MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Software Terms Dictionary – A guide to industry terminology
by busenurcetin | 2026-01-23 16:40:48+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a dictionary to help newcomers and industry experts navigate software development terminology (from A to Z).

I realized that even experienced devs sometimes struggle with specific jargon outside their niche, so I wanted to create a central resource.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/busenurcetin/YazilimTerimleriSozlugu/blob...

Feedback on the definitions or terms I might have missed is welcome.
by wan23 | 2026-01-23 16:41:02+00:00
Liberal still means liberal, and still means all the things you said. Without getting into the merits of any particular side, IMO we have a categorization problem. People use the word liberal for all types of left ideologies, which is a mistake as it makes it hard to pin down what people actually believe. Also the concepts of left and far left (and right and far right) are overused. The combination of these two phenomena make it so that people will say that things leftists do are "more liberal" when they are in fact not liberal at all.
by rlpb | 2026-01-23 16:41:23+00:00
> And all of this has to be done in a way that will hold up in court, therefore snail mail.

This needs to change. Snail mail is no longer reliable. Letters often get delayed by weeks or go missing altogether, but the law still assumes that justice is being done by it being sufficient to assume that a letter that was posted has been received within a few days. It's no longer true.
by msp26 | 2026-01-23 16:41:56+00:00
Originally I thought that Gas Town was some form of high level satire like GOODY-2 but it seems that some of you people have actually lost the plot.

Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly.

---

https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503

Problem:

Every gt command runs bd version to verify the minimum beads version requirement. Under high concurrency (17+ agent sessions), this check times out and blocks gt commands from running.

Impact:

With 17+ concurrent sessions each running gt commands:

- Each gt command spawns bd version

- Each bd version spawns 5-7 git processes

- This creates 85-120+ git processes competing for resources

- The 2-second timeout in gt is exceeded

- gt commands fail with "bd version check timed out"
by jppope | 2026-01-23 16:42:08+00:00
Its sooooo weird to me that indie software is the target... the author is interested in replacing things that were always accessible to replace but not really worth it (Typora is still one of my favs) and not at all interested in replacing trash enterprise software.

I see basically no reason why Salesforce can't be taken down by a 2-3 person team right now. Shopify? Everything Intuit? Atlassian (Jira, Confluence)?
by TheRealPomax | 2026-01-23 16:42:12+00:00
They're not halluciations. Don't anthropomorphise this nonsene, call it what it is because this is not a new problem: this is garbage data, and that garbage data should have been caught. Having a submission pipeline that verifies sources even exist (not that they're citing the right thing) is one the bare minimum responsibilities of a paid journal.

This has almost nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with a journal not putting in the trivial effort (given how much it costs to get published by them) required to ensure subject integrity. Yeah AI is the new garbage generator, but this problem isn't new, citation verification's been part of review ever since citations became a thing.
by racl101 | 2026-01-23 16:42:12+00:00
Doesn't every musician with money have this problem? Every rockstar owns like 50 guitars. And they don' like to admit they're just collecting. They always got some story about why they need to buy the nth guitar that's missing from all the other tens of guitars they already own.

Almost all of them own instruments and gear they'll touch once and never do anything meaningful with ever again. Then it becomes a fixture on their walls or den.

It all seems wasteful.

But still, by rich people standards, it seems cheaper than other things like buying a huge boat.
by al_borland | 2026-01-23 16:42:19+00:00
> They text when they have no reason to text. They suggest the coffee. They make the plan. They do not keep score.

Not keeping score is an important part. A lot of people reach out, then think it’s the other person’s turn.

My dad has maintained a large group of friends into his 70s. People from all stages of his life. He understands people are busy with their lives, and doesn’t take it personally when they don’t call to set things up. He reaches out, he makes the plans, and as a result he has a rich social life in retirement.

I have this example, but still find it difficult. I imagine it gets easier with practice.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-23 16:42:35+00:00
If you're going to put something on someone else's desk, you're going to have to own it.

If you don't check it yourself, then you're going to own whatever your tooling misses, and also own the amount of others' time you waste through what the project has decided to categorize as negligence, which will make you look worse than if you simply made an honest mistake.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-23 16:42:45+00:00
Oh, and have a backup workflow. Find / test / use other LLMs and providers. Don't become dependent on a single provider.

I have pro subscriptions to all three major providers, and have been planning to drop one eventually. Anthropic may end up making the decision for me, it sounds like, even though (or perhaps because) I've been using Claude CLI more than the others lately.

