MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lordnacho | 2025-11-03 20:17:04+00:00
Huge problem with the conclusion, and it is something mentioned in the article. It is suggested to view the language choice as an economic decision. But guess what, that is already what the decision makers think they are doing.

There's another almost-got-it in the article. He is suggesting people tie their identity to their programming language of choice. This seems odd to me, because we tend to think of identity as think like religion or ethnic group, not sub-professional groupings like neurosurgeon or devops, and certainly not specific to tooling ("I'm a DeWalt carpenter!")

The missing connection is back to economics. If I've spent a bunch of time coding .NET, it's going to cost me something to code Java or python. This is the actual economic conversation being had. People will have to learn a new toolset, while having deadlines over their heads.

The solution is actually this: You hire people who are language-agnostic.

I used to spend a LOT of time in VBA, and then .NET. I was daunted by making the jump to C, then c++ and python. Only over time did I overcome the nerves and move on with Java, Kotlin, Elixir, js, and Rust. It was an eye-opening experience that you could do this. Just make the leap, and you find it wasn't that far.

If you don't have people who have done this a few times, you will get resistance, and the real resistance is they don't think it's worth it to put in the hours to learn the new tools. They come up with all sorts of justifications for why things are fine with the old tools.

You'll also become a language lumper if you do this. I don't really think there's a lot of language features. The main ones are GC vs manual memory, strong vs weak type, imperative vs declarative. Once I had a few points on these axes, a lot of things eased when it came to new languages.
by hiros-neko | 2025-11-03 20:17:15+00:00
Location: Ontario, Canada Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: C# / Unity / ASP.NET / Blazor WebAssembly Résumé/CV: https://kyle.giammar.co/s/resume.pdf Email: kyle@giammar.co

Full-stack developer and/or Unity Developer with experience publishing mobile apps and B2B & B2C websites/portals
by pesch3 | 2025-11-03 20:17:26+00:00
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by feoren | 2025-11-03 20:17:37+00:00
Anyone can decide a statement is "ideological" just by disagreeing with it. The statement "the government can and should provide services to its people if those services are important to its future and the free market is incapable of providing them" should not, and did not used to be, ideological. The fact that such a statement is far outside of the current Overton Window is the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign to destroy everyone's faith in government so it can be looted, and everyone who parrots "government bad" is (knowingly or not) playing a part in this propaganda campaign. I assume the issue you have with my comment is that I knew 95% of readers would immediately regurgitate "but government bad!", but of course I was right that that happened.

When the Overton Window shifts to the point where saying "people should be decent to one another" becomes a radical ideological statement, make sure you flag every comment that says that too. We can't have radical ideologues on HN, after all.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-03 20:18:06+00:00
> You do know that you can learn to make new sounds with your mouth, tongue and vocal chords right?

Of course. I speak French at a pretty high level (the accent has gotten worse from disuse but in 2007 most people in France couldn't tell I was foreign); nevertheless, when I say "France" (while speaking English), I pronounce it the American way, not the French way, because switching to a different language for one word in your sentence would sound silly.

And that gets to why the purported Türkiye change bothers me: it's not even really a different name; it's pretty much the same name, only pronounced and spelled in Turkish rather than in English. Most name changes are done for some more serious purpose, like to resolve a genuinely important political dispute (in the case of Macedonia becoming North Macedonia), to make the name better fit English place naming conventions and actually be easier to say in English (Czech Republic to Czechia), to assert independence by discarding a foreign name imposed by former colonial masters (Swaziland to Eswatini), or to switch away from a totally different name in a foreign language used by the people who used to live there centuries ago (Constantinople to Istanbul). Or they happened long enough ago that the new name is established and I can't muster the energy to resist it now (Burma to Myanmar).

None of these reasons apply to Turkey; the purported name change is just a demand that everybody start using Turkish sounds and letters for the same name. Given the ideology of the person calling for this change (Erdogan), I can only conclude that it's entirely driven by a puerile sense of nationalism: "let's prove how strong we are by forcing everyone to use our language, if only for this one word!" It sounds ridiculous when put that way, but Erdogan is indeed a ridiculous person.

