skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you on your first statement. Exceptions for control flow is an awful API.

I also wholeheartedly agree with your comments that nullability should be a first-class language feature, part of the type system. I think what you describe is one of the active JEPs.

* Plain old String is "I don't know if it's nullable or not, so I'll let you dereference it without checking, but I may issue a warning.

* String! is "You're telling me it cannot be null so I will enforce that it is not null on the way in (e.g. when converting from String) and will issue no warning on the way out because it cannot be null.

* Finally, String? is "You're explicitly telling me it can be null, so I will force you to do a null check before converting to a String!"

But that's only part of it. I think Java desperately needs a ?. operator (Optional.map but without the Optional). I also think it needs a ?? operator (Optional.orElse but without the Optional).

So far I think Optional is more of a detriment to Java than a benefit. It feels like it was hacked in because without it some of the Stream APIs would be nightmarish given Java's current type system, and getting streams into the standard library API was too important a feature to wait for fixing the long-standing issues with nullability.

The only thing I disagree with you on is I do think there is some merit to checked exceptions when used sparingly. Capturing the idea that a method can fail for a reason that has to do with the program's input or environment (checked exception) vs. a reason that has to do with the program's code and cannot be solved without changing the program's code (RuntimeException) is a pretty neat thing.

I think the Streams API could have easily implemented terminal operations like forEach(ThrowingConsumer<E,X>). This could still be added.

I also think that the <X> ... throws X pattern should accommodate a union type like IOException|ParseException and that this should be inferred so that in this example of a throwing Consumer, whatever checked exceptions the method throws simply become the checked exceptions of the forEach method.

Conceptually, these are straightforward ideas. I suspect the limiting factor is figuring out how in the world to actually implement what I just described.
I think AI will thrive in low-code systems, not by writing Javascript.
It explains how to integrate AG Grid into LiveView projects, enabling features like real-time sorting, filtering, and pagination without full page reloads. The article also covers customizing cell data and implementing efficient updates to ensure a dynamic user experience.
Copyright law as it exists is bad per se.
It's common in non-dead languages. If your language is smaller you're bound to have a lot of "foreign words" in it. To this day I find it funny how my native language teachers would start to speak with tons of english and french words when they wanted to "showcase the complexity/beauty of our native language"/appear smart.

An LLM should do fine with that since it's usually the foreign word spelled in a way that makes sense in that language. I'm more curious about the inverse though. It's sometimes quite difficult to explain the meaning of a word in a language that does not have an equivalent, be it because it has a ton of different meanings or because it's some very specific action/object.
not the same as the classic bootstrap theme from 2.x though is it? if you know otherwise, please correct me.
When you start working with sql you despise leading commas.

When you stop working with any other code than SQL you look back on your younger self and think ‘I was soooo young’ when typing those lovely leading commas.
As mentioned in TFA.
Many C*Os plunder the companies they work for, then move to another one. They don't care about the market share of the company they'll leave, no more than bugs care about a tree they are eating. They'll move to the next one. There is always a next tree, until suddenly there are no more trees nearby.
Could have been "I am a solo developer and I have to work half the time only now."
Pure speculation: Maybe this is an attempt of 'outrage marketing'?
> are selling just fine.

Is it? I thought it was in deep troubles.
Gulf of Mexico Watcher
So the end does justify the means? So it is okay to rip off thousands of authors?
> I'm not sure if most people can agree with what is considered using a global variable

Sure, for example it turns out that by "global" you mean "thread local" and I expect lots of people don't agree with you about that.
The moment my Remarkable shows me ads is the moment I burn the company to the ground (reputationally).
Twitter is, in fact, not online. It redirects to something called X, which is not Twitter.
So using buckets with linked lists like that is neither space efficient or fast. A strategy that nowadays is more common and fast is to store conflicts in the table itself using some strategy to find a place in the table itself to put the new entry. The simplest (but not optimal) way to do this is to just take the next one that isn't used yet.

This means a linear scan that once the table gets close to being full will approach O(n). To avoid this, better strategies for choosing the next place to look is used, as well as automatic resizing of the hash table at some occupancy percentage to keep the lookup chains short. Other strategies in use will also approach O(n) but will require resizing on difference occupancy percentage. What is new in this approach is that they manage to go faster than O(n) even at almost full occupancy.
The `KW item[,item]+ KW` grammar just sucks in general. Natural-ish grammars are really stupid and shortsighted.
this is a "web application that monitors the official name of the Gulf of Mexico using the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) API. The app polls the API every 30 seconds to check if the name has changed from "Gulf of Mexico"."
Atlassian (broken Markdown parsers, incredibly sluggish/laggy UIs, update state issues on page without reload, and countless more)

Microsoft Windows (bugs relating to icons "down at the clock" and tooltips of those icons, sound volume management, start menu lag, stupid search in start menu, where when you type 3 letters it finds the thing you search, but when you type 4 letters it is no longer there, worse and worse system settings dialogs, hiding everything behind 3 more dialogs to click, and many more)

Salesforce Slack (buggy Markdown parser (what is it with these big companies always getting something like Markdown wrong???), laggy as hell, still no voice chat on FF, ...)

