MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-10-13 20:14:37+00:00
The company has some money. They choose to return it to shareholders. There are two legal ways to do so: Buy back some stock, or issue a dividend.

Now assume I am a long-term investor, who invested money into a company, and wants to keep all that money in the company, instead of taking money out.

If the company pays a dividend, I can put the money they paid me back into the company, but I have to pay capital income tax on the money in between. If they buy back some stock, I have essentially fully reinvested my money to grow my share of ownership in that company, but I have not paid any tax on this, and will only have to do so at the end. As I get to grow compound interest on my money, I will come out much better in the long term.
by tpoacher | 2025-10-13 20:14:39+00:00
Not necessarily an identical thought to OP, but, anecdotally (n=1), my experience teaching the exact same course on Advanced Java Programming for the last 4 years has been that the students seem to be getting more and more cynical, and seem to think of programming as an art or as a noteworthy endeavour in itself less and less. Very few people have actually vocalised the "why do I even need to learn this if I can write a prompt" sentiment out loud, but it has been voiced, and even from those who don't say it there's a very definite 'vibe' that is all but screaming it.

Whereas the vibe in the lecture theatre 4 years ago was far more nerdy and enthusiastic. It makes me feel very sorry for this new generation that they will never get to enjoy the same feeling of satisfaction from solving a hard problem with code you thought and wrote from scratch.

Ironically, I've had to incorporate some AI stuff in my course as a result of needing to remain "current", which almost feels like it validates that cynical sentiment that this soulless way is the way to be doing things now.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-13 20:14:40+00:00
Never grew popular, perhaps. But I'm not sure how it failed, and not sure how many of the Venm Diagrams of concerns plan9 really has with containers.

Yes there was an idea of creating bespoke filesystems for apps, custom mount structures that plan9 had. That containers also did something semi-parallel to. But container images as read only overlays (with a final rw top overlay) feel like a very narrow craft. Plan9 had a lot more to it (everything as a file), and containers have a lot more to them (process, user, net namespaces, container images to pre-assembled layers).

I can see some shared territory but these concerns feel mostly orthogonal. I could easily imagine a plan9 like entity arising amid the containerized world: these aren't really in tension with each other. There's also a decade and a half+ gap between Plan9's hayday and the rise of containers.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-10-13 20:14:42+00:00
Lots of various laments on this tip around here the last while (with mixed responses)

I do not want to be a programmer anymore

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45481490

I Don't Want to Code with LLM's

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332448
by thom | 2025-10-13 20:14:48+00:00
No, this is the exact opposite of my experience. I have little interest in the AI's code, it can be very illustrative but I find it ugly, unmaintainable (for either humans or itself after enough iterations) and regularly wrong. But it's so much better than Google at teaching me new things, and helping with the boring bits like debugging stack traces and making random throwaway visualisations. I ask it dumb questions until I'm sure I understand things, in ways I would never burden a co-worker with, or that would be impossible when faced with a narrow blog post. And I'm left to just concentrate on my craft. It doesn't feel too slow to me because there's no point arriving at the destination if I didn't enjoy the journey and turn up with the AI having forgotten to pack any trousers.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-13 20:15:01+00:00
There is plenty of moderation on 4chan. It actively avoids breaking the laws of the country it's hosted in (the USA). You may not like what's on it, but it's not "extreme".

It used to be more extreme, it's not today. It's why spinoffs like 8chan were created, they felt there was too much moderation on 4chan. If you hear of some diabolical internet stunt, these days it was probably soyjak.party that organised it, not 4chan's /b/

As you allude, Ofcom cares not, they just want all sites to bend the knee to them.
by kragen | 2025-10-13 20:15:17+00:00
You mean, if the 80386 hadn't been designed with 8086 backwards compatibility in mind? What attributes do you see in common? "x86 started clean" might be a reasonable description of iAPX432, RL78, Itanic, 68000, or ARM2, from different points of view.

I've only written some small and simple RISC-V code; enough to know that I like it a lot better than AMD64 but not as well as ARM32.
by travisgriggs | 2025-10-13 20:15:23+00:00
Web Programming has stolen satisfaction from programming. At least for me.

I've coded in win32, XWindows, GTK, UIKit, Logo, Smalltalk, QT, and others since 95. I had various (and sometimes serious) issues with any of these as I worked in them. No other mechanism of helping humans interact with computation has been more frustrating and disappointing than the web. Pointing out how silly it all is (really, I have to use 3 separate languages with different computation models, plus countless frameworks, and that's just on the client side???), never makes me popular with people who have invested huge amounts of time and energy into mastering etheral library idioms or modern "best practices" which will be different next month. And the documentation? Find someone who did a quick blog on it, trying to get their name out there. Good luck.