> The only thing you do by continuing to argue against that point is push your own Anglicize-all-the-things notion of the world, which is certainly not shared by all, not even remotely.

Well, it doesn't really have to do specifically with anglicization. English-speakers should continue calling it Turkey, French-speakers Turquie, German-speakers die Türkei, and so on.

Edit: to be clear, if I ever meet a real Turkish person who actually cares about this, I'll probably call it whatever they prefer, at least around them, out of politeness. But this has yet to happen. Every Turkish person I know still just calls it Turkey in English.
by tailrecursion | 2025-11-03 20:18:09+00:00
> A new language / style / technology / whatever very often will leave us less competent.

This may be a big factor in rejecting unfamiliar languages. Over time the brain trains itself to grok a specific syntax, and understanding becomes partly automatic: we look at a Java program and our brain injects meaning into our consciousness. If we then look at APL or Lisp, however, that training on Java doesn't apply and the automatic injection doesn't function. We're left having to read the symbols directly, and it's unsettling not having the auto-assist. It makes us feel we "can't" understand the language, when it would likely take a couple weeks of immersion to change that impression.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-03 20:18:11+00:00
> I say "it's only highly contested by Israel".

There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.

But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.
by Balinares | 2025-11-03 20:18:34+00:00
I once was involved in a complete rewrite in a new language that ended up saving the company -- so those do happen, empirically.

That was an unusual scenario, however; the previous iteration of the product had major issues, buggy and costly to maintain, and the language change was in part for the purpose of repointing the hiring pipeline toward a different kind of profile. Such special circumstances aside, I'm with you on recommending against rewrites. Much as I'm often tempted.
by chrishill89 | 2025-11-03 20:18:40+00:00
> Might as well squash as nobody wants to deal with untested in-between crap.

I would rather deal with nice and tidy but untested commits rather than a very well-tested but too monolithic squash. If you test the eventual merge then you have done no less testing than the squash case.

Old commits are read more than they are run.
by cal_dent | 2025-11-03 20:18:43+00:00
I think this is true but the original point still stands. Online world now definitely plays a bigger role but I'd still suspect that for the majority online issues/drama are still a small % of what their real world looks like. Despite the media (social or news) bombarding the space with their 'model' of the world.

It has always felt to me like an amped up version of what the news is. As someone who has largely spent most of life as an immigrant, from a family of mostly immigrants all across the world, we always find it amusing how you get messages from people about the big x thing going on in whatever country you are, as per what is going on in the news/social media, and the person you're messaging is literally unaware that that is a big deal or is affected by it even indirectly enough for it to register. Anectodally, that happens far more frequently now than it did 5-10 years ago
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-11-03 20:19:02+00:00
That's the nature of nutritional science: We know little for sure, and what we do know is often questionable. Personally I grew up reading a new big-headline story about whether butter or margarine is healthier every few months in the local newspaper. The results were always in conflict with what you thought we knew and I still don't know.

> Participants completed questionnaires about diet at the start of the study, detailing what they ate and drank over the past year.

OMG as someone who once worked in the field of designing nutritional health questionnaires, for the love of god please don't ask people what they have been eating over the past year. They will misremember what they ate the past day.

So the upside is that this paper's role in life will be relegated to becoming another data point in a future meta-study; until such study comes out, there's no need to overly worry about the results based on this study alone. I mean come on, retrospective nutritional self-disclosure for twelve months. What did you eat in January 2024?

That said, there's recently been an increasing number of studies claiming that some sweeteners actually enhance appetite (not surprising when you know those are also used to fatten pigs) and others are bad for your cardiovascular health, but I cannot be sure I haven't seen the titles of those studies just because some small number of HN contributors like to post those stories.
by dvt | 2025-11-03 20:19:17+00:00
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by leoc | 2025-11-03 20:19:37+00:00
People in computing like Alan Kay and Ted Nelson were reading people like Postman and Marshall McLuhan and worrying about this kind of thing decades ago. Unfortunately, instead we've got to the point where the computer industry has created TV on the computer from the visionary post-war manifesto Don't Create TV on the Computer. And while it was probably always the case that most people would end up mostly taking the path of least resistance through their lives, the state of the technology is actively funneling them there, because it usually makes it so bloody painful, and sometimes quite isolating, to do things which are more thoughtful or effortful, or even just to do the same things in a more thoughtful way.

