MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zbentley | 2025-10-04 20:18:29+00:00
Oh totally agreed; for complex transformations, being able to compose and tap the intermediate states is really nice (though I quite like generator/yielding functions with captured stack state as a happy medium).

But that’s not the claim I was pushing back on. That claim was that, given a loop and some equivalent chained list-processing functions, primarily FP-taught people could not understand the loop due to their background. That’s bogus.

That complex loops are hard to understand for anyone is inarguable. But there’s not some magical “functional mindset” in which imperative/mutative code is unintelligible to the point of total obscurity and functional code is not. If there were, how would anything ever get rewritten in a functional style?
by bwilliams | 2025-10-04 20:18:36+00:00
> The best part about blog feeds? It's just an idea. There's no central authority. There's no platform.

I think this is blessing _and_ a curse. I had an idea that I built a while back that centralizes RSS feeds so you get the centralized benefits of social media while authors can own and control their own content.

If anyone's curious, I built it out here: https://onread.io but I never had the time to really share it out or push it beyond the SUPER basic MVP that it currently is. I was thinking about pivoting it more into a tool that I could turn into an RSS feed for myself, but I haven't found the time, really.

Either way, I don't think RSS feeds as-is are as useful as they once were, and social media still has significant value over feeds due to conversation, sharing of content to folks with similar taste and interests, etc.
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 20:18:44+00:00
> This idea often gets repeated here but it’s based on ZIRP from 2010s ...

I don't think it is just the ZIRP/2010s. Here's a post I wrote about developer arrogance in 2004, well before the ZIRP era: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/134
by worik | 2025-10-04 20:18:56+00:00
Democratic Socialism has a long history, and is easy to understand in a wider political context

It is transforming society to socialism (a system which is based on needs and capabilities rather than ownership of private property) by using the available democratic institutions.

Easiest to understand in contrast to Revolutionary Socialism that advocates the complete overthrow of the existing institutions.

Scandinavian countries, yes, China no.

It is not hard to understand
by riazrizvi | 2025-10-04 20:19:47+00:00
> It is simply a fact that software engineers are tools in the political game being played at large companies, not players in their own right.

I like this truth. Talent is mostly a zero-sum game against your time. You can’t be great at playing politics unless you have the time in your role to focus on that, and software engineers are paid to be code mules.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-04 20:19:50+00:00
I agree with you.

Further, it seems to me there are forces at play recently trying to put people at odds with each other over as many dimensions as possible.

What I'm not sure about is whether this is some sort of organic mitosis like force that naturally oscilates over time, an unfortunate accident (e.g. side effects of attention economy) or if it's a conspiracy (e.g. most advertising dollars are spent trying to drive division).

Either way, everyone's constantly being influenced into a victim mentality with boogymen galore.
by DataDaoDe | 2025-10-04 20:20:44+00:00
> The different political labels are interesting but also deeply frustrating because it paints people at odds when they're not.

I agree.

I don't necessarily think the two baskets analogy is even the right framework tbh. The important issues imho are transparency, corruption, incentive alignment, feedback loops, it doesn't really matter to me - and I think probably most people - if its in the government or business space.

What matters, at least to me, is how decisions are made, how information flows, and how citizens (or employees) can see whats going on, influence and hold accountable the decision-makers.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-04 20:21:13+00:00
> Maybe life is easy, but intelligence is hard

Intelligence has evolved three times independently on earth - dinosaurs/birds (raptors, covids), mammals, and cephalopods (Octopus)

> Maybe you need water and carbon

Maybe so, but Oxygen and Carbon are only behind (albeit far behind) Hydrogen and Helium as the most abundant elements in the universe
by creer | 2025-10-04 20:21:45+00:00
> In long run it makes code base way better.

is true but may be irrelevant. Your hierarchy may have the correct understanding: that this better code base will be irrelevant because the company would then be out of business (because you spent your hours on the wrong obsession). Or will be irrelevant because this product line will change to use an entirely different protocol. Or this engineering group will be working on a different product and different code base. Etc.

