MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bataowt | 2025-12-27 07:28:29+00:00
Thank you.

It’s my pet theory that China and friends have been running some serious propaganda in the West which has culminated in this red vs blue vitriol that’s bordering on mindless, thought terminating cliches. I say that because they routinely get away with far worse and very few people speak up against it nevermind do something about it. The air around it is so quiet it’s as if people are siding with them (and perhaps they are).

[nb. The average Chinese person would easily point out the number of Jews as heads of prominent tech companies in the West and not flinch saying it. The average Westerner dare not even think about saying it. That’s how crippled your standing is right now.]

Blaming Trump won’t help rewind the clock, and there’s ultimately very little he’s personally responsible for in the grand scheme of things. This started decades ago and you’re up against a country that will use every dirty trick in the book, because they are playing to win.

First realize how disadvantaged you are at the moment that whatever you do, your country would stand in your way and sabotage you out of petty reasons, against a country that’s turning more and more people into millionaires and proliferating across the globe and who has softly and quietly taken key strategic economic and industrial positions at a global scale. You can blame Trump if it makes you feel better, but it won’t help you win.

Population across the globe may be dwindling, but some people have more to lose than others and still come out on top.
by jarofgreen | 2025-12-27 07:28:54+00:00
Hello,

I'm James based in Scotland. For 7 years I ran Open Tech Calendar listing mainly in-person tech events.

After a pause I'm now relaunching Open Tech Calendar to list virtual events - this shift in focus is due to personal life changes that mean that virtual events is what I'm interested in, and looking at other sites that are now doing a great job listing in person events in Scotland. I know virtual events aren't as popular, but when I talked about this on social media, people suggested many reasons that virtual events may be preferred - public health, child care and other caring duties, people in rural areas.

I am specially going for events that include community participation - I'm keen to avoid "this virtual tech event could have been a video" and instead encourage events that people can get involved in.

We are also provide Open Data exports and are keen to encourage events to provide Open Data we (and others) can just import and reuse. Happy to help with options for that.

Brief word on the tech: I'm collecting data in a GitHub repository, then building that into a SQLite database with an Open Source library, then it's a Django site to provide all the filter options and open data feeds I wanted to provide. It's hosted on one virtual machine with Apache caching content.

So:

Constructive feedback on the project and site welcome!

If you know any good virtual tech events, do add them! You don't have to be the organiser. There are details how on the site, or just comment here with details.

Thanks,
James
by dpark | 2025-12-27 07:29:44+00:00
For software engineering, “impact” or “value delivered” are pretty much always your job unless you work somewhere really dysfunctional that’s measuring lines of code or some other nonsense. But that does become a lot about politics after some level.

I would not say it’s about getting other people aligned with your priorities instead of theirs but rather finding ways such that your priorities are aligned. There’s always the “your boss says it needs to help me” sort of priority alignment but much better is to find shared priorities. e.g. “We both need X; let’s work together.” “You need Foo which you could more easily achieve by investing your efforts into my platform Bar.”
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 07:30:42+00:00
I got confused by the direction of the discussion.

My original point was that Requests imports in pip used to not be deferred like that, so you would pay for them up front, even if they turned out to be irrelevant. (But also they are relevant more often than they should be, i.e. the deferral system doesn't work as well as it should.)

Part of the reason you pay for them is to run top-level code (to create function and class objects) that are irrelevant to what the program is actually doing. But another big part is the cost of actually locating the files, reading them, and deserializing bytecode from them. This happens at import time even if you don't invoke any of the functionality.
by da_grift_shift | 2025-12-27 07:31:20+00:00
It makes sense when you consider that every part of this gimmick is rationalist brained.

The Village is backed by Effective Altruist-aligned nonprofits which trace their lineage back to CFEA and the interwoven mess of SF's x-risk and """alignment""" cults. These have big pockets and big influence. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950)

As expected, the terminally online tpot cultists are already flaming Simon to push the LLM consciousness narrative:

https://x.com/simonw/status/2004649024830517344

https://x.com/simonw/status/2004764454266036453
by ReflectedImage | 2025-12-27 07:31:48+00:00
Type free languages like Lisp, Python and Ruby have faster software development times than languages that use types.

The developers who are using the statically typed languages, which are slower to develop in, with are being pushed to use the faster languages.

But those developers don't know how to code in type free languages. So they attempt to add the types back in.

This of course reduces the software development speeds back to their previous speeds.

This means the whole thing is basically folly.

If you want a real example you can take a look at Turborepo, which in weakly typed Go took 1 developer 3 months to develop and has 20,000 lines of code. The direct port to Rust took a team of developers 14 months to develop and has 80,000 lines of code.