(Probably the single thing that most needs to get fixed immediately, right away, is to get content-addressable networking—IPFS, a better iteration of IPFS, your favourite alternative to IPFS, have your pick—up to an adequate level of practical usability, support and actual adoption. This is a blocker or near-blocker for many things, sometimes in unobvious ways.)

All that said, the fact that that Postman book is from 1985, still pretty solidly in the pre-Internet mass-media world, illustrates that the cultural-decline issue probably isn't really, or mostly, a computer or even a consumer-Internet problem. Revolution in the Head is another book of the same kind of cultural pessimism, also from (basically) the pre-Web era.
by logifail | 2025-11-03 20:19:48+00:00
> It seems hard if not impossible to prevent or stop?

Thought experiement: you can buy and register a car, and then lend it to someone else to use.

That's certainly "hard if not impossible to prevent or stop" and might seem fine ... right until the point when it isn't fine any more.

At which point the police will come to knock on your door (first).
by thomasmg | 2025-11-03 20:19:59+00:00
> the language most of the team know the best

I fully agree. The challenge is, some will want to use the latest languages and technologies because they want to learn it (personal development, meaning: the next job). Sometimes the "new thing" can be limited to (non-critical) testing and utilities. But having many languages and technologies just increases the friction, complicates things, and prevents refactoring. Even mixing just scripts with regular languages is a problem; calling one language from another is similar. The same with unnecessary remote APIs. Less technologies is often better, even if the technologies are not the best (eg. using PostgreSQL for features like fulltext search, event processing, etc.)

This is a bit related to external dependencies vs build yourself (AKA reinvent the wheel). Quite often the external library, long term, causes more issues than building it yourself (assuming you _can_ build a competent implementation).
by Centigonal | 2025-11-03 20:20:11+00:00
Here are more details on this: https://truthout.org/articles/house-republicans-investigate-...

Here is the letter from two US congressmen, requesting information from Wikipedia, including "Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by [Wikipedia's arbitration committee]": https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
by johnisgood | 2025-11-03 20:20:13+00:00
You claimed much more than that.

See your statement: "Not so with with the first two! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.".

Your whole comment is about favoring Rust over those two because Rust is your beloved language.

Additionally, it is not up to me to teach you Forth nor Common Lisp.

Finally, you should read your own comment where you replace Rust with Common Lisp, for example, and Forth and Common Lisp with Rust. You may see what I was referring to.

In fact, let me do it for you:

> Rust is demanding, but they demand different things of the novice programmer than Common Lisp. The latter's baroque syntax is not provably good or necessary, but I'd call it the other end of a compromise for safety and expressiveness. And once you learn it, you've learned much of the language by default.

> Not so much with Rust! The mental models involved in reasoning about a piece of code require much more cognition on the part of the programmer.

See it yet?
by mikewarot | 2025-11-03 20:20:17+00:00
The advertising/panopticon funding model is turning this timeline into a dystopia worthy of George Orwell. Because of algorithmic tuning to optimize "engagement", the promise of the internet has been turned into a dark pattern instead.

We can run our own servers, curate our own sources of information, and build reputation networks, in spite of the overall trends. The key difference is to do it for any reason other than profit.

Another weakness of the evolved systems is the whole "Up/Down" voting system that happens everywhere. When you force everything into that single dimension, you waste almost all information that can be gleaned from someone who has just spent their attention on something. I think that we need to have systems that can vote with vectors. Something can be funny, technically wrong, and insightful all at the same time... wouldn't it be nice to be able to learn those things?

