MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shoo | 2025-11-19 04:22:01+00:00
Michael Feathers, author of the book "Working Effectively with Legacy Code", [f] defined legacy code as code without automated tests.

From memory, the argument is that once you have automated regression/characterisation tests with sufficient coverage around the part of it you need to change, you're in a good position to attempt to make a change since you will be alerted if you are unintentionally introducing regressions. Without automated tests you can't efficiently and confidently make changes without significant risk of regressions. Feathers' book discusses testing and refactoring techniques to take OOP-ish application code that has no automated tests and get enough tests in place to let you change what needs to be changed in a controlled way.

A consequence of Feathers' definition of legacy code is that fresh code you wrote yesterday in a trendy programming language still gets classified as legacy code if you didn't also write the supporting test suite to help others maintain it in future! It's not a perfect definition, some might find it provocative, but it's both pragmatic and actionable.

A different take on legacy code could be something like Peter Naur's paper 'Programming as Theory Building' [n]. I don't believe Naur specifically discussed legacy code, but the rough idea is that each program has a corresponding theory (relating to the problem domain, organisational constraints, the implemented solution and its structure, alternative solutions that were considered and rejected, etc). Some of this theory can be written down in artefacts such as design docs, requirements or comments in the code, but for a software project to be alive, the theory needs to live inside the heads of enough of the team who are building and maintaining the software. If that is lost (e.g. the team departs and a fresh team is hired to replace them) then no one in the new team may understand the "theory" so the software project is effectively dead until the new team learns the problem and solution space and develops their own new theory.

I'd regard such a "dead" software project where none of the current maintainers understand the theory behind the existing code as being legacy code -- but this is a joint property of the people working on the codebase and the artefacts (source code, design docs etc), it isn't a property of the code base in isolation. Maybe "legacy code" is the wrong way of framing it as it misses the importance of the relationship between the maintainers, the codebase and the surrounding context, and something like "dead project" is a little more helpful.

[f] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit... [n] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
by nurettin | 2025-11-19 04:23:45+00:00
I can never get used to the error happening at call site rather than within the function where the early return of Err happened. It is not "much cleaner", you have no idea which line and file caused it at call site. By default Returning should have a way of setting a marker which can then be used to map back to the line() and file(). 10+ years and still no ergonomics.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-11-19 04:23:47+00:00
>You joke and I think its funny, but as a junior engineer I would be quite proud if some small change I made was able to take down the mighty Cloudflare.

I mean, with Cloudflare's recent (lack of) uptime, I would argue there's a degree of crashflation happening such that the prestige is less in doing so. I mean nowadays if a lawnmower drives by cloudflare and backfires that's enough to collapse the whole damn thing
by bombela | 2025-11-19 04:25:01+00:00
I have been using freecad extensively. Almost daily. It's an absolute utter mess. It barely works. But it's essentially the only open source CAD. So I keep trucking.

The most important improvement is the toponaming heuristic solver spearheaded by Realthunder.

Since that was merged into mainline, it seems that the devs keep breaking the UX and shortcuts without rythme nor reason, while the fundamentals are broken beyond repair.

I would never recommend freecad to anybody, even though this this the only CAD I use, and I actually write python for it for some automation.

I cannot live without freecad. But damn it's a mess.
Ask HN: Low hanging fruit projects for gaining open source clout
by fud101 | 2025-11-19 04:25:19+00:00
I think there is a trend of using Rust to do X where X is something already done in Python/Javascript/Go/whatever and making it go zoom.

Are there any such projects for a time rich unemployed hacker of average ability which might be a fruitful endeavour

aside, what's a good reference for learning enough rust to hack up something useful for someone who has little interest in the language
by EagnaIonat | 2025-11-19 04:26:03+00:00
> For now.

What evidence are you basing that on?

From what I read of the article if it was on by default, it does nothing.

When it's on you get the option to create an agent. That's when you need to be careful.

Even so, the current version is off, it has a big warning about the dangers of using it before and during switching it on.

> that makes it easy to give access to an entire library instead of requiring explicit tight scoping of access to individual files is dangerous

Again from the article, the user literally set the access rights of the agent.
by true_religion | 2025-11-19 04:26:23+00:00
When it comes to cooperating with other entities, governments have to take a unified approach. Rather than have individual teachers deciding to question students on immigration status or not, they decided to not pursue the matter at all.

