MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjfisher | 2026-01-02 09:18:36+00:00
Could you give a few examples? I'd lean towards adjusting tooling if you can.

My spelling is often horrendous and I know it - but almost every dev I know of prefers to copy and paste anything that might be misspelled just because it's easier than taking the risk.

Similarly - how does does this get anywhere near causing a production outage?

I'd be tempted to view this as a blessing in disguise; this person sounds like they'll trip up more often than the rest, but if one individual can cause a production outage with spelling mistakes something's gone awry with your processes elsewhere. You have an opportunity to fix whatever that is now.
by DavidPiper | 2026-01-02 09:18:39+00:00
One reason we might assume "engineers" tend to operate with better ethical frameworks is that (in Australia at least) you generally have to register for accreditation via a large organisation like Engineers Australia, IChemE, etc, to actually practice professionally. These organisations have standard codes of ethics that, if breached, can result in your removal and an inability to continue professional practice.

Naturally, software engineering has none of this, and in most cases explicitly doesn't want it.

But that's one reason I can think of.
by jonway | 2026-01-02 09:19:00+00:00
People flocked for this crap though, they were a consistent and reliable partner here. Times change though and everyone started just heading to Walmart, the modern version of sears in essence I guess, and Amazon who didn’t profit at all for like a decade and also never ever paid a dividend.

I wonder about comparing the total sales rev of Walmart or Amazon (lifetime revenue) to the lifetime revenue of Sears Roebuck and whatever, adjusted for inflation. This would probably paint an interesting picture of our consumer trends and corporate governance
by goku12 | 2026-01-02 09:19:33+00:00
This is the natural way to do it. I have had to use the issue tracker for asking questions (support requests) or informing the developer of something (like of implementing a related feature in another software). Clearly, those aren't issues at all, and the normal workflow steps like closing the ticket doesn't make much sense at all. They belong to the discussions list.

Issue trackers should be used exclusively for earmarking and tracking the progress of actionable items. This is somewhat similar to the integration between email clients and task managers, like how it's done in Gmail, Zoho, etc. You read the message first. If it requires an action from your side, create a task from it and link them.

There are other projects that do this too. A good example is the 'mise' project. Sourcehut projects use this workflow almost exclusively since it's the default by design. I think sourcehut had if before github did. What I would like to see is better integration between discussions/messages and task/issue lists on all these platforms.
by final_aeon | 2026-01-02 09:19:34+00:00
DOGE was mostly about government efficiency and restructuring rather than actually proving vast fraud. What DOGE did accomplish is cutting a lot of politicized / ideologically driven spending.

Fraud is a serious crime and it is not just "political actions that I don't like." The Somalian fraud rings are actually fraud on a vast scale. So please stop defending actual fraud, which is supposed to not be a partisan issue
by neiman | 2026-01-02 09:20:00+00:00
A few questions:

1. People still do software based on the GNU license. What's the difference?

2. I'm a mathematician - math is not copyrighted, yet it's still being done.

3. Is it really so important for society that copyrighted movies be based on old stories? Won't society benefit from new stories and characters?

To be clear, I don't propose to really implement it. But the existing system also sucks. I'm thinking that maybe incorporating such an idea into the existing system - limiting what you can do with public domain work - can be beneficial.
by tw1984 | 2026-01-02 09:22:07+00:00
> US/EU automakers are still struggling to offer anything barely competitive.

Imagine yourself being one of the top management guys in one of those legacy car makers, you've spent your entire life building what you "earned" in that company...Suddenly the company tells you that you will be sidelined so more resources that once thought to be under your control can be allocated to an EV project so you can be further marginalize in the near future. what will be your reactions? You offer to help in the project (by building junks with your legacy understanding on cars) or you do anything possible to sink that project.

The result is the same - your legacy carmaker company is fxxked.

It is not like just US/EU legacy automakers struggling to offer anything competitive - Chinese legacy automakers that have been in the exact same market for decades with direct access to the exact same supply chain and government subsidies are suffering from the exact same problem. It is not about regulations, market access or subsidies. It is just human nature.
by b112 | 2026-01-02 09:22:20+00:00
I recall looking at a car to buy, and the salesman toted the gas cap on the right as the "safe side".

The logic was, if you run out of gas, you can refill on the side away from traffic.

Dumbest design reasoning. Plan the side, for an event most people never experience?! Or if they do, once... and maybe on a rural dirt road, not necessarily a freeway.

