MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yibg | 2025-10-13 23:28:46+00:00
It seems like the US in particular isn't able to pick one path and stick with it. The shift towards services has already happened. But investment in silicon, renewables etc is on again off again. There now seems to be a desire to bring all manufacturing jobs back to the US, although it's not clear who wants this or why. e.g. who actually wants clothing and toy manufacturing back in the US?

So we have a set of ad hoc policies (or EOs), that don't seem to have an overarching goal.
by zigzag312 | 2025-10-13 23:29:08+00:00
Sorry, I probably should have quoted to which part I was referring. It's:

> with no technology to speak of for the 1000 years after Roman Empire

While it's true that some technology declined in the West, it wasn't as dramatic as you've suggested. Popular media also often exaggerates it.

https://www.britannica.com/technology/history-of-technology/...

Adding USSR into the discussion greatly increases complexity of the discussion. From analysis I've read, central planning is supposedly fine when country doesn't have much industry, because to start things up, it can provide essential investments and starts organizing production. But when country is somewhat developed, efficiency starts to matter and top-down approach to decision making of central planning vs bottom-up decision making mechanisms of markets produce different results. Politics and other things are important factors too, but I think that would be too much for this discussion.
by labcomputer | 2025-10-13 23:29:53+00:00
I guess they are if you mean fly-by-piano-wire!

The (as of a this year) second-most popular airliner, the Boeing 737, has fully mechanical controls for the ailerons and elevator (with hydraulic boosting). Elevator trim is also mechanical.

The pilot needs to be built like a gorilla to fly it, but primary flight controls continue work, even with a total failure of all electrical and hydraulic systems.
by orangea | 2025-10-13 23:30:14+00:00
> Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.

That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.
by immibis | 2025-10-13 23:30:38+00:00
It's mostly because mobile networks can't get the size of address blocks they'd need to give every customer an IP address. They all run CGNAT, but that's a pain too. Both Google and Apple require your apps to work on IPv6-only networks IIRC, or they won't be approved for the app stores. Fun fact: Your website loads faster on cellphones if it supports IPv6, because the CGNAT gateway detour adds measurable latency.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-13 23:30:42+00:00
On a tangent, the somewhat related issue of Python 3 not being able to import Python 2 packages famously led Zed Shaw of "Learn Python the Hard Way" to write a rant about how Python is not Turing Complete. I checked again and apparently he removed that rant and only has a disclaimer in its place mentioning that he was obviously being hyperbolic [0].

[0] https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/nopython3.html#the-py...
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-13 23:31:42+00:00
Python 2.0 was released in October 2000. The Python ecosystem has witnessed several significant shifts in expectation as far as how software is built and delivered, from Slackware-style source builds to vendor packages to containers to uv just downloading a standalone binary archive. And the deadsnakes ppa and venvs, plus the ongoing awkwardness about whether pip should be writing stuff into usr/local or ~/.local or something else.

All of this alongside the rise of GitHub and free CI builders, it being trivial to depend on lots of other packages of unknown provenance, stdlib packages being completely sidelined by stuff like requests.

It’s really only in the last ten years or so that there’s been the clarity of what is a build backend vs frontend, what a lock file is and how workspace management fits into the whole picture. Distutils and setuptools are in there too.

Basically, Python’s packaging has been a mess for a long time, but uv getting almost everything right all of a sudden isn’t an accident; it’s an abrupt gelling of ideas that have been in progress for two decades.
by like_any_other | 2025-10-13 23:31:48+00:00
What about them? The claim, or rather implication, was that Western powers would never allow equivalent protectionist policies, such as preventing the export of key industries and skills, to be enacted by other countries. Yet such protectionism is routine in China (and many other Asian countries), and "whole hell" did not break loose.