It seems fair. Immigration policy isn’t supposed to be enforced by local authorities to begin with. And unlike hiring a worker, there’s no easy way for people to verify immigration status. Finally, immigration offenses can be misdemeanors so spending effort in upholding hard to determine civil infractions seems unwise for local officials.

If ICE or CBP actually shows up and investigates, local authorities do help. Even in Chicago where the public is very much against it, the local police continue to cooperate with ICE … if nothing else just to shield them from protesters.

All sanctuary laws said is that local authorizes do not have to do thankless investigative work on people hundreds if not thousands of miles away from a land border with another country.

As someone who cares about democracy, I think it’s best practiced at the most local level possible, and if federal authorizes disagree with local policy they can override it via laws.

You just don’t see thus happening in many cases because local laws agree with federal ones, or are even more stringent. But this is a case where the locals could not, constitutionally, make a law (it has been tried, like in Arizona to have locals investigate legal immigration status but it’s been deemed unconstitutional).

For the record, I don’t think we a huge difference in opinion. I’m not surprised that ICE and CBP is out in force. I’m surprised it took so long, but think they could be more targeted, less brutal, and overall more competent.
by iLemming | 2025-11-19 04:26:26+00:00
> I didn't say that it does have exhaustive immutability support

seal and freeze in js are not 'immutability'. You said what you said - "JavaScript itself has built in immutability features (seal, freeze)".

I corrected you, don't feel bad about it. It's totally fine to not to know some things and it's completely normal to be wrong on occasion. We are all here to learn, not to argue who's toy truck is better. Learning means going from state of not knowing to the state of TIL.

> you can't just shove a whole different model of handling objects into a thirty year old language

Clojurescript did. Like 14-15 years ago or so. And it's not so dramatically difficult to use. Far more simpler than Javascript, in fact.
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by epistasis | 2025-11-19 04:27:29+00:00
The electricity cost is actually very low compared to the capital cost of the stuff the the electricity runs. But not having access to the electricity means that all that capital is going to waste.

So Microsoft is less price sensitive than other electricity customers.

Plus they get the PR and hype boost from saying they are using nuclear, which is huge right now. Which is big enough that the other hyperscalers thought they had to announce new nuclear projects, even though it will be a decade before those new nuclear projects could ever come on line.
by pandaman | 2025-11-19 04:28:18+00:00
Considering that there are over 2M immigrants per year and the USCIS staff is about 20K, it's actually pretty quick. If all USCIS did was just immigration it would still be ~100 immigrants per year per employee or about 2 workdays per immigrant. Even considering that some of those are dependents on the same case, it's still pretty fast. But USCIS also handles all the non-immigrant stuff: CoS, AoS, asylums, etc so they don't dedicate their whole workforce to the immigration and the actual caseload is higher than this estimate.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-19 04:28:20+00:00
> "If there’s a cut in my wire’s insulation, the device won’t get enough voltage" doesn't follow from: "voltage is like water pressure in pipes"

I absolutely agree! In the same way, "an LLM can solve complex problems if it breaks them into subtasks" doesn't follow from "NASA breaks large projects into smaller parts"
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-11-19 04:29:38+00:00
Looks like this is just a clone of pre-commit, with the same general design.

> pre-commit is a framework to run hooks written in many languages, and it manages the language toolchain and dependencies for running the hooks

The “and” here are the main annoyances with pre-commit. It does too many things, which would each be best served by a separate tool.

As a developer working on a project, I already have mechanisms to set up a development environment. Having pre-commit install another copy of the dev environment is redundant, and typically necessitates duplicating dependency declarations too.

I’d much rather see a tool that focuses on running commit hooks, while leaving dependency management to another tool. Most projects already have something in place anyway, since dependencies are necessary for development beyond the scope of pre-commit hooks.

The really useful part of pre-commit is that it: (1) only runs hooks based on file that changed and (2) stashes all unstaged changes and untracked files.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-19 04:29:46+00:00
Beat for beat it would probably be cheaper to get the Chinese to do it.Cost per watt charts [1] show US builds still high while they are decreasing for the rest.

Apart from the obvious labour costs difference , theres also the skills at scale.Chinese have been on a continous buildout of new plants , so at this point they have designs/skilled teams for whom this is another routine at this point(i think 30+ under construction concurrently).The US builds are almost artisinal at this point.

