MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inkyoto | 2025-11-21 04:56:15+00:00
Constructing a new OAuth2/OIDC Identity Provider from the ground up is an undertaking fraught with complexity – and not of the elegant variety. The reasons are numerous, entrenched, and maddeningly persistent.

1. OAuth2 and OIDC are inherently intricate and alarmingly brittle – the specifications, whilst theoretically robust, leave sufficient ambiguity to spawn implementation chaos.

2. The proliferation of standards results in the absence of any true standard – token formats and claim structures vary so wildly that the notion of consistency becomes a farce – a case study in design by committee with no enforcement mechanism.

3. ID tokens and claims lack uniformity across providers – interoperability, far from being an achievable objective, has become an exercise in futility. Every integration must contend with the peculiarities – or outright misbehaviours – of each vendor’s interpretation of the protocol. What ought to be a cohesive interface degenerates into a swamp of bespoke accommodations.

4. There is no consensus on data placement – some providers, either out of ignorance or expedience, attempt to embed excessive user and group metadata within query string parameters – a mechanism limited to roughly 2k characters. The technically rational alternative – the UserInfo endpoint – is inconsistently implemented or left out entirely, rendering the most obvious solution functionally unreliable.

Each of these deficiencies necessitates a separate layer of abstraction – a bespoke «adapter» for every Identity Provider, capable of interpreting token formats, claim nomenclature, pagination models, directory synchronisation behaviour, and the inevitable, undocumented bugs. Such adapters must then be ceaselessly maintained, as vendors alter behaviour, break compatibility, or introduce yet another poorly thought-out feature under the guise of progress.

All of this – the mess, the madness, and the maintenance burden – is exhaustively documented[0]. A resource, I might add, that reads less like a standard and more like a survival manual.

[0] https://www.pomerium.com/blog/5-lessons-learned-connecting-e...
by gassi | 2025-11-21 04:56:38+00:00
I commented some version of the stated theory when the original article was posted, and having read this post, I don't agree with the idea that "the same basic pattern applies to basically anyone who is trying to make money by doing anything", at least not the examples given.

Pizza restaurants want to sell pizzas and are incentivized to produce quality, affordable pizza so people come back regularly. Customers want pizza (every now and then) and will visit pizzerias that offer tasty pizza, made with quality ingredients, in a pleasant setting, at a reasonable price. Ergo, incentives are aligned.

Dating app users (generally) want to find a partner and leave the app, ideally never to come back. Dating apps make money when users fail to find partners and pay for features that "increase their chances". Now, incentives are unaligned.
by phplovesong | 2025-11-21 04:57:11+00:00
Python is not (usually) run like PHP. Python programs (like most other languages) "run", compared to PHP where you in 99% of all cases instead "execute". (run = the program is running for a long period of time, and execute = run/die immediately).

This subtle difference has huge implications. You could in theory have an "compile step" in. Python, but in PHP you really cant as the program is never "running".

Python built syntax for types / generics etc. Its actually a quite capable typesystem (im not a python developer, but use python on some occasions). Python then has tools for static typechecking that can be run outside execution.

This means that if python would do actual static typechecking on runtime it would be nothing more than wasted cpu cycles.

Thats why python opted for the syntax only, as its basically zero cost. In php land the typechecking is done on EVERY execution, even if the code was unused. (a void functions that has an int param, but gets passed an string, that just discards the parameter). Even worse, a type error thats not executed wont be caught by every execution.

In short PHP typesystem is just runtime checks for primitives / classes and wont catch errors where not executed. Its like the worst of both worlds.
by RobGR | 2025-11-21 04:57:24+00:00
This article didn't make complete sense to me. However I think what it describes overlaps somewhat with the "Cravath System" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System

The wiki page doesn't do it full justice, as I understood it it is:

* A firm can easily end up in a situation where weak performers stay as long as they can, and strong performers leave because they can operate independently. This can have a very strong effect because the partners or permanent management starts seeking out work to keep the bulk of their remnant people busy, which is not the high end work that builds the firms reputation.

* Instead, make offers every year to the top 3 people from each Ivy League law school, but the offers are for 18 months only.