The fact that an AI is an efficient, but lossy compression of the big pile, to help me churn it faster, it's actually kind of refreshing for me. Any confidence that I was doing the Right Thing in this domain always made me wonder how "imagined" it was. That fact that I have a stochastic parrot with sycophantic confidence to help me hallucinate through it all? That just takes it to 11.

I thought when James Mickens wrote "To Wash It All Away" (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitalla...), maybe someday things would get better. 10 years later, the furniture has moved and changed color some, but its still the same shitty experience.
by davedx | 2025-10-13 20:15:26+00:00
I don't understand -- useful how exactly?

For most of my recent projects I use Prisma with Postgres; Prisma tables by default are named like TableName, and yes - for actual Postgres SQL that means you need to wrap everything in double quotes if you do anything manually `SELECT * FROM "TableName"` because otherwise it won't work.

But that's never actually been an issue for me in some way? Compared to the immense benefits of having a well designed ORM (like Prisma), this linter doesn't seem useful to me at all. But maybe I'm missing something.
by overrun11 | 2025-10-13 20:15:27+00:00
Buybacks are still better if you want to hold forever and don't care about share price. With a dividend distribution you must pay taxes and reinvest the diminished proceeds. You end up with a smaller share of the company than in the buyback scenario. Example:

A: Hold $10 of stock. Buyback of 1$ per share. You're left with $10 of stock. B: Hold $10 of stock. Dividend of 1$ per share. You're left with 9$ of stock and $1 cash - taxes payed. Once reinvested you have $9 + (1 * tax rate) in stock.

You're making two mistakes: One is thinking that dividends are magic money that do not cause share prices to fall in exact accordance with the distribution and the other is that buybacks lift the share price somehow (they do not, see Modigliani-Miller).
by more_corn | 2025-10-13 20:15:33+00:00
Don’t use AI in the fully automated, big picture dehumanizing way. (It will screw up if you do that and you won’t be able to catch and correct it)

Use it in the precise, augmenting, accelerating way.

Do your own design and architecture (it sucks at that anyway) and use AI to tab complete the work you already thought through and planned.

This can preserve your ability to reason about the project and troubleshoot, improve your productivity while not turning your brain off.
by fragmede | 2025-10-13 20:16:41+00:00
Here is the exact guidance from QT:

> In case of dynamic linking, it is possible, but not mandatory, to keep application source code proprietary as long as it is “work that uses the library” – typically achieved via dynamic linking of the library. In case of static linking of the library, the application itself may no longer be “work that uses the library” and thus become subject to LGPL. It is recommended to either link dynamically, or provide the application source code to the user under LGPL.

https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations#lgp...

That last sentence is key. It is a recommendation to dynamically link OR provide application source code. We don't want to be forced to provide application source code, so according to QT.io, dynamically linking is the way to go.

On top of that, there are GPL-only licensed QT modules that aren't suitable for use by closed source applications. Programs using QT on locked down OSes aka iOS and Android are subject to LGPL version 3's anti Tivo-ization clause. I'll revert to my original claim: Using QT is complex for commerical products.

Specific questions about dynamic linking and derivative works re: LGPLv3 have never been tested in a court of law, in any jurisdiction, so all we have to go on are tea leaves and armchair Internet lawyer-ing. The FSF and GNU are certainly entitled to their own opinion about their own license, but they also have a vested interest in casting as wide a net as possible. There are plenty of dissenting opinions out there, by actual lawyers. The important point is that GNU/FSF wouldn't be one deciding what's what in a court of law, a judge is. That judge gets to decide if the specific technical differences between static linking vs dynamic linking are even relevant in the first place. They might decide there isn't one!

Since it hasn't been tested in a court of law, different people are going to have different opinions on what's actually right. QT.io gives a specific recommendation on how to use their library, so I'll defer to what they have to say, but everyone's free to make their own decisions.
by akho | 2025-10-13 20:16:51+00:00
The list includes jq. I’d frankly love to never have a problem that jq solves, but, well, here we are.

ripgrep is something I have installed, but use only via text editor integrations. fzf is nice for building ad-hoc TUIs. fd may make sense (I’m told it’s faster than find), but I already know enough find.

The “next gen ls” family of tools in the article is baffling.
by quit32 | 2025-10-13 20:17:07+00:00
Odd use of Twilio for just a SIP Trunk provider. They also offer programmable voice SIP, a product that is a distinct offering from the Elastic SIP trunking used here. With PV SIP you can directly register the Grandstream HT801 ATA to a programmable SIP endpoint on Twilio and move all the programming logic, including text to speech, to a Twilio serverless "function" and completely cut out the need for a RasPi and Asterisk.

