MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-10-13 23:41:45+00:00
I've seen this called "agentic RAG" by some people. The easiest way to get a local demo is with Claude Code or Codex CLI. They know how to use grep, and you can set them loose on a folder full of text files and tell them to use grep to answer questions - it can work really well.

I just tried this in "claude --dangerously-skip-permissions":

> Use Python and AppleScript to find Apple Notes that mention UPS

... and fell down a rabbit hole of optimizations because my Notes collection is HUGE, but it got there in the end!
by shtzvhdx | 2025-10-13 23:42:02+00:00
The British, French and Israelis literally went to war against Egypt over the Suez.

They only backed up when the US told the Brits and France they would tank their economies still on US life support.

And, pray, why did the Machado win the hypocrisy prize on Friday? Why are American ships outside the waters of Venezuela?
by crazygringo | 2025-10-13 23:42:28+00:00
But are those really the root causes?

An inflexible timeline is a constraint that is often valid -- e.g. if you have to launch a product meant for classrooms before the school year begins.

So then the real question becomes, why wasn't work scoped accordingly? Why weren't features simplified or removed once it became clear there wouldn't be time to deliver them all working correctly? There's a failure of process there that is the root cause.

Similarly, with "incentives are misaligned", that's fuzzy. A real root cause might be around managing time spent on bugfixes vs new feature, and the root cause is not dedicating enough time to bugfixes, and if that's because people aren't being promoted for those, it's about fixing the promotion process in a concrete way.

You can't usually just stop at fuzzy cultural/management things because you want to blame others.
by andy99 | 2025-10-13 23:42:40+00:00
I’ll bite - I could care less about speed, that feels like a talking point I see often repeated despite other package managers not being particularly slow. Maybe there’s some workload I’m missing that this is more important for?

I’ve tried uv a couple places where it’s been forced on me, and it didn’t work for whatever reason. I know thats anecdotal and I’m sure it mostly works, but it obviously was off putting. For better or worse I know how to use conda, and despite having to special attachment to it, slightly faster with a whole different set of rough edges is not at all compelling.

I have a feeling this is some kind of Rust fan thing and that’s where the push comes from, to try and insinuate it into more people’s workflows.

I’d like to hear a real reason I would ever migrate to it, and honestly if there isn’t one, am super annoyed about having it forced on me.
by zahlman | 2025-10-13 23:43:00+00:00
1. Age; there are absurd amounts of legacy cruft. Every time you have a better idea about how to do things, you have to agonize over whether you'll be allowed to remove the old way. And then using the old ways ends up indirectly causing problems for people using the new ways.

2. There is tons of code in the Python ecosystem not written in Python. One of the most popular packages, NumPy, depends on dozens of megabytes of statically compiled C and Fortran code.

3. Age again; things were designed in an era before the modern conception of a "software ecosystem", so there was nobody imagining that one day you'd be automatically fetching all the transitive dependencies and trying to build them locally, perhaps using build systems that you'd also fetch automatically.

4. GvR didn't seem to appreciate the problem fully in the early 2010s, which is where Conda came from.

5. Age again. Old designs overlooked some security issues and bootstrapping issues (this ties into all the previous points); in particular, it was (and still is) accepted that because you can include code in any language and all sorts of weird build processes, the "build the package locally" machinery needs to run arbitrary code. But that same system was then considered acceptable for pure-Python packages for many years, and the arbitrary code was even used to define metadata. And in that code, you were expected to be able to use some functionality provided by a build system written in Python, e.g. in order to locate and operate a compiler. Which then caused bootstrapping problems, because you couldn't assume that your users had a compatible version of the main build system (Setuptools) installed, and it had to be installed in the same environment as the target for package installation. So you also didn't get build isolation, etc. It was a giant mess.

