MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creer | 2025-11-20 21:38:53+00:00
I am agreeing with you that there was a mismatch between the expectations on using the elaborate documentation in its various forms and the tutorials and the stellar course - and a large set of potential users. Nobody expected "the entire book" but perl 5's rise came at the time when many stopped reading man pages, and many projects stopped providing them.

I agree with you that this probably was a contributor in some people giving up perl quickly. For python or php.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, for people for whom using a book would be a barrier - perl would have been a poor choice anyway. You can't program in perl without using the man pages and books. It's a large language, with lots of features purposely made less visible to the newcomer.

In addition, many people were exposed to perl from web scripts. And it was sooo tempting to just paste in a perl script, and then want to modify it, without spending any time on learning the language. Perl makes that frustrating (and compensates with a stellar course book). I still defend perl by arguing that (in perl) there is no point in discussing what $| might mean even before having covered the basics, for example sigils. The course book is layered, and for good reason: to let you write a program in useful order, fundamentals first. The special variables come up fairly early but then again the course book had an extensive index which includes these special variables first in a symbol section, and then again in the alphabetical order for their wordy version $| or $OUTPUT_AUTOFLUSH. I'm not trying to beat you over the head with the manual. Just pointing out that the course book was throrough and intelligently written.

I'll point out that throwing a question at a forum without poking around it a little to figure out the local mores - well, still now, that will get you barked at. Lesson: Forums would do well to provide a more useful paste-in than "RTFM" - ready to go for their users. Instead of "RTFM". At least if they want to foster adoption. Does any forum do that particiularly well, that you have noticed? Most discords for example, do NOT do that well: it's possible to create stickies and they are really not visible. So people create onboarding documents which then get too long and get skipped. A problem not solved there.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 21:39:02+00:00
> As a total beginner to the functional programming world, something I've never seen mentioned at length is that OOP actually makes a ton of sense for CRUD and database operations.

I've heard this a lot in my career. I can agree that most object-oriented languages have had to do a lot of work to make CRUD and database operations easy to do, because they are common needs. ORM libraries are common because mapping between objects and relations (SQL) is a common need.

It doesn't necessarily mean that object-oriented programming is the best for CRUD because ORMs exist. You can find just as many complaints that ORMs obfuscate how database operations really work/think. The reason you need to map from the relational world to the object world is because they are different worlds. SQL is not an object-oriented language and doesn't follow object-oriented ideals. (At least, not out of the box as a standardized language; many practical database systems have object-oriented underpinnings and/or present object-oriented scripting language extensions to SQL.)

> it's super hard without an ORM or at least some kind of object layer

This seems like you might have got caught in something of a tautological loop situation that because you were working in a language with "object layers" it seemed easiest to work in one, and thus work with an ORM.

It might also be confusing the concepts of "data structure" and "object". Which most object-oriented languages generally do, and have good reason to. A good OOP language wants every data structure to be an object.

The functional programming world still makes heavy use of data structures. It's hard to program in any language without data structures. FP CRUD can be as simple as four functions `create`, 'read`, `update`, and `delete`, but still needs some mapping to data structures/data types. That may still sound object-oriented if you are used to thinking of all data structures as "objects". But beyond that, it should still sound relatively "easy" from an FP perspective: CRUD is just functions that take data structures and make database operations or make database operations and return data structures.

A difference between FP and OOP's view of data structures is where "behaviors" live. An object is a data structure with "attached" behaviors which often modify a data structure in place. FP generally relies on functions that take one data structure and return the next data structure. If you aren't using much in the way of class inheritance, if your "objects" out of your ORM have few methods of their own, you may be closer to FP than you think. (The boundary is slippery.)
by jajuuka | 2025-11-20 21:39:18+00:00
I got really into C&C with Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 was a big change but I fell in love with it for the same reasons you mentioned. It's been the most disappointing part of seeing them open source all the old games. That this amazing game AND Tiberian Sun won't be part of it because they lost the code.

The "we made units this way because it's fun" philosophy is sorely missed. Every game feels like it goes through a tuning phase just for esports. Even if the game isn't out yet.
by newfriend | 2025-11-20 21:40:07+00:00
> willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.

Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.

> This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans.

There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.

> Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.