Also FYI for those who do want to use Asterisk behind CGNAT and cannot open ports - if you use PV SIP you can also register it as a Trunk in Asterisk and it can then receive inbound calls over the connection established by the outbound registration with simple a simple Twiml bin that routes whatever Twilio numbers you want to the SIP user you used to register the Asterisk's SIP Trunk. Asterisks can can then use inbound number plan to further route the inbound call as needed.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-13 20:18:09+00:00
I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't much care about crypto and know pretty much nothing about Tether beyond the fact that they have a USD-linked coin, plus what I just read on Wikipedia. "They're on the up-and-up because they say they're going to be complying with US law in the future" just isn't a very convincing argument.
by throwaway98743 | 2025-10-13 20:18:15+00:00
^ this is my point. You remove any grounding. We don’t allow children to drink (we allow them younger in the UK than the US), drive, and many other things we have safeguards for. Also, how do you suggest parenting solves for this? Are children with parents all the time? Does the data suggest an only parenting technique works? No, course not. What’s your solution to something that is a problem? All up for a critique of the act but to say “there is no problem” is absurd.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-13 20:18:33+00:00
How can you say what the minerals were actually used for though is the question I always have in these types of situations. There are multiple uses of the minerals. Since I've now gotten a literal boat load of the minerals from you, I can use those minerals on other things which now frees up my personal source of minerals on the things you didn't want them used in. In the spirit of the agreement, I'm in full compliance all while achieving the thing you didn't want me to achieve. It's nothing but Pilate washing his hands
by gordonhart | 2025-10-13 20:18:44+00:00
I largely agree. Thinking through the business requirements, hammering out the design, testing against the requirements, and reviewing the code were never the fun parts, but they were usually <50% of the job as an IC. Now that LLMs do the fun part (actually writing the code), those parts are all that’s left.

The job now feels quite different than the one I signed up for a decade+ ago. The only options I see are to accept that with a sigh or reject automation of the fun part and lose employability (worst case) or be nagged by anxiety that eventually that’ll happen.
by dingnuts | 2025-10-13 20:19:48+00:00
> today you can get a kindergartener level chat model for about $100. Not hard to imagine the same model costing $10 of compute in a few years.

No, it's extremely hard to imagine since I used one of Karpathy's own models to have a basic chat bot like six years ago. Yes, it spoke nonsense; so did my GPT-2 fine tune four years ago and so does this.

And so does ChatGPT

Improvement is linear at best. I still think it's actually a log curve and GPT3 was the peak of the "fun" part of the curve. The only evidence I've seen otherwise is bullshit benchmarks, "agents" that increase performance 2x by increasing token usage 100x, and excited salesmen proclaiming the imminence of AGI
by jmclnx | 2025-10-13 20:19:56+00:00
FreeBSD jails years ago based upon a user request.

>hosting provider's ... desire to establish a clean, clear-cut separation between their own services and those of their customers

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

My guess Linux started getting requests rom various orgs for a while, so in true Linux fashion, we got a a few different container type methods years later.

I still think Jails are the best of the bunch, but they can be a bit hard to setup. Once setup, Jails works great.

So here we are :)
by proc0 | 2025-10-13 20:20:08+00:00
More or less yes, but not necessarily because AI is taking over as much as companies taking what AI can do and evolving the role of web developer/engineer into something that is a hybrid and contains many disciplines.

This has been happening for like a decade, as far as I can tell. Web development has been increasingly easier and easier, both backend and frontend. This has made the role take on other responsibilities and recently it seems to me that web development or even software engineering for web, means that you need to be good at business management as well.

As a side note, I think this has been bad for the industry and AI will accelerate this "increase in entropy". Web apps tend to be fragile and require constant updates. Having worked at large companies, it's insane how often things are breaking and there are always "fires" to deal with that are never seen from the outside. All of this could be prevented. Working on software should be pleasant and predictable, but it requires companies to respect the discipline and invest in specialized engineers instead of giving every engineer the entire business vertical from ideation to releasing to production, telemetry and then post-launch analysis of how the product is doing. AI is just making this worse and I think web engineers are basically going to be a one-person company within a company.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-13 20:20:54+00:00
> you live in a police state.

sigh You've not lived in a police state, or more accurately, you've been online too much to actually get context.

In the UK threatening to kill someone has been illegal since at least ~1880 something. Going online an publicly calling for the death of one or more person (which in the eyes of the law is pretty close to sending a good old paper death threat) is not only widely considered a dick move, its illegal.

Now, How do you enforce that? the police investigate, and if its deemed a credible threat, you are visited by the plod. Who most likley go "look mate, don't be a dick".

If you are really being a dick, you might be cautioned (taken to the police station and told "you're being a shit")

The next stage up is appearing in court.

And then you have to be convicted by a jury of your peers, and the burden of evidence is really quite high. ("oh but that mum, she was innocent." I advise you to read all that she wrote, you know the extra bits that the sun can't print)

Its not like you're bundled into the back of a van by masked goons who refuse to identify themselves. Taken to a mass detention centre and not seen for weeks, and then yeeted to an illegal jail.

