MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2025-12-29 16:55:20+00:00
> Just let the people who are actually there and can actually see the situation use some judgement.

Okay. But we are beyond that. The people who were there handled the situation and we both seem to agree that they didn't handle it well. We just seem to disagree how they should have handled it differently.

Your proposal is that they should have dumped people on the tracks. My proposal is that they should have done more to get the train next to a platform.

> This is unfortunately exactly an example of the type of take I was complaining about

Tell me where do you disagree. Have you looked at the track layout of the station? Have you looked at images of the platforms?
by fogleman | 2025-12-29 16:55:28+00:00
> The kinds of topic being discussed are not "is DRY better than WET", but instead "could we put this new behavior in subsystem A? No, because it needs information B, which isn't available to that subsystem in context C, and we can't expose that without rewriting subsystem D, but if we split up subsystem E here and here..."

Hmm, sounds familiar...

Bingo knows everyone's name-o

Papaya & MBS generate session tokens

Wingman checks if users are ready to take it to the next level

Galactus, the all-knowing aggregator, demands a time range stretching to the end of the universe

EKS is deprecated, Omega Star still doesn't support ISO timestamps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
by mysterydip | 2025-12-29 16:55:47+00:00
I'm not sure what the net workforce reduction will actually be on final tally. Some that were let go were re-hired or came back as contractors (generally higher $).

The less tangible but important question is workforce efficiency. Government tends to have a lot of tribal knowledge not captured in written processes, or "if you need to do x you have to talk to y", and if y isn't there anymore will things get slower (as no one else knows how) or faster (as they were a roadblock).
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-29 16:55:49+00:00
> don't think ignoring them would be constructive.

see, i'm saying, i like to construct games, and so do a ton of other people, and they ignore all the stuff you are talking about all the time. it's not just me. it truly doesn't matter. this is because iOS and the Switch are already such buggy systems, that if you get worked up about any particular performance bug or IT flaw, you will never come up with good game ideas, let alone ship.
by shimman | 2025-12-29 16:56:50+00:00
The reasoning is simple, Marc Rubio holds a grudge against the anti-conservative forces throughout South America. This likely grudge comes from his parents and Miami Cuban conservative community (they are all big on South American regime change). It also happens to coincide that oil corporations want to sell more of the oil on the global market.

If you want to learn more about the why, I suggest the book "Gangsters of Capitalism" by Jonathan M. Katz it's about the military exploits of Smedley Butler and how they helped American imperialism.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-29 16:57:12+00:00
I think this framing quietly smuggles in a category error. Corporations do not behave like scaled up humans, so analyzing them with human intuitions about motivation, learning, or sanity is often misleading.

A corporation is not a person with beliefs, emotions, or a unified model of the world. It is a distributed optimization process composed of agents with local incentives, asymmetric information, and weak feedback loops. What looks like irrationality at the system level is often perfectly rational behavior at the component level. The result is behavior that would be pathological in a human but is structurally normal for an organization.

This is why corporations often resemble what we would call psychopathic traits if observed in individuals. Lack of empathy is not a moral failure, it is an emergent property of decision making that is mediated through abstractions like metrics, quarterly targets, and legal responsibility shields. Harm is externalized because the feedback is delayed, diluted, or borne by parties not represented in the decision loop. There is no felt guilt because there is no felt anything.

Humans update beliefs through direct experience and social feedback. Corporations update through KPIs, incentive realignment, and legal or market pressure. Those signals are coarse, lagging, and often gamed. So you get persistence in obviously harmful or stupid behavior long after any individual inside the company privately knows it is wrong. The system cannot feel embarrassment or regret. It can only respond when the gradient changes.

This also explains why appealing to realism at the individual level often misses the point. Understanding what is likely to happen is useful, but the likelihoods themselves are shaped by incentive topology, not by shared understanding. Even when everyone agrees something will fail, it can still proceed if failure is locally optimal or diffused. Conversely, things that seem impossible can happen quickly when incentives snap into alignment, regardless of prior beliefs.

So cynicism versus optimism is not about mood here. It is about whether you model organizations as intentional agents or as blind selection processes. Once you adopt the latter view, a lot of so called dysfunction stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like exactly what the system was designed to produce.

The depressing part is not that corporations become bureaucratic. It is that they often become very good at optimizing for the wrong thing, and there is no internal mechanism that prefers truth, coherence, or human values unless those happen to coincide with the gradient.
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-29 16:57:46+00:00
In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.

Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-29 16:57:50+00:00
> Turning a knob with a mouse is the worst interface I can think of.

I'm racking my brain thinking of what a better interface would be for selecting a number between a range of values, where the number is a point on a continuum and not any specific value, and can't think of one. The equivalent "traditional" UX for webapps would be a slider control, but that's functionally the same and you'd be going against many years of domain-specific common understanding for not much benefit.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-29 16:58:50+00:00
The generous assignment of motivation is realpolitik anti-Russia + China stuff.

Less generous but probably true as at least part of the motivation, there’s the usual factor of US companies wanting to “invest” in a foreign country to extract natural resources.

One may guess at other, more-personal motivations for parties involved.

It, transparently, has dick-all to do with drugs.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-29 16:58:53+00:00
Nobody is blameless in this story. I don't really want to explain to you the decades-long history of Western encroachment on Russia's neighbor, or how we repeatedly lied to the Russians.

>And no, Ukraine would have fallen a while ago already if not for western aid, so it wasn't at all for nothing.

Akshually it will be for nothing if Ukraine is completely conquered. Do you think the hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians would rather be living Russians instead, or is everyone happy losing their families to have made it more difficult or expensive for Russia to invade somebody else? Our politicians have crudely said the obvious, which is that it's all about wearing down the Russians without getting too involved.
by atrettel | 2025-12-29 16:59:31+00:00
Reading that particular section made me think of the tree swing cartoon [1]. I agree that the best engineers have likely been on the ground making concrete changes at some point, watching bricks being laid as you said, but I have encountered quite a few supervisors who seemingly had no idea how things were being implemented on the ground. As the post says, people on the ground then sometimes have to figure out how to implement the plan even if it ignores sound design principles.

I don't view that as a failure of abstraction as a design principle as much as it is a pitfall of using the wrong abstraction. Using the right abstraction requires on the ground knowledge, and if nobody communicates that up the chain, well, you get the tree swing cartoon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_swing_cartoon
by sixhobbits | 2025-12-29 16:59:36+00:00
I love e-sims for travel and easy switching, but I also switched my primary number back from an e-sim to a physical sim after I realised what a pain it is to use it in another phone (my provider requires a fresh QR code sent by post to my registered address in order to do the switch - huge pain when my phone went in for repairs so I had to switch twice within two weeks, switching to a secondary phone, and then back to normal phone once it was repaired).
by nickmonad | 2025-12-29 17:00:01+00:00
I have a few cases in this (proof of concept) codebase that require knowledge about allocation strategy, even in Zig, but that's on me and the design at this point. Something I wanted to touch on more in the post was the attempt to make the components of the system work with any kind of allocation strategy. I see a common thing in Zig projects today where something like `gpa: std.mem.Allocator` or even `arena: std.mem.Allocator` is used to signal intent, even though the allocator interface is generic.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-12-29 17:00:20+00:00
I plan on a mix of conceptual questions, pseudocode and code annotation. I think this may be on of those historical ironies where the slowness of universities to adapt actually works in its favor. I do agree that most universities do a bad job of preparing computer science students and I’m working to fix that as best I can where I teach. We will see how things pan out.
by metalman | 2025-12-29 17:00:37+00:00
call it 10 million customers @ $50/month
+- $ 6 billion/yr, now.
and for the near future starlink will remain the only possible service for much of the earths surface.
I considered starlink, but found another solution(cell booster) for my remote(ish) internet needs but the decider was the nazi saluting asshole factor, too bad, as the guy was moving the edge for a while, and then went all in for regresive tedious whackological nonsense.
by nicbou | 2025-12-29 17:00:55+00:00
Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you, stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to be taken for granted.

I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is convincing them that you're either overprepared or litigious.
by walidthedream | 2025-12-29 17:01:05+00:00
I am quite annoyed by the people who don't see the issue with eSim because "they never had an issue" with it. It's like having one murder down your block and stating that you don't see the issue because nobody attempted to murder you so far. ESim are backed up as part of iCloud backups, had one dodgy carrier in Europe (Lyca) who never activated my eSim so I switched back to a new carrier but I had to get a transfer authorization from Lyca. Guess what , since I was no longer a customer I was sent to hell by their customer support. Best joke that it was impossible to remove on my iPhone. It was part of the backup, a reset attempt did not solve it so I had to drive 200km to an Apple store to get a hard reset and the Apple genius advising me against restoring my data "otherwise it would retrieve the faulty ESIM back in your phone" !!!
by basisword | 2025-12-29 17:01:25+00:00
In person exams are useless too. I was at a UK university as a mature student about 8 years ago. When exams came around a significant number of people went to the bathroom repeatedly during the 2-3 hour exam clearly to check notes on their phones. There isn't really anything that can be done to stop this other than doing some sort of spot check/search for phones on people mid-exam which would obviously be horribly disruptive.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-29 17:01:33+00:00
I like iOS' "Notification Summaries" as a compromise. It's about as close to "turn all these notifications into a regularly scheduled newspaper" as we can get.