Conjecture. Trump was not in office in 2024. That bill may or may not have addressed some issues, while also creating new issues or making things worse.
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-20 21:40:09+00:00
For good reason. Being "investigated" for illegal things is a key way to violate personal liberties. If you believe in freedom, you have to accept that some people who are not nice people benefit from those human rights. You may find yourself an "enemy of the people" for a variety of reasons.

In most cases, cell tower data is sold in the open market in aggregate. A commercial real estate developer can buy datasets that provide the average household income of passers by by hour of the day and month of the year, for example. The police can request tower ping data, generally by warrant. There are exceptions, especially in the federal space.

The Feds have a massive surveillance network. Every journey on the interstates between Miami and the border crossings near Buffalo, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Vermont and Maine all the way down to Miami is logged and tracked by a DEA program, which has likely expanded. You can get breadcrumbs of LPR hits and passenger photographs throughout the journey.

Flock is a cancer, as it is deployed by individual jurisdictions (often with Federal grants) and makes each node part of a larger network. They help solve and will likely eliminate some categories of crime. But the laws governing use are at best weak and at worse an abomination. Local cops abuse it by doing the usual dumb cop stuff -- stalking girlfriends, checking up on acquaintances. The Federal government is able to tap in to make it a node in their panopticon. Unlike government systems, stuff like user ids aren't really governed well and the abuses are mostly unauditable.

The private camera networks are a problem for commercial abuse and Federal abuse. They aren't as risky for local PDs because they generally require a paper trail to use. Corrupt/abusive cops don't like accountability.
by vkou | 2025-11-20 21:40:34+00:00
> I'm curious what you think the solution is?

The solution is simple. If there's a judge that signed off on a warrant to track a particular vehicle or person, cameras should be permitted to track its movements.

Otherwise, cameras should only be allowed to track people actively breaking the law - such as sending tickets to people running red lights. They should not record or retain any information about drivers that are following the rules.

Fishing expeditions are illegal and immoral. Mass tracking of innocent people is immoral.

---

Judicial warrants exist as a counterbalance between two public needs (The need to not be harassed by the police for no good reason, and the need for the police to be able to conduct active, targeted investigations of a particular crime.)
by pdabbadabba | 2025-11-20 21:40:38+00:00
I reread that old thread, and then skimmed the Penn State article (a bit quickly, I admit). I gotta say: I think you're overstating your case here. Certainly, the author of that article is skeptical about the 100-mile zone and makes plenty of good (and, IMO, obvious) points about why it is constitutionally suspect. But, to read your comments, you'd think that some important court somewhere has actually placed meaningful limits on immigration enforcement within that zone (outside the context of an actual border crossing). If so, I don't see where you're getting that. If that's actually in the article, could you tell us where?

To be fair, though, I think it is also true that the ACLU is too eager to talk about the "Constitution-Free Zone" as though it is fact. I also agree that people should not simply accept that the Constitution-Free Zone exists. It is definitely not that simple and what would otherwise be 4th Amendment violations should absolutely still be challenged even if they occur within the zone. There is still every opportunity for more good law on this.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-20 21:41:05+00:00
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.

There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
by abraae | 2025-11-20 21:41:26+00:00
You're not wrong.

It's fashionable to dunk on OOP (because most examples - like employee being a subtype of person - are stupid) and ORM (because yes you need to hand write queries of any real complexity).

But there's a reason large projects rely on them. When used properly they are powerful, useful, time-saving and complexity-reducing abstractions.

Code hipsters always push new techniques and disparage the old ones, then eventually realise that there were good reasons for the status quo.

Case in point the arrival of NoSQL and wild uptake of MongoDB and the like last decade. Today people have re-learned the value of the R part of RDBMS.
by cogman10 | 2025-11-20 21:41:28+00:00
Objects/classes work best for datastructures (IMO).

Outside that usecase, I think polymorphism via inheritance is generally a mistake.

Programs manipulate data and datastructures organize that data in a way that's algorithmically efficient.

The main issue with OOP is that without a very clear abstraction, it can be almost impossible to reason about code as you end up needing to know too much about the hierarchy of code to correctly understand what will happen next. As it turns out, most programmers are pretty bad at managing that abstraction boundary.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-20 21:41:37+00:00
I think it would be very nice if the author provided citations for their assertions about how OOP was adopted. I was alive and gigging as a coder in the 80s when people had interminable arguments about Structured Programming, unstructured programming, OOP and every now and again LISP or FORTH. None of what the author mentions rings true. Standard interfaces came DECADES before anyone started talking about OOP. Rationalizing standard interfaces was mentioned in mythical man month. Structured Development was all the rage in the early 80s when I started selling 6502 op codes. Half the people I talked to in the 80s insisted C++ WAS OOP while the other half found that quote from Alan Kay who said C++ wasn't what he was thinking of when he invented the term "Object Oriented Programming."