Also, a pet peeve - HTML doesn't allow the Markup of Hypertext. It actively works against the idea of a Memex, a thing we still don't have 80 years later. 8(
by spookie | 2025-11-03 20:20:19+00:00
Thing is, they only help to an extent. There are many golden nuggets out in wild waiting to be seen, most don't realize this and end up writing or thinking along the same lines as others already have. You are limiting the potential of your review by doing this, and finding those golden nuggets is your true goal. You need to get out of the local maxima my brother. Your goal is to give these golden nuggets the sunlight they need.
by hshdhdhehd | 2025-11-03 20:20:26+00:00
Language choices does make a decent difference to time spent, bugs, extensibility. Id guess a 20-100% tax for choosing the wrong language. However most of the time the best language is the one the team knows well. Caveat to that is if the threading model or performance doesnt suit. Or company platform engineering reasons (e.g. availability of platform libraries).
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-03 20:20:40+00:00
There already is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Extrajudicial_killings_o... (there even is a larger article about "Capital punishment in Gaza" if that wasn't enough already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Gaza... [goes beyond Hamas])

Did you honestly spend any time at all to see if it was already included in Wikipedia or not before you wrote your comment?
by gojomo | 2025-11-03 20:20:52+00:00
The Wikipedia page is useful, and as you've identified the 2025 MN Representative Hortman murder as the "first assassination of a sitting legislator at the state or federal level in my lifetime" – not counting the 2015 murder of SC Senator Pinckney – is it safe to assume you're a precociously-posting 10-year-old?

I was born in 1970; per your reference, there've been a bunch of state & federal legislators (or recently-former legislators) killed for political (or pseudo-political deranged) motives "in my lifetime" – and far more in the 1970s than in the last 10 years.

In my lifetime, one sitting President was shot at & missed (Ford in 1976), and one was shot at & hit by a ricochet (Reagan in 1981) – again, more in the past than the shots that grazed candidate Trump in 2024.

The Wikipedia-listed murders of other officeholders, like mayors or judges, are also more frequent in the past than recently – especially going before either of our lifetimes.

So trend impressions are very subject to frames of reference & familiarity with history.

I suspect if people in general had a deeper & broader sense of how common political violence has been, both in US history & worldwide, they'd be, on the one hand, less prone to panic over recent events & rhetoric (even though it is concerning), but also on the other hand more appreciative of the relative peace of recent decades (even with the last few years' events).
by Merad | 2025-11-03 20:21:08+00:00
> Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter

The hybrid electric motor in a Toyota is already pretty comparable in weight to the motor in TFA, but obviously much less powerful. You can see the main hybrid motor of a RAV4 at [0]. If memory serves both the Camry and RAV4 hybrid models are only 2-300 lbs heavier than their gas counterparts.

0: https://youtu.be/O61WihMRdjM?t=120
by crq-yml | 2025-11-03 20:21:28+00:00
One of the things I remember about myself and others as young people emerging in the years around Y2K, was that we were taught presumption at every opportunity. Pat answers from the elite circles were to be found for everything, and the referential aspects of pop culture were built on that; they could critique it, make satire, but they couldn't imagine a world without it, and therefore the conversation had a gravity of the inevitable and inescapable. Piece by piece, that has been torn down in tandem with the monoculture. A lot of it has been subsequently called out as something toxic or an -ism or otherwise diminishing.

Every influencer now has this dance they do with intellectual statements where, unless they intentionally aim to create rhetorical bait, they don't make bold context-free claims. They hedge and address all sorts of preliminaries.

At the same time, the entry points to culture have shifted. There's a very sharp divide now, for example, between online posting of fine art, decorative art, commercial art, and "the online art community" - influencer-first artists, posting primarily digital character illustrations on social media. The first three are the legacy forms(and the decorative arts are probably the least impacted by any of this), but the last invokes a younger voice that is oblivious to history - they publish now and learn later, so their artistic conversation tends to be more immature, but comes with a sense of identity that mimicks the influencer space, generally. Are they making art or content? That's the part that seems to be the foundational struggle.