MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whizzter | 2025-12-15 09:16:53+00:00
A lot of unnecessary complexity/overhead for a minor seldomly touched part of a much larger already complex system?

I'll give a comparison.

JSON

- We have some frontend logic/view (that can be feature-flagged per customer) to manage updating the data that's otherwise mostly tagging along as a dumb "blob" (auto-expanded to regular a part of the JSON objects maps/arrays at the API boundary making frontend work easier, objects on the frontend, "blobs" on the backend/db)

- Inspecting specfic cases (most of the time it's just null data) is just copying out and formatting the special data.

- If push comes to shows, all modern databases support JSON queries so you can pick out specifics IF needed (has happened once or twice with larger customers over the years).

- We read and apply the rules when calculating prices with a "plugin system"

DB Schema (extra tables)

- Now you have to wade through lots of customer-specific tables just to find the tables that takes most of the work-time (customer specifics are seldomly what needs work once setup). We already have some older customer-specific stuff from the early days (I'm happy that it's not happened much lately).

- Those _very_ few times you actually need to inspect the specific data by query you might win on this (but as mentioned above, JSON queries has always solved it).

- Loading the universal info now needs to query X extra tables (even when 90%-95% of the data has no special cases).

- Adding new operations on prices like copying,etc now needs to have logic for each piece of customer specific table to properly make it tag along.

- "properly" modelled this reaches the API layer as well

- Frontend specialization is still needed

- Calculating prices still needs it's customization.

I don't really see how my life would have been better for managing all extra side-effects of bending the code to suit these weird customer requests (some that aren't customers anymore) when 90-95% of the time it isn't used and seldomly touched upon with mature customers.

I do believe in the rule of 3, if the same thing pops up three times I do consider if that needs to be graduated to more "systematic" code, so often when you abstract after seeing something even 2 times it never appears again leaving you with some abstraction to maintain.

JSON columns, like entity-attribute-value tables or goto statements all have real downsides and shouldn't be plonked in without a reason, but hell if I'd have to work with overly complex schemas/models because people start putting special cases into core pieces of code just because they heard that a technique was bad.
by moh_quz | 2025-12-15 09:16:57+00:00
That definitely helps, but I don't think it solves the compromised machine scenario.

If the attacker has shell access to the dev's laptop, they are likely just running commands directly from that machine (or proxying through it). So to GitHub, the traffic still looks like it's coming from the allowed IP.

Allowlists are mostly for stopping usage of a token that got stolen and taken off-device.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-15 09:17:16+00:00
> Men are born without a understanding of how the female body works, same with women who are born with no understanding of how the male body works.

Men are also born without an undertanding of how the male body works and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with women.

> Just placing ur brain in a new body wont magically unlearn all the things you know about the other body.

I mean, absent knowledge of what it takes to make a brain work with a new body, putting it in one is also magic and what other magical (from our perspective) effects do or do not come along with that is... highly speculative. It might be that accessing some of those as anything different than the memories of counterfactual dreams isn’t possible without connections, or biochemical conditions, that don’t exist without intentional intervention in a body configured differently.

> So regardless of the body your brain was put into, you now have both genders because you experienced both sides.

No, gender (either ascribed gender or gender identity) is not inherently tied to “what combination of anatomical and hormonal sex traits have I experienced”. It might be that having this kind of experience affects gender identity, but (even assuming initial gender identity was in one or the other position on the traditional binary, whether or not the side stereotypically associated with gross anatomy of the original body) it doesn't automatically make it encompass both sides of the gender binary. And what it does or doesn't do for ascribed gender is dependent on the viewss of the society in which it occurs, not an outside observer in our society.

> Personally, I am not attracted to men in the slightest regardless of their body now having female features. So while I am not against people swapping genders how they please, it would be a dystopia for me personally in my subjective view, because I wouldn't magically become bisexual.

It would be a dystopia becuase people would be free to engage in one more choice than they are in our current society that, because of your quirky views about the relation of gender to biological history of the individual, would render them sexually uninteresting to you?