Probably wanted an excuse for moving it.
by happymellon | 2026-01-02 09:23:08+00:00
Current job used to let us run containers locally, but they decided to wrap initially docker, and then podman with "helper" scripts. These broke regularly, and became too much overhead to maintain so we are mandated to do local dev but access a dev k8 cluster to perform any level of testing that is more than unit and requires a db.

A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.
by mcv | 2026-01-02 09:23:16+00:00
I'm not buying vinyl records, but I still have a ton of them, and my ancient record player broke down ages ago. Similarly, I've got tons of CDs I'm not using anymore. The fate of old media, I guess. But I do miss selecting a specific album to listen to. Spotify is not the same.

I guess I'm in the market for a new record player. Is that market picking up again?
by kubb | 2026-01-02 09:23:35+00:00
Interestingly, you’re demonstrating arrogance.

All you’re bringing to the discussion is “my feelings are hurt”. And you’re putting the onus to fix that on me.

You have the power to change your paradigm, but you refuse to. Others have to see things through your lens, you won’t have the flexibility to change yours for a moment.

Meanwhile I’ve started with a plausible explanation of why someone sees things differently.

From the get go, I had more willingness to understand than you did.

How’s that for a framing?
by arendtio | 2026-01-02 09:23:58+00:00
Well, but many games just work. Actually, I try starting the games without any tweaks before heading over to protondb.com, and often they run just fine.

But it is also true that many games still require minor tweaks. For example, just last week, I found out that I had to enable hardware acceleration for the webview within Steam, just to be able to log in to Halo Infinite. It was just clicking a checkbox, but otherwise, the game would not have been playable.

But I am always surprised when you find out you have those kinds of issues with Windows as well.
by CraigJPerry | 2026-01-02 09:24:26+00:00
only thing i'd add is mas for mac app store apps you want to ensure are installed but otherwise i run pretty much the same setup.

When i install a fresh macos i have two commands to run - install nix using the determinate systems installer, then apply my nix config.

It's not quite as streamlined as nixos but good enough.

My biggest remaining pain point is dev envs - i've been leaning into adding a flake in each project, so for example i have a single project that's written in scala 2.13, when i cd into that project dir, the correct jvm version, sbt, intellij etc are installed, some useful env vars and shell aliases etc. - that's all great (i haven't felt the need to adopt denenv.sh or flox yet) but i do find myself wanting a devcontainer sandbox workflow more often these days (blame cli coding "agents"), i lean on vscode for that rather than nix so far. In python (where i spend a lot more time) uv loses a lot of value in nix and i don't like that.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-02 09:24:34+00:00
That’s because you misunderstand the terminology. They’re talking propaganda and “submissiveness” means something else in their language.

There’s a weird fetishism across Russia: everything is centered around gay sex. There’s no cooperation in the world, either you take it and become “petukh” (cock) or you give it and become “pakhan” (shot caller).
by kldg | 2026-01-02 09:24:34+00:00
also essentially how many large news organizations have pivoted. $520/year for WSJ, $400/year for Bloomberg (excluding terminal-only news and other extras, of course), $390/year for NYT, $120/year for WaPo (with exclusions). For only $2,500 or so a year, you can have a balanced stream of news and journalism. -But not your household; you need to pay extra for family plans.

(or you can do what most people do)
by TFYS | 2026-01-02 09:24:37+00:00
> The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada.

Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence? And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?
by aembleton | 2026-01-02 09:24:39+00:00
Surely the abuse is caused by your browser showing you the slide in.

python.org might be asking your user agent to do it, or it might be asking a third party to do this; either way the interpretation of how to display that is down to the user agent. I don't see any popover/slidein but I'm running uBO which is probably blocking this. I do this because I don't want the 'abuse'.
by FireInsight | 2026-01-02 09:24:42+00:00
With the caveat of it not being a portable single file, I find custom image-based Linuxes fill this gap perfectly.

There's of course Fedora Silverblue / Fedora Bootc with https://universal-blue.org/ and https://blue-build.org/ being good examples.

Recent developments have seen the creation of bootc images for non-Fedora distros too, and at this point I've seen quite a few cool arch-bootc custom images, completely customized to the author's desires. See: https://github.com/bootcrew/, https://github.com/tartaria-dev/tartaria
by bgbntty2 | 2026-01-02 09:24:46+00:00
> Approximately, if the user doesn't have root then there's no way to trick them.

So not having root (somehow?) prevents phishing and tricking? That doesn't seem useful or relevant for people who know what they're doing. If I'm wrong, please elaborate.

> They also can't access internal app files which gives app authors tight control over how their software is used.