And yeah at $1B , given prior examples , it expect them to be late and costs to baloon.Unless they use this as a template to upskill/retrain a workforce that will lead a new buildout so economies of scale take over and put downward pressure on the costs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/climate/china...
by bix6 | 2025-11-19 04:29:52+00:00
Worth reading the letter from local govs as they lay out why this is such a complicated and slow problem: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/20251...

No big business in the US acts in good faith so the fact they are cheering this on tells me to be suspect. My read of this is they want to juice returns / timelines by avoiding bureaucracy and the city / local residents will deal with the inevitable mess.
by rayiner | 2025-11-19 04:29:56+00:00
> What if I want more foreigners? What if I want people to come here?

Your view doesn't reflect the electorate. Cato, an extremely pro-immigration organization, did a study in 2021. They found that, after being informed about current immigration levels, the median respondent stated 500,000 immigrants should be admitted to the US annually: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_3x/pu.... A recent Pew study found that 11 million immigrants arrived from 2020-2025, or over 2 million per year. That's four times what the median American thinks the immigration influx should be.

The New York Times did a great podcast about how Congress has been (falsely) promising since the 1960s that changes to immigration laws would not result in increased immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi....

> You need to add a "to my preference" here when you talk about which parts of the country are "culturally better" than others. You clearly have strong ideas about what you'd like US culture to be, many of which I suspect I deeply disagree with.

It's not purely subjective. Communities in America settled by Puritans, Quakers, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Mormons simply do better on objective metrics. For example, a UCLA study found that Mormon men live 10 years longer than white men generally: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves.... The two states with the highest social mobility (Utah and Vermont: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...) are polar opposites politically, but are similar in that both were settled by people from particular parts of Britain.

But the subjective matters as well. Lee Kuan Yew visited London in the 1960s, and was amazed by an unattended news stand in Piccadilly Circus with an "honor system" cash box: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/1mn8moh/how_do_you_.... As someone from Bangladesh, I fully concur. My preference is the opposite of Bangladesh, something like an orderly New England town full of high-social trust people who raise their kids with sayings like "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

> Is your argument that West Virginia is "disorderly" or "culturally inferior" because of immigrants? Which groups, and from when?

Appalachia was settled by people from a culturally distinct region of northern Britain: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/four-folkways. Hundreds of years later, this group remains culturally and sociologically distinct from other British Americans.
by bakugo | 2025-11-19 04:30:00+00:00
> with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything

That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times.

As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.
by joseangel_sc | 2025-11-19 04:31:24+00:00
after watching Swarm in love, death and robots i realized it is a short story, https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf but reading pdfs sucks, i made this small website to be able to read it without hurting my eyes, don't know if this is hackernews worth it, but i'm really proud of it
by James_K | 2025-11-19 04:31:52+00:00
A static site cannot inspect headers. There is no HTML, or even JavaScript function you can put in a file to inspect the headers before the file is sent to the client.

A static site is a collection of static files. It doesn't need a server, you could just open it locally (in browsers that don't block file:// URI schemes). If you need some special configuration of the server, it is no longer a static site. The server is dynamically selecting which content is served.
by nullhole | 2025-11-19 04:32:09+00:00
He's blogged for years, writing a number of short 1 or 2 sentence notes daily, on a very wide range of topics, taking positions on each of them from a lefty and analytical point of view, generally covering various political/environmental/economic/legal topics.

And, for what it's worth, he recanted the statement he made that was posted above.
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 04:32:21+00:00
Hey, I wrote a long response to your other reply to me, but your comment seems to have been flagged so I can no longer reply there. Since I took the time to write that, I'm posting it here.

I'm glad I was able to inspire a new username for you. But aren't you concerned that if you let other people influence you like that, you're frying your brain? Shouldn't everything originate in your own mind?

> They don't provide any value except to a very small percentage of the population who safely use them to learn

There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? Ban those things? Post exclamation-filled comments exhorting people not to use them? This comes back to what I said at the end of my previous comment:

You might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.

Do you know the answer to that?

> A language model is not the same as a convolution neural network finding anomalies on medical imagining.

Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves?

The last paragraph of your other comment was literally the Luddite argument. (Sorry I can't quote it now.) Do you know how to weave cloth? No? Your brain is fried!