* If the new people aren't going to make partner ever, don't keep them around. Let them know well before the 18 months are up, and have them pick the corporate clients they like and work with them so they can jump over to working for the client directly, and they will then always come back to the mothership when the giant, interesting, complex case comes along.

* Out of each "class" you make partner offer to only the best, maybe none, each year.

This differs from the article because the firm is keeping the best and sending out the rest.

But maybe most firms aren't like the Cravath, they prefer to over charge clients for a weak performer then charge and pay a strong performer ? Maybe this makes sense if you have a very short term view of the life of your firm and it's reputation ?
by petsfed | 2025-11-21 04:58:03+00:00
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.

Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.

All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
by diogenescynic | 2025-11-21 04:58:48+00:00
>Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure).

This strikes me as 1000% accurate from my work experience. I see people who do amazing work but get unrecognized and then move on while other people do mediocre work but put a huge effort into self-promotion and end up being promoted despite the work not being great... The reorgs also seem like a way to kneecap the employees and lower expectations.
by vee-kay | 2025-11-21 04:59:01+00:00
The only one selling a lie here is you.

You have clearly not worked in any major company in India, Or even other nations (since PIP is a common process worldwide in most companies).

Any employee can escalate to the company Ombudsman if they feel they are being subjected to unfair treatment or inappropriate processes. It is the job of the Ombudsman to be neutral and do an thorough impartial investigation.

PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) is a formal process, it even HR and senior management (skip level 1 manager at the very least) are involved in it. There is specific time duration and set of expectations given formally (under review process with HR, so there is full transparency) to the employee to improve the performance.

A top performer cannot be nixed via PIP, because the onus of performance proofs is on the employee and those evidences are visible to HR and upper management.

PIP is used to nix bad performers, not top performers.

Typically, even if an employee clears PIP, they need to get an "Exceed Expectations" (or equivalent) appraisal rating in the next appraisal cycle in order to continue in the organisation, but if they get lower rating instead, they are in hit list to be nixed during next round of job cuts whenever it happens.

Top performers may quit due to office politics and lack of growth, but PIP is not their way out.

PIP is a permanent black mark on an employee's record (which is maintained historically), so it disallows the company from hiring that person again if that person exited due to PIP.

Top companies in India and elsewhere have very formal processes, including Ombudsman and PIP, which get audited.
by noosphr | 2025-11-21 04:59:51+00:00
The overwhelming majority of people who worked on x11 are retired and a growing minority are dead.

This is the fourth incarnation of x11 and the people working on it now have nothing to do with the people who developed it.

Xorg is the castodian group who started life as a fork, of a fork, of a fork of an spinout from mit.

Them trying to kill X11 is laughable to anyone who knows anything about its history.

Wayland on the other hand is now 18 years old and we've been told it will be good any day now for 18 years.
by ruined | 2025-11-21 04:59:55+00:00
paramilitary insurgent groups are abolished, actually. it is illegal to operate a paramilitary insurgent group. this is the main way they prevent groups from doing paramilitary insurrection.

that, and most military actions are also illegal, if you're not a member of the military following lawful orders. so there's not much paramilitary stuff one can do. and insurgency is like... outlawed
by Plagman | 2025-11-21 05:00:27+00:00
I would keep in mind that the results reported there are likely quite a bit lower (in terms of CPU-side performance) than what you could achieve in practice, because it's running all of x86 Steam+Proton in the emulator. In a pre-configured environment (like SteamOS for ARM), the Steam client and Proton itself would be native ARM code, and emulation would stop at the win32 API boundary (or at certain critical libraries' APIs if you're using Linux apps).
by komali2 | 2025-11-21 05:00:38+00:00
Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions in capitalism.

The quality of the work isn't as important as the margin between the cost of labor and the income earned by it.

To be the best and still pass that test you need to be so good that it makes up for your higher cost, which is a more difficult bar to pass than being good enough but being cheap. Also there's an upper limit anyway where no matter how good your margin is, your cost can't be justified, since "local market rates" apply downward pressure, as well as an upper limit on how much clients are willing to pay or the size of the market you're selling to or temporal factors e.g only a certain amount of widgets a country can consume in a month.