I feel that it's fine to do small refactors when they help YOU understand the issue you are working on. Anything beyond that does NOT go without saying. Anything beyond that may well be hours you are wasting on a non-existent issue. In theory worthwhile but the company / your engineering group does not live in theory

Now, ideally, when you discuss refactoring with your manager, they have an understanding they can share - so you can understand. And this will make it easier for the individual contributor to work this way and not that way.
by prerok | 2025-10-04 20:21:57+00:00
Exactly, but how do you catch the exception? One exception catch to catch them all, or do you have to distinguish the types?

And yes... error handle on the input and you'd be fine. How would you write code that is cognizant enough to catch outofrange for every +1 done on the field? Seriously, the production code then devolves into copying the value into something else, where operations don't cause unexpected exceptions. Which is a workaround for a silly restriction that should not reside in runtime level.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-04 20:23:24+00:00
If your OEM can be coerced into pushing a backdoor in an OTA update, maybe our software habits are to blame.

We'll always be powerless to stop top-down attacks like this until we demand real audits and accountability in the devices we own. Shaming the UK only kicks the can down the road and further highlights the danger of trusting a black box to remain secure.
by mr_toad | 2025-10-04 20:23:51+00:00
> Suddenly, high adaptability and intelligence and resilience was what mattered, and being big and strong suddenly was a massive disadvantage.

Maybe it was just being small, puny, and having a tendency to cower in burrows was what saved us. Our ancestors may not have been much smarter than squirrels, and squirrels aren’t very bright.

Hominids brains didn’t get big until long, long after the KT extinction. A Tigers brain is not that much smaller than that of an an Australopithecus.
by zrm | 2025-10-04 20:24:08+00:00
> For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.)

There's a pretty good chance this is because Shopify is sending a lot of email users mark as spam, or is using the same mail server as someone who does. Then you marking them as not spam gives them a better score but the sender's reputation is still so bad that it can't break the threshold to stay out of the spam folder.
by palata | 2025-10-04 20:25:43+00:00
IMHO it doesn't matter whether you are CEO, CTO, CFO, C-whatever-you-feel-like-O, as long as you are a founder.

A startup is a kind of ponzi scheme benefitting the founders (and VCs).

Successful founders will happily tell everyone and their dog how being a founder was so much work, how they didn't go on holiday for a few years, how they worked long hours, etc. And mostly why they deserve to be rich now while none of their employees is. None of them will talk about how being one of the first employees was also so much work, usually with a pretty bad salary and order of magnitudes fewer options than the founder.

I always wonder how the founders can genuinely believe that they are actually worth thousands of me. I am pretty damn sure that with a thousand me, we produce more than the founders alone.
by hansvm | 2025-10-04 20:25:53+00:00
This is one of those things that's annoying to talk about, reason about, and legislate against because our intuition fails us when thinking about emergent behaviors. Some examples:

1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.

2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.

3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.

4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.

5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.

Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:

1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.

2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.
by hypeatei | 2025-10-04 20:26:20+00:00
> 59% of respondents (and 58% of Republicans) blame landlords and banks more than government regulation for the high cost of housing.

I know it's popular to blame landlords, but this isn't a serious take. Landlords are operating in a market of artificially constrained supply, so of course prices are going to rise! The issue, IMO, is on three groups: NIMBY homeowners, voting landlords, and local government officials because they all propose/support policies that make it harder to build homes in their locality.

Someone wanting even more government involvement in housing at this point would be quite surprising.
by erxam | 2025-10-04 20:26:36+00:00
If they have no influence, then why are they found in every single right-wing government as the architects of the new economic model?

Is Javier Milei not influential? Who or what is influential, then?

> Friedman was not an Austrian

Yeah, ok, he was from the Chicago school. Same shit to me. Whatever mental masturbation they dedicated themselves to is irrelevant to me. What is relevant is which policies they championed, influenced and implemented.

And they seem pretty indistinguishable from each other. At the end of the day, they all loved the holy and sanctimonious free market like a harsh but fair deity who would grind all the undeserving and the rabble into dust.
by godelski | 2025-10-04 20:26:47+00:00
> I would prefer to pay 20% more

That's the problem with lemon markets though. They are a feedback loop and usually dependent on asymmetric information.

As a simple version think about it this way: if a customer can't tell the difference in quality at time of purchase then the only signal they have is price.