A few more than half century old examples don't change what we can all see is the case in the present day.
by andrepd | 2025-10-13 23:31:50+00:00
Am I the only one that thinks this is very unwholesome? Giving a simulacrum of human interaction to children who are presumably waay to young to understand [1] that they're talking to a novelty device. It's possible I'm being a luddite but then again perhaps people really need to stop trying to achieve 100% completion in turning Black Mirror episodes into reality.

[1] Which even many adults apparently don't understand!
by eulgro | 2025-10-13 23:31:52+00:00
Avoiding ultra-processed food is completely realistic.

It's a question of priorities. If she really wanted to avoid them she would take the time to do so, even if that means working less.

What's unrealistic is expecting everyone to have the drive to do what's necessary to avoid ultra-processed food.

Tangentially, kids will always want to eat what everyone else is eating. If you start feeding them home cooked Golden fish or whatever, people at school are going to judge them, your kids will feel excluded because they won't be eating the same things as everyone else, and they'll end up resenting you somewhat.

For me the challenge here is really how to give your kids healthy food while also not excluding them from the normal kid experience, which, for better or worse, is going to include consuming ultra-processed until the day we have proper regulations.
by mrexroad | 2025-10-13 23:32:00+00:00
I love 5+ why's. I find it to be a fantastic tool in many situations. Unfortunately, when leadership does not reward a culture of learning, Five Why's can become conflated with root cause analysis and just become a directed inquiry for reaching a politically expedient cause. The bigger the fuck up, the more it needs an impartial NTSB-like focus on learning and sharing to avoid them in the future.

Fwiw, if I were your manager performing a root cause analysis, I'd mostly expect my team to be identifying contributing factors within their domain, and then we'd collate and analyze the factors with other respective teams to drill down to the root causes. I'd also have kicked back a doc that was mostly about blaming the other team.
by bane | 2025-10-13 23:32:41+00:00
That's basically correct. But the more general problem is that engineers simply lost the ability to succinctly package applications and their dependencies into simple to distribute and run packages. Somehow around the same time Java made .jar files mainstream (just zip all the crap with a manifest), the rest of the world completely forgot how to do the equivalent of statically linking in libraries and that we're all running highly scheduled multithreaded operating systems now.

The "solution" for a long time was to spin up single application Virtual Machines, which was a heavy way to solve it and reduced the overall system resources available to the application making them stupidly inefficient solutions. The modern cloud was invented during this phase, which is why one of the base primitives of all current cloud systems is the VM.

Containers both "solved" the dependency distribution problem as well as the resource allocation problem sort of at once.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-13 23:33:07+00:00
Prescriptions keep getting more expensive thanks to tariffs and inflation which hurts the poorest people the most, plus increased unsafe coping habits occurring due to added misery inflicted by this heartless regime equals more OD's.

Another related problem is the narrow therapeutic range of legal and illegal opioids combined with inadequate prescription duplication and overlap detection leads to less aware patients taking multiple substances and/or taking too much leading to unintentional OD.
by astrange | 2025-10-13 23:33:28+00:00
Also, it's possible to have businesses in a park (rented sports fields, coffee stands etc). I know a park nearby with a pottery studio in it.

Generally Americans don't think of this because they think public services "shouldn't try to make money" and interpret this as they need to be designed to lose money as hard as possible. So public transit stations have no vending machines and activists are constantly trying to ban them from charging fares.
by sieve | 2025-10-13 23:33:33+00:00
I have been doing this for 25 years and no longer have the patience to deal with stuff like this. I am never going to install Arch from scratch by building the configuration by hand ever again. The same with pytorch and rocm.

Getting them to work and recognize my GPU without passing arcane flags was a problem. I could at least avoid the pain with llama-cpp because of its vulkan support. pytorch apparently doesn't have a vulkan backend. So I decided to roll out my own wgpu-py one.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-13 23:33:48+00:00
> Wealth is arbitrary post settlement. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on a regulated market. In that sense, wealth is a decadent category the West will be destroyed by, look at the current state of oligarchy, particularly tech. There's little if any ecological parity in these displays of wealth and extraction status.