That seems more than a little narcissistic.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 09:17:52+00:00
> I don't wanna have to read datasheets and erratas

I recently started programming Arduino for profit and you need to do exactly that, because the libraries range from somewhat buggy to completely broken. They so often just write into random other registers and if it works it is only do to the chip already working without any configuration and the library not breaking things too badly.
by quailfarmer | 2025-12-15 09:18:28+00:00
Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.
by Closi | 2025-12-15 09:18:34+00:00
The concept of recording a macro (telling a computer the steps you want it to do, and then it repeating it) is very different to telling the computer the outcome you want and it working out the steps.

Going back to the 'help me calculate the financial implications of a house purchase' example - making a macro might make your work repeatable, but doesn't avoid users needing to learn excel or needing to put in the effort to build the spreadsheet.
by Swizec | 2025-12-15 09:19:01+00:00
> If your grading is based mostly on correctly reproducing facts and applying algorithms you memorized then that’s the outcome your education system optimizes for

My favorite college class was compilers.

The whole semester you worked on a compiler for a simplified Pascal. Each homework added a feature.

The final exam was 4 hours. Open textbook, open internet. No chat with classmates. You got a description of 3 features to add to your compiler. Grade is number of tests passed.

Fantastic way to teach understanding.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-15 09:19:07+00:00
That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.
by andy_ppp | 2025-12-15 09:19:54+00:00
> Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways.

Maybe write some tests and have great software development practices and most importantly people who care about getting the details right. Honestly there’s no reason for software to be like this is there? I don’t know how much off the shelf ERP software you have used but I wouldn’t exactly describe that as flawless and bug free either!
by rusk | 2025-12-15 09:20:28+00:00
> 1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.

I gave up on this. I turned off a lot of the smart features but couldn’t justify not being able to use the apps.

It’s pretty dystopian my TV spying on me for sure but they’ve already got my phone, my internet history and presumably some pretty good spy satellites

If a drone has my name on it I’m done for either way
by Incipient | 2025-12-15 09:21:50+00:00
I would absolutely agree with your approach for large-scale saas/highly publicised applications, especially when you have a team/people dedicated to security/versioning.

In small teams where you're focused on building features, being able to rely on semver for non-breaking versions has been very helpful/successful. I personally haven't encountered a breaking feature added to something that shouldn't be.

This also applies to our docker containers, using python 3.13-slim-trixie for example, and letting the patch version sort itself out.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-15 09:21:55+00:00
That is due most likely because you are using bad screens and/or bad fonts.

Any computer monitor with a resolution less than 4k renders text with a much worse quality than printed paper. Smaller resolutions may be perfectly adequate for movies and games, but they are not good enough for reading long texts, e.g. books.

Something like a 27 inch or 32 inch 4k monitor is acceptable for reading text. It is still not quite as good as printed paper, but the price of better monitors increases very quickly. At such sizes a 5k monitor would be needed for good text rendering, but those are much more expensive.

You normally sit at a longer distance from a monitor than from a book, so the dot-per-inch resolution of the monitor should be configured so that a page of text should have greater dimensions on the screen than when printed. For instance, for my 27 inch 4k monitor I configure a 216 dots-per-inch value, which results in an on-screen size about 4/3 bigger than on paper, e.g. for an A4 page. I also do not use the default OS fonts, but I replace them with better fonts. Some bad graphic environments may provide no access or only a hidden access to configuring directly the DPI value of the monitor, which is the right way for scaling what is displayed, and they provide only settings that may result in low-quality text rendering, e.g. a multiplier for the size of the fonts or of the windows.

With a good monitor and with well-configured appearance settings in the OS, I prefer very much to read books on the computer display, instead from physical books.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-15 09:21:56+00:00
Don't the subscriptions on AI services charge VAT? Do the AI companies pay corporate taxes?

But as others pointed out, this is a silly anthromorphisation of AI - it's a tool, just like any software, nothing more. Tax the companies for sure, but don't treat LLMs like people or human-like entities. There's generations of automation tools that should be taxed as such, otherwise.
by nine_k | 2025-12-15 09:22:39+00:00
Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
by quailfarmer | 2025-12-15 09:22:57+00:00
+1, if only for the documentation. If you haven’t, skim through it: https://pip.raspberrypi.com/documents/RP-008373-DS-2-rp2350-... it’s truly unlike any reference manual I’ve ever read. I will happily pay a few extra cents at modest volumes for a chance to get the detailed technical details and opinions from the design team.
by rob74 | 2025-12-15 09:23:02+00:00
> Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"

Asimov seems to have been a very modest man...
by alfonsodev | 2025-12-15 09:23:09+00:00
Awesome! I like when imagination fills the gaps of technology, maybe because I played on old computers like spectrum, we had few pixels and had to imagine the rest.

