MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonesss | 2025-12-07 17:17:29+00:00
With poor abstractions I can improve abstractions and ensure holistic impact because of the reuse. Then I’m left with well factored reusable code full of increasingly powerful abstractions. Productivity increases over time. Abstractions improve and refine over time. Domain understanding is deepened.

With duplicated messes you may be looking at years before a logical point to attack across the stack is even available because the team is duplicating and producing duplicated efforts on an ongoing basis. Every issue, every hotfix, every customer request, every semi-complete update, every deviation is putting pressure to produce and with duplication available as the quickest and possibly only method. And there are geological nuances to each copy and paste exercise that often have rippling effects…

The necessary abstractions often aren’t even immaturely conceived of. Domain understanding is buried under layers of incidental complexity. Superstition around troublesome components takes over decision making. And a few years of plugging the same dams with the same fingers drains and scares off proper IT talent. Up front savings transmutate to tech debt, with every incentive to every actor at every point to make the collective situation worse by repeating the same short term reasoning.

Learning to abstract and modularize properly is the underlying issue. Learn to express yourself in maintainable fashion, then Don’t Repeat Yourself.
by nine_k | 2025-12-07 17:17:34+00:00
Clojure is built on dynamic typing. This is pain. I wrote enough Python (pre-mypy), Javascript, and elisp to say this. Past certain size a dynamically typed codebase becomes needlessly hard to wrangle because of that. Hence the success of Python type annotations and Typescript.

Instead, the world should have seen the light of Hindley-Milner type systems, ML-inspired languages, immutability, or at least not sharing mutable state. Did Haskell fail? Hmm, let's look at Typescript and Rust.

Don't get me wrong, a Lisp is always a great and fun language, and you can write whatever DSL you might like on top of it. But the old joke that "a Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, and the cost of nothing" still has quite a bit of truth to it.
by whiteboardr | 2025-12-07 17:18:19+00:00
> and Ive’s utter disdain for Dye’s talent, leadership, and personality.

Ive was the one handing him that role within design at Apple bleeding into and ultimately taking over a significant influence over their whole product line from a UI standpoint - if he disdains him that much, he had all the power to right his wrong.

Anyone here with insights on how this came about and Dye stayed in that role for so long?
by simonw | 2025-12-07 17:18:34+00:00
I'm finding the GPTZero share links difficult to understand. Apparently this one shows a hallucinated citation but I couldn't understand what it was trying to tell me: https://app.gptzero.me/documents/9afb1d51-c5c8-48f2-9b75-250...

(I'm on mobile, haven't looked on desktop.)
by phillipwisn10 | 2025-12-07 17:18:56+00:00
Location: Charlotte, NC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: Cypress, CI/CD, JavaScript, React.js, Python

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1THtxMCBq6ddRdN6DBSZAp08tIBS...

Email: phillip.wisniewski10@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/phillsatellite

Hi! I'm Phill I am a QA Engineer with 4 years of experience doing manual testing and some automation and now an aspiring Software Engineer currently attending Flatiron with graduation date expected in April. So far I've gained knowledge of JavaScript, React.js, Python and some Next.js and now looking for an opportunity to put my new skills to work.
by freehorse | 2025-12-07 17:19:50+00:00
A reviewer is assessing the relevance and "impact" of a paper rather than correctness itself directly. Reviewers may not even have access to the data itself that authors may have used. The way it essentially works is an editor asks the reviewers "is this paper worthy to be published in my journal?" and the reviewers basically have to answer that question. The process is actually the editor/journal's responsibility.
by the8472 | 2025-12-07 17:21:11+00:00
It's not possible to correctly implement any cryptographic algorithms in any high-level language with an optimizing backend where timing is not considered an observable/perserved property. Currently this includes anything backed by LLVM or GCC, though there's a proposal to introduce such guarantees through a new builtin in LLVM https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/166702 though those could still be broken by post-build optimizers, like wasm.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-07 17:21:18+00:00
> The article could really benefit from some steel-manning. Remove the cute Flatland metaphor and it is effectively arguing that lisp/clojure haven’t been universally adopted because most programmers haven’t Seen The Light in some sort of epiphany of parentheses and macros. The truth is more nuanced.