But why are the police investigating social media?

Now thats a good question. And the answer is: Musk doesn't moderate. Stuff that gets you a visit from the plod is generally against the community standards of social media, even X.

Now to your point here: "When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress"

I've had a visit from the police, why? because I was young and being an antisocial shit. The police were not actually there to arrest me, and I don't think they could actually if they wanted to. The point was, they were there to make the town liveable for all it's citizens. I was "fucking around", and the police were gently telling me that I'd really not like to "find out".

"OH BUT PERSONAL FREEDOM". Now, the thing is, I was perfectly free to carry on my bad ways. The problem was, those ways, had they descended further, would have resulted in jail time. The choice was mine.

I don't want to live in a country where its acceptable to bully whomever I like, in the guise of personal freedom. Sure, speak your mind, but don't be a dick about it.
by ptx | 2025-10-13 20:22:24+00:00
Only phones sold by carriers were controlled by carriers. You could easily (in Europe at least) buy an unlocked phone and put in a SIM from any carrier of your choice. You could then easily install (i.e. "sideload") Java apps from anywhere you wanted, e.g. from a storage card or over Bluetooth, although some permissions were restricted unless you bought an expensive code-signing certificate.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-10-13 20:22:38+00:00
Many years ago, I worked at Amazon, and it was at the time quite fond of the "five whys" approach to root cause analysis: say what happened, ask why that happened, ask why that in turn happened, and keep going until you get to some very fundamental problem.

I was asked to write up such a document for an incident where our team had written a new feature which, upon launch, did absolutely nothing. Our team had accidentally mistyped a flag name on the last day before we handed it to a test team, the test team examined the (nonfunctional) tool for a few weeks and blessed it, and then upon turning it on, it failed to do anything. My five whys document was most about "what part of our process led to a multiweek test effort that would greenlight a tool that does nothing that it is required to do."

I recall my manager handing the doc back to me and saying that I needed to completely redo it because it was unacceptable for us to blame another team for our team's bug, which is how I learned that you can make a five why process blame any team you find convenient by choosing the question. I quit not too long after that.
by hedgehog | 2025-10-13 20:22:38+00:00
Containers happened because running an ad network and search engine means serving a lot of traffic for as little cost as possible, and part of keeping the cost down is bin packing workloads onto homogeneous hardware as efficiently as possible.

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

(arguably FreeBSD jails and various mainframe operating systems preceded Linux containers but not by that name)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-13 20:22:52+00:00
As a DC resident, I periodically wonder if my city will be frozen in stasis forever.

I get the general concern with drones & why we have a no-fly zone. But 15 miles is huge. And there's no permitted activity at all, nothing. I have such a hard time imagining a sub 250g drone under 50ft being justifiably something that the state can deny people in such a huge radius.

I'd like some day to be able to bike down the street with my kid, and have the drone take some photos. It seems brutal and unfair that that's not an option, even in the far off burbs.

I feel similarly tension here. I absolutely think drones can be a pox upon the world, loud and obnoxious, intrusive invaders without facing making a horrible racket & asymmetrically being able to photograph in incredible detail people with no defense who have imo a natural right to be able to enjoy the world unmolested by these machines invader detestable scum, without intrusion. But also it seems horrific to me to have such an absolute boundary, to have total denial of access to some of the most incredible places on earth.

Ideally I'd like to imagine some day some compromise. First Thursdays of every month where drones are allowed, maybe.

I wish more good rules/prohibitions had some reasonable exceptions to them. The law squeezing too hard is an affront.
by greggoB | 2025-10-13 20:22:53+00:00
> Thanks for sharing a video blaming Trump for the Ukraine war.

I had to do a double-take here - where exactly in the video is Ukraine featured?

> I don't recall Trump ordering American troops to invade Ukraine. Don't see how you're negating my point?

The entire premise of the video I linked is that Trump has no qualms having the US involved in military action, it befuddles me that you somehow seemed to missed this entirely.

> (fwiw, I am not a Trump supporter at all, I just try to see both sides and not hate trump because "he's the other team" - politics is not football)

Hate has nothing to do with it, you made a statement regarding his stance on foreign wars, I provided a source which I believe contextualizes that statement. You're welcome to disagree with the source or its contents or whatever, but throwing out pretty blatant red herrings and silly strawmen just looks silly.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-13 20:22:56+00:00
> We already had this argument when Oracle sued Google over Java.

"It's boilerplate therefore it isn't IP" isn't the argument that was made by Google, nor is it the argument that the case was decided upon.

It was decided that Google's use of the API met the four determining factors used by courts to ascertain whether use of IP is fair use. The court found that even though it was Oracle's copyrighted IP, it was still fair use to use it in the way Google did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...