MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-26 00:50:23+00:00
You will never get to the moon by making a faster and faster bus.

I see a lot of software with that initial small scale "baked into it" at every level of its design, from the database engine choice, schema, concurrency handling, internal architecture, and even the form design and layout.

The best-engineered software I've seen (and written) always started at the maximum scale, with at least a plan for handling future feature extensions.

As a random example, the CommVault backup software was developed in AT&T to deal with their enormous distributed scale, and it was the only decently scalable backup software I had ever used. It was a serious challenge with its competitors to run a mere report of last night's backup job status!

I also see a lot of "started small, grew too big" software make hundreds of silly little mistakes throughout, such as using drop-down controls for selecting users or groups. Works great for that mom & pop corner store customer with half a dozen accounts, fails miserably at orgs with half a million. Ripping that out and fixing it can be a decidedly non-trivial piece of work.

Similarly, cardinality in the database schema has really irritating exceptions that only turn up at the million or billion row scale and can be obscenely difficult to fix later. An example I'm familiar with is that the ISBN codes used to "uniquely" identify books are almost, but not quite unique. There are a handful of duplicates, and yes, they turn up in real libraries. This means that if you used these as a primary key somewhere... bzzt... start over from the beginning with something else!

There is no way to prepare for this if you start with indexing the book on your own bookshelf. Whatever you cook up will fail at scale and will need a rethink.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-26 00:51:14+00:00
They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-11-26 00:51:33+00:00
Sure, we programmers aren't likely to kill anyone with malpractice (in most software development disciplines, anyway). But we have a much, much broader impact. An exceptionally bad bridge collapse kills maybe a couple hundred people. Incompetent or malicious coding practices on a site negatively effect millions, with some sites getting up to the billions.
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-26 00:51:47+00:00
That’s a great point.

We started with React because that’s what we knew best and the community we were most embedded in.

We have no dogmatic attachment to React. We hope to support Svelte and Vue soon. We’ll start on that once we feel that our data model and flow are sufficiently nailed down that we feel comfortable committing to porting our SDK to other frontend frameworks.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-26 00:51:47+00:00
This is a simple regression to the old days when they could just make up BS and not something that represents a perceived increase in threat level to anyone who was already jaded.

It has nothing to do with surveillance and everything to do with the fact that there are no consequences for the agencies and individuals involved. And this isn't just a cops problem. Just about every department that can make money fining people gets caught violating rights or otherwise playing dirty in some capacity at some point
by brightball | 2025-11-26 00:52:50+00:00
What measurements show the charter schools are worse?

Locals demand charter schools when the existing schools are already failing but the politics of a larger district make it impossible to meaningfully change anything.

It’s been a couple of years since I looked into Louisiana’s charters. When I last looked most of what I saw was political propaganda (from both proponents and opponents).

EDIT: I looked into it. Charters appear to experience the same performance spread (approximately) as district schools where negative performance is primarily associated with poverty.

And that makes the point…school funding is not the problem. The environment outside of school for the child is the problem. Pumping money into the schools isn’t going to get the benefit because it can’t affect outside factors. Money is better allocated elsewhere.

Relevant excerpt:

> Older studies align with this nuance: A 2013 analysis found 86% of Louisiana charters outperforming peers in reading/math, with spillover benefits. But a 2023 legislative audit linked poor results to poverty—71% of students are economically disadvantaged statewide, and concentrations above 80% predict lower scores. Notably, 85 of 138 rated charters earned D’s or F’s, and some high performers enrolled fewer low-income students than legally required.
by iLemming | 2025-11-26 00:53:28+00:00
None of this even remotely true. I've gotten into Clojure without knowing jackshit about Java, almost ten years later, after tons of things successfully built and deployed, still don't know jackshit about Java. Mia, co-host of 'Clojure apropos' podcast was my colleague, we've worked together on multiple teams, she learned Clojure as her very first PL. Later she tried learning some Java and she was shocked how impossibly weird it looked compared to Clojure. Besides, you can use Clojure without any JVM - e.g., with nbb. I use it for things like browser automation with Playwright.

