MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aforwardslash | 2025-11-26 17:48:53+00:00
rolls eyes

No, their error was that they shouldn't be querying system tables to perform field discovery; the same method in postgresql (pg_class or whatever its called) would have had the same result. The simple alternative is to use "describe table <table_name>".

On top of that, they shouldn't be writing ad-hoc code to query system tables, but having a separate library instead to perform those kind of task mixed with business logic (crappy application design).

Also, this should never have passed code review in the first place, but lets assume it did because errors happen, and this kind of atrocious code and flaky design is not uncommon.

As an example, they could be reading this data from CSV files *and* have made the same mistake. Conflating this with "database design errors" is just stupid - this is not a schema design error, this is a programmer error.
by QuercusMax | 2025-11-26 17:49:07+00:00
Too willing to write a ton of code - this is absolutely one of the things that drives me nuts. I ask it to write me a stub implementation and it goes and makes up all the details of how it works, 99% of which is totally wrong. I tell it to rename a file and add a single header line, and it does that - but throws away everything after line 400. Just unreliable and headache-inducing.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 17:49:08+00:00
We talk about dark ages probalby in a different way.

I talk about a time were we had no proper female rights. Females can only vote around the globe since 1893 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage)

A refrigerator was only common in 1913.

Before all of that, we spend a LOT of time on just surviving.
by cr1st1an | 2025-11-26 17:49:38+00:00
Thanks for all the comments so far. I wanted to share what I am taking from the discussion and also open the door if anyone wants to keep pushing on any of these points. There is a lot of useful input here.

About the $2.99 plan. Several people pointed out that the pricing feels too low or too open ended. That is fair. I priced it that way for launch, but I am going to adjust it with a clearer fair use limit and a slightly higher base price. If anyone has strong opinions on what feels reasonable for small sites while still being safe for me, I would love to hear it.

Who the plugin is actually for. A few replies assumed this is mainly for people who already use Cloudflare DNS. The real target is the group that cannot or do not want to move their nameservers, but still want Cloudflare-level delivery. If anyone here has seen this pattern with clients or non-technical users, I am curious how common that is in your experience.

Privacy wording. Some comments pointed out that my privacy section could be clearer about what Cloudflare logs. I agree. The plugin itself does not track anything, but Cloudflare obviously logs what any CDN logs. I will rewrite that part. If there is better wording that avoids confusion, I am open to suggestions.

Why use a Worker at all. This is not an offloader, although that's a good plug in on itself. I saw a few questions about why not rely entirely on Cloudflare’s built in caching. The Worker is mainly there to keep all Cloudflare setup outside of WordPress and avoid credential handling inside the plugin. If anyone sees a simpler pattern that avoids that overhead, I would like to hear it.

Content and responsibility. The point about hosting other peoples images under my own domain is valid. I am adding more safeguards and encouraging bigger sites to self host their Worker. If you have experience dealing with this at scale, any advice is welcome.

Overall this thread has been helpful. There are still a few open questions and I am happy to keep the conversation going if anyone wants to dig deeper into pricing, edge behavior, privacy, or Cloudflare alternatives.
by fstoppper | 2025-11-26 17:49:41+00:00
Pixelmator always felt like it was built by Apple even before they touched it. That absorption felt more like a formality than an acquisition and the product has pretty much stayed exactly the same since.

Colo.io is different, mostly because it's a web app which is already a strike given Apple's allergy to anything on the open web. Also it was made by one person so would be a low-cost acquihire that neutralizes a potential competitor outside of their walled garden. Founder walks with a few mil plus a senior role and the web loses another good tool. Net win for Apple, arguably for the founder and a net loss for the web ecosystem. Business as usual.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-26 17:49:45+00:00
I can't understand it either. To me it seems people are excessively risk-averse. I can understand that but I don't understand the leadership not trying to stimulate a little bit of risk and growth there. It's getting to absurd levels at places.

But regardless. Not like USA companies are open to EU citizens currently. Whether it's politics, compliance / legal, or tax-related, it does not matter much. Most US job ads I've seen lately are making it super clear that they want only US citizens.
by TomasBM | 2025-11-26 17:49:58+00:00
Looks great, and I definitely like the approach, but I wonder who would be the ideal user here.

Regional pricing is not that difficult of a problem, unless you're targeting particular customer bases and want to introduce discounts. So, I expect you'll always have devs who can't be bothered, and will opt for the defaults.