I think even here on HN if we're being honest with ourselves it's hard to tell quality prior to purchase. Let alone the average nontechnical person. It's crazy hard to evaluate software even hands on. How much effort you need you put in these days. The difficulty of differentiating sponsored "reviews" from legitimate ones. Even all the fake reviews or how Amazon allows changing a product and inheriting the reviews of the old product.

No one asks you because all the sellers rely too heavily on their metrics. It's not just AI people treat like black boxes, it's algorithms and metrics in general. But you can't use any of that effectively without context.

At engineers I think we should be a bit more grumpy. Our job is to find problems and fix them. Be grumpy to find them. Don't let the little things slip because even though a papercut isn't a big deal, a thousand is. Go in and fix bugs without being asked to. Push back against managers who don't understand. You're the technical expert, not them (even if they were once an engineer, those skills atrophy and you get disconnected from a system when you aren't actively working on it). Don't let them make you make arguments about some made up monetary value for a feature or a fix. It's managements job to worry about money and our job to worry about the product. There needs to be a healthy adversarial process here. When push comes to shove, we should prioritize the product over the profit while they should do the opposite. This contention is a feature, not a bug. Because if we always prioritize profits, well, that's a race to the bottom. It kills innovation. It asks "what's the shittiest cheapest thing we can sell but people will still buy". It enables selling hype rather than selling products. So please, be a grumpy engineer. It's in the best interest of the company. Maybe not for the quarter, but it is for the year and the decade. (You don't need to be an asshole or even fight with your boss. Simply raising concerns about foreseeable bugs can be a great place to start. Filling bug reports for errors you find too! Or bugs your friends and family find. Or even help draft them with people like on HN that raise concerns about a product your company works on. Doesn't need to be your specific team, but file the bug report for someone who can't)

And as the techies, we should hold high standards. Others rely on us for recommendations. We need to distill the nuances and communicate better with our nontechnical friends and family.

These won't solve everything but I believe they are actionable, do not require large asks, and can push some progress. Better something than nothing, otherwise there will be no quality boots to buy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
by LexiMax | 2025-10-04 20:26:56+00:00
On the contrary I would not call Zig very C-like at all, and that's what makes the interoperability so impressive to me.

Zig feels like a small yet modern language that lacks many of C's footguns. It has far fewer implicit type conversions. There is no preprocessor. Importing native zig functionality is done via modules with no assumed stable ABI. Comptime allows for type and reflection chicanery that even C++ would be jealous of.

Yet I can just include a C header file and link a C library and 24 times out of 25, it just works. Same thing if you run translate-c on a C file, and as a bonus, it reveals the hoops that the tooling has to go through to preserve the fiddly edge cases while still remaining somewhat readable.
by verdverm | 2025-10-04 20:27:53+00:00
I'm the goto person in my friends/family for things like this and not one has ever asked about being locked out of a google/apple account. I don't know anyone this has ever happened to, so when people say it's some widespread problem at top of mind, forgive me for being extremely skeptical. These stories tend to be told by people it has happened to and extended beyond the bounds they are actually a worry for most people.
by avmich | 2025-10-04 20:28:04+00:00
Probabilistic constraints are all around us. You learn that the sine function is the ratio of the length of the side of the right triangle opposite to the angle to the length of the side opposite to the right angle, so obviously the sine is always positive. Yet your thinking should be flexible enough to allow changing the definition to the ordinate of the point on the unit circle where the line corresponding to the given angle and drawn from zero intersects that circle. So your knowledge - the symbolic one - can also be probabilistic.
by thisjustinm | 2025-10-04 20:28:09+00:00
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by tredre3 | 2025-10-04 20:28:29+00:00
To be clear the equivalent C++ code is:

#include <windows.h> extern "C" __declspec(dllimport) int __stdcall MessageBoxA(HWND, LPCSTR, LPCSTR, UINT); // or extern "C" __declspec(dllimport) int __stdcall MessageBoxA(void *, const char[], const char[], unsigned int);

It's not exactly a stellar improvement.
by imiric | 2025-10-04 20:28:35+00:00
> But you have to imagine what it must sound like from the perspective of a PM or EM. Itd be like my PM saying “I spent the last month organizing all eng docs to be properly formatted with bullet points.”

If your managers think that, and don't understand the value of refactors, you've already lost. You can try explaining it to them, but if this is how they perceive that type of work, it's a sign that you're working at a company that doesn't understand software engineering.