The tooling story is also very solid - I use Emacs, but many of my friends and colleagues use IntelliJ, Vim, Sublime and VSCode, and some of them migrated to it from Atom.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-11-26 00:54:11+00:00
Agreed on the last paragraph. When I grew up (long time ago), almost everyone saw the most recent <kids show> because there were only 3 or 4 on after school, and generally only one targeted towards each major peer group.

Sure, you can now choose from 27 different shows in each genre (comedy, drama, romance, business, cops, medical dramas, etc), each with many seasons to watch/stream/binge, but odds that your friend saw the same episode last night? Approximately zero. Whereas, "must see tv", as trite as it was, almost always gave you something to talk about the next day.. "No soup for you!" was huge in my circles for quite some time, for example.

And the less someone shares with you in terms of background, the easier it is to withdraw into your own bubble, and watch more shows alone, and become more isolated..
by komali2 | 2025-11-26 00:54:19+00:00
> The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.

Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?

I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.

If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-26 00:54:59+00:00
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content

This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)

I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
by ux266478 | 2025-11-26 00:55:13+00:00
I don't think that's the right metaphor to use here, it exists at a different level than what I would consider "reinventing the wheel". That to me is more some attempt to make a novel outward-facing facet of the program when there's not much reason to do so. For example, reimplementing shared memory using a custom kernel driver as your IPC mechanism, despite it not doing anything that shared memory doesn't already do.

The difference between the examples is so trivial I'm not really sure why the parent comment felt compelled to complain.
by m55au | 2025-11-26 00:55:36+00:00
Someone correct me if I'm completely wrong, but by default (i.e. precompiled wheels) numpy has 0 dependencies and pandas has 5, one of which is numpy. So not really "squillions" of dependencies.

pandas==2.3.3

├── numpy [required: >=1.22.4, installed: 2.2.6]

├── python-dateutil [required: >=2.8.2, installed: 2.9.0.post0]

│ └── six [required: >=1.5, installed: 1.17.0]

├── pytz [required: >=2020.1, installed: 2025.2]

└── tzdata [required: >=2022.7, installed: 2025.2]
by ilaksh | 2025-11-26 00:55:38+00:00
They are not optimized to waste tokens. That is absolutely ridiculous. All of the LLM providers have been struggling from day one to meet demand. They are not trying to provide outputs that create more demand.

In fact, for example, Opus 4.5 does seem to use fewer tokens to solve programming problems.

If you don't like cleaning up the agent output, don't use it?
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-26 00:56:26+00:00
With Flowglad you’d pay ever so slightly less than you would with a vanilla Stripe integration which usually includes Stripe Billing. That total cost is 3.6% (2.9% per charge + .7% for billing) and $.30, whereas we’re 3.55%.

We’re not really trying to compete on cost. But we certainly aren’t more expensive once you include the cost of Stripe Billing.
by atombender | 2025-11-26 00:57:15+00:00
The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.

No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.

The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
by nlawalker | 2025-11-26 00:57:43+00:00
Proposing a new AI benchmark - convince a human team of maintainers to merge a big new feature in a venerable project where the human accountability for its direction and stability is of greater value to its users than any one big feature. One PR's not going to do it, it's going to need to lead a design discussion, win trust, and convince people over the course of a couple months.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-11-26 00:58:32+00:00
> But I think those have the same flaw, in that there isn't enough of a consequence for each part of the process

If there was sufficient consequence for this stuff, no one would ever take on any risk. No large works would ever even be started because it would be either impossible or incredibly difficult to be completely sure everything will go to plan.

So instead we take a medium amount of caution and take on projects knowing it's possible for them to not work out or to go over budget.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-11-26 00:58:51+00:00
Neuralink was mentioned, and it immediately made me remember the sad stories of the rhesus macaques that were used as Neuralink animal test subjects for brain implants. The quality of the work was poor and they were able to pull the implants out and then the implants got loose, causing bacterial and fungal infections and swelling and the macaques had to be euthanized. But not before banging their heads against everything, picking on the holes in their skulls and going insane as their brains got increasingly infected. Reading that kind of disgusting inhumane crap makes me ashamed of being a member of the same species.