I think the author is correctly picking up on how messy changes in best common practice can be. Also, different communities / verticals convert to the true religion on different schedules. The custom enterprise app guys are WAAAAY different than games programmers. I'm not sure you'll ever get those communities to speak the same language.

OOP is dead. Long live OOP.
by torginus | 2025-11-20 21:42:27+00:00
My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that. You might even lose warranty as the manufacturer could claim that the issue they fixed via a software update couldn't be installed on your car - or couldn't monitor some diagnostics which are a prerequisite for in-warranty repair.

Most telco execs would sell their own mothers before offering reasonable data plans - that your car comes with one for free should be very telling
by immibis | 2025-11-20 21:43:10+00:00
I do not get this use of the word "reality"? The reality is Ted Bundy's currently-at-large successor has the ability to shoot me with a gun. And that fact is about as relevant as what you said.

What you're doing here is resigning from a game just because of the fact there is a game, and then being condescending to other people for trying to win the game instead, as if what you're doing is something superior. This would already be very odd behaviour if this were only Monopoly or Risk, but is downright dangerous propaganda when the game is capitalism and the future of free computing is at stake.
by ethin | 2025-11-20 21:43:24+00:00
Where are you from? In the US, there are well over a thousand laws on the books. Might be more like 10000 with respect to criminal law alone. And that's at the federal level. Factor in all the various states and criminal codes for those states and the surface area becomes enormous.

In my state alone, it is illegal to do things like:

* Hold stud poker games by charitable groups more than twice a year

* Keep an elk in a sandbox in your back yard

* Serve both beer and pretzels at a bar or restaurant simultaneously

* Swim naked in the Red River from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m

* Wear a hat while dancing or at any event where a dance is happening

* Lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on

Yes, these are actual crimes in the state I'm in. If you think those are absurd, you should see some other states criminal codes; for example, in Alaska, it is illegal to appear drunk in a bar. No, really, I'm serious. So you literally can't live your life without breaking the law somehow. I'm pretty sure Legal Eagle has an entire video (or more than one) dedicated to downright stupid laws like these.

In a just world, these laws wouldn't exist, but, well...

Edit: just wanted to add that I can't seem to find actual legal citations for some of these but they may be county or city ordinances. Regardless, they are still stupid and still crimes from what I know.
by ActorNightly | 2025-11-20 21:43:26+00:00
Yeah and if you have your cell phone with you, license plates readers are irrelevant.

Fun fact, the Austin bomber was caught because publically available user data used for advertising, as gathered by a bunch of 3d party apps, allowed a cross reference of cellphones in vicinity within certain time ranges, which narrowed the suspect pool to very few people from which they were able to start their investigation.
by Animats | 2025-11-20 21:43:27+00:00
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.

That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics. Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
by geophile | 2025-11-20 21:44:10+00:00
No, "we" are not replacing OOP with something worse. "We" are replacing layers of stupid shit that got layered on top of, and associated with OOP, with different renderings of the same stupid shit.

I have been programming since 1967. Early in my college days, when I was programming in FORTRAN and ALGOL-W, I came across structured programming. The core idea was that a language should provide direct support for frequently used patterns. Implementing what we now call while loops using IFs and GOTOs? How about adding a while loop to the language itself? And while we're at it, GOTO is never a good idea, don't use it even if your language provides it.

Then there were Abstract Datatypes, which provided my first encounter with the idea that the interface to an ADT was what you should program with, and that the implementation behind that interface was a separate (and maybe even inaccessible) thing. The canonical example of the day was a stack. You have PUSH and POP at the interface, and the implementation could be a linked list, or an array, or a circular array, or something else.

And then the next step in that evolution, a few years later, was OOP. The idea was not that big a step from ADTs and structured programming. Here are some common patterns (modularization, encapsulation, inheritance), and some programming language ideas to provide them directly. (As originally conceived, OOP also had a way of objects interacting, through messages. That is certainly not present in all OO languages.)

And that's all folks.