5a. So they invented a system (using pyproject.toml) that would address all those problems, and also allow for competition from other build back-ends. But the other build back-end authors mostly wanted to make all-in-one tools (like Poetry, and now, er, uv); and meanwhile it was important to keep compatibility, so a bunch of defaults were chosen that enabled legacy behaviour — and ended up giving old packages little to no reason to fix anything. Oh, and also they released the specification for the "choose the build back-end system" and "here's how installers and build back-ends communicate" years before the specification for "human-friendly input for the package metadata system".
by next_xibalba | 2025-10-13 23:43:21+00:00
From what I can find for the 2024 presidential election:

Trump/Republicans spent a total of $2.13 billion vs. $3.37 billion by Harris/Dems. This is inclusive of "dark money".

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-tr...

[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-tr...

[3] https://www.campaignnow.com/blog/dems-outspent-gop-2-to-1

[4] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/dark...

[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/live-update/election-news-2024/...
by hinkley | 2025-10-13 23:43:39+00:00
Usually things like that have to end up in retrospectives, and the first thing I hated about Scrum (or maybe just the first Scrum team, though they tried really hard to follow the letter of the process) was that you basically had to know about a problem for 5-7 weeks before you could get anyone to act on it. Because the uncomfortable items had to repeat at least 3 times before people wanted to look at them.

This was and is torture to me. I'm not going to fuck something up on purpose just to make the paperwork look good if I can tell ten minutes in that this is a stupid way to do it and I should be doing something else first.
by sudodevnull | 2025-10-13 23:44:11+00:00
You think Datastar CEO is nothing beyond a joke. Oh I get it now, you have literally no idea about this space at all and are just a karma tourist farming for troll points. Sorry to feed you! Was hoping you'd actually engage with the values of the project. That is my fault and I apologize for keeping you fed. I will endure to be better in the future!
by astrange | 2025-10-13 23:45:07+00:00
> Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution

Economists are practically the only social scientists capable of doing this (even if it involves a lot of rainfall IVs). Everyone else p-hacks and calls it a day.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-13 23:45:12+00:00
Avoiding it altogether? Sure, that may be unrealistic. Minimizing it to a large degree? Definitely doable (we do it with 2 school age kids, or at least we think we do). But! it has to be a priority, and it takes time and money (we're not wealthy but we prioritize it in our spending and cut back on other things).
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-13 23:45:17+00:00
Sure looks like it. Expect more of this ultra processed "news" propaganda with all of the partisan hack trad and social media consolidation out to manufacture consent of low information scrolling consumers who then try to gaslight the sane into believing nonsense.

No one with a functioning brain believes for a second that HFCS-laden Mt Dew Code Red or Flamin' Hot Doritos Max XXXX Blast Ultra are health food.
by jdmichal | 2025-10-13 23:45:43+00:00
It's like bike shedding. It's a side effect of mixed expertise (and confidence) working together on things that are only partially understood by all. When something is clearly outside one's expertise, they are content to leave it to others. But then you'll get minor questions with low stakes like "what color to paint the shed". And how everyone feels like they can participate, so suddenly there's a huge discussion / debate / argument about a very, very minor thing.
by anitil | 2025-10-13 23:46:05+00:00
> Besides, if credit quality keeps you up at night, you should be much more concerned about bog-standard commercial real estate loans.

I hope that this means there's a followup article coming down the pipe! I have heard of a little bit of weirdness in commercial lending here in Sydney where prices are a fixed multiple of the current rent. That means that is sometimes makes sense to leave a property empty rather than leasing it out at a lower rate, which would devalue the asset pool. Somehow zero is better, who would've guessed.
by crdrost | 2025-10-13 23:46:09+00:00
This is what's nice about Pkl, you define a schema as a Pkl file, you define a value of that schema as a Pkl file that imports the schema, `pkl eval my file.pkl` will do the type check and output yaml for visual inspection or programmatic processing, but keeping it to one file per module means that I almost never obsessively D-R-Y my Pkl configs.