The ordering could’ve been “solved” with a WhatsApp message, ( or shouting ? :D ) but that would have been so boring!

This much better life UX !

This app is a reminder of being playful and imaginative in life can bring joy, congrats!
by reincoder | 2025-12-15 09:23:20+00:00
If it is an anycast IP address, we have hints of all locations. However, because we have to produce a standard IP geolocation product, we can only select one address. So, we choose the address we find from a reliable geofeed and designate the IP address as "anycast" in the API response.

Internally, we have an anycast database. I believe we can also provide all the location hints we see for each anycast IP. It is generally niche data though.
by pmontra | 2025-12-15 09:23:41+00:00
Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.

It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.

By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
by dddw | 2025-12-15 09:24:25+00:00
I got a last.FM story. I used last.fm for years, then wanted tot use it again after a hiatus. But was locked out of my account, and the email I used of that service didn't exist anymore. I contacted last.fm saying what the old email was, and told them the profile picture was from a guitarist from an obscure islandic band, who's blonde hair I photo shopped into brown, so he looked more like me. They gave we a reset link. Very happy to use it again. I do wonder how they stay afloat.
by smaughk | 2025-12-15 09:24:50+00:00
Working on turning individual disparate services into a unified zero-trust overlay network (what we're calling a Synthetic Environment™) where mocks and real services can be integrated or work seamlessly together, accessible through traditional networking or exposed public tunnels.

This is a developers tool, that can be used during development to seamlessly integrate mocks and changes into existing systems. Or easily expose internal work through a public tunnel. Or if been in an position where its hard to push to staging, pre-prod or other environments because of many competing constraints, then this product may help.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-12-15 09:25:26+00:00
> Why do we expect school or university to teach „understanding”.

Having been taught in different systems that emphasize understanding vs memorization, I'd have to disagree. The teachers and the overall academic system can encourage, test for, and reward rote memorization. Or it can encourage, test for, and reward problem-solving, critical thinking, and understanding.

Everything from the way teachers lecture, to assigned reading, to assignments, to tests will influence how students think and what they optimize for. There will always be exceptions who forge their own path, but most students like most people just go with the flow.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-15 09:25:42+00:00
Well, this is the idea at the heart of it which has been pushed for many decades in some form or another. The EU/EEC etc started like the Zollverein which helped Germany unite.

Personally I wish the EU had modelled itself more around Switzerland than the USA which is fast turning into its primary model.

(By the way, some far rightists have pushed a united Europe for some time. The two ideas are not necessarily contradictory. Oswald Mosley was such a person.)
by asmor | 2025-12-15 09:26:18+00:00
That "AI is just like your coworker / friend / companion" view is intentionally created by people who need the bubble part of AI to go as far as possible.

I only know about this TED Talk because it was in a mandatory training course for my work, but these is the kinds of things being said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKNCiRWd_j0 (he's trying really hard with the Steve Jobs look)
by ehnto | 2025-12-15 09:26:50+00:00
> The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity.

Which I don't think can be replaced by AI in a lot of cases. I think in the software world we are used to things being shared, open and easily knowable, but a great deal of industry and enterprise domain knowledge is locked up inside in companies and will not be in the training data.

That's why it's such a big deal for an enterprise to have on prem tools, to avoid leaking industry processes and "secrets" (the secrets are boring, but still secrets).

A little career advice in there too I guess. At least for now, you're a bit more secure as a developer in industries that aren't themselves software, is my guess.
by xnorswap | 2025-12-15 09:27:47+00:00
The guidelines I follow for C# has "use var where it's obvious, but explicitly type when not".