I read that in the security model and I don't care for it. App authors shouldn't have any control over how their software is used. In my opinion, of course, but for my computers my opinion is what matters.
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-02 09:25:47+00:00
I've started using Karakeep as well, however I don't find its built-in viewer as seamless as a plain browser page. It's also runs afoul of pages which combats bots due to its headless chrome.

Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
by gethly | 2026-01-02 09:25:47+00:00
I remember that i did not used to make typos but since a particular period that i vaguely rememebr i have noticed that i make more and more of them. It was some kind of switch, not a long period that the transition took place in. I could not pinpoint the reason behind it but my theory is that my speed of typing increased and with it the amount of incidence of hitting the wrong keys. I think it started primarily when my right digits hit faster than my left ones, so letters get switched. It might be neurological or i picked up some trait from some exercises related to reflexes(martial arts), hard to say but all i could recommend is typing slower or trying to write with the style of never taking your hands off the keyboard and typing with all 10 fingers instead of just few, like most of us do. Hard to switch to this style without actual desire to do so, but it is a solution.

I have also switched to mechanical keyboard because i have noticed that i was missing letters despite feeling that i hit the keys. So having more sensitive keyboard helped to mitigate quite a bit of typos. I have the brown tactile switches but i think i would go for the more sensitive red ones in the future to decrease the key travel distance for key press detection.

BTW dyslexia is more about reading rather than writing and it concerns only languages that are not phonetic.
by merelysounds | 2026-01-02 09:25:58+00:00
Context for anyone unfamiliar with GoboLinux:

> each program in a GoboLinux system has its own subdirectory tree, where all of its files (including settings specific for that program) may be found. Thus, a program "Foo" has all of its specific files and libraries in /Programs/Foo, under the corresponding version of this program at hand. For example, the commonly known GCC compiler suite version 8.1.0, would reside under the directory /Programs/GCC/8.1.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux
by paganel | 2026-01-02 09:26:27+00:00
I'm in Europe, in case you're on the "wrong" side of the pump you just have to make sure that you park the car a little further, so you'd get the pump hose through the back and on to the other side without scratching the car's paint. That's all it is to it. I'm from Romania and I've driven (and hence re-fueled) my car all the way from Bretagne, France, to Peloponnese, Greece, never had a problem.

I also don't know anything about any "arrow" signalling anything in my dashboard, maybe it's only on the US-made cars, I wouldn't know cause I generally know on which side I have to fuel my car.
by dawnerd | 2026-01-02 09:26:32+00:00
I think they all do that to an extent. But they also kinda force drivers to take lesser value orders to keep their accept rate up. There’s been a few food delivery drivers make videos on it.

No matter what all of the apps are designed to screw the customers, the restaurants, and the drivers.

I’ve stopped using them stateside ever since that California law went into effect to affect that basically jacked prices up even more plus tips on top. It’s pretty ridiculous. So glad my local pizza place still has their own drivers.
by anon7000 | 2026-01-02 09:28:01+00:00
I mean, it’s not even remotely hard to believe. There are plenty of extremely similar examples, such as:

- grocery delivery algorithmic price fixing: https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo

- dollar general lying about prices: https://youtu.be/uE5THiD-kTk

But yeah, it’d be good to get this backed up even better. Delivery companies are already on thin ice
by xnorswap | 2026-01-02 09:28:14+00:00
There's a trick to USB, the block part (in the wire) is nearer the ground. ( motherboard-side for vertical desktops )

Since learning that, I have the confidence to stick it in first time rather than 3rd or 4th.

That's not to say that USB-C isn't a huge improvement that has thankfully resolved having to know that.
by tornadofart | 2026-01-02 09:28:30+00:00
Example:

A string value in a json config needed to be updated.

On one prod instance, typo while updating the config by hand. Config validation of the software caught it, software stopped with the appropriate error message, a few minutes later we were up and running again.

We introduced work reviews on prod instances (similar to code reviews) after that.

Later, he then wrote a patch script to avoid making that mistake again.

In the json schema definition used in the script, the name of the property had a typo (how it came to be... no clue, copy paste should have taken care of that).

The script was part of a MR, the reviewer missed the typo. We noticed it in staging.

We introduced tests for config editing scripts after that.

And so it went on and on... The problem is not that it happens and we then refine our processes. It is the frequency.
by scotty79 | 2026-01-02 09:29:10+00:00
If only we could separate out social network from content.

I think chat apps are a good place to start. It's a place where contents of your friends list matters. Where the only way to have something recommended to you is asking someone for it or someone close to you coming to the conclusion that you, personally might enjoy it.