Is this meant to be post-modern? Whatever you feel about wealth, wealthier citizens overall are happier and have a better quality of life. Do you think people are clamouring to immigrate to the West for the weather?

> I have no relationship with politics

LMFAO. Dress it up all you want. You're either ideological or you aren't, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You're free to criticize Capitalism and/or Liberalism, but in doing so you can't pretend you believe in nothing that can be defined in political terms.

> Rosenberg quote

Economics doesn't try to predict what policymakers and irrational actors do. But it's generally good at forecasting some effects from changes along specific dimensions; if it wasn't, microeconomics and central banking wouldn't matter. If the interest rate increases 10 points overnight, what happens - nothing?
by greenavocado | 2025-10-13 23:34:57+00:00
You don't even need to edit any files yourself for most simple use cases.

uv init uv add package uv run program.py

That's it.

If you inherit a codebase made this way from someone else, merely running uv run program.py will automatically create, launch the venv, configure packages, run your script, seamlessly on first launch.

Uv lets you almost forget virtual environments exist. Almost.
by eipi10_hn | 2025-10-13 23:35:14+00:00
"Custom scriptlets" are not random words. They are capabilities of multiple blockers on MV2.

I want to interfere websites' javascripts to block the ads that are not addressed by the extensions without the need to write whole userscripts. For example, stopping/replacing an inline script, pruning the ads/annoyances out of the JSONs, replacing the arguments of a native function, setting the constants of global variables to any values I want, preventing `setTimeout`, `setInterval`, `eval`, removing event listeners on the elements I want, removing/replacing/setting the attributes' values of the elements I want... and the list goes on. I can do these with uBO.

I want to strip out/replace the fingerprinted JSON data in the request headers of the XHR/fetch requests. I can do this with uBO.

I want to block YouTube from delivering bs AI dub audio by default to me. I can do this with uBO.

I want to not let the websites go through the trackers before redirecting to the destination link if the destination link already appears in the URL. I can do this with uBO.

I want to strip out any tracking parameters of a URL that I want without the need to wait for the extension to approve and update for me. I can do this with uBO.

I want to block and redirect the resources to the neutralized resources built inside uBO, or redirect to any other domains/URLs that I want without the need to report and wait for the extension to approve and update for me. I can do this with uBO.

I want to set the iframes not load by default and just put a placeholder which I can choose which one I want to load by clicking on it. I can do this with uBO.

I want to by default block 3rd-party resources (`script`, `iframe`, `images`, `xhr`...) and only whitelist which domains/URLs I trust locally/globally via simple clicking/tapping. I can do this with uBO.

I want to set the websites to `noscript` mode by default and only set the websites I want to run javascript by myself. I can do this with uBO.

The key here is "custom". It's about how free I am to block things ("things" on websites are not just elements to hide or network requests to block) on the websites for myself with the extension, not reporting and hoping the extension to approve and update for me; and not bother to write my own extensions or userscripts.
by hagbard_c | 2025-10-13 23:35:34+00:00
As to whether this DHH person has said any 'vile far-right stuff' I do not know since I don't know the character, am not interested in this distribution - plain Debian + Xmonad does just fine for me - and do not want my operating system to dictate my politics in any way. But... there is always that but, isn't there?

For years, nay decades by now it has been practice to label those who do not toe the Party line and follow whatever diktat handed down from on high on any number of subjects as 'Nazi', 'Fascist', "${identity_group}phobe" (this needs double quotes for expansion to work), to throw bucketfuls of epithets at those who refuse to obey the order to put black squares on their web things, who dare to insist that war X was in fact started by party Y, that a hulking man with a bulge in his pants is in fact just that and not a woman, etcetera.

