MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattbillenstein | 2025-12-30 22:33:49+00:00
This - even 5 devs.

Also rebasing is just so fraught with potential errors - every month or two, the devs who were rebasing would screw up some feature branch that they had work on they needed and would look to me to fix it for some reason. Such a time sink for so little benefit.

I eventually banned rebasing, force pushes, and mandated squash merges to main - and we magically stopped having any of these problems.
by georgebcrawford | 2025-12-30 22:33:59+00:00
He was successful at Air NZ from memory. But they're completely different jobs. For example, he cut services and jobs which helped increase profits. Not uncommon for an airline. The same approach when running a country is disastrous and not uncommon for out of touch neoliberals like Luxon.

His management experience at Air NZ has not correlated with strong leadership. Compare him with the previous PM (Jacinda Ardern) and most Kiwis, even the right, would agree she handled things better. A few lefties like myself think she could have done more (especially wrt to housing policy) with the immense political capital she had just before Covid, but oh well.

You didn't ask for any of that sorry!
by kristianbrigman | 2025-12-30 22:34:10+00:00
That's partly because python has a very large installed base, and ease of entry (including distribution). This leads to people running into issues quicker, and many alternative solutions.

Unlike something like Rust, which has much fewer users (though growing) and requires PhDs in Compiler Imprecation and Lexical Exegetics.

Or C++ which has a much larger installed base but also no standard distribution method at all, and an honorary degree in Dorsal Artillery.
by abetusk | 2025-12-30 22:34:13+00:00
Alas, HN does not belong to us, and the existence of projects like this are subject to the whims of the legal owners of HN.

From the terms of use [0]:

"""

Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site. The buying, exchanging, selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.

"""

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou
by debugnik | 2025-12-30 22:34:29+00:00
> not hosted in just any data center [...] a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services

This is ambiguous, it could mean either a contributor's rack in a colocation centre or their home lab in their basement. I'd like to think they meant the former, but I can't deny I understood the latter in my first read.

Also, no details on the hardware?
by whstl | 2025-12-30 22:35:07+00:00
> I think the types of items you listed above are the shallow layer

They are not, by definition. You provided proof for it yourself: you mention the "body of knowledge [...] above that", so they really aren't the topmost layer.

> is enormous and growing

That's why you learn the fundamentals. So you can understand the refinements and applications of them at first glance.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-12-30 22:35:11+00:00
> Page management isn't really a thing we can do well "in user space".

But it is the thing most high performance OLTP DBMSs, most of us are aware of, do?

I'm also not sure your cite is relevant here. Or it is at least niche. The comparison is made to LeanStore, which is AFAICT is not feature complete, and a research prototype?

Your cite does not describe a unikernel use case, only in kernel modules. Your cite is about leveraging in kernel virtual memory for the DB buffer cache and one wonders how sophisticated is the VM subsystem in most unikernels, thus, how is this argument for unikernels?

Seems like pretty thin grist.

> And then, further, a DB goes and basically implements its own equivalent of a filesystem, managing its own storage. Often fighting with the OS about the semantics of fsync/durability, etc.

The fights you're describing what have thus far been the problems of ceding control of the buffer cache to the kernel, via mmap, especially re: transactional safety.

If your argument is kernels may need a bottom up redesign to make ideas like this work, I suppose that makes sense. However, I'm not sure that makes unikernels more of an answer here than anywhere else, though.

> I don't think it's an unreasonable mental leap for people to start thinking: "I'm by necessity [cuz cloud] in a VM. Now I'm inside an OS in a VM, and the OS is sometimes getting in my way, and I'm doing things to get around the OS... Why?"

I think that's a fair thought to have, but the problem is how it actually works in practice. As in, it hasn't seemed to be a good tradeoff in practice.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 22:35:12+00:00
That's mostly (though not 100%) true, and a fair comment to make here.

Something that's a little relevant to how I work here is that I deliberately use big-team software engineering methods - issue trackers, automated tests, CI, comprehensive documentation, well-tuned development environments - for all of my personal projects, because I find they help me move faster: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

But yes, it's entirely fair to point out that my use of LLMs is quite detached from how they might be used on large team commercial projects.
by basilgohar | 2025-12-30 22:35:35+00:00
I think all the criticism of what F-Droid is doing here (or perceived as doing) reflects more on the ones criticising than the ones being criticised.