If you want to read more the search keywords are: "Animal 20" "Neuralink"

> Animal 20 was seen "pulling on port connector which is now dislodged (no longer secured)". The next day, Animal 20 was "picking at incision and occasionally pulling on implant". Soon, infections developed. On Dec. 20, UC Davis staff found antibiotic resistant E. coli and Candida glabrata, a fungal infection, at the surgical site. They discussed a "necropsy next week", meaning they planned to euthanize Animal 20.

Fucking cowards.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-11-26 00:58:56+00:00
> that's not real-world coding

It's pretty clear the post is focused on the context of work being done in an academic research lab. In that context I think most of the points are pretty valid, but most of the real world benefit I've experience from using Python is being able to work more closely with engineering (even on non-Python teams).

I shipped R code to a production environment once over my career and it felt incredibly fragile.

R is great for EDA, but really doesn't work well for iteratively building larger software projects. R is has a great package system, but it's not so great when you need abstraction in between.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-11-26 00:59:09+00:00
I think another good example was the recent example of when a model learned to "cheat" on a metric during reinforcement it also started cheating on unrelated tasks.

My assumption is when encouraging "double-speak", you will have knock-on effects that you don't really want in the model for something making important decisions and asked to build non-trivial things.
by wofo | 2025-11-26 00:59:39+00:00
I for one am glad there is a commercial angle to the project. Done right, it means more hours could go into making things better, in a sustainable way. Also, having paying users provides a strong incentive to keep the technology grounded / practical.

Without the commercial stuff, Unison would be just another esolang to me. Now I'm probably going to play with it in upcoming side projects.
by DANmode | 2025-11-26 01:00:26+00:00
See other reply.

Ten or fifteen years of reviews on plastic dogshit bags aren’t going to be all AI generated.

Same with bike models,

headlight brands,

and onward into the sun.

So, tell it to read only old reviews.

Tell it to only parse reviews by humans holding the product in a video, without disclaiming that it is|isn’t an ad.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-26 01:02:09+00:00
Python threading and computational errata issues go back a long time. It is a popular integration "glue" language, but is built on SWiG wrappers to work around its many unresolved/unsolvable problems.

Not a "smear", but rather a well known limitation of the language. Perhaps your environment context works differently than mine.

It is bizarre people get emotionally invested in something so trivial and mundane. Julia is at v1.12.2 so YMMV, but Queryverse is a lot of fun =3
by Yokohiii | 2025-11-26 01:02:18+00:00
I can see that high level overviews of complex systems are useful to get some insights, but in the same way I have the feeling that this mentality of high level, abstract organization is the root of the problem. If you have a complex system and simplify the components into abstractions, you will repeatedly run into difficulties because you've actively ignored the dirty bits. It's an top down approach that tries to tackle all issues, but an bottom up approach could even eradicate myriads of issues.
by germandiago | 2025-11-26 01:03:16+00:00
Read my comment above: hardening is in, an effort to classify and remove UB is on the way. Implicit contracts (yes, that means basically to bounds-check even native arrays automatically) is on the way.

If you use warnings as errors they catch even subsets of dangling nowadays. Other ways of dangling have been made illegal (temporary conversions and range for lifetime extension).

I agree with you the defaults are still not the best but it is dteafily getting better.

But I think in the next years things are going to be tightened further in standard terms for better defaults. In fact, it is already happening.

The difficult part I think it is lifetimes.
by iLemming | 2025-11-26 01:03:21+00:00
I don't have great experience of using CL for analyzing data, because of "why?", if I already have another Lisp that is simply amazing for data.

Clojure, unlike lists in traditional Lisps, based on composable, unified abstraction for its collections, they are lazy by default and literal readable data structures, they are far easier to introspect and not so "opaque" compared to anything - not just CL (even Python), they are superb for dealing with heterogeneous data. Clojure's cohesive data manipulation story is where Common Lisp's lists-and-symbols just can't match.
by mikepurvis | 2025-11-26 01:03:55+00:00
Adam Conover argued that the craze is an indicator of economic nihilism, that people who can’t afford these things buy them anyways as an expression of hopelessness that they’ll ever have a pathway to legitimately changing their station: https://youtu.be/l1O6bN2zWSM?si=QGd51tfmh8lOjezk
by belorn | 2025-11-26 01:03:59+00:00
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.