Exact same program but the development costs went up proportionally to the increase in the strength of the type system.

There are plenty of developers out there who have only used static typing and don't understand it comes with massive software development costs compared to it alternatives.

If you are developing a SaaS and you use duck typing, unit tests and micro-services. You will get to market long before your competitors who don't.
by f1shy | 2025-12-27 07:31:56+00:00
>> Try and run custom software on his medical device which can likely kill him? More than likely

I think this sentence is very sad. Not only this is a hard accusation, it is also the primary argument of the anti right to repair movement. An argument that I think is extremely bogus and ill intentioned, and I particularly (like Mr. Rossman) viscerally dislike.

Maybe the primary motivation is a) curiosity, and b) just for kicks to know if they honor the license.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-12-27 07:33:39+00:00
Two reasons.

First, YJIT/ZJIT do much better when they know the type signatures of methods. You pay a performance penalty for implicit polymorphism, e.g. using a mix of types (Integer, Symbol, String) etc in the same method argument.

Second, from my experience with Typescript, as much as I naturally dislike type declarations, I find it does help LLMs. Having strongly typed libs/gems and being able to mix in untyped app code would be a nice balance.
by darshdeep351 | 2025-12-27 07:34:08+00:00
We play music in the office on Thursdays and Fridays. Built a Slack integration so people can queue up songs instead of interrupting whoever's DJing. My first Node.js project.

Also learned about Qstash as an out of the box queueing and workflow service, saved me the trouble of setting up so many AWS permissions.
by sroerick | 2025-12-27 07:35:38+00:00
I'm sad you're getting downvoted. This is objectively uglier Ruby code. Ruby is a gorgeous language, and aesthetics is seemingly not allowed in the conversation.

I'm not convinced that the time savings of types exist at all, but even if it took twice as long to do anything with types, there is a completely valid argument that "it's worth it to look at nicer code".
by crawshaw | 2025-12-27 07:35:40+00:00
[exe.dev co-founder here] It is planned! The reason we have not got to it yet is it needs to be very different than IPv4 support. We have spent a lot of time on machinery to allow `ssh yourmachine.exe.xyz` work without having to allocate you an IPv4 address. The mechanisms for IPv6 can and should be different, but they will also interact with how assigning public static IPv4 addresses will work in the future.

We do not want to end up in the state AWS is in, where any production work requires navigating the differences between how AWS manage v4 and v6. And that means rolling out v6 is going to be a lot of work for us. It will get done.

I added a public tracking bug here: https://github.com/boldsoftware/exe.dev/issues/16
by f1shy | 2025-12-27 07:36:10+00:00
Anytime anybody does something himself, there is a risk. People die because of welding parts cleaned with break-cleaner, people die driving, diving, sky-diving, doing bungee jumping...

Advertising that code, IMHO would be as showing of you doing extreme sports, for example. I do not think is any bad. A good disclaimer should be enough to take away any guilt.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-27 07:36:18+00:00
> But they don't have the budget and resources that commercial entities have.

Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. You're not going from stone tools to jet engines in a month, but you could fix a bug in one in that time.

> They don't have the same due diligence requirements. They don't have the same liability.

Things that exist to try to mitigate the misalignment of incentives that comes from paying someone else to create something you depend on. Better for the incentives to align to begin with.

Notice also that these things are floors, not ceilings. The company is only required to do the minimum. You can exceed it by as much as you like.

> If I use a commercial device unaltered, it's the company's fault if the device fucks up or is defective and causes harm. If I install random internet software on my medical device and it fucks up and causes harm, it's my fault.

And then if the community version fixes a bug that would have killed you and you stick with the commercial version you can sue them for killing you. Except that you're dead.

> There is simply no way random folks on the internet can test these types of systems to any reliable degree.

Basically the entire population is on the internet, so the set of them includes all the people doing it for a corporation. Are they going to forget how to do their jobs when they go home, or when they or a member of their family gets issued another company's device and they want it to be right?
by habinero | 2025-12-27 07:36:40+00:00
I read through this to see if my AI cynicism needed any adjustment, and basically it replaced a couple basic greps and maaaaybe 10 minutes of futzing around with markdown. There's a lot of faffing about with JSON, but it ultimately doesn't matter to the end result.

It also fucked up several times and it's entirely possible it missed things.

For this specific thing, it doesn't really matter if it screwed up, since the worst that would happen is an incomplete blog post reporting on drama.

But I can't imagine why you would use this for anything you need to put your name behind.

It looks impressive, sure, but the important kernel here is the grepping and there it's doing some really basic tinkertoy stuff.

I'm willing to be challenged on this, so by all means do, but this seems both worse and slower as an investigation tool.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-27 07:37:43+00:00
>The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.