Those who want to do the additional legwork won't face that many problems with calculations, although admittedly your tool makes it easier for them. But what's the genuine difference between the default and your prices, and how much of a customer base is actually lost in that difference?

In fact, to reframe this more optimistically, I'd suggest you reach out to people at Steam (and other platforms) who are working on this. Since your tool is already free, you can aim for even more impact and tell them why their current system is wrong, why this matters and why yours is better.

If you want to adapt this to something you can monetize, I'd suggest introducing more complex considerations into the mix. What if I wanted regional pricing and info when to apply discounts where? What platforms should I support to get the most players from X country? You could leverage more data and advanced analytics to support complex decisions that users would pay for.

Just my two cents.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-11-26 17:50:20+00:00
Kagi also kept using Yandex - a Russian search engine - despite many people explicitly requesting they not provide funding to imperialist invaders (aside the obvious question of censorship skewing result quality).

When they said no, and explained Yandex only gets paid when needed for a search anyway, people asked for a toggle to disable Yandex for their searches. That way at least they aren't funding it. Rejected that too.

Not going to lie, it is kinda weird how this is happening again.
by orbifold | 2025-11-26 17:50:49+00:00
One other thing I've observed is that Claude fares much better in a well engineered pre-existing codebase. It adopts to most of the style and has plenty of "positive" examples to follow. It also benefits from the existing test infrastructure. It will still tend to go in infinite loops or introduce bugs and then oscillate between them, but I've found it to be scarily efficient at implement medium sized features in complicated codebases.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-26 17:50:50+00:00
Fair point, I was thinking of the relatively modern digital era. 150 years ago a person in Eastern Europe could not reset my bank account password remotely with a phone call.

But these huge data breaches have been happening for a few decades now. Pretty much anyone who's had any accounts with banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, utilities, or any online services has been included in one or more of them. It must be the assumption going forward that this information is no longer secret.
by aseipp | 2025-11-26 17:51:11+00:00
If you want thin client like behavior, you should look at stuff like Waypipe or just outright using RDP directly, both of which are much better at the job of "display remote graphical application on my computer" than X11's client-server design ever managed to accomplish.

If anything, the variety of alternative solutions for that today -- everything from single-app to high-res full-desktop game streaming -- are much more robust and viable on modern networks than the X approach ever was, even if it was a neat-o "freebie" thing that fell out of its design. You get what you pay for, I guess.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-11-26 17:51:16+00:00
I have used a spare (older) Kelly Kettle as a sand battery while camping up some damp mountains in my neighborhood (Austria) and it has been consistently terrific to charge it up, and bring it inside to heat up the tent. The other (newer) Kelly Kettle serves boiling water purposes too, though, of course .. but otherwise the sand-kettle is real convenient, and easy to recharge as well ..
by thisisit | 2025-11-26 17:51:19+00:00
This is the sad reality. Because things can go the other way as well. Something can be amazing but beaten down because - AI.

Here's a video which was discussed by VFX artists at Corridor Digital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43h61QAXjpY

This is so much creative work. But once people know that genAI and ComfyUI might be involved they might beat it down.
by wathef | 2025-11-26 17:51:42+00:00
an insulin pump is a good metaphor; insulin as a hormone has a lot of interactions and the pump itself, if not wanting to unalive its user, should (most do not) account for external variables, such as: exercise, heart rate, sickness, etc. these variables are left for the user to deal with, and in this case, is a subpar experience in managing a condition.
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-26 17:53:08+00:00
As somebody currently navigating the brutal job market, I'm scared shitless about that too. I have to tell you though, that the historical success rate of railing against "technologies that make labor more efficient" is currently at 0.0000000%.

We've survived and thrived through inflection points like this before, though. So I'm doing my best to have an adapt-or-die mindset.

"computers are taking away human jobs"

"visual basic will eliminate the need for 'real coders'"

"nobody will think any more. they'll 'just google it' instead of actually understanding things"

"SQL is human readable. it's going to reduce the need for engineers" (before my time, admittedly)

"offshoring will larely eliminate US-based software development"

etc.

Ultimately (with the partial exception of offshoring) these became productivity-enhancers that increased the expectations placed on the shoulders of engineers and expanded the profession, not things that replaced the profession. Admittedly, AI feels like our biggest challenge yet. Maybe.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-26 17:53:12+00:00
> opposition to AI springs from having their identities threatened.

I think there's definitely some truth to this. I saw similar pushback from the "learn to code" and coding bootcamp era, and you still frequently see it in Linux communities where anytime the prospect of more "normies" using Linux comes up, a not insignificant part of the community is actively hostile to that happening.