All the glop that was added later -- Factories, FactoryFactories, GoF patterns, services, microservices -- that's not OOP as originally proposed. A bunch of often questionable ideas were expressed using OO, but they were not part of OO.

The OOP hatred has always been bizarre to me, and I think mostly motivated by these false associations. The essential OOP ideas are uncontroversial. They are just programming language constructs designed to support programming practices that are pretty widely recognized as good ones, regardless of your language choices. Pick your language, use the OO parts or not, it isn't that big a deal. And if your language doesn't have OO bits, then good programming often involves reimplementing them in a systematic way.

These pro- and anti-OOP discussions, which can get pretty voluminous and heated, seem a lot like religious wars. Look, we can all agree that the Golden Rule is a pretty good idea, regardless of the layers of terrible ideas that get piled onto different religions incorporating that rule.
by legitster | 2025-11-20 21:44:11+00:00
I mean... the whole point of a license plate is that it's a public identifier. It should not be that controversial that's publicly registered information. In the same way that flights are tracked.

Multiple Supreme Courts have also made it clear several times that they believe you do not have a right to privacy in public spaces. So all the traffic camera databases do is automate and make easier something that is currently definitively legal.

The more pertinent issue in this case is that driving patterns should not be grounds for detainment without a warrant. Especially if you have no evidence to link the driver to the car. But unfortunately, the recent Supreme Court decision made suspicion of being an illegal immigrant grounds for detainment.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-20 21:44:14+00:00
> This "average nontechnical user" stuff, though, miss me with. For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise that any kind of message encryption is the best alternative to sending plaintext messages. No: telling people not to send those kinds of messages at all, unless you're dead certain the channel they're using is safe, is the only responsible recommendation.

Eh. You misunderstand me. I don't really have too much of a view on this personally. Unless you specifically think that the term "average nontechnical user" is a bad term.

N.B. for other readers of this thread to flesh out my initial point:

Signal specifically didn't do that recommendation until they got sufficient critical mass of users in 2022. In particular Signal gracefully degraded to unencrypted SMS if the other side didn't have Signal.

Likewise Signal required phone numbers until 2024 when it shifted over to usernames, with all the security vulnerabilities that entails.

Signal has repeatedly made trade-offs that prioritize UX over absolute security even in 1-1 chat settings. That's not to criticize those trade-offs, there's a variety of reasons why they make sense or don't. But Signal has consistently demonstrated that it is not willing to make severe compromises to the UX and understandability in the name of absolute security and that it will balance the two.
by Freak_NL | 2025-11-20 21:44:52+00:00
> Remember that if someone Googles this person for a newer job, it might show up.

Not to sound too harsh, but this is a person who rudely let AI perform a task badly which should have been handled by just… merging/rebasing the PR after confirming it does what it should do, then couldn't be bothered to reply and instead let the robot handle it, and then refused to fix the mess they made (making the apology void).

That's three strikes.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-20 21:45:34+00:00
You can't even call the GOP the party of capitalism either.

The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.

Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-20 21:45:36+00:00
> You made this up

Correct. "Once hired, ICE agents receive training before beginning fieldwork" [1].

That said, "unlike many law enforcement roles, no previous experience in law enforcement is required, and candidates do not need to take a pre-employment exam." And the training is minimal, as evidenced by the dismal deportation figures.

> so just normal law enforcement arresting people

Normal law enforcement is bound by laws and identifies itself. We do that to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that unidentifiable agents shoving Americans into unmarked cars is something that raises alarm, because there is zero assurance it's ICE versus e.g. foreign operatives or gangs.

> Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing

These processes are being kept under wraps because they're a massive expansion of state power. The kind conservatives and libertartians oppose. The narrow branch of MAGA that's distrating federal law enforcement isn't representative of any governing coalition.

Understanding why process matters is difficult for everyone when your guy is in charge. A good method is to imagine a left-wing President having these extralegal authorities and resources.

[1] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/what-it-takes-to-become-an-...
by ceroxylon | 2025-11-20 21:45:42+00:00
Kagi reminds me of the original search engines of yore, when I could type what I want and it would appear, and I could go on with my work/life.

As for the people who claim this will create/introduce slop, Kagi is one of the few platforms where they are actively fighting against low quality AI generated content with their community fueled "SlopStop" campaign.[0]

Not sponsored, just a fan. Looking forward to trying this out.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html