...and hardly anybody, here or elsewhere in 'polite society' dared to say anything about it for fear of being labelled themselves, here on this site for fear of being greyed out or shadow-banned. So DHH says nasty things? That is quite possible. If it is so he is just like all the others who say nasty things like I described above. He may even aim his remarks at some of the same people, quite possibly so because those who think for themselves are often disliked by those who want to do their thinking for them.

Think for yourself, don't leave that to others.
by alganet | 2025-10-13 23:36:31+00:00
That is just not true.

Holoprogramming is a recurring theme in TNG and VOY. There's even a recurring character that is supposed to represent this role of specialized programmer, Reginald Barclay, among other one-ofs (such as Dr. Zimmerman).

> Picard says "Tea, earl grey, hot" and the computer instructs the replicator to create such a beverage. He doesn't even think about someone coding up a "tea" app - the computer is intelligent enough to know what he needs and controls the device to deliver.

You are clearly not versed in the ways of Star Trek. This notion is directly confronted in the classical scene of Lt. Paris asking the replicator for tomato soup in VOY, and getting super annoyed by the way it is programmed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD4EVXkfe0w
by BeetleB | 2025-10-13 23:36:36+00:00
Nah - I want something that one can monetize and actually makes the kids be good (somehow).

Perhaps a parent commitment that if the kids earn X many goodie (goody?) points, then the CC is charged, and let the parent control how they earn those X points.

Gamifying good behavior has been shown to be pretty effective with kids. See Kadzin.
by bragr | 2025-10-13 23:37:39+00:00
On one hand, I totally get where you are coming from and feel similarly. On the other hand, we take our kids to the mall and tell them that lowly paid actor is _really_ Santa and he _really_ wants to hear what they want, and he totally isn't just counting down the minutes to his next smoke break. That doesn't strike me as an "authentic" human interaction so I'm ambivalent.
by jolmg | 2025-10-13 23:37:58+00:00
> If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation.

It's not a zero-sum game in that regard. The entire point of Linux phones is to get Linux distros working in phone form-factors. Getting them to work as general-purpose computers is the easier, already finished part. Getting them to work as phones is the harder-part, the new work. Removing the easy, already finished part doesn't make writing the camera drivers, modem-handling software, etc. any easier.

> But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.

Without the "workstation" stuff? That's Android.
by quamserena | 2025-10-13 23:38:14+00:00
Long term there is no bull case. Most of the cheap energy that we used to build society has been used up. The U.S. has no investments in renewables. It has no access to HREEs. It has lost a lot of its talent after gutting universities. Demographics indicate that the U.S. will stop growing in population. Yields tick steady higher as the realization that the U.S. has absolutely no plan to pay off its debt sets in. What happens when our economy reaches its maximum extent and stops growing? Not even degrowth – just a plateau. How do we pay down the debt without a tax hike that destroys the economy? The only way out is with inflation. Evidently, people are seeing this and so money flows into commodities, equities, and cryptocurrency.
by rootsudo | 2025-10-13 23:38:20+00:00
The neon issue was the engine harness fraying to the PCM and eventually burning out either that pin on the PCM or cable grounded itself.

Back in the day I was buying these, around 2005' or so, for $300-400 non stop and repairing that, the dash that cracked and misc cosmetics.

They were great cars, the R/T model in manual was fantastic in gas, reliability and safety (sadly crashed it.) but boy was 16-20yr old me happy with these neons. Can't believe they sold shy of $9,999 when new (for base of course)

Just reading your post took me back 2 decades, wow.
by astrange | 2025-10-13 23:38:30+00:00
One kind of worker the chains are better for is the people who work at the chain. Large businesses treat their employees better because they're more professional and can eg afford an HR department.

Sole proprietorships can be okay, but employee-hiring small businesses are run by tyrants and have fewer protections against worker abuse. After all, they're only small businesses because they aren't good enough to become big businesses.
by taffer | 2025-10-13 23:38:46+00:00
Again, performance is not my point. If you want maximum performance, use a low-level key-value store, hence my VSAM analogy. On the contrary, for me it is about simplicity.