Actually that's not the biggest benefit (which is tests for schemas) but it's nice to have the “.ts” file actually log the actual config as JSON and then the app consumes it as JSON, rather than importing the .ts file and all its dependencies and having weird things like “this configuration property expects a lambda.”
by crazygringo | 2025-10-13 23:46:12+00:00
> I'd also have kicked back a doc that was mostly about blaming the other team.

Agreed. If the test team messed up, then you need to answer the "why" your team didn't verify that the testing had actually been done. (And also why the team hadn't verified that the tool they'd sent to testing was even minimally functional to begin with.)

Five whys are necessarily scoped to a set of people responsible. For things that happen outside that scope, the whys become about selection and verification.
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-13 23:46:27+00:00
The older I get the less I care to believe in memes that float around, if everyone online memes about how horrible some product or brand supposedly is. In fact, the more prevalent the memeing is, the more I assume it's either manufactured or has just reached critical level of viral meme where now everyone repeats something simply because everyone else says it.

What percentage of people shitting on some brand actually have owned that brand for many years? And also owned other brands for many years, to be able to compare reliability and have any sort of informed opinion on the topic?

Things like Consumer Reports are just small surveys of the opinion of random members of the population, what they think about the brand, there's no connection to any objective reality about how reliable they vehicles actually are.

In the past I've tried to find a single study that actually compares objective reliability of brands. It does not exist. If you Google for it, everything you will find will eventually, at the bottom of it all, link back to the same Consumer Reports study.

I've owned a 2018 Wrangler for 6 years now, I've put 75k miles on it, many thousands of miles in the most remote places in the country, where if it had issues it'd be a 30 mile hike to safety. It's never once let me down in any way. Never once had a major problem. That's all I care about.
by cjflog | 2025-10-13 23:46:39+00:00
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I will look into Labdoor and their funding models. I'm definitely open to expanding to other types of testing if/when this project grows. I'm actually already able to test for nearly everything you'd want to check for in a consumable, I'm just keeping the focus of the public website on plastic chemicals for now to avoid feature creep and scope management issues.

I have considered creating specific ad-hoc campaign pages for folks with special interests and let them drive people to the page (like a more focused Kickstarter or GoFundMe with a lab on the back end).

If anyone has a special interest I'm happy to mock up what funding targets would be.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-13 23:46:40+00:00
uv is comparable to npm. All your deps get auto tracked in a file. There are other things that do this, but pip isn't one of them, and I vaguely remember the others being less convenient.

The speed usually doesn't matter, but one time I did have to use it to auto figure out compatible deps in a preexisting project because the pip equivalent with backtracking was taking forever with CPU pegged at 100.
by culi | 2025-10-13 23:46:40+00:00
Grieving orcas have been found to move their dead babies around for many weeks. Chimps will fetch plants like Scutia myrtina, which is toxic in large amounts but acts as a anthelmintics (anti-worm drug), for fellow members of their group when they're sick. Elephants will defend their wounded and even bring food or water to them or help them stand up when they're struggling to.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're absolutely right. These types of behaviors can be seen all throughout the animal world. Especially for animals showing degrees of eusociality.
by Groxx | 2025-10-13 23:47:19+00:00
I'm honestly kinda curious why nobody's blocking these IPs from sending data near the source.

Like, I can come up with plenty of possible reasons, and reasons why it could potentially be very bad if ISPs started cracking down on this, but I don't actually know any reasons.

Are any talking about why / why not? It seems like this whole insecure-IoT-device thing would probably dry up pretty quickly if people's internet was cut off when one was detected. They can then turn around and lambast / sue / etc the company that sold it, putting pressure on the source of the problem. Right now there's no reason for sellers to do anything at all to ensure security, afaict.