I still cull notifications that I don't think provide value (notifications are a privilege based on trust and apps that break that trust lose that privilege), but yeah even when I get notifications I only really get them once every 4 hours or so, and that's nice.
by tetraodonpuffer | 2025-12-29 17:01:37+00:00
having "homework / coursework" count for the final score is what surprised me the most when learning about schooling in the US, in my university 100% of the score was the final, typically written test first, then oral in front of a blackboard (and usually the oral portion could move the needle of the written only +20%, but could definitely have you fail completely).

The one course that had something similar was microelectronics where during Christmas holidays we were given an optional assignment where we could design IIRC a NAND gate (2um process I think, most people ended up with a 5ft x 5ft sheet of paper at the end) which took a long time, but would give you up to +5% at the final (only one person got the full 5%, due to their creative use of the diffusion layer for interconnects). I don't remember any other course having anything along those lines, although to be honest you could slightly influence the difficulty of the oral final questions depending on how hard you worked / your behavior in class (of course only in years 4-5 where courses had only 20-30 students, no chance in year 1-2 with 400+)

It was extremely high stress, as you can imagine, but basically impossible to cheat. Every year a significant percentage of the students had to drop out, so by the time the 5th year thesis came around I think less than 20% of first years graduated at all. You were allowed to retake course finals if you wanted a different score (available 3x year typically, no guarantee you'd do better tho), but if you failed enough times you had to retake the course from scratch. You also were not allowed to enroll in the next year's courses until you passed all the prerequisites.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 17:02:03+00:00
> If you throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, some of it is going to stick. Especially when it appears to be random words that can be applicable to millions of situations.

Indeed. I'm amazed so many HN regulars are surprised by this. It's how horoscopes work, we've known this for centuries now.

Have people forgotten the scientific method, the standards of proof, etc?
by peterfirefly | 2025-12-29 17:02:15+00:00
You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same flexibility as planes have regarding routes.

The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.
by anonymars | 2025-12-29 17:02:18+00:00
Something I read recently which I think is interesting food for thought:

Did ditching the headphone jack increase the number of people in public who just play their music / talk on speakerphone, because now the alternative is much more complex and expensive compared to simple 3.5mm wired headset?

Before proclaiming that Bluetooth is in fact simple and cheap, consider how your situation may differ from that of the perpetrators
by aspect0545 | 2025-12-29 17:02:31+00:00
Of course there’s exaggeration. Nobody really believes this person was kidnapped by the German train company.

People do get kicked off trains, usually it’s the entire train that is being emptied. Happened to me in NRW. Happened to me in Brandenburg. When there’s a problem with the train, then sometimes it has to be evacuated.

He would have not been entitled to a cab ride by the way, he was travelling with Deutschlandticket. Your entire comment is not only pedantic, it’s also completely wrong lol.
by ilaksh | 2025-12-29 17:03:03+00:00
This is also the type of thing that makes having separate software architects that aren't actually maintaining the software generally a nonsensical idea.

There are too many decisions, technical details, and active changes to have someone come in and give direction from on high at intervals.

Maybe at the beginning it could make sense sort of, but projects have to evolve and more often than not discover something important early on in the implementation or when adding "easy" features, and if someone is good at doing software design then you may need them even more at that point. But they may easily be detrimental if they are not closely involved and following the rest of the project details.
by loeg | 2025-12-29 17:03:11+00:00
> Colleges are clearly not working, as evidenced by the number of unemployed graduates.

What are you talking about? College-educated unemployment is 2.9% while for highschool-only it's 4.4%. Neither is high, but college-educated is definitely lower.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/unemployment...
by RiverCrochet | 2025-12-29 17:03:40+00:00
> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music?

If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.

To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.