So for example I'd write:

var x = new List<Foo>();

Because writing:

List<Foo> x = new List<Foo>();

Feels very redundant

Whereas I'd write:

List<Foo> x = FooBarService.GetMyThings();

Because it's not obvious what the type is otherwise ( Some IDEs will overlay hint the type there though ).

Although with newer language features you can also write:

List<Foo> x = new();

Which is even better.
by k9294 | 2025-12-15 09:28:33+00:00
Working on https://ottex.ai/ - BYOK alternative to Wispr Flow and Raycast AI shortcuts.

I love global voice-to-text transcription (especially when working with Claude Code or Cursor) and simple AI shortcuts like "Fix Grammar" and "Translate to {Language}".

I realized I was spending around €35/mo (€420 a year) on two apps for AI features that cost just pennies to run.

So I built Ottex - a native macOS app with a tiny footprint. Add your OpenRouter API key and get solid voice-to-text using Gemini 2.5 Flash, plus any OpenRouter model for AI shortcuts.
by trinix912 | 2025-12-15 09:29:23+00:00
Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk.

Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job?

iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by the headline. Not to mention insane prices for consumables (filters, bristles, etc) - I got Aliexpress replacements at 1/10 of the cost and there's literally no difference in the end result.
by jeswin | 2025-12-15 09:29:36+00:00
> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools.

That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.
by bebb | 2025-12-15 09:29:39+00:00
> many cultures across the Americas and Oceania had and have non-binary systems,

As I understand it, this is because these cultures had deeply sexist ideas about how women and men should behave, so they created additional categories to shovel everyone who didn't conform into. In practice this tended to mean that gay men would be placed in some sort of "non-man" male category. So while sexuality and gender are different things, in practice they end up linked through this mechanism of othering.
by Lerc | 2025-12-15 09:30:02+00:00
>Co-lead author Anton Dek, a researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance,

I find it amusingly apt that research into fake accounts is done by someone who people must regularly assume is a fake name.

You'd have to carry ID all the time with a name like that.

This is what British people will hear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_%26_Dec
by torginus | 2025-12-15 09:30:12+00:00
In my experience, SaaS is also fragile. It's real software, with real bugs. Most complex solutions offer an extensible API/scripting support with tons of switchable/pluggable modules to integrate with your company's infra. This complexity most often means that your particulary combination of features is almost wholly unique, and chances are your SaaS has much less open mindshare/open source support than any free solution.

We often ended up discarding large chunks of these poorly tested features, instead of trying to get them to work, and wrote our own. This got to a point where only the core platform was used, and replacing that seemed to be totally feasible.

SaaS often doesn't solve issues but replaces them - you substitute general engineering knowledge and open-source knowhow with proprietary one, and end up with experts in configuring commercial software - a skill that has very little value on the market where said software is not used, and chains you to a given vendor.
by d--b | 2025-12-15 09:31:28+00:00
There are 2 reasons for taxes to exist:

1. To finance the state's activities (mostly defense, social security, education, infrastructure and healthcare)

2. To disincentivize detrimental activities like smoking or fracking.

We should tax tech companies for their off-the-charts energy consumption which is not sustainable environmentally.

But taxing AI because it replaces jobs doesn't make much sense to me as the technology is supposed to produce more stuff for less overall human labour.

If the goal is to avoid concentration of wealth, governments should tax wealthy companies/individuals and redistribute by subsiding activities that are not as revenue generating but play other significant role in society, like reduce dependency on foreign imports or you know cough health cough care cough.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-15 09:32:24+00:00
An interesting twist on this, would be to hold the used item while "paying" for it with a collateral. It would remove the need to have an owner to which the item must return to, allowing it to behave more like a linked list, reducing the amoutn of trips by two.

I also think that for taxeable purposes this would work better than buying and selling used items, especially in countries with gross income taxes. In the rest of the cases at least it would reduce the administrative burden to prove that ones net-income or value-add was marginal or negative.
by mintflow | 2025-12-15 09:32:37+00:00
Working on my app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mintflow-netstack/id6742394218

As an engineer working on networking and fiddle with various networking OS on router and switch, I finally port my favorite fd.io vpp to darwin platform and built a app to management multiple VPN/Proxy in one profile.

Also in this project I start writing some rust code with many years experience in C but rust's memory and high performance really impressed me a lot.