So... not actually arguing in favor of it, but definitely curious about any stated ISP / core networking system's stated reasons.
by cgearhart | 2025-10-13 23:47:40+00:00
I’ve been trying uv lately to replace my normal workflow of selecting a python with pyenv for the shell, then making a venv, then installing a bunch of default packages (pandas, Jupyter, etc). So far the only benefit is that I can use just the one tool for what used to take 3 (pyenv, venv, pip). I don’t _hate_ it…but it really isn’t much of an improvement.
by kragen | 2025-10-13 23:47:55+00:00
I'm so tired of this bullshit mystique around assembly: "you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly."

There's nothing insane about writing games or other programs in assembly language. It takes longer than writing them in C or JS, sure. Debugging them becomes more difficult. Sometimes you can achieve results that way you can't achieve in higher-level languages. But it's not some kind of superhuman wizardry. Assembly language is actually simpler than the higher-level languages. Virtually all videogames for the Nintendo were written in assembly. People have written entire operating systems in assembly.

It's not "brutal". It just takes longer, that's all. People like to set up hierarchies of languages based on what's more difficult, but I think that's kind of juvenile: teenage boy one-upmanship. Solving puzzles is fun, but anybody can learn to solve them.

Assembly-language programs can be beautiful. So can programs in any language. Usually they aren't.
by lelandbatey | 2025-10-13 23:48:24+00:00
I think it's also from trying to keep with the old paradigm of "libraries are installed and managed globally, potentially as linkable object files."

All the languages of today gain all their improvements from:

1. Nothing should be global, but if it is it's only a cache (and caches are safe to delete since they're only used as a performance optimization)

2. You have to have extremely explicit artifact versioning, which means everything needs checksums, which means mostly reproducible builds

3. The "blessed way" is to distribute the source (or a mostly-source dist) and compile things in; the happy path is not distributing pre-computed binaries

Now, everything I just said above is also wrong in many aspects or there's support for breaking any and all of the rules I just outlined, but in general, everything's built to adhere to those 3 rules nowadays. And what's crazy is that for many decades, those three rules above were considered absolutely impossible, or anti-patterns, or annoying, or a waste, etc (not without reason, but still we couldn't do it). That's what made package managers and package management so awful. That's why it was even possible to break things with `sudo pip install` vs `apt install`.

Now that we've abandoned the old ways in e.g. JS/Rust/Go and adopted the three rules, all kinds of delightful side effects fall out. Tools now which re-build a full dependency tree on-disk in the project directory are the norm (it's done automatically! No annoying bits! No special flags! No manual venv!). Getting serious about checksums for artifacts means we can do proper versioning, which means we can do aggressive caching of dependencies across different projects safely, which means we don't have to _actually_ have 20 copies of every dependency, one for each repo. It all comes from the slow distributed Gentoo/FreeBSD-ification of everything and it's great!
by hu3 | 2025-10-13 23:50:14+00:00
In my experience, tests help me refactor stuff and detect when I have broken some expected inplementation.

For example, I was refactoring a SQL query builder and tests told me my JOINs where no longer containing ON clause. Might seem trivial but multiply this by a large codebase and benefits increase.

Another thing is that when I write functions with tests in mind, they tend to be more maintenable and simpler because it's hard to test functions that to a ton of things and have many side effects.
by lordkrandel | 2025-10-13 23:50:23+00:00
Totally do not agree. Ethics and morals are tied to action. You cannot develop an AI tool without biases, you cannot develop GPL open source software without doing an act belonging to the left, you cannot ask for premium fees on your open core without doing something that belongs to the right. Just state your politic side, and do your work anyway for the benefit of every person, left or right.
by ziml77 | 2025-10-13 23:50:31+00:00
It really is!

I switched to using uv just 2 weeks ago. Previously I had been dealing with maintaining a ton of batch jobs that used: global packages (yes, sudo pip install), manually managed virtualenvs, and docker containers.

uv beats all of them easily. Automatically handling the virtualenv means running a project that uses uv feels as easy as invoking the system Python is.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-13 23:50:33+00:00
Of course, and that's very much the point.

If you get a bunch of analyses that point to underinvestment in x in order to achieve y, and you can measure that this is losing money, then the top level recalibrates.