The talk I posted from Alan Kay is the steel man. I think you've missed the essence of TFA because it's not really about Clojure or lisp.
by photochemsyn | 2025-12-07 17:21:42+00:00
Looks like someone at OpenAI had the bright idea that they could push 'Christmas shopping season' apps 'assisted by ChatGPT' to 'help find the perfect gift' to paying users and everyone (including me) was really disgusted by having that garbage clogging up screen space.

Really just confirmed to me that long term, the best option for inference is just running an open source model on your own hardware, even if that's still expensive and doesn't generate as high quality output.
by fluidcruft | 2025-12-07 17:21:45+00:00
Marketing is known to lede a lot of bullshit. Celebrite saying "We tried our stuff and it didn't work" is very likely more about obscurity than focused effort. Unless you know that celebrite has been specifically hired to break into a GrapheneOS device and put as much effort into it as they do into standard Android and iOS and failed, it means nothing. It's like the old thing about MacOS 9 being more secure than Windows.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-07 17:22:10+00:00
They absolutely have. They force upgrade computers to Windows 11, which then won't boot, because the system doesn't actually support it. I guess they also have a smoother way to achieve that. They are also cases where an update broke the booting process, so the bitlocker key was lost. Everything is encrypted with it by default, and the only copy sits on a MS server connected with you MS account. Guess what happens when they say sorry, we can't just give you that key...
by tootie | 2025-12-07 17:22:16+00:00
I wrote a ton of Perl 5 and also found it very intuitive and powerful. I think the notion that Python is "more readable" is true, but also less useful of a metric than it would seem. Python is still gibberish to a new coder and requires training and experience to master. Perl requires somewhat more effort to acclimate to, but ultimately is much more expressive and much closer to real-world software engineering problems. Once the incremental effort is made, Perl is (or at least was) a better Python.
by 9dev | 2025-12-07 17:22:20+00:00
That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows.

Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.

Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.
by johnfn | 2025-12-07 17:22:28+00:00
Quite a lot of people have given Lisp a shot and determined, for one reason or another, that it doesn't work for them. Why wouldn't that be the case? There are no special forces that prevent people from giving Lisp a shot when every other popular language in the world was at one point in time was at Lisp's level of popularity, and overcome the barriers that Lisp could not.
by RodgerTheGreat | 2025-12-07 17:23:39+00:00
A sadly typical flavor of essay: a lisp enthusiast who believes that learning lisp has made them into a uniquely Very Smart Boy who can think thoughts denied from programmers who use other languages. The "blub" paper asserts that there exists a linear hierarchy of goodness and expressiveness in languages, where lisp, by virtue of its shapelessness, exemplifies the pinnacle of expressiveness.

This is a profound misapprehension of the nature of language design. Languages exist within contexts, and embody tradeoffs. It is possible- common, even- to fully grasp the capabilities of a language like lisp and still find it inappropriate or undesirable for a given task. Pick any given context- safety-critical medical applications, constrained programming for microcontrollers or GPUs, livecoding environments where saving keystrokes is king- and you can find specialized languages with novel tools, execution models, and affordances. Perhaps it never crossed Paul Graham's mind that lisp itself might be a "blub" to others, in other situations.

The idea of a linear hierarchy in languages is the true flatlander mindset.
by CharlesW | 2025-12-07 17:23:40+00:00
> It’s notable that accessibility isn’t mentioned once in this post, or, in fact, in the component’s documentation.

It's a red flag for sure. That said, there's nothing preventing toasts from being accessible: https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/useToast.html

I think it would be accurate for GitHub to say, "GitHub no longer uses toasts because we didn't want to make the effort to make them accessible or usable."
by broken-kebab | 2025-12-07 17:23:53+00:00
This theory may only sound convincing if you ignore parts of history which don't fit. Which is pretty much all of them. RTFM-culture was the norm for all online computer-related communities until 00s. Nothing of this phenomenon is Perl-specific.

In late 80s and early 90s professional knowledge was way harder to get. Learning required significant devotion, and often was obtainable through experience only, and at the same time computer-related work wasn't as well-paid as it will become later. And had controversial social standing. Like, my brother said "It will hurt your chances with girls, bro!" when I told him I want to be a programmer, and with typical sibling-love added "This, and your ugly face of course".

RTFM emerged naturally with all of these: people paid with their time and social life for this knowledge, and wrote down what they found in manuals, most often for free, and you can't just bother to read them?

FWIW most BOFH types in my memory were C programmers, and early Linux UGs. Perlists in comparison were mild, and way more open (Perl community included biologists, linguists, and other non stereotypically computer people).

