussion about Wikipedia not actually being in financial jeopardy has been around for some time, and I remember reading about it at least once a year, during the donation banner season. Here are a few sources that discuss them.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

[2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...

[3] https://archive.ph/CClQ6 (this is a Washington Post article. I'm using the Archived link as it's paywall-free)
by mikepavone | 2025-09-05 17:16:30+00:00
If you compare it to the commuter rail systems in those places, BART feels impressive (though less so with the service cuts). I was a regular rider on the Metro North New Haven line and had experience with SEPTA and NJT commuter rail and I was really impressed with BART when I moved out here. Peak frequency was pretty good (at least on the Red line I primarily used) and when things were on time they were very on-time ("on-time" Metro North trains were always at least a few minutes late in my experience).

If you compare it to the NYC subway, it's obviously not impressive at all (though the tech is less dated). As a rapid-transit system, BART isn't exactly a commuter rail or subway system exactly, but I think it's closer to the former than the latter.
Ask HN: What Does a Social Media Analytic Want and Do?
by bpavuk | 2025-09-05 17:16:41+00:00
I want to build a social media analytics toolkit for Bluesky (and possibly expand it to every social thing I use) just because I can. I have a crapload of time, and I want to put it into building a tool for a domain I don't quite understand with people that do understand. It all comes down to a question, which data does a user need and in which wrap?

So, I'm asking it - what do you measure, plot, and derive as a social media analytic? What would you if you were one?
by zamalek | 2025-09-05 17:16:52+00:00
As a huge fan of podman this is definitely one of my disappointments. In the event that you're still struggling with this, the answer is using a --user systemd quadlet. You'll need to use machinectl (machinectl shell <user>@.host) for systemd commands to work, and you'll want to enable linger for that user.

One thing which just occurred to me, maybe it's possible to have a [container] and a [service].user in a quadlet?
by tarxvf | 2025-09-05 17:16:59+00:00
I don't think it's at risk of being overstatement. CW bands are more crowded than ever before, because there are more CW ops than ever before.

This is, I think, because it's easier to learn than ever, ham radio equipment is more capable for a cheaper (adjusted) price, and ham radio has grown tremendously worldwide due to all barriers being lowered a bit.

CW is very popular, especially given all the other options that are easier.

That it's a smaller percentage of hams that know CW than before is another way of saying ham radio has expanded well beyond CW and the population has grown. But if you have a finite resource (bandwidth) and it's in significantly more demand than ever before, it's a hard argument to suggest that it's not 'very' active.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-05 17:17:49+00:00
> It was actually a problem with the plug in the garage, it must have gone off a few minutes after I plugged it in. Now what? Wait 16 more hours?

So what, that's something you find out once that your electric installation is shoddy enough to most likely be a fire risk (because the charger plug has a thermal protection built in!), fix it and then you won't have that problem again. And as the Leaf should have 150 miles worth of range, you still should have way more than enough range on the battery to do two days worth of commute even if you suddenly find out the trickle charge didn't work.
by klodolph | 2025-09-05 17:17:51+00:00
Protobuffers suck as a core data model. My take? Use them as a serialization and interchange format, nothing more.

> This puts us in the uncomfortable position of needing to choose between one of three bad alternatives:

I don’t think there is a good system out there that works for both serialization and data models. I’d say it’s a mostly unsolved problem. I think I am happy with protobufs. I know that I have to fight against them contaminating the codebase—basically, your code that uses protobufs is code that directly communicates over raw RPC or directly serializes data to/from storage, and protobufs shouldn’t escape into higher-level code.

But, and this is a big but, you want that anyway. You probably WANT your serialization to be able to evolve independently of your application logic, and the easy way to do that is to use different types for each. You write application logic using types that have all sorts of validation (in the "parse, don't validate" sense) and your serialization layer uses looser validation. This looser validation is nice because you often end up with e.g. buggy code getting shipped that writes invalid data, and if you have a loose serialization layer that just preseves structure (like proto or json), you at least have a good way to munge it into the right shape.

Evolving serialized types has been such a massive pain at a lot of workplaces and the ad-hoc systems I've seen often get pulled into adopting some of the same design choices as protos, like "optional fields everywhere" and "unknown fields are ok". Partly it may be because a lot of ex-Google employees are inevitably hanging around on your team, but partly because some of those design tradeoffs (not ALL of them, just some of them) are really useful long-term, and if you stick around, you may come to the same conclusion.

In the end I mostly want something that's a little more efficient and a little more typed than JSON, and protos fit the bill. I can put my full efforts into safety and the "correct" representation at a different layer, and yes, people will fuck it up and contaminate the code base with protos, but I can fix that or live with it.
by Buuntu | 2025-09-05 17:18:09+00:00
Everyone here blaming BART and bureaucracy for being inefficient when in reality it's starved for funding due to our own voting (and zoning preventing housing/badly needed ridership near transit stops). Yes it's expensive to build transit just like it's expensive to build anything in America, which we should fix but that is not unique to BART.

It's quite possible the system will collapse next year if we don't pass increased taxes to fund it in 2026 https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis.

Just last year we failed to pass a common sense bill to make it so we only need a 51% majority for transit bills in the future, indicative of how opposed we still are to transit in the Bay Area https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-proposi....

Not to mention the fact that Silicon Valley opted out of BART and chose car dependent sprawl instead.

So let's be clear, most of the issues with BART are due to anti-transit and suburban voters starving it of support.
by candiddevmike | 2025-09-05 17:18:13+00:00
This is a really well written article and contains references to back up the claims made. This part was mind blowing though:

> Cursor sends 100% of their revenue to Anthropic, who then takes that money and puts it into building out Claude Code, a competitor to Cursor. Cursor is Anthropic's largest customer. Cursor is deeply unprofitable, and was that way even before Anthropic chose to add "Service Tiers," jacking up the prices for enterprise apps like Cursor.
by kerblang | 2025-09-05 17:18:30+00:00
Journalists & executives see you as a sort of savant who spends all your time encoding & decoding the little bits and bytes - mostly a construction worker. They correctly recognize that we ought to be able to build some sort of robot that does this for you - why do it by hand?

They don't understand that this AI was built decades ago and has been improved on several times over: Compilers & Interpreters. Furthermore, you don't need billion-dollar neural-network supercomputers, just a vanilla laptop.

It's because of how you talk about the job, though. We automate every other kind of "coding" - why can't we automate yours?
by nabla9 | 2025-09-05 17:18:30+00:00
Based on the information in that article, the proposed compensation is fair. Tesla’s current business is worth perhaps 10-15% of its market value, the rest is future hopes and promises. If Musk can increase the price by 8x in 10 years, he earned it.

I think changes of Tesla being valued even $1.1 trillion decade from now are not that good.