What I'd really like to do is put a machine in the back room that can do 100 tts or more with the latest, greatest Deepseek or Kimi model at full native quantization. That's the only way to avoid being held hostage by the big 3 labs and their captive government, which I'm guessing will react to the next big Chinese model release by prohibiting its deployment by any US hosting providers.

Unfortunately it will cost about $200K to do this locally. The smart money says (but doesn't act like) the "AI bubble" will pop soon. If the bubble pops, that hardware will be worth 20 cents on the dollar if I'm lucky, making such an investment seem reckless. And if the bubble doesn't pop, then it will probably cost $400K next year.

First-world problems, I guess...
by mrlongroots | 2026-01-23 16:43:09+00:00
While Arrow is amazing, it is only the C Data Interface that can be FFI'ed, which is pretty low level. If you have something higher-level like a table or a vector of recordbatches, you have to write quite a bit of FFI glue yourself. It is still performant because it's a tiny amount of metadata, but it can still be a bit tedious.

And the reason is ABI compatibility. Reasoning about ABI compatibility across different C++ versions and optimization levels and architectures can be a nightmare, let alone different programming languages.

The reason it works at all for Arrow is that the leaf levels of the data model are large contiguous columnar arrays, so reconstructing the higher layers still gets you a lot of value. The other domains where it works are tensors/DLPack and scientific arrays (Zarr etc). For arbitrary struct layouts across languages/architectures/versions, serdes is way more reliable than a universal ABI.
by Bender | 2026-01-23 16:43:11+00:00
Many white-collar jobs will be automated and those people will have to adapt and learn new skills.

We are still quite a ways away from a robot showing up to the home to fix plumbing along with many other blue-collar jobs. It will happen but I have no clue when or if it will even happen in my lifetime. The prototype robots that could in theory do these jobs have a lot of development, real world testing and improvements before they are commercially viable in my opinion.

Like FSD they will have to prove themselves to multiple levels of government before they are permitted to perform regulated and licensed functions. Electrician, Plumber, Civic Engineering, Certified Aircraft Mechanic, etc... There are known-unknowns that will have to be dealt with before a generic robot is permitted into a home and operate around children such as security hardening and physical safety. How much strength and killing power will a generic robot be permitted to have? What is the most damage a hacker can do to adults and children via remote control of a robot? Will all robots be required to have a "safe word" that is hard wired into their firmware and a physical cut-off switch in a standard location?

There will be unknown-unknowns that pop up along the way slowing their progression. There is also the aspect of insurance and liability for generic robots operating in a commercial environment, proof of protection from IP theft, protection from take-over by competitors. There will be questions such as what is a robots responsibility if it observes a human in danger, a human breaking laws, another robot malfunctioning or harming a human and so on.

Will these robots be permitted to share everything they witness with a company and / or government? What privacy laws will exist? What happens if a robot starts to exhibit true sentience and not just mimicry of sentience like LLM's? Will their be a legal process to validate sentience? What rights will robots be afforded? Will sentient robots be given human rights? Will a marriage between a human and robot be legally recognized? If a robot breaks the law will it be punished or would that fall back to the corporation as a "industrial incident" of sorts? How will we determine the line between accident and remote assassination?

Yes I have watched iRobot way too many times and I have always enjoyed Isaac Asimov's work.

As for UBI, something has to pay for it. In the USA we already have a massive national debt and the petro dollar may not exist much longer the only thing allowing us to have such a massive dept. Do we cancel all existing welfare and related programs and consolidate them into UBI? Would that even begin to pay for such a universally applied program for hundreds of millions of people? I know people will suggest Robin Hood tactics like excessive taxes on the wealthy but that would be short lived even if it were implemented. What would the long term strategy be?
by JimDabell | 2026-01-23 16:43:17+00:00
Yes, I had an Acorn Electron (a BBC Micro-compatible), and the software came on audio cassettes and were sometimes taped to the front of computer magazines to share software demos. It was basically a modem that wasn’t hooked up to a telephone. If the tape was getting worn out, you occasionally had to fix it by putting a pencil in one of the gears and winding it a bit tighter. You could copy software with any dual tape deck designed for music.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-23 16:43:18+00:00
Even then, it required specialized hardware on the ISP side to connect above 33.6kbps at all, and almost never reliably so. I remember telling most of my friends just to get/stick with the 33.6k options. Especially considering the overhead a lot of those higher modems took, most of which were "winmodems" that used a fair amount of CPU overhead insstead of an actual COM/Serial port. It was kind of wild.
by belorn | 2026-01-23 16:43:39+00:00
The primary alternative is to have signed delivery, in which case some people will simply refuse to sign it and thus prevent delivery. Signed delivery is the way the postal service usually differentiate between normal delivery which has some kind of error rate which the postal service do not take responsibility for, and the signed service which usually carry some insurance (up to a maximum) of delivery.