How many things went upside down and all the "right" things were done (corporate governance, cloud native deployment, automation, etc.). The truth is none of these processes are actually going to make things more secure, and many projects went belly up despite following these kinds of recommendations.

That being said, I am grateful to F-Droid fighting the good fight. They are providing an invaluable service and I, for one, am even more grateful that they are doing it as uncompromisingly as possible (well into discomfort) according to their principles.
by leptons | 2025-12-30 22:35:38+00:00
>AI is ALREADY going to change the world.

Nice slop response. This is the same thing said about blockchain and NFTs, same schtick, different tech. The only thing "AI" has done is convince some people that it's a magical being that knows everything. Your comments seem to be somewhere on that spectrum. And, sure what if it isn't changing the world for the better, and actually makes things much worse? You're probably okay with that too, I guess, as long as your precious "AI" is doing the changing.

We've seen what social media and every-waking-hour access to tablets and the internet has done to kids - so much harm that some countries have banned social media for people under a certain age. I can see a future where "AI" will also be banned for minors to use, probably pretty soon too. The harms from "AI" being able to placate instead of create should be obvious, and children shouldn't be able to use it without adult supervision.

>The speculation is that the AI will get better and will no longer need hand holding.

This is nonsense. No AI is going to produce what someone wants without telling it exactly what to do and how to do it, so yes, it will always need hand holding, unless you like slurping up slop. I don't know you, if you aren't a bot, you might just be satisfied with slop? It's a race to the bottom, and it's not going to end up the way you think it will.
by sph | 2025-12-30 22:36:11+00:00
What? AI will dumb down the average programmer, while making the “real” ones that know how to use their head, and not throw more code at the problem, even more valuable.

That said, I don’t think people are writing rocket science if boilerplate code is the bottleneck that you need to automate that part. I have said time and time again, my worth as an engineer has little to do with how much lines of code I churn out in a day, but rather all the hard thinking that done beforehand.
by krapp | 2025-12-30 22:36:35+00:00
"A CIA plot" goes too far, true. But to believe the CIA isn't involved at all in fomenting revolution in a country whose current government is the result of the CIA having done so in the past, and which the US considers part of the "Axis of Evil," and which is an ally to a country the US is currently waging a war of aggression and plunder against (Venezuela) seems naive.
by duxup | 2025-12-30 22:36:56+00:00
The whole banned via banking thing is scary. A local business in my area was flagged as some sort of illicit operation. There was almost no way to know it even happened outside being unable to take payment ... that was it.

No notice, no reason why, no recourse for them. They had google for their life for weeks talking to people online who it happened to and make dozens upon dozens of phone calls and explain the whole saga every time. Tons of false leads and promises for folks to call them back who never did.

They eventually found that it was some old bank they were in good standing with who after weeks of not responding, still couldn't explain why, but they said they apparently flagged them. It was undone after about 12 weeks and ultimately only because someone at this random bank took the initiative to lift the flag, but they didn't have to.

The process is completely opaque and you effectively have no rights to know or resolve anything.
by hbarka | 2025-12-30 22:37:27+00:00
> AI21 was founded in 2017 by Professor Amnon Shashua,…

Some of you may recall the Elon Musk-Amnon Sashua feud in the first years of Tesla when Musk OEM’d Mobileye then tried to force Mobileye to join Tesla in claiming autonomous driving capabilities beyond what Ammon Shashua was comfortable in accepting. Integrity chose to walk away from the deal.
by PTOB | 2025-12-30 22:37:55+00:00
> Nearly nobody cares about ...

That's an accurate and sad truth about humanity in general, isn't it? We all feel safer and saner if we avoid thinking about how things really are. It's doubly true if our hands are dirty to some extent.

At the same time, I submit that ignoring the effectiveness of very small contingents of highly motivated people is a common failure mode of humanity in general. Recall that "nearly nobody" also describes "people who are the President of the United States." Observe how that tiny rounding error of humanity is responsible for quite a bit of the way the world goes - for good or ill. Arguably, that level of effectiveness doesn't even require much intelligence.

> Why should they care about the same for AI which for most people is “out there online” somewhere?

Well, some will be smart enough to see the problem. Some portion thereof will be wise enough to see a solution. And a portion of those folks will be motivated enough to implement it. That's all that's required. Very simple even if it's not very easy or likely.
by sanufar | 2025-12-30 22:38:04+00:00
I think for me, the difference really comes down to how much ownership I want to take in regards to the project. If it’s something like a custom kernel that I’m building, the real fun is in reading through docs, learning about systems, and trying to craft the perfect abstractions; but if it’s wiring up a simple pipeline that sends me a text whenever my bus arrives, I’m happy to let an LLM crank that out for me.