The world changes, and I find it more interesting and challenging to change with it, than to fight to maintain some arbitrary status quo. To quote Ghost in the Shell:

All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

For me, it's not about "getting ahead" as you put it. It's about enjoying my work, learning new things. I work in software development because I enjoy it. LLMs have opened up new possibilities for me. In that 5 year future you mentioned, I'm going to have learned a lot of things that someone not using LLMs will not have.

As for being dependent on Altman et al., you can easily go out and buy a machine that will allow you to run decent models yourself. A Mac, a Framework desktop, any number of mini PCs with some kind of unified memory. The real dependence is on the training of the models, not running them. And if that becomes less accessible, and new open weight models stop being released, the open weight models we have now won't disappear, and aren't going to get any worse for things like coding or searching the web.

> Keep falling for lesswrong bs.

Good grief. Lesswrong is one of the most misleadingly named groups around, and their abuse of the word "rational" would be hilarious if it weren't sad. In any case, Yudkowsky advocated being ready to nuke data centers, in a national publication. I'm not particular aware of their position on the utility of AI, because I don't follow any of that.

What I'm describing to you is based on my own experience, from the enrichment I've experienced from having used LLMs for the past couple of years. Over time, I suspect that kind of constructive and productive usage will spread to more people.
by WillAdams | 2025-11-19 04:32:25+00:00
Another opensource CAD tool to look at is Dune 3D: https://dune3d.org/

which has been discussed here in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37979758

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41975958

which if it just had parameters/scripting would have a lot more potential.
by Pulcinella | 2025-11-19 04:33:22+00:00
Yeah @IBOutlets are generally the one thing that are allowed to be implicitly-unwrapped optionals. They go along with using storyboards & xibs files with Interface Builder. I agree that you really should just crash if you are attempting to access one and it is nil. Either you have done something completely incorrect with regards to initializing and accessing parts of your UI and want to catch that in development, or something has gone horribly, horribly, horribly with UIKit/AppKit and storyboard/xib files are not being loaded properly by the system.
by oso2k | 2025-11-19 04:35:14+00:00
VM does not mean Virtual Memory in this context. VM does mean Virtual Machine. When an OS/DPMI Server/Supervisor/Monitor provides an OS or program a virtual interface to HW interrupts, IO ports, SW interrupts, we say that OS or program is being executed in a Virtual Machine.

For things like Windows 3.x, 9x, OS/2, CWSDPMI, DOS/4G (DPMI & VCPI), Paging & Virtual Memory was an optional feature. In fact, CWSDPMI/djgpp programs had flags (using `CWSDPR0` or `CWSDPMI -s-` or programmatic calls) to disable Paging & Virtual Memory. Also, djgpp’s first DPMI server (a DOS extender called `go32`) didn’t support Virtual Memory either but could sub-execute Real Mode DOS programs in VM86 mode.

http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/v2faq/faq15_2.html
by 1shooner | 2025-11-19 04:35:23+00:00
This was my conclusion after reading both sides. It seems that Rebble is inevitably going to be an archive, while new development will be distributed on Core's store. Core temporarily needs some of its (unlicensed) catalog to bootstrap its new products.

Having the Core store populated with fresh development seems like good platform management anyway. Let the Rebble store be the 'classic apps' archive.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-19 04:36:44+00:00
How about where's the most basic test to check if your config file will actually run at all in your application? It was a hard-coded memory limit; a git-hook test suite run a MacBook would have caught this. But nooo, let's not run the app for 0.01 seconds with this config before sending it out to determine the fate of the internet?

This is literally the CrowdStrike bug, in a CDN. This is the most basic, elementary, day 0 test you could possibly invent. Forget the other things they fucked up. Their app just crashes with a config file, and nobody evaluates it?! Not every bug is preventable, but an egregious lack of testing is preventable.

This is what a software building code (like the electrical code's UL listings that prevent your house from burning down from untested electrical components) is intended to prevent. No critical infrastructure should be legal without testing, period.
by brudgers | 2025-11-19 04:38:52+00:00
Obviously FizzBuzz is a property of integers

Integer extend [ fizzbuzz [ (self \\ 15 = 0) ifTrue: ['fizzbuzz' printNl] ifFalse: [ (self \\ 3 = 0) ifTrue: ['fizz' printNl] ifFalse: [ (self \\ 5 = 0) ifTrue: ['buzz' printNl] ifFalse: [self printNl] ] ] ] ] 1 to: 100 by: 1 do: [:i | i fizzbuzz]