So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.

Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.

Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
by bcrl | 2025-11-26 01:04:26+00:00
This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal splice, failure to seal a gasket properly resulting in water intrusion that stresses fibres when the water turns into ice, ...), but those become quite rare if you're done your job properly.

On the other hand, software is never done. Even simple features, like headphones, regress these days. (I missed a meeting today because my phone decided to send audio notifications into the black void of the heat death of the universe because I didn't unlock my phone after plugging the headphones into the USB-C port of my iPhone -- the audio didn't come out of the speaker, nor out of the bluetooth of the car I was driving. No sound worked until after the phone was unlocked.)

At least with open source software I can fix the bugs I care about, but the fun goes away once you have to deal with other people to get things merged.

Is there a community of software Luddites I can go live with where we build simple technology that works and works well?
by sershe | 2025-11-26 01:04:55+00:00
You can literally open the page I sent you and they are selling vacant lots to neighbors for 100 dollars. They have also done thousands of demolitions of the houses that nobody would have at any price. The reason they were not sold is not because of market failure, it is because there was no viable buyer. With property taxes and maintenance obligationss their market price was negative. The government had to issue bonds to tear them down. That means, procedural constraints aside, you could go and have the house for nothing. The market price of a marginal house in Detroit is/was recently below 0. Supply and demand. Of course, just like when your house price goes up you don't get charged extra money, when your house price goes down nobody undoes your mortgage, so people keep paying. But for a new buyer, your only cost after a nominal fee would be properly taxes and maintenance/utilities, those are hard to blame on neoliberal turn.

I think it is you who is suffering from ideological blindness, especially since you keep changing and confusing your timelines and definitions.

I sent you BLS data on housing as percentage of income for the entire 20th century. And census data on median house size. Spending on housing went up from 29 to 32 percent from 1960 to 2000, more than offset by other essentials in the same paper and for much more house. When was that mythical impact of the neoliberal turn? Last time we were talking about taxing the rich or whatever, I sent you the flat-ish 1% tax burden data since 1979, you didn't like it as it didn't have earlier data. Was the negative impact from the neoliberal turn before 1979, or after 2000? Is it in the room with us right now? ;)

EDIT as for US or not; I accidentally erased part of the comment when editing. Would you agree that US is more neoliberal than Europe when you talk about neoliberal turn? If so the impacts of neoliberal turn should be larger, and it should be sufficient to discuss the US. In other cases, since I dunno much about Europe other than high level, I cannot comment on their unique neoliberal negatives. Perhaps those are bad and they should do what US did instead.
by fluorinerocket | 2025-11-26 01:05:15+00:00
When I was a kid in Italy in the late 80s early 90s the elentary school teachers also did "interrogazione" at the blackboard. That is individual kids would go up to the blackboard and get asked questions front of the rest of the class.

Not sure if those two were just old school (they'd occasionally hit us/ pull ears too) but damn was I ahead of all the other kids when I came back to the USA

Also the two teachers had the same class of kids for all of elementary school, teaching 1st through 5th grades sequentially So they got to know the kids quite well
by JAlexoid | 2025-11-26 01:05:18+00:00
If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.

Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-26 01:06:08+00:00
To be fair, the Apple contact said that wasn't the case. Engineering had interest, but there are specific requirements for them to accept an issue so they just can't chase something that isn't there anymore. Things might have played out differently if they got back to me while I still had the issue.

However, I knew I was on a time constraint with Thanksgiving and the holiday season coming up, so really wanted some kind of resolution before that and you can't argue the board swap didn't get it functional again even if it leaves the question open of it coming back again.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-11-26 01:06:24+00:00
Agreed. I want to build things that collaborate locally if the internet goes away. It seems like the hash-addressed function thing would be a pretty nice way to do that: no name resolution needed, just talk in terms of hashes to whoever's in range.

But all of the resources available for learning the language are funneling me towards using cloud hosted infra that won't be available if the internet goes away. For all I know there is a Unison-y way forward for my idea, but the path is obscured by a layer of marketing haze.