The attitude goes all the way back to eternal september.
by acedTrex | 2025-11-26 17:53:36+00:00
I'm currently really feeling the pain the side bar stuff. The non "application" code/config.

Scripts, cicd, documentation etc. The stuff that gets a PR but doesn't REALLY get the same level of review because its not really production code. But when you need to go tweak the thing it does a few months or years later... its so dense and undecipherable you spend more time figuring out how the llm wrote the damn thing than doing it all over yourself.

Should you probably review it a little harsher in the moment? sure, but thats not always feasible with things that are at the time "not important" and only later become the root of other things.

I have lost several hours this week to several such occurences.
by taco_emoji | 2025-11-26 17:53:48+00:00
I'm curious: why don't YOU create this app? 95% of a software business isn't the programming, it's the requirements gathering and marketing and all that other stuff.

Is it beneath YOUR dignity to create this? What an untapped market! You could be king!

Also it's absurd to an incredible degree to believe that any significant portion of programmers, left to their own devices, are eager to make "big, complicated, enterprise-scale" software.
by hotsauceror | 2025-11-26 17:54:08+00:00
I don't have a good answer for why they haven't already. I have wondered about the possibility of doing this for 10 years or more.

"The data that on-air personalities are too expensive?" It doesn't seem to me , for the purposes of this conversation, that identification of a cost center required a quantitative analysis. The cost of human talent is non-zero, presumably large enough to merit scrutiny, and unpredictable; that is sufficient, to my way of thinking. So is the cost of the equipment and infrastructure to capture and transmit video image of that human talent, and the humans who maintain and operate that infrastructure.

We've seen several decades of human cost-reduction initiatives, across multiple industries and fields of endeavor, so I'm taking that as evidence that if there is a cost that can be reduced or removed, someone somewhere is looking at doing so. Everything from assembly-line automation, to switching to email over inter-office memos and mailrooms, to the abandonment of fixed-benefit pensions, to self-service kiosks in fast-food restaurants, demonstrates that costs will be cut where they can be cut.
by Glemkloksdjf | 2025-11-26 17:54:09+00:00
Build a system which can read MRI images, now AI took over the whole MRI Analysis sector.

Let AI diagnose the avg cold, now AI took over the household / local doctor for 90% of cases.

Use AI for support, now AI took over the call-center business.

AI can already code. It might not be perfect, it might not be always good but NO ONE assumed that 2025 some matrix multiplication can mimick another human being so well that you can write with it and it will produce working code at all.

thats the hype, thats the market of ai.

And in parallel we get robotic too. Only possible because of this AI thing. Because robotic with ML is so much better than whatever we had before. Now you can talk to a robot, the robot can move, the robot can plan actions. All of these robots use some type of ML in the background. Segment Anything is possible because of AI.

Thats the reason why this 'AI crap' is so hyped.
by dpark | 2025-11-26 17:54:22+00:00
I don’t understand why anyone should want this. Why should normal engineering efforts be held to the same standards as life-critical systems? Why would anyone expect that CloudFlare DDoS protection be built to the standards of avionics equipment?

Also if we’re being fair, avionics software is far narrower in scope than just “software in general”. And even with that Boeing managed to kill a bunch of people with shitty software.
by imiric | 2025-11-26 17:54:26+00:00
Funny, I think it is you who has this backwards.

> The community of people cannot exist without the code and the license.

That is obviously false. Communities form around any common interest. They also exist around proprietary software, where no code is shared.

When code is freely available, it is the community of people who make the project successful—not the code, and certainly not a piece of legalese text.

> The code and the license can and often does exist without dedicated communities.

Technically true, but such projects languish in obscurity. They're driven by the will of a small group of people, often the original lone author, and once that diminishes, they are abandoned and forgotten. The vast majority of software which can technically be described as "open source" is mostly inconsequential to computing or anyone's lives. It once scratched the itch of a single person, and now sits unread on some storage device.

Thus, communities are what make software successful. Not just free software, but software in general. We write software for people, and we publish its source code to help others. We do so because software is better when shared and improved by a community of passionate users, rather than written by one or a few people who wanted it to exist.