SQL is the most high level language in common use. It abstracts away everything: Storage, memory, concurrency, and, most importantly, control flow. Complexity comes from complecting things, simplicity comes from decomplecting [1] things. SQL decomplects the what (data flow) from the how (control flow) which means less cognitive load, higher developer productivity and better maintainability.

In my experience, writing business logic in SQL results in fewer bugs and less code. I have replaced 50-line Java methods with 15-line SQL projections multiple times. With Python, the ratio is closer to 2:1, but it's still impressive.

And all of this without having to consider type impedance, eager versus lazy loading, result set mappings, second-level caching, dirty tracking, lifecycle management, OCC, or obscure savepoint bugs. Performance is just a nice, but welcome side effect.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
by hn_acc1 | 2025-10-13 23:38:55+00:00
Ah, Barbarian.. That was like the holy grail of the Atari ST scene back in the day.. TWO floppies, not just one! And it took a couple of hours each to download at 2400 baud.. (my family hated picking up the phone and hearing the modem screeches)...

I've definitely seen and played multiple of his games. Wow, trip through memory lane..
by bilekas | 2025-10-13 23:40:10+00:00
Yeah, that will greatly impact one of our products. As usual with AWS documentation it's not very clear what the update path seems to be.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/amazon...

I wonder why they're going that direction too, if anything those lambdas must be making money for them.
by hinkley | 2025-10-13 23:40:12+00:00
General trick in any project management is try to arrange for the work to be done by the group that has the most influence over it.

Just as you should never take responsibility over something you are given no power over, you should move responsibility to where the power is (and if they won't take responsibility, you start carving out the edges of their power and hand it over to adjacent groups who will).

I learned pretty early how to hack the 5 Why's in order to make sure something actionable but neither trivial nor overwhelming gets chosen as the response. And I often do it early enough in the meeting that I'm difficult to catch doing it.

If I don't get invited I will sometimes crash the party, especially if the last analysis resulted only in performative work and no real progress. You get one, maybe two, and then I'm up in your business because mistakes don't mean you're stupid, but learning nothing from them does.
by wucke13 | 2025-10-13 23:40:38+00:00
My take: containers forced devepopers to declare various aspects of the application in a standardized, opinioated way:

- Persistant state? Must declare a volume. - IO with external services? Must declare the ports (and maybe addresses). - Configurable parameters? Must declare some env variables. - Trasitive dependecies? Must declare them, but using a mechanism of your choosing (e.g. via the package manager of your base image distro).

Separation of state (as in persistency) and application (as in binaries, assets) makes updates easy. Backups also.

Having most all IO visible and explicit simplifies operation and integration.

And a single, (too?!?) simple config mechanism increases reusability, by enabling e.g. lightweight tailoring of generic application service containers (such as mariadb).

Together this bunch of forced, yet leaky abstractions is just good enough to foster immense reuse & composability on to a plethora of applications, all while allowing to treat them almost entirely like blackboxes. IMHO that is why OCI containers became this big, compared to other virtualization and (application-) cuntainer technologies.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-10-13 23:40:45+00:00
Use your imagination a little; I'm sure you can come up with several variants that are an even viler and more exploitative/manipulative idea than the product as it stands.

Let your kid call a crude simulacrum of dead relatives, let religious folks call a crude simulacrum of $DEITY, make an "adult" version that crudely simulates a phone-sex hotline (charge extra to recharge the minutes on that one obviously), etc, etc.
by lukeschlather | 2025-10-13 23:41:02+00:00
I feel like I've tried at least 5 different package management tools for python. Between pip, poetry, pip-tools, pipx, I'm not really sure what easy_install, egg, pkg_info are, but I do know I have always been surprised I need to care.

It sounds like uv is a drop-in replacement for pip, pipx, and poetry with all of their benefits and none of the downsides, so I don't see why I wouldn't migrate to it overnight.