I’ve realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot more energy onto high satisfaction projects
by Quothling | 2025-12-30 22:38:06+00:00
UV is a drop-in for pip, rather than a replacement. It functions differently than pip behind the scenes, which is why it's faster, but when you use it, it's basically still pip. Except it makes everything easy. You create your venv with uv venv, you update packages with uv sync, you run things without activating your venv with uv run... It uses the pyproject.toml, so it's very easy to share things like linters and build tools. Then when it's time to deploy, you can compile your pyproject.toml to a requirements.txt file and use it in any Python container image. Which is very handy when you work with something like Azure Container Functions which don't come with UV (and you probably don't want to use an UV image or install UV in your build process).

I've been using it for so long now that I recently couldn't remember how to use Python without it, when one of our BI guys needed some help. Which was ridiculously embarrassing.

I don't think it really compares to Go though. It's not as straight forward if you work on different python distributions. It's also not as easy to work with something like micro Python compared to targeting a specific embedded platform with Go.
by remich | 2025-12-30 22:38:16+00:00
I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic coding era, the problem was always that I had way more ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the capacity to build when I had to confront the work of building everything by hand, also dealing with the inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting started.

I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.
by Zambyte | 2025-12-30 22:39:46+00:00
Zig is safer than C under default conditions, not faster. By default does a lot of illegal behavior safety checking, such as array and slice bounds checking, numeric overflow checking, and invalid union access checking. These features are disabled by certain (non default) build modes, or explicitly disabled at a per scope level.

It may be easier to write code that runs faster in Zig than in C under similar build optimization levels, because writing high performance C code looks a lot like writing idiomatic Zig code. The Zig standard library offers a lot of structures like hash maps, SIMD primitives, and allocators with different performance characteristics to better fit a given use-case. C application code often skips on these things simply because it is a lot more friction to do in C than in Zig.
by KomoD | 2025-12-30 22:39:58+00:00
> Gullos Hosting which has 128 Mb server for 3.5$/yearly and also for $4.49 you can still get a 256mb server from C-servers and $5.50 from byteVirt.

I can't recommend Gullo's. I experienced near-constant network issues with my NAT VPS (in Poland, I think?), making it so unusable that I just let it idle until it expired. I should've spent the money on a 6 pack of beer instead, it is what it is.
by mothballed | 2025-12-30 22:40:23+00:00
If I did this to someone society liked (say, a girlfriend who had moved in and claims she is now a tenant), even as a fellow tenant, invited someone over with a sword to bear (but not "use") that sword as part of a pattern of activities intended to deprive her of her peaceful enjoyment of her tenancy including deploying "tear gas" and "smoke grenades" and play "extremely high-decibel sound" I would expect, at a minimum, I'd be looking at

1) Domestic violence
2) Harassment
3) Possibly Assault

At the very least I would expect to get booked, even if the charges didn't stick.

If I did this to some random homeless person or gang member, I'd expect basically a high five from the cops and nothing else.

Of course I do not live in CA, I live in AZ. In my state, ranchers have just straight up shot trespassers and nothing happened to them, despite the fact that by the book this would be highly illegal.

The guy doing this has discovered that in order to be convicted someone has to complain, then the police have to care, then a judge has to let it go to trial, a prosecutor has to actually want to competently build a case, and then after all that a jury actually has to convict you. I'm guessing the chance of all those stars aligning when the squatters are people literally spray painting "Kill all Bailiffs" (in one ASAP website screenshot) is next to nill.
by pseudony | 2025-12-30 22:40:35+00:00
It is not a popularity issue.
If it were, company after company would have switched as soon as they could make it work (office365, outlook online, whatever SAAS they use, none care about their desktop, only the browser, and all major browsers are available on Linux).

From there, popularity outside the organization is irrelevant, internal support and userbase is for and on some version of Linux.

As this would spread, we would eventually see global usage increase and global popularity become a non-issue.
by wtallis | 2025-12-30 22:40:36+00:00
At the very least, it's reasonable to expect the maintainers of such a project to be open about their situation when it's that precarious. Why wouldn't you take every opportunity to let your users and downstream projects know that the dependency you're providing is operating with no redundancy and barely enough resources to carry on when things aren't breaking? Why wouldn't they want to share with a highly technical audience any details about how their infrastructure operates?
by kasajian | 2025-12-30 22:40:37+00:00
I'll check back every few years to see if either this project, Wine or ReactOS can run Visual Studio 2026 (or 2022) and .NET Framework 4.