The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.
by rubymamis | 2025-12-29 17:03:46+00:00
> The challenge, though, is there isn't really a good comprehensive list of those things the would allow you to compare the framework you use to native. And you can't patch everything if you don't even know where the holes are

> Yes, of course they can, but to do in reality requires too much effort, so you end up with with the state mentioned in the first part of the quote. (that's the whole point of the framework - to handle that complexity for you, and if the whole huge QT can't do that even though "they can" why do you think a single dev can?)

Yep. This is why I'm now working on a framework built on top of Qt that takes care of all these small but important details that takes time to figure out that Qt isn't equipped with built-in. For example, smooth swipeable StackView on mobile, support for native text handling on mobile, smooth scrolling on ListViews (that's horrible now), etc etc.

> So you now have constant layout shifts when you simply move your caret around.

That's a feature in such apps (look at Bear, etc). I plan to have an option to disable that so the editor is entirely WYSIWYG.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-29 17:03:47+00:00
I've found this as well; totally painless to add a destination data plan just before jumping on the plane. And even switching my local plan was pretty straightforward when a promo offer came in from a competitor.

That said, I'm sympathetic to the stance of the article's author. I recently had a scare with my iPhone 13's battery not being able to charge (it recovered itself eventually) and I realized it was going to be a hassle to switch to another phone if I couldn't get the old one powered on enough to run the esim transfer, much less the whole OS migration.
by bitwize | 2025-12-29 17:04:41+00:00
Bodybuilding does not have a linear progress bar. Sometimes you train and train and train and see little or no progress, and you need your coach to come make adjustments to your diet, routine, or supplements (incl. anabolic "supplements") in order to break the logjam.

Source: Not a bodybuilder but know enough bodybuilders to have heard this story many times.
by ranger_danger | 2025-12-29 17:04:49+00:00
I have a lot of experience with the latter kind of maintainer... some have even quit their own projects after realizing a fork existed that they don't like (especially if it's good enough to take users away from the original), but those forks were always born out of necessity when the original maintainer was toxic to work with or just kept ignoring or outright refusing PRs/issues over personal/ideological reasons.

I really don't understand why so many people will choose a specific license, and then get upset when people do exactly what it allows them to do.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-29 17:05:15+00:00
During the 30yr prior to the GFC the kinds of Americans who don't work in downtown offices, don't get compensated partly in RSUs and who aren't represented well in internet discussions and mainstream media complained fairly unanimously about the same things. Regulation forced their main street economies to either consolidate or pack up for China. The grocery store and hardware store became a Walmart. But nobody listened to them.
by tomashubelbauer | 2025-12-29 17:05:18+00:00
I tried using a work eSIM as a secondary SIM to my personal physical SIM on my iPhone in 2022 or 2023. I was taken aback by how poor the experience was, both on the iOS level and the eSIM technology level. At that time I reckoned it's probably like 10 years too early and I don't think I will be giving an eSIM (primary or secondary) a shot sooner than in the 2030s.
by reactordev | 2025-12-29 17:05:31+00:00
Not thankfully. The whole point of this thread is that Unity is barebones without community support. What you’re describing is that community support. Glad you like it. I find these kind of lack of attention to your product a huge turn off. Unity Community is naive in the fact that they allow this company to walk all over them because they lack the willpower to steamroll them. There are plenty of Unity community members that are capable of making a better Unity. Unity itself relies on their community otherwise who would pay for an engine? So by saying “just use this plugin” is basically just reinforcing my perspective.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-29 17:05:39+00:00
I do indeed. Because developmental windows exist. You can take the cat out of the vertical world, but you can't take the vertical world out of the cat. Trying to train them out of it only helps a little - too much damage is already done. The brain has developed a certain way, and you can't un-develop and re-develop it.

There is no consensus that autism is like this, but a lot of evidence points that way.

We'd need at least a generational leap in neuroscience to be able to pull off something like that. It's not a "laws of physics prevent you" level of impossible - we just don't have a clue of how would we even begin approaching something like that.
by LeFantome | 2025-12-29 17:05:43+00:00
I think the “some years ago” is pretty relevant.

.NET has heavily invested in performance. If I understand your article correctly, you tested .NET 5 which will be much slower at this point than .NET 10 is.

I also think it matters what you mean by “Mono”. Mono, the original stand-alone project has not seen meaningful updates in many years. Mono is also one of the two runtimes in the currently shipping .NET though and I suspect this runtime has received a lot of love that may not have flowed back to the original Mono project.