The US has their Service of process which is commonly seen in movies, which is often made into a joke in comedies.

A much older system is the one where by law people had to put a notice in the news paper, sometimes multiple notices, and then that was considered enough proof of delivering the notice.

It would be an interesting conversation to philosophy how a future system should be designed that can't be refused, where delivery to the recipient is guarantied, where the sender and the delivery service must produce proof of their parts.
by rvermeulen98 | 2026-01-23 16:44:19+00:00
I started off using tview/tcell, and only later found out about bubbletea and the charmbracelet ecosystem. Then I didn't really find a solid reason to switch over to bubbletea. So far I really enjoyed the experience building the app with tview, the only real limitation I ran into was switching the theme at runtime, for which I had to build a custom mechanism.
by lorenzleutgeb | 2026-01-23 16:44:26+00:00
Right. Radicle would be one way to connect all these Raspberry Pis in many pantries together, and have them replicate each others repos. It also enables others to send patches, without first having to create an account on that Raspberry Pi in your pantry. And in case your Raspberry Pi is offline, others will just as happily serve your project, with cryptographic assurance that it wasn't modified.

Don't get me wrong. Power to you and your Raspberry Pi! Radicle invites you to join a network of people that solve the same problem as you do, and pool resources.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 16:44:35+00:00
> A Timex ad went viral this year: “Know the time without seeing you have 1,249 unanswered emails.”

Having to micromanage notifications is why I have two phones - one without a SIM card. It's nice to be able to do stuff on the phone and know it won't bug you. I simply put the one with the SIM card elsewhere (other room, leave in car, etc). No - I'm not going to spend too much time learning how to "effectively" manage notifications on a smartphone (and if I do, have it change on me with some future update).

I've been saying it since around 2004-2005 - even before smartphones - that consolidating everything into one device is a bad idea.

One thing I really miss from the 80's and 90's: When you buy a product (hardware or software), its features and capabilities were stable. You never had to worry about some update changing the behavior on you.

I really like some of the health features on Apple Watch. But I won't buy it because I don't want it to be my watch, and I don't want to pair my Apple account with it. I just want the health features and nothing else.
by nh2 | 2026-01-23 16:44:56+00:00
Are you open to rename the "patches" terminology?

Apparently currently "1 patch = 1 pull request of e.g. multiple commits" in Radicle.

That confusing, since in Git a patch usually refers to a single commit:

* git format-patch outputs 1 ".patch" file per commit.
* Its output also enshrines that, in the subject lines that appear e.g. on Linux mailing lists: "[PATCH 1/2]", meaning "one of two patches in a patch series".

(That said, `git format-patch --stdout` can concatenate multiple commits into a single output, but it does not offer to write those into a single .patch file by itself.)

So when reading "Patches", I was intuitively unnecessarily scared that the tool cannot handle whole branches, and flattens out all commits.

Maybe "Patchsets"?

That's what kernel people apparently call them:

https://kernelnewbies.org/PatchPhilosophy#What_is_a_patchset...

https://kernelnewbies.org/PatchPhilosophy#Patches_are_git_co...
by throwawaypath | 2026-01-23 16:45:27+00:00
>Who knew that cutting taxes while keeping government spending high AND lowering interest rates could result in so much free money going around?

That's been going on for many presidents in a row, in no way unique to Trump. Bush and Obama take the cake.

>That coupled with the dollar losing 10% of its value in a year

Is this some new virtue signal on BkueSky? USD is still trading in its channel at above historic averages. This is like saying the US market is crashing because we had a -2.5% day on Tuesday. Look at DXY and zoom out. It's been flat since May.

>of course stocks are higher than before. Inflation and dollar losing value = winning!

Three consecutive years of solid double digit market growth that has outpaced inflation and dollar valuation. Tell me you know nothing about financial markets without telling me you know nothing about financial markets.
by bluGill | 2026-01-23 16:45:27+00:00
Historians have come up with a lot of theories. There is no way to answer for sure though. General thought is they didn't even try because they had slaves they could force to do the hard labor, so there was not point. England developed steam engines in a world where slaves didn't exist. The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology as a society like England did, and so they mostly didn't try to develop technology (except as it related to winning wars - anyone who wins wars was a big deal)

However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.
by zerkten | 2026-01-23 16:45:30+00:00
>> Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.

How would the economics of this work universally? Jetbrains is a bit of an oddity in terms of SaaS. For the most part, it's desktop or on-premises software that was sold with a perpetual license. If you've bought a subscription and canceled, they've generated some revenue. Maintaining a subscription generates more revenue for them, but they can slow or stop development without stopping you from using the product.

