MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IanCal | 2025-09-10 13:21:03+00:00
> My company deals with a lot of CSV and we literally built tools and hire multiple full time employees whose entire job is handling CSV sucking in new and interesting ways.

Truly shocking how many ways people manage to construct these files. I don't think people really get this if they've mostly been moving files from one system to another and not dealing with basically the union of horrors all the various systems that write CSV can make.

> Parquet literally eliminates 1/2 of our our data ingestion pipeline simply by being typed, consistent, and fast to query.

Parquet has been a huge step forwards. It's not perfect, but it is really good. Most improvements I'd like actually are served well stepping up from that to groups of them in larger tables.

> One example of a problem we constantly run into is that nobody likes to format numbers the same way. Scientific notation, no scientific notation, commas or periods, sometimes mixed formats (scientific notation when a number is big enough, for example).

That's a new one on me, but makes loads of sense. Dates were my issue - you hit 13/2/2003 and 5/16/2001 in the same file. What date is 1/2/2003?

For anyone that's never dealt with this before, let me paint a picture -

You have a programming language you're working in. You import new packages every single day, written by people you start to consider adversarial after a few weeks in the job.

You need to keep your system running, with new imports added every day.

There are only string types. Nothing more. You must interpret them correctly.

This is an understatement for what CSV files coming from random customers actually means. I did it for a decade and was constantly shocked at what new and inventive ways people had to mess up a simple file.

> I'd take xml over CSV.

Not to rag on xml but because it feels like you're in or have been in the same boat as me and it's nice to share horror stories - I've had to manually dig through a multi gig xml file to deal with parsing issues as somewhere somehow someone managed to combine files of different encodings and we had control characters embedded in. Just a random ^Z here and there. It's been years so I don't remember the details of exactly how we reconstructed what had happened but there was something due to encodings and mixing things together that messed it up.

This isn't xmls fault, and was a smaller example but since then I've had a strong mistrust of anything that lets humans manipulate files outside of something that can validate them as being parsable.

Also would take XML over CSV.
by m-watson | 2025-09-10 13:21:10+00:00
Here is the actual RSL website [0] and announcement [1]

"RSL is an open, decentralized protocol, based on the widely adopted RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard, that scales to millions of websites and can be applied to any digital content, including web pages, books, videos, and datasets."

[0] https://rslcollective.org/ [1] https://rslstandard.org/press/rsl-standard
by raincole | 2025-09-10 13:21:15+00:00
While HN users have various backgrounds, I suppose programmers make up quite a large proportion of this community.

Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.
by hylaride | 2025-09-10 13:22:21+00:00
Offshoring can be a success, but because most companies do it for cost reasons, they focus on cost over everything. Outsourcing to India can be cheaper than setting up shop in the western world for relatively equivalent results, but most companies will head to the cheapest outsourcers in India AND not set up the relatively expensive process to deal with quality control, timezone issues, etc. In other words, it's usually driven by bean counters and not engineers.
by atwrk | 2025-09-10 13:22:24+00:00
Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.
by knorker | 2025-09-10 13:22:40+00:00
> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.

I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.

> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.

The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".

I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
by simonmorley | 2025-09-10 13:22:47+00:00
Yeah, exactly. It isn't. At one point, someone in their team sent me a internal DDOS audit for the sui application. And basically said "no problems". Erm.

What’s ironic is that Aptos (their supposed arch nemesis) came back clean as a whistle on our first pass. Yet it’s Sui always "out there winning" because of their massive marketing spend.

That said, I started publishing the node scores to the blockchain and someone did ask me if they should move their staked funds from one that was sub-standard.... Yes, you should.
by dml2135 | 2025-09-10 13:23:01+00:00
> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-09-10 13:23:21+00:00
I'm not referring to the gap between the countries, I was focused on the historic development of the one population.

The old paradigm produced results(arguably?), but was "gutted". By this train of reasoning, this old, and still "current" teaching paradigm simply does not work without violent coercion is the point I was really trying to drive.
by tirant | 2025-09-10 13:23:22+00:00
It's not about being bigger, but having high population density.

Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.

Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.

It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.

The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.

A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
by Ajedi32 | 2025-09-10 13:23:33+00:00
Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.

The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-10 13:23:36+00:00
>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.

You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
by bko | 2025-09-10 13:23:44+00:00
I think it's naive to think that management would push something so unpopular and expensive just because some kind of emotional attachment or to help some other unrelated commercial property owners.

I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.

It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
by nathan_compton | 2025-09-10 13:23:53+00:00
IF ONLY MY PHONE WERE THINNER, I SCREAM INTO THE VOID.

Ok, to not be totally glib, I think my reaction to this is coming from a place where, if I made a big list of every single thing I want in a phone, "thinner" would be at the bottom.

I want more freedom to do what I want with my phone, primarily to stop it from spying on my activity to give information to advertisers. I would get a phone twice as thick as my current phone if I could just use it to tell advertisers and information brokers and monopolies to f-OFF with it. I do not care about this and I hate that thousands of man hours and millions of dollars are going into this shit.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-10 13:23:54+00:00
1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.

3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.

Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.
by penguin_booze | 2025-09-10 13:23:56+00:00
Apple is the pioneer of 'expensive is the new cool' phenomenon. Like the pied piper, with every release, Apple keep leading the fan boys to jump off progressively taller cliffs. Meanwhile, other manufacturers realized that they, too, can play this game. Rather, they gets looked down upon if they don't amp up their prices. It's amazing to witness this happening.

Economists knew this phenomenon well before, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good.
by quitit | 2025-09-10 13:24:02+00:00
I think the apple watch fills that role now. The watch is easier to carry for activities, while reproducing the core functions of the phone (music/podcasts, payments, messages/urgent notifications), leaving little reason to check the phone at all. Also the combination of not possessing the iphone's more distracting elements, and the way that it's tiring to hold the arm upwards+inwards for an extended period probably also help keep the wearer focused on their task.

I see the difference often in the gym. The people with smart watches for music aren't getting distracted from their workouts, while the people with their phones for music tend to take long pauses, or even get caught up watching tiktok/stories/reels.
by throwaway6977 | 2025-09-10 13:24:11+00:00
I just spent a lot of yesterday tweaking a docker image with xfce and vs code so I can just let codex go full access mode without too much worry in a throwaway sandbox. The agent runs similarly-namespace-constrained and without sudo. I think it's a relatively safe middleground- do you really think container escape is still a big deal here?

Finally getting this setup also allowed me to very quickly troubleshoot what was breaking my build in the codex cloud hosted container which obviously has even less risk attached.

Now I'm juggling and strategizing branches like coding is an RTS game... and it feels like a super power. It's almost like unlocking an undiscovered tech tree.
by sebstefan | 2025-09-10 13:24:15+00:00
There's simply not enough space in a city to accommodate everyone's car. Houston is 70% roads+parking lots and they're still congested

Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-10 13:24:25+00:00
The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/

The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.

The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.

So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).
by brianshaler | 2025-09-10 13:24:28+00:00
In 2008 I was given 2 offers from a company: WFH or paid relocation to work in-office. I chose the former, which came with a 26% lower salary, and have been remote ever since. Just comparing the salaries in that case is a little disingenuous, however, since the relocation was from a low cost of living city to a high cost of living city.

A large impact on the extent to which WFH may need to come at a discount is specialization: If you're easily replaceable with an in-office worker, why would the company deal with remote? If you're not so easily replaceable, the company is more likely to be willing to work with you on your terms.

There's generally been a large disconnect between the job market in the tech sector and the rest of the economy, at least until a few years ago. There's now much more of a bifurcation within the tech job market, where rank-and-file and entry level software engineers are suffering while experienced and specialized software engineers may be doing better than ever. This plays into the RTO/WFH discussion because some people may not have the option to get their preference at any discount, or given either option in the first place.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-10 13:24:31+00:00
>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.