It's wild that you would bring up Stallman as an example, since everything he's done goes completely against your point. That printer story served as a good example to illustrate to others why free software is necessary—not just for him, or for the team and company he worked with at the time, but for the world at large. He didn't need to invent a social movement and philosophy to fix his printer issues. He probably could've hacked around it and found a solution that worked for their specific case, and called it a day. And yet he didn't. He believed that software could be built and shared in a different way. In a way that would benefit everyone, and not just the people who wrote it. He believed in the power of sharing knowledge freely, of collaborating, and building communities of like-minded people. The source code is important, and the license less so, but it is this philosophy that brings the most value to the world.

> A ton of very important open source code was thrust into the world, created immense value, but was never further supported or developed by its original developers. Off the top of my head: git, Doom, Bitcoin, and basically everything Fabrice Bellard has ever done.

Whether the original developers supported it or not is irrelevant. All of the examples you mentioned are projects supported by someone, and have communities of passionate people around them. That is the point. Individuals may come and go. The author is no more important than any talented and passionate member of the community. But someone cares enough to continue maintaining the software, and to nurture the community of users around it, without which none of these projects would be remotely as successful as they are today.
by Panzerschrek | 2025-11-26 17:54:34+00:00
How does your compiler manages to perform lifetime check? What if I save a pointer allocated from an arena somewhere, so it outlives it? What if I forgot to free memory via defer?

What about spatial memory safety? Can I read/write outside allowed memory by misusing pointer arithmetic?

What about concurrent access? What if a pointer to some piece of memory is invalidated by some other code?
by somenameforme | 2025-11-26 17:54:42+00:00
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.

Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
by duckmysick | 2025-11-26 17:54:43+00:00
On the other hand, #1 makes it extremely difficult (if not impossible at all) to have a decent UI automation on Wayland. Sure, you can still do it if you're not leaving the terminal or a web browser, but anything else (including Electron apps) is a no-go. All the existing tools are written for X11.

The last time I looked into it, I found out I would have to deal with each compositor separately. On top of that, the target apps would have to be written with the new API in mind.
by RajT88 | 2025-11-26 17:55:19+00:00
When I was learning cloud computing I ran an ASP.Net forum software on Azure Cloud Service with Azure SQL backend. It cost me ~110 USD per month and was a total dog - slow as hell intermittently.

Moved it to AWS on a small instance running Server 2012 / IIS / SqlExpress and it ran like a champ for 10 USD a month. Did that for years. Only main thing I had to do was install Fail2Ban, because being on cloud IP space seemed to invite more attackers.

10 dollars a month is probably less than I paid in electricity to run my home server.
by Topgamer7 | 2025-11-26 17:55:26+00:00
Todays game of was it AI generated?

> The compact size of the Mac mini, which packs a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) into a tiny footprint.The energy efficiency of Apple silicon (M-series) chips, which allows high density without overheating or excessive power draw.

This really adds nothing to the article, and looks like AI fluff to me.

Combine that with there being a bold section in like every single paragraph, I'm going to assume yes
by elektronika | 2025-11-26 17:55:32+00:00
Marx addressed exactly this sort of improvement in productivity from automation. He was writing with full hindsight on the industrial revolution after all. I hope coding LLMs give professional computer touchers a wakeup call to develop some sorely lacking class consciousness.

>the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade […] The law of the determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method.

From Capital, Vol 1 Chapter 12 if you're curious.
by jimbohn | 2025-11-26 17:55:47+00:00
The "maybe (former) members of a controversial state could also work" carries A LOT of weight here. Given the connection with Yandex, I assume the company itself is A-okay with what russia is doing, since the company is working with what is basically going to be russia's wechat.

I disagree that what a random russian believes doesn't matter. And I disagree about the ethnicity argument. Russian is not "just another ethnicity". Countries bordering russia are now (again) under threat (or war) using "muh russian minorities" as a casus belli. Enough of them in a city/province/country, and institutions will start getting conditioned, from within and from without. I am a liberal, but there is being a liberal, and there is self-sabotage.

Deciding to look the other way, as a company, is just another signal about the owner of that company.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 17:55:52+00:00
> Anyone in avionics software dev to give an opinion?

I've done some for fuel estimation of freighter jets (not quite avionics but close enough to get a sense for the development processes) and the amount of rigor involved in that one project made me a better developer for the rest of my career. Was it slow? Yes, it was very slow. A couple of thousand lines of code, a multiple of that in tests for a very long time compare to what it would normally take me.

But within the full envelope of possible inputs it performed exactly as advertised. The funny thing is that I'm not particularly proud of it, it was the process that kept things running even when my former games programmer mentality would have long ago said 'ship it'.

Some things you just need to do properly, or not at all.