It's not about blame, it's about course-correcting including at the top level. They can't do that course-correcting without these analyses.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-13 23:51:04+00:00
Yeah, it was quite disheartening.

I really wish Apple would go ahead and make a replacement for my Newton MessagePad....

As it is, rPi cyberdeck seems the best option --- waiting on a Soulcircuit Pilet from Kickstarter, and am considering swapping an rPi 5 into my Raspad v3 tablet shell for the nonce.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-13 23:51:05+00:00
Hard to say what Wave could've become, but in Google fashion, they didn't really try and threw it away. Maybe it could've become a Discord-like meets Zoom platform but with more integrations.

Honestly, I'd like to see something like a hosted FOSS Hubot (bot) for Signal that can tap into zillions of IoT and cloud integrations.
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-13 23:51:30+00:00
The absolutely insane thing about Yes is that (IMO) their best albums/best versions of their songs are the live ones, consistently. Something like the Yesshows version Gates of Delirium[0] with headphones can teleport you off completely into another universe until 15 minutes in where there's a lull and the crowd starts cheering and you remember this was a live recording, wtf. Yesshows and Yessongs are both mind-bending. Dean's artwork was perfect for Yes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPghboSkX6s&list=OLAK5uy_klz...
by bb88 | 2025-10-13 23:52:28+00:00
I've always respected PonyORM because of their level of hacking of the python language.

select(p for p in Product if p.name.startswith('A') and p.cost <= 1000)

PonyORM inspects the AST of the generator, and then translates that to SQL.

I feel like maybe something similar could happen to make the syntax more native for Amaranth.
by eslaught | 2025-10-13 23:52:32+00:00
Conda doesn't do lock files. If you look into it, the best you can do is freeze your entire environment. Aside from this being an entirely manual process, and thus having all the issues that manual processes bring, this comes with a few issues:

1. If you edit any dependency, you resolve the environment from scratch. There is no way to update just one dependency.

2. Conda "lock" files are just the hashes of the all the packages you happened to get, and that means they're non-portable. If you move from x86 to ARM, or Mac to Linux, or CPU to GPU, you have to throw everything out and resolve.

Point (2) has an additional hidden cost: unless you go massively out of your way, all your platforms can end up on different versions. That's because solving every environment is a manual process and it's unlikely you're taking the time to run through 6+ different options all at once. So if different users solve the environments on different days from the same human-readable environment file, there's no reason to expect them to be in sync. They'll slowly diverge over time and you'll start to see breakage because the versions diverge.

P.S. if you do want a "uv for Conda packages", see Pixi [1], which has a lot of the benefits of uv (e.g., lock files) but works out of the box with Conda's package ecosystem.

[1]: https://pixi.sh/latest/
by tingletech | 2025-10-13 23:52:33+00:00
I had an early job with an ISP that was similar, had modems in people's garages all over the county since this was when calling local could get expensive. The ISP was in the back of a computer store though. Once an ISP customer came into the store. I was just answering phones in the back room, but they sent me to the floor to talk to the customer. I was wearing sandals, and the sales manager fired me on the spot for being on his floor with sandals. The person who I really reported to tried to hire me back when he found out that sales manager had sent me home and fired me.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-10-13 23:53:08+00:00
cgroups first came from resource management frameworks that IIRC came out of IBM and got into some distro kernels for a time but not upstream.

Namespaces were not an attempt to add security, but just grew out of work to make interfaces more flexible, like bind mounts. And Unix security is fundamentally good, not having namespaces isn't much of a point against it in the first place, but now it does have them.

And it's going pretty well indeed. All applications use many kernel features, and we do have very secure high performance web and other servers.

L4 systems have been around for as long as Linux, and SEL4 in particular for 2 decades. They haven't moved the needle much so I'd say it's not really going all that well for them so far. SEL4 is a great project that has done some important things don't get me wrong, but it doesn't seem to be a unix replacement poised for a coup.