Perl decline was to some extent a cultural thing. But absolutely not the culture the author means. In Perl Larry Wall promoted a sort of expressive style of writing code where you can chose between several compiler-equivalent ways to implement logic: There is More Than One Way To Do It (aka Tim Toady) principle. The alleged reason is that the choice you make conveys some subtle nuances of your thinking which 1) gives you more comfort while coding, 2) gives potentially more information to someone who will read your code. This was outrageously contrary to the mainstream tendency of commoditization of software development (and software developers) which started to gain the steam at those times. Managers wanted (and I guess still want though to the date the idea mostly failed) THE one and only right way to code each task, peferrably with the only one language (with Java as the main contender), standard training programs, and certifications - all across all domains, and as a result replaceable and transferrable coders. Perl was clearly unfit for this perfect future with its proud selection of 4 or 5 implementations of OOP, and it hurt the language promotion a lot. And then there was disastrously optimistic declaration about soon-to-be major uprgade to Perl 6 which in reality will take 15+ years, all while lots of interesting things happening outside.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-12-07 17:23:59+00:00
I put him up for the night on my sofa once.

When you do this, you get his "rider". Google it, it's real, it's infamous for the "don't buy me a parrot" section.

Anyway, in that, he makes clear that if people at dinner are not interested in talking about free software, he's going to pull out his laptop and get on with his work relating to free software.

He doesn't care about fancy food, drinks, etc. - he wants to raise money for free software, and work on free software. He did this in a restaurant when three others of us were chatting about something else, and we all just accepted that's what he does, and that's him. It was fine.

If you're not familiar with him or this, then it's going to be a weird experience.

He also struggles with social interactions in my limited experience, particularly when it's a "fan boy" interaction.

I've seen him not being super nice to other people who were trying to have a conversation with him, not because he's not a nice person (I found him quite personable one on one), but it seems to me that he struggles to know how to behave around people who don't know how to just talk to him about things he wants to talk about.

I once saw him in the audience of a conference with quite a notable set of speakers [0], and I can't remember who it was who he started hectoring in the Q&A (I mean, look at the speaker list, whoever it was, it's somebody you've probably heard of), but he just diverted it into a little lesson about free software for the speaker and everyone else listening. It's the only thing he cares about talking about. It's either a super-power focus, or really annoying. I personally think at this point you just either need to meet him where he is, or avoid him if you don't want to. He's not going to change.

I'm glad I met him, I'm glad he does what he does, I know he's a little spikier than others around him and I'm OK with that. I also know plenty of people who never want to speak to him ever again and think free software needs a new figurehead.

[0] https://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Turing100/www.turing100...
by thfuran | 2025-12-07 17:24:07+00:00
>No, I merely said that the scientist is the one responsible for the quality of their own work.

No, you expressed unqualified agreement with a comment containing

“And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers?”

>Any critiques you may have for the tools which they use don't lessen this responsibility.

People don’t exist or act in a vacuum. That a scientist is responsible for the quality of their work doesn’t mean that a spectrometer manufacture that advertises specs that their machines can’t match and induces universities through discounts and/or dubious advertising claims to push their labs to replace their existing spectrometers with new ones which have many bizarre and unexpected behaviors including but not limited to sometimes just fabricating spurious readings has made no contribution to the problem of bad results.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-07 17:24:46+00:00
> make everything executable immutable

How though? Presumably you mean we should trust the OS to do that?

Edit to be clear auditd has the same issue. We're trusting it to audit itself. However, we know that we cant trust it because rootkits are a thing. So now what?...

I guess we need a tool thats designed to be tamper proof to monitor it. We do that by introducing an external validation. A 2nd external system can vouch that hashes are what we expect, etc.
by rtp4me | 2025-12-07 17:25:23+00:00
Yes, I have used iVentoy very much in the past as well. However, running a dozen (+12) simultaneous installs of Linux seems a stretch for 1G NICs. Using a small PC with a 2.5G NIC could probably do just as well as the 10G one - just slightly less expensive. The 2.5G NIC hardware has really come down in price; you can get an 8-port 2.5G switch for $45, and many mini-PCs have 2.5G built-in.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-07 17:25:34+00:00
> If a carpenter builds a crappy shelf “because” his power tools are not calibrated correctly - that’s a crappy carpenter, not a crappy tool.

It's both. The tool is crappy, and the carpenter is crappy for blindly trusting it.

> AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is.

Similarly, both are a problem here. LLMs are a bad tool, and we should hold people responsible when they blindly trust this bad tool and get bad results.
by danaris | 2025-12-07 17:25:36+00:00
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

——

Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.
by ruricolist | 2025-12-07 17:25:48+00:00
The sketch here would be that Lisps used to be exceptionally resource-intensive, allowing closer-to-metal languages to proliferate and become the default. But nowadays even Common Lisp is a simple and lightweight language next to say Python or C++. Still it's hard to overcome the inertia of the past's massive investments in education in less abstraction-friendly languages.
by jchw | 2025-12-07 17:26:06+00:00
Personally I would just wire some NEMA 240V outlet and then have a separate adapter with a pigtail of that receptacle type and a workbox with the UK receptacle. It's a little unwieldy, but it puts the questionable hackery outside the realm of the building inspection at least.

Whether it's actually safe I though, that I am curious. Obviously the kettle can get the 240V potential it expects, but the neutral is center tapped out of the split phase transformer, right? Not sure how people wire this. (Doesn't the neutral wind up having to be one of the hots instead?)
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 17:26:24+00:00
For context, it's important to keep in mind the population density in former DDR regions is very low. Young people often flee towards bigger liberal cities, as soon as possible. Pronounced in eastern Germany, the AfD is a national problem.

In short: Propaganda. Germany is a major target of Russian influence. The AfD itself is heavily funded by Russia. There is no "old love" situation, Russia isn't representing socialist ideals or anything. (Russia wasn't loved back then either, btw.) Quite frankly, AfD followers often are just misled and detached from reason (e.g. objectively voting against their own interests). If you talk to them they often entertain some really fucking wild ideas and conspiratorial thinking. Of all parties in Germany, AfD has probably the most successful social media campaign, especially on TikTok. Mind you, the AfD's "not our problem"/"do nothing" position is aiding Russia in Ukraine. It's easy to put a nationalist/antisemitic spin on it.

Now, the leftist party is another story. There you find a completely misguided "old love" base, which is dogmatically "pacifist" and anti-NATO. They really should check the values Russia represents these days...
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-07 17:26:46+00:00
You'd have to be pretty dumb to believe ads are only for the free tier. Look at literally every subscription streaming service. They all have ads on paid tiers now.

They will put ads in the paid ChatGPT tiers. That is an absolute certainty. The only question is how long will they tolerate un-advertised eyballs on paid plans.
by hylaride | 2025-12-07 17:27:41+00:00
> Does everything has to have taking over the world as a goal? Perl still exists, I guess it's updated, why isn't that enough?

I never got the impression that perl's goal was to take over the world, but it was good at dealing with certain kinds of problems at a time in computing where it mattered, especially for one-offs.

The 1980s/1990s was full of many, many different data formats in a time before XML/JSON, often by long dead companies. Many a tech person was in a situation where "Oh fuck, how do I get this data out of some obscure database or other data format from some dead company that only ran on SCO UNIX or whatever into SAP/Oracle/etc" only to see somebody else already done it and made a CPAN module.

It also became an early CGI workhorse because, quite frankly, it was just there until much cleaner web-native languages started to show up.

Anecdotally, as part of some corporate lawsuits that involved stuff going back decades, a former colleague of mine recently had to grab ancient data for an insurance company from backup tapes that were last accessed in the 1980s (apparently getting readers for them was its own story). The only google results he could get for the data formats stored on them were literally usenet posts from the 1990s of people discussing working with it and...some CPAN modules somebody wrote to export it. He did chuckle when for the first time in his life he used tar without the -f switch, though.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-07 17:28:03+00:00
> there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum.

I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it.

Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.
by the_real_cher | 2025-12-07 17:28:31+00:00
Of course urine would, its the result of kidneys eliminating the acid brought to them by the plasma buffer system. But blood and body Ph don't change.

The body is incredibly complex so I'm not saying this is conclusive but here's a source plus a lot of explanation with numerous experiments.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3828631/

Another thing: Calcium strongly associates with acid.

And there's no evidence of osteoporosis or bone leaching with high acid diets.
by cratermoon | 2025-12-07 17:28:45+00:00
I believe we discussed this last week, for a different vendor. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088236

Headline should be "AI vendor’s AI-generated analysis claims AI generated reviews for AI-generated papers at AI conference".

h/t to Paul Cantrell https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/115633840133507279