Of course, new features have to be built, and bugs have to be fixed. Those are always priorities. But refactors are just as important for keeping the software in a maintainable state, precisely because they enable new features to be built faster, more efficiently, and in a more robust way.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-04 20:29:13+00:00
> copycats are free to write thier own drivers though?

Sure, anyone paying for a Microsoft certified hardware driver, USB PID allocation, and cert fees every year... Everyone else is not allowed in the OS we paid for...

It is a decades old serial port emulation chip... Racketeering with a computer should still be illegal. =3
by autoreleasepool | 2025-10-04 20:29:23+00:00
Beautifully put, poetic even. The only problem is that, in (*actual).reality, unsafe Rust is difficult to read, difficult to write, difficult to maintain, difficult to learn, has zero features for ergonomics, and has poorly defined rules.

C and Zig have a big advantage for writing maintainable, easy to read unsafe code over unsafe Rust.
by Tade0 | 2025-10-04 20:30:12+00:00
The other day I checked gsmarena for any smartphones with a width of 68mm or less (like my Xperia 5 V or previous Galaxy S8) that came out this year.

Here's the single search result that appeared:

https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_kingkong_mini_4-14099.php

Its CPU is comparable to that of my old S8, but the GPU is considerably worse.

This size category actually extends to 70mm, as there are no other vaguely mainstream phones smaller than the Galaxy S25 clocking in at 70.5mm.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-04 20:30:41+00:00
Your false claim is that somehow I have my head in the sand for daring to point out that you are providing anecdotes which are feelings based (there are zero hard facts in your claim, no numbers, no examples, just "looks like more people")

The pointlessness of your claims is upsetting you, because you've been found out. I get it, you thought that you could get away with BS, but you got called out instead.

If you have hard facts, that are credible and verifiable, you can post them at any time.

You don't have those, that's why you resorted to insults.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-04 20:30:53+00:00
Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns?

2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines.

2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were just boring to write.

2024-2025 My day to day usage has decreased. The models seem better at fact finding but worse for code. None of those "cool" prototypes from myself or anyone else I knew seemed to be able to become more than just that. Many of the cool companies I started learning about in 2022 started to reduce staff and are running into financial troubles.

The only area where I've been impressed is the relatively niche improvements in open source text/image to video models. It's wild that you can make sure animated films on a home computer now.

But even there I'm seeing no signs of "exponential improvement".
by godelski | 2025-10-04 20:31:07+00:00
I'm not sure this really matters at this point. It's like filming yourself giving food to the homeless. Is it better if you didn't? Yeah, probably. But at the end of the day does that person have food when otherwise they wouldn't? Also yeah.

I'd rather take a step in the right direction than none at all. If the management can be convinced that there's more money to be made this way then that gives us engineers more power to convince them to solve other such problems. If they care about quality then that gives us back negotiating power. You don't outsource to a third world software mill or AI when your concern is quality. But you do when you were trying to sell the cheapest piece of shit that people will still buy. So yeah, I'm okay with this
by Herring | 2025-10-04 20:32:17+00:00
> This shouldn't be some us vs them thing dammit, we all have the same vision for the economy and arguing over the details—because they are details—ought to be civil rather than territory grabbing and flag planting.

You can't kumbaya your way to peace with Nazis. Black people have been trying to explain this forever. Look at how Germany does it: Speech and expression related to Nazism is heavily regulated and subjects you to imprisonment. Demonstrations/rallies are often banned. The Nazi party itself is banned. AfD is being monitored by intelligence agencies and might be banned in the future, etc. They do this defensively when groups demonstrate an "actively belligerent, aggressive stance" towards the democratic order. Because it's like pointing a gun at people in public - it's already violent even if you don't pull the trigger. Eventually America will have to learn this.
by Animats | 2025-10-04 20:32:19+00:00
Right. It's discouraging. We now know that many stars have planets, and some of them are even in the Goldilocks zone. But if it takes a planetary collision to get water... And only one planetary collision, because each one wipes out essentially all life.

Look at the rest of the solar system. Mars - almost no water. Luna - almost no water. Venus, maybe water[1], but as steam. Too close to the sun and too hot.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2025-10-venus-clouds-reanalyzed.html