I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
by notTooFarGone | 2025-09-10 13:24:37+00:00
>Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car

if everyone is driving, noone is. This is simple game theory and a system fault happens when there are too many cars. You can't widen city streets.

For example: public transportation in NY is often faster and cheaper than a car + parking.
by tolerance | 2025-09-10 13:25:13+00:00
I like your extension of the term “readers” but I don’t think that’s the intended use for this matter. And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?

> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?

That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”

And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.

The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.

If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.

How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
by Sophira | 2025-09-10 13:25:14+00:00
That's potentially different, to be fair. Websites are generally made with the intention of making them public, and unless you're digging through stuff that hasn't been made public, there's nothing wrong with browsing your customers' websites and talking about it. (Of course, maybe that's what the Hostgator employee was doing - in which case, shame on them.)

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the person who installed Huntress did not intend to upload any info at all, let alone to have that information made public.
by Newlaptop | 2025-09-10 13:25:16+00:00
8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.
by rollcat | 2025-09-10 13:25:19+00:00
This.

At $PAST_DAYJOB we've adopted Docker "only" around 2016, and importantly, we've used it almost identically to how we used to deploy "plain" uWSGI or Apache apps: a bunch of VMs, run some Ansible roles, pull the code (now image), restart, done.

The time to move to k8s is when you have a k8s-sized problem. [Looks at Github: 760 releases, 3866 contributors.] Yeah, not now.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-10 13:25:19+00:00
Most schools here have those too. The problem is in the United States children are treated just a hair better than chattel slaves and their parents can basically do anything they want up to the line of actually killing them, and the state does very little.

And, even in the cases where the state should and could do something, the line for those services is incredibly long and the child will be properly fucked up by the time they get to the front.
by IanCal | 2025-09-10 13:25:53+00:00
Love it.

The first data release I did excel couldn't open the CSV file, because it started with a capital I (first column ID). Excel looks at this, looks at this file with a comma in the header and text and the ending "csv" and says

I KNOW WHAT THIS IS

THIS IS A SYLK FILE

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH "I"

NO OTHER POSSIBLE FILE COULD START WITH THE LETTER "I"

then reads some more and says

THIS SYLK FILE LOOKS WRONG

IT MUST BE BROKEN

ERROR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Link_(SYLK)
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-09-10 13:26:06+00:00
On the other hand I had unlimited video games which boomers were certain was going to doom me, yet it was fine, and I'm fine. My kid's watch less YouTube than I played NHL 93 at their age tbh.

> $14/mo is a lot just for brainrot so you can listen to your kid shout "skibidi Ohio sigma rizz" all the time

They'll get that from school, most of them aren't watching a YouTube vid and inventing culture, they're just picking it up. Like every other generation
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-10 13:26:11+00:00
I've basically switched to Linux. The bar is insanely low for me with Microsoft, get rid of all the telemetry bull#@$@# or make it easy for me to disable it without having to run obscure github scripts.

I have 0 telemetry on Arch Linux.

Assuming Apple itself doesn't bypass Little Snitch, I don't even think Apple is doing the level of telemetry Microsoft does.

I bought a Mac for my next laptop, and I have 0 need for Windows, I have been maining Linux for like six years now, and anything that needs me to use Windows is usually also available on Mac.

Your move Microsoft. Give me an OS for power users that isn't full of marketing driven development.
by pixelpoet | 2025-09-10 13:26:18+00:00
Nice article, haven't seen this one yet! I was fortunate to be the first to render the Mandelbulb, there are some nice articles by the person who originally described the formula, Daniel White: https://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbrot.html and https://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html
by thinkharderdev | 2025-09-10 13:26:37+00:00
> I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.

Maybe, but I find it hard to believe that someone who has spent their entire career in the tech industry actually believes this.

The "backdoor layoffs" theory seems suspect to me more generally. It's not like they're particularly averse to doing layoffs the normal way. Especially now where the signal from big tech company doing layoffs is "we're really good at AI".