Chinese EVs are a Trojan horse. Even if they weren't, we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.

>I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.

I know that. Ethanol somehow reduces certain kinds of supposedly harmful emissions, and it gives farmers someone to sell their corn to. We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve. If we had crop issues, rest assured that they would probably stop using ethanol until things got back to normal.

>If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago.

We had EV cars a hundred years ago and abandoned them. Petrol works better. People could be encouraged to use electric trains or something but it turns out that city life is not practical or desirable for everyone.

>They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.

Every country prizes its auto industry (if it has one) because it is related to nearly every other production capability. Building all the shit the military needs from scratch down to the raw material supply chain is not something that can be done in a hurry. Also, I don't know if you knew, but the interstates are used for rapid shipping and military movement. Trains still exist but they can't compete with trucks on highways for most things.
by TekMol | 2025-12-27 07:38:36+00:00
This is cool. I am currently using GitHub codespaces and I would love a version of it with nothing but a web based terminal. I don't need all the other windows they put around it. This might be it.

Trying my way around it now. Not sure what is going on:

me: apt install apache
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "apt"

What is "exe.dev repl"? Am I not in a shell?

me: bash
the shell: exe.dev repl: command not found: "bash"

Damn, it seems the "shell" is not a Linux shell?
by ivell | 2025-12-27 07:39:51+00:00
One of the big advantages of types is documenting what is *not* allowed. This brings a clarity to the developers and additionally ensure what is not allowed does not happen.

Unit tests typically test for behaviours. This could be both positive and negative tests. But we often test only a subset of possibilities just because how people generally think (more positive cases than negative cases). Theoretically we can do all those tests with unit testing. But we need to ask ourselves honestly, do we have that kind of test coverage as SQLLite? If yes, do we have that for very large codebases?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-27 07:40:01+00:00
The process you're describing is hardly unheard of. The problem is that a large corporation's assets include things like employees, office buildings, supplier contracts, etc, which generally aren't valuable except in the context of the business unit they operate within. So if you want to maximize recovery, you have to keep critical business units intact, which often means that large parts of the business survive in all but name.

Purdue Pharma is a recent instructive case. The marketing folks did some terrible stuff, but it would be pretty rough on victims, employees, and patients who need pain meds to respond by tearing down Purdue's factories and auctioning off the contents. So the bankruptcy plan calls for keeping the factories running, transferring them to a new company called Knoa, which will be owned by a trust that's dedicated to managing the opioid crisis. Isn't Knoa just Purdue wearing a new hat? Kinda, sure, but there's no better alternative.
by buu700 | 2025-12-27 07:40:15+00:00
As the saying goes, "If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Of course AI can be used to lazily stretch a short prompt into a long output, but I don't see any implication of that in the parent comment.

If someone isn't a good writer, or isn't a native speaker, using AI to compress a poorly written wall of text may well produce a better result while remaining substantially the prompter's own ideas. For those with certain disabilities or conditions, having AI distill a verbal stream of consciousness into a textual output could even be the only practical way for them to "write" at all.

We should all be more understanding, and not assume that only people with certain cognitive and/or physical capabilities can have something valuable to say. If AI can help someone articulate a fresh perspective or disseminate knowledge that would otherwise have been lost and forgotten, I'm all for it.
by lostnground | 2025-12-27 07:40:33+00:00
While I agree that officers should be accountable. More enforcement of them will not suddenly make them good officers. Other nations train their police for years prior to putting them into the thick of it. US police spend far less time studying, and it shows, in everything from de-escalation tactics to general legal understanding. If you create a pipeline to weed out bad officers, then there needs to be a pipeline producing better officers
by commandersaki | 2025-12-27 07:40:46+00:00
I've posted this about a year ago on another Framework thread. I see a lot of questions from people interested in FW laptops, so I thought my experience may help understand the good and bad.

I bought a Framework 13" in 2022, Intel 13th gen with 32GB ram (probably not as stupid as expensive as it is now) and 1TB drive.

It has good intentions but falls short. I would say overall it is a mediocre laptop in terms of quality.

Will it last longer than any other laptop? I would think so, as it has a strong story of available parts and upgrades. Similarly I believe it would last longer than any other laptop, since you can essentially do a Ship of Theseus with it.