There is no labor under capitalism without significant profit margin, and always the profit extractor (employer) is trying to get the most profit for the least cost from the profit generator (employee), who is in the opposite position, but at a disadvantage since they are a human who is influenced by things like social pressure, a desire for recognition, and the natural human tendency to be good at something and do it well. The employer isn't human, it's just a profit generating algorithm, and so only cares about such things insomuch as it can leverage them to increase profits.

There's other factors in play as well though that corporations can't include in their algorithm since they're purely selfish actors which results in macroeconomic catastrophes, so for example if wages get too low then people don't buy things anymore which drives down profits from selling which forces wages down lower and so on until economic collapse.
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-21 05:00:52+00:00
It's just an addiction to cause and effect, short form video, long form video, anything that beguiles us from screens. It was always an addiction to cause and effect. Sometimes there's a protagonist to mindread it from, other times there's villains. But mostly it's eye-of-the beholder cause and effect. These are just magic tricks of another sort that beguile us away from the mysteries of correlation and reality. It's a vacation from the intense complexities and deterministic thrust of chaos.
by DavidWoof | 2025-11-21 05:01:03+00:00
> My understanding was that it was the tenant rights movement that killed SROs and boarding houses by making it practically impossible to keep them orderly

It depends on the time frame you're talking about. Long-term SROs like boarding houses were absolutely affected in the 50s/70s by tenant rights laws. But they adapted. In the 70s/80s, SROs were still widespread in large cities except that they all had occupancy time limits (usually 60s days or so) to avoid tenancy laws. But people who relied on them could just move to a new one when the time limit came, so the market was still viable.

But then in the late 80s/early 90s they all got zoned away in the way this article talks about. It was really more NIMBY than reformer. Note that this time frame corresponds with the height of the US crime wave, and what was once a sketchy urban neighbor became the source of major neighborhood blight, especially as re-urbanization started up in the late 90s
by card_zero | 2025-11-21 05:01:07+00:00
British standards are all BS. The electrical wiring one is BS7671. It divides the bathroom into zones: https://flameport.com/wiring_regulations/BS7671_selected_sub...

Zone 0 is inside the bathtub. Damn, so I can't put an outlet there? Zone 1 is over it, and zone 2 is 2 feet around it, and allows 12-volt outlets for small gadgets. Beyond that you can have ordinary outlets with the right circuit breakers (aka RCDs, GFCIs) integrated into them.
by noduerme | 2025-11-21 05:02:27+00:00
That's really nice. I remember when I was 8 or so, I phoned up NASA and told them I'd drawn up plans for a spaceship. The lady on the phone sweetly took me very seriously and asked questions about where such a thing would launch (answer: any big airport). She encouraged me to send them in.

Around the same time (1988) my best friend and I started making our first game in HyperCard. Getting more immediate results from that is probably how I ended up a SWE instead of in aerospace.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-21 05:03:28+00:00
> The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here.

Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.

Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.

Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?

The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.

Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
by protocolture | 2025-11-21 05:04:32+00:00
>For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?

Over a period of ~8 months, they were subjected to like 4 different levels of restriction over here, culminating in them only being provided by pharmacies to prescription holders. An entire cottage industry of compliant vape selling businesses were forced to close, and significant numbers of users have been deprived access to the commodity. Honestly its been a goldmine for discussing law/regulation with the up and coming generation.

>Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk.

Regulation forces the non prescription having user to the black market where no safety or quality checks are conducted. And they did this on the basis that the health risk is unknown, having already banned the vape juices that we know can in a small number of cases cause complications.

>Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?

I think you internalise the standard fallacy. I explain in another post that all regulations need to justify themselves, not simply have a stated cause. You seem to believe as most people who are unimpacted, that one can simply write law like code, and the execution proceeds flawlessly. There need be no thought given to the negative case, to the behaviour changes outside of your scope. Its quite a suffocating arrogance.