What's left to figure out is how to connect these systems that have strong identity and viciously curated friends lists to recommendation engines and content mills in a way that's opt-in. That lets users control the content that lands in their lap. That let's them decide where they land between "I'm gonna ask a friend about what's cool" and "just plug me to firehose" spectrum.

The connection should let users make available many freshly generated pseudonymous identities so that content mills can only create ephemeral profiles of you.

I imagine chat systems should let you tag your contacts and expose only a part of your social network when you ask content mill for recommend content.

There's so much more to discover beyond the modern status quo where we basically surrendered everything.
by throwaway81523 | 2026-01-02 09:29:14+00:00
The trouble here is that github issues is crap. Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
by retatop | 2026-01-02 09:29:25+00:00
I haven't used Nix yet, but I have done exactly this a number of times with Guix now. I assume Nix has the same capabilities. In Guix you can specify a home configuration that includes packages, configuration files, and running services all in one manifest.scm file. If you want to make sure that it's isolated from whatever else is set up on the system you can launch that manifest in a container with a single extra flag
by throwaway132448 | 2026-01-02 09:29:50+00:00
I mean, you only have to quote the letter itself:

"I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low."

This particular kind of American perspective on Europe always falls into the same trap: Not understanding a world where economic performance is _not_ the be-all-and-end-all, not understanding the connection between the benefits of such a world (things that consider externalities - not individuals - in order to exist) with the costs of such a world (taxes).
by mns | 2026-01-02 09:30:16+00:00
The attitude here is quite astounding, seeing how any criticism of the author or this piece is seen as some sort of reductionism of his views and european smugness (?!?), all the while the author reduces an entire nation (Germany in this case) to the anecdote of a Georgian mass murderer, probably one of the most ruthless and diabolical people that ever existed, so yeah, very balanced discussion here.
by deliciousturkey | 2026-01-02 09:30:35+00:00
Yes, the right of passage through the strait would still clearly remain. This is already the case with Denmark and Sweden as these ships need to cross Öresund or Great Belt strait to reach the Atlantic.

However, this act would, in my understanding, give much more power to Finland and Estonia to detain these ships, and charge the crew for the crimes they have committed. Right now there seems to be a loophole in the legislation that Russia is actively exploiting for hybrid warfare purposes. If the strait rules would give Russia more ways to cause harm, some other way of dissuading Russia from making these acts should be done.

In general though, it feels stupid that we have to play by these rules, when the enemy makes a mockery of them and actively tries to exploit them to cause as much harm as possible. But that's the reality when bordering Russia.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-02 09:30:37+00:00
>"Insecure" for the program against the user.

We already tried out trusting the users and it turns out that a few bad apples can spoil the bunch.

>It's such a dystopian idea that I don't know what to respond with.

Plenty of other devices are designed so that you can only use it in safe ways the designer intends. For example a microwave won't function while the door is open. This is not dystopia despite potentially going against what the user wants to be able to do.

>I don't believe any external party has the right to require me to use my own property in a certain way.

And companies are not obligated to support running on your custom modified property.

>The bar gets lower by the day with locally deployable AI.

The bar at least can be raised from searching "free hacks" and double clicking the cheat exe.

>who don't want you to have any control whatsoever

This isn't true. These systems offer plenty of control, but they are just designed in a way that security actually exists and can't be easily bypassed.

>and would probably inject ads/backdoors/telemetry into your "free" guest anyway.

This is very unlikely. It is unsupported speculation.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-02 09:31:05+00:00
Sure, issues for tasks and discussions for conversations.

And then there are developers who idly complain about normal participation on the work of issues and coordination of testing and feedback because it sends them a notification that they turned on. Unconstructive bitching drives users and collaborators away. They could solve their notification problem rather than impose a burden and emotional bullshit on everyone else.
by fxwin | 2026-01-02 09:31:18+00:00
idk what to tell you except that your personal experience does not generalize, see https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

the regional trains run by regional orgs rather than db get similar results, e.g. bwegt in baden württemberg or beg in bavaria

https://beg.bahnland-bayern.de/de/aufgaben/kontrollieren/pue...

https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/mobilitaet-verkehr/bahn-...
by thyristan | 2026-01-02 09:32:31+00:00
In a democracy, "We The People" is the sovereign. It is in the hands of the voters, and it is their responsibility to choose leaders wisely and shape their overall legal system. In democracies, the population doesn't get to use the "but its just our evil leaders" excuse. Only in other less democratic forms of government.

And yes, this means that in a democracy, the opposition's voters are screwed because they share in the responsibility, even if they were right. Why? Because they were unable to convince the majority of the wrongness of the majority vote.