Not talking about the cross-platform versions of .NET and VS-Code. I'm specifically talking about the Windows-specific software I mentioned above.

I don't see this happening, despite the fact that by now, these types of porting efforts were supposed to be trivial because of AI. Yeah, I'll wait.
by mindslight | 2025-12-30 22:40:38+00:00
2012? Against the wildly popular incumbent? Blaming it all on smears seems like a rationalization. So the real question is what would have happened if Romney had run in 2016. But we basically know what would have happened, because there were other moderate/conservative candidates who did run in 2016. And the answer to that is the Republican party would have still voted for the New York Democrat con artist who paid lip service to their longstanding frustrations but didn't have any actual policy beyond "burn it all down".
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-30 22:40:39+00:00
If your monorepo compiles to one binary on one host then fine, but what do you do when one webserver runs vN, another runs v(N-1), and half the DB cluster is stuck on v(N-17)?

A monorepo only allows you to reason about the entire product as it should be. The details of how to migrate a live service atomically have little to do with how the codebase migrates atomically.
by servercobra | 2025-12-30 22:40:49+00:00
I've been a big fan of monorepos for awhile, but like the author, not a huge fan of using e.g. yarn workspaces. React Native can get pretty pissy with hoisting. I just started putting things like implementation plans and PRDs in the repo and I'm loving it so far. It helps give AI more of the context to make good choices.
by christophilus | 2025-12-30 22:41:00+00:00
I mostly agree, but today, Opus 4.5 via Claude code did something pretty dumb stuff in my codebase— N queries where one would do, deep array comparison where a reference equality check would suffice, very complex web of nested conditionals which a competent developer would have never written, some edge cases where the backend endpoints didn’t properly verify user permissions before overwriting data, etc.

It’s still hit or miss. The product “worked” when I tested it as a black box, but the code had a lot of rot in it already.

Maybe that stuff no longer matters. Maybe it does. Time will tell.
by remich | 2025-12-30 22:41:11+00:00
As a former tech lead and now staff engineer, I definitely agree with this. I read a blog post a couple of months ago that theorized that the people that would adopt these technologies the best were people in the exact roles that you describe. I think because we were already used to having to rely on other people to execute on our plans and ideas because they were simply too big to accomplish by ourselves. Now that we have agents to do these things, it's not really all that different - although it is a different management style working around their limitations.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-30 22:42:00+00:00
That's what most of the usual reasons given (excuses and lies, really) ignore. They'll blame economics (despite us getting richer by nearly every metric, and extra funding only getting us more aggressively ugly buildings [1]), or the lack of craftsmen to carve gargoyles (as if there weren't countless beautiful buildings without anything so intricate), changing tastes (despite overwhelming public consensus older buildings looked better), or most hilariously, some kind of "survival of the prettiest", where supposedly buildings used to be just as ugly in general, but most were demolished, and only the best looking kept (yet e.g. old photos of Manhattan will show nearly every building being beautiful, at least compared to today).

Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to the dominant schools of thought in architecture, Loos and Bauhaus and modernism, that basically outright require ugliness and generic sterility.

[1] https://www.thehideawayexperience.co.uk/blog-post/scottish-d...
by LoganDark | 2025-12-30 22:42:34+00:00
Broader autism is four phenotypes :) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.15.24312078v...

But yes, if you are saying ASD (and not autism itself, as you quoted from the article) is by definition a hindrance, I would be inclined to agree with you, for the reasons you've outlined.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-30 22:42:50+00:00
> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care

It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time.

You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations.

> You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?

Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-30 22:43:12+00:00
Some of these are resellers. Big provider sells them a package of 10-1000 VPSs and they set up websites to sell them to you. But you can also find lots of direct deals as well. BuyVM famously has their $15/year deal on a 1GB VPS. You can also often find dedicated servers for like $25/month. I recently bought a $75 lifetime deal on some email hosting for up to 25 domains and I think 250GB storage. Great for some secondary domains and such that I use. There are some real gems out there and you should see their Black Friday threads. Kind of a wild place.
by simonw | 2025-12-30 22:43:17+00:00
If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources?

OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well.

Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign.

Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional resources.

UPDATE: See comment below for the answer to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067