Not to mention you also immediately fall into "OH YOU ARE AGAINST X, WELL YOU MUST LOVE Y", which is telling.
by tormeh | 2025-11-21 05:04:58+00:00
No. If you want to build big products, you need big organizations (i.e. companies). Big products have moats, often network effects or natural monopolies or whatever, but if nothing else then just the sheer investment required to build a competitor. Products with moats can extract wealth. So big companies are often extremely profitable. That's where the money is. Consulting is something talented people do in countries with no big tech companies.
by hattmall | 2025-11-21 05:04:59+00:00
A decade from now Quantum computing will be in the same place it was a decade ago, on the cusp of proving a quantum advantage for tailor made problems in comparison to normal availability supercomputers. Classical compute will advance in that time period to keep the quantum computers always on the cusp.

The major non-compute related engineering breakthroughs needed for quantum computing to actually be advantageous in a way that would be revolutionary are themselves so revolutionary that the advancements of quantum computing would be vastly overshadowed. Again it's a case where those breakthroughs would so greatly enhance classic compute in terms of processing and reduction in costs that it still probably wouldn't be economically viable to produce general purpose quantum computers.
by sixhobbits | 2025-11-21 05:05:41+00:00
This is nice that you know about the issue and are working on it. I really appreciate all the new "Get api key" buttons across google ai products that already makes it much easier than setting up a cloud project and getting credentials json files.

But I do think it's a general problem with Google products that the solution is always to build a new one. There are already like 8 ways to use and pay for Google AI and that adds to the complexity of getting set up, so adding a new simpler better option might make that all worse instead of better
by protocolture | 2025-11-21 05:06:15+00:00
>The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.

The problem with blind government maximalism is that it ignores the fact that what these governments claim to actually be trying to accomplish can actually be harmful and have considerable negative impact on society in general.
by phplovesong | 2025-11-21 05:06:52+00:00
Just looked at Laravel, and it feels like its trying its hardest to lipstick the PHP warts. When i look at a framework like it i see just bloat. You really only need like 5-10% of stuff thats there. Thats why its most likely slow and heavy, and looks like it was cowboy copied from some legacy .NET enterprisey framework from the early 2010s.

Jobs? Sure. There are PHP jobs, and the PHP devs are a dime a dozen. But i will agree with you, Laravel is a fine pick for websites, but not so much for more real world, high load applications.

Theres also 100x more jobs for WordPress than Laravel, so if you want to do PHP, i suggest going the WordPress route instead.
by b33j0r | 2025-11-21 05:08:21+00:00
I got a PIP because my manager mistakenly thought I was stealing equipment, and he just kept adding agile story points until I failed.

I was too pissed off to go to an ombudsman. It honestly didn’t occur to me. It just felt like “this guy hates me and wants me out.”

He called me two years after I was fired to inquire about missing equipment that I never had.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 05:08:29+00:00
The second one is the better one.

There are some laws prohibiting the sale of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. In some motorsports you want tires with no tread (slicks). Moreover, they're being used in a different context (a vehicle on a track rather than public roads). But the law prohibits the sale because it takes no account of the context.
by awalsh128 | 2025-11-21 05:08:56+00:00
Yes votes were 144 D and 213 R in the house with unanimous yes (only one no) in the Senate. Right after 9/11 people were fine giving up with their rights pretty much across the spectrum. Granted Republicans more than Democrats. I think since then it has just been the status quo for every president since Bush. I hate it but it has been engrained at this point IMO.

This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
by anovikov | 2025-11-21 05:09:49+00:00
Yes you are right, but it doesn't contradict my statement. Of course big companies are necessary and big companies are where the moats and thus wealth creation is. But it doesn't mean they need to hire the best people (market control/moats make them competitive even if almost all employees are disposable drones), or that they can do it (because of agency problem). Small companies both need the best people (they don't have those moats and also don't have division of labor deep enough to make do with more stupid people doing better granulated/formalised work, everyone has to wear many hats and be flexible), and can do it because agency problem there is less pronounced due to fewer layers of management. Yes as a result, they make less profit (can take less of market for having no/smaller moat, and have to pay more to people because they have to hire better ones), but this is the company's problem, not employees'.