Pain points:

- display hinge problem, picking up the laptop would make the screen lie flat 180 degrees, which is really annoying - this has been fixed in newer versions of framework, but to get a new hinge kit costs $39 AUD plus $30 AUD in shipping, so I'm not willing to make that purchase due to the ridiculous shipping price,

- the modular ports are nice, but I'd rather just have fixed ports and more of them, of course that'd obstruct the repair/modularity story,

- sometimes the modular ports do not work after resuming from a hibernate, I have to eject and reseat it,

- the display is okay, I notice mine has a small granular line of off coloured pixels - i don't think this is due to any physical damage but rather a defect in the screen as I've never had this kind of issue with any other laptop and I've handled the framework fairly carefully; but this line of off coloured pixels is very faint and virtually unnoticeable unless using very dark colours, so it's not a huge deal as I make it out to be,

- the keyboard works great, but I was hoping for an upgrade to something along the lines of an apple style layout with half height inverted-t arrow keys and fn/ctrl swapped; the idea of a marketplace for custom parts never really eventuated save a few niche things like RISC V,

- Battery life of about 3-4 hours of very average usage,

- Speakers are trash.

The webcam / mic are good enough.
I run Linux on it, and seems to run pretty stable.

I needed this laptop because I needed 32GB of ram for compile jobs (c++ programmers on large projects knows such pain). I have since got a macbook pro 16" with >32GB of ram and it can compile what I need using Rosetta 2 for Linux (so amd64 compiles). Since my mac can now do everything I need, I haven't really touched my Framework; I just keep it spare when I need a bare metal x86-64 in a pinch. I loathe the idea of having to use it over a mac laptop.

The good news is since my post a year ago, Apple has since released the m4 chips which allow the Macbook Air range to drive up to two external displays using thunderbolt.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-27 07:41:28+00:00
Maybe for some kind of multiplayer game which has massive bandwidth and CPU usage requirements and has to be supported by paper-thin advertising profit margins... When tiny performance improvements can mean the difference between profitable and unprofitable, then it might make sense to optimize but this... But for the vast majority of software, the cost of serializing JSON is negligible and not worth thinking about.

For example, I've seen a lot of companies obsess over minor stuff like shaving a few bucks off their JSON serialization or using a C binding of some library to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of those technologies... While at the same time letting their software maintenance costs blow out of control... Or paying astronomical cloud compute bills when they could have self-hosted for 1/20th of the price...

Also, the word scale is overused. What is discussed here is performance optimization, not scalability. Scalability doesn't care for fixed overhead costs. Scalability is about growth in costs as usage increases and there is no difference in scalability if you use ProtoBuf or JSON.

The expression that comes to mind is "Penny-wise, pound-foolish." This effect is absolutely out of control in this industry.
by oarsinsync | 2025-12-27 07:41:57+00:00
Alternatively, companies hire multiple subject domain experts, and pay them handsomely.

The experts believe they've been hired for the value of their opinions, rather than for being 'yes-people', and have differing opinions to each other.

At a certain pay threshold, there are multiple peoples who's motivation is not "how do I maximise my compensation?" and instead is "how do I do the best work I can?" Sometimes this presents as vocal disagreements between experts.
by f1shy | 2025-12-27 07:42:33+00:00
Why do people think constantly something made by some random company is automatically better than something made "DIY".

I totally understand, that because of liability and some more availability of resources, you would expect a company product to be "safe". BUT: if it is your butt that is going to be in the line, then I bet you: you will be much more careful that a random engineer in some random company. About the resources available in a big company, they are usually more directed to marketing, legal (including lobbing to avoid right to repair) and oder areas to maximize revenue, and not exactly in quality.

I worked in 2 different big companies which worked in "mission critical systems" and boy! I can tell you some stories about how unsafe is what they do, and how much money is invested in "cover your ass" instead of making products better/safer.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 07:43:48+00:00
> Linux systems commonly already provide an outdated system Python you don’t want to use

Even with LTS Ubuntu updated only at EOL, Python will not be EOL most of the time.

> A single Python version for the entire system fundamentally doesn’t work for many people thanks to shitty compat story in the vast ecosystem.

My experience has been radically different. Everyone is trying their hardest to provide wheels for a wide range of platforms, and all the most popular projects succeed. Try adding `--only-binary=:all:` to your pip invocations and let me know the next time that actually causes a failure.

Besides which, I was very specifically talking about the user story for people who are just learning to program and will use Python for it. Because otherwise this problem is trivially solved by anyone competent. In particular, building and installing Python from source is just the standard configure / make / make install dance, and it Just Works. I have done it many times and never needed any help to figure it out even though it was the first thing I tried to build from C source after switching to Linux.
by codeflo | 2025-12-27 07:44:34+00:00
That's no longer as true as it once was. I get the feeling that quite a few people would consider "benevolent dictator for life" an outdated model for open source communities. For better or worse, there's a lot of push to transition popular projects towards being led by committee. Results are mixed (literally: I see both successes and failures), but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the trend.