SaaS is typically some server software hosted by someone else which most often doesn't have an on-premises version. They can stop making feature updates, but if they turn off the servers, the service ends. They still have costs even if you use the software less. You can argue about the profit margins, but that's not the point here. As most SaaS companies don't start with on-premises, they can't ever get their software working there for many reasons. There are a few like Atlassian and GitHub that do both, but if you look at the heritage, both are really on-premises first.
by idonotknowwhy | 2026-01-23 16:45:57+00:00
Yes, it does exactly that. It also sends other prompts like generating 3 options to choose from, prefilling a reply like 'compile the code', etc. (I can confirm this because I connect CC to llama.cpp and use it with GLM-4.7. I see all these requests/prompts in the llama-server verbose log.)

You can stop most of this with

export DISABLE_NON_ESSENTIAL_MODEL_CALLS=1

And might as well disable telemetry, etc:
export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1

I also noticed every time you start CC, it sends off > 10k tokens preparing the different agents. So try not to close / re-open it too often.

source: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings
by Fabricio20 | 2026-01-23 16:46:01+00:00
Yeah this is not a new thing with AI, you can unsubscribe all you want, they are still gonna email you about "seminars" and other bullshit. AWS has so many of those and your email is permanently in their database, even if you delete your account. I also still get Oracle Cloud emails even though I told them to delete my account as well, so I can't even log in anymore to update preferences!
by nolok | 2026-01-23 16:46:10+00:00
It's a different social contract. It's not just the waitress, it's service in general. One trying to judge the other is never quite going to work because it rubs us wrong in some weird internal way.

Eg go into a big store brand in most of the US and the cashier will be all flashy smile asking how is your day, and you ignore it and ask your request, and that's the game. A french person would mostly hate that, feel the question as annoying.

You go to a similar french store and the cashier and yourself will say the bonjour / merci / ... yada yada game and if someone doesn't do his part he's considered rude; I found a lot of foreigner surprised by that, the fact that you're not answering "merci" or asking "s'il vous plait" because it's nice, but because not doing it puts you in unpleasant person territory.

Ok business meeting, even in tech. American are always super optimist and happy, and seeing a solution and the end goal, French are over realist bordering on pessimist.

It's not that black and white of course there is a lot of inter mingling and differences, but overall which one you feel "better" is very personnal and based around what you're used to.
by cbeach | 2026-01-23 16:46:26+00:00
lingrush4 and me (chrisbeach, the OP of that comment) are unconnected. Likewise mjparrott.

And I didn't realise my original comment was flagged (!). Thanks to whoever vouched for it.

Quite sinister how people misuse the flagging tool on this site, to try to hide any opinions they find personally inconvenient
by rurp | 2026-01-23 16:46:38+00:00
It's been some years since I watched the show so I've probably forgotten a fair amount, but I remember it differently. I recall Tennant arguing at various points that it's probably the more obvious suspect/explanation. It's the whole you're probably hearing horses not zebras thing. Which in reality is the more competent approach. Crimes usually are committed by the most obvious suspect and pursuing more obscure theories is a worse approach.

But of course in a TV universe that's completely flipped on its head, nobody makes shows about normal straightforward cases.

This same conflict bugged me about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The main analyst is 1000% sure that her hunch is correct and is constantly aggressively adamant about it, despite a lack of hard evidence. The others analysts are shown being much more rational, giving probabilities to their assessments and grounding conclusions in evidence. But since it's a movie of course you know the heroine is going to be correct and all of the other people seems like indecisive fools. But in reality someone who acted like her would be an absolute train wreck and the sober rational ones would be getting things done consistently with far fewer screw ups.
by maherbeg | 2026-01-23 16:46:43+00:00
Gotta say, I love using PGDog. It has some fantastic built in features, and I'm looking forward to testing out the improved query parser. Lev and the team are heroes.

At the scale we were using PGDog, enabling the previous form of the query parser was extremely expensive (we would have had to 16x our pgdog fleet size).
by julesallen | 2026-01-23 16:46:53+00:00
There’s need and there’s want I suppose.

My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.

Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.
by drillsteps5 | 2026-01-23 16:47:11+00:00
Someone should just build an ANN as big as currently as possible with current hardware, while still having both inference and training to be as close to real-time as possible (micro-to milli-seconds), build the self-learning using some loose equivalents of pain/pleasure feedback in actual brains, plug sensors and actuators from some sort of robot, and just see what happens.

I think anything less than that is just a parlor trick.
by s_dev | 2026-01-23 16:47:12+00:00
High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.

The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.

Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.