All of these big companies make dysfunctional software, that they can only push down our throats, because of uninformed management levels and the sheer size of marketing budgets they spent.
The only software that "keeps real people safe" is Tails+TOR, certainly not anything that has "Google, OpenAI, Discord" in the title.
> Did you know that you can use YAML and provision actual cloud provider resources with boring tech? Welcome to Ansible

Anyone using Ansible for cloud infrastructure management is not to be taken seriously. It's among the worst tools for the job - not (always) idempotent, no state tracking, slow, very limited in the resources it can manage, very lacking templating, fun stuff like "state: absent", running, and then having to remove the corresponding lines to delete, etc etc. You're literally better of bash scripting the cloud provider's CLI than using Ansible. Terraform/OpenTofu, Pulumi/tfcdk if you hate your future self are just clearly so much better.
For each programmer who actually spends their time on complex design work or fixing difficult bugs, there are many more doing what amounts to clerical work. Adding a new form here, fiddling with a layout there.

It is the latter class who are in real danger.
Isn't that backwards? If a penny contains more than a penny's worth of copper you can make "infinite" money by exchanging some money for pennies, smelting them down into copper, selling the copper for more money than you exchanged in the first place, and repeating the process until you're as rich as Bezos.
So this friend of mine last year visited a Mercedes Benz retailer, and was told "Actually our corporate mission is now to pioneer the electronic butler embedded in the vehicle (as in, oh look, parkings are nearby, and you are near a place where you may want to like to buy something...). If you oppose that, this is the last brand you want to approach".

It's a race. Still maybe not so evident, but declared.
I don't have anything against this style of writing in particular, but it's a shame it makes me assume it was written by an LLM
My volvo DID brake automatically and it pissed me off multiple times.
The 1960s were not that long after World War II. I assume they understood that fascists were the person you voted for.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvine_UFO) has a better overview, of course, but this article in The Guardian has a better picture at least.
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Twitter is essentially losing money even with a bare bones staff

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24351317/elon-musk-x-twit...

It's being kept online because it's a good propaganda tool, not due to how it performs on the free market.
What if you don't connect your car to the internet in the first place?
I sure empathize.... our AI is fussy and rigid... pedantic even.
A suspended sentence doesn't take effect unless you commit further crimes, so that's irrelevant: my point is that people who post to Facebook are regularly spending more time in prison than people who commit violent crimes, and that point is correct.

I specifically didn't say what was being posted on Facebook, because that is - again - irrelevant to the point! When you argue with this and call it a "cute minimization", what you're saying is that you believe it's right and just that words are punished more severely than rape, when you personally disagree with the politics of the speaker. Putting aside the morality of that, whether you agree with the policy just isn't relevant to whether it exists.

> "weird way" suggests coercion or cheating

That's not a definition you'll find in any dictionary. The top definition of weird in Mirriam Webster is "of strange or extraordinary character", which is a reasonable description of an election in which supporters of the oldest political party in the world collectively decide it should be destroyed and the winner gets a landslide on fewer votes than the previous election, which they lost.

> you get your news from sources who don't want you to know ... The BBC

Exactly. The stories I linked to are on the BBC, because I suspected you wouldn't read them if I linked to alternative sources. But these stories aren't highlighted and the general trend of two-tier justice isn't discussed. The top result on the BBC site for the phrase is headlined "Two-tier policing claims are 'nonsense', MPs told" and which simply lets the police deny it all without any pushback. They want to keep you in the dark, confused and mystified about why other people act the way they do, and it works: you were completely unaware of any of this. You won't be able to understand international or even domestic events if you get your news exclusively from the BBC.

And this stuff matters. It's not about me, or you. These stories have had a huge impact on Trump, Musk and the American right in general. They hold them up as examples of what would have happened to America if the Democrats had won, and of course America isn't averse to wielding American power against countries that they think are or are becoming totalitarian. These judicial rulings are therefore a major influence on the stance of the UK's most important ally (or maybe now, unfortunately, "ally"). To write it off as a mere difference in personal news preferences is to show how badly the BBC's selective reporting is distorting people's world views.
I really appreciate this one from 4.18:

Certain menus were not being properly translated when switching languages in the app. You know what they say about menus — they’re most helpful when you can read them.
Were I to design a computer (both HW & SW), the founding principle should be compatibility with legacy code at no expense of performance or user effort.

Stuff like this gives me hope that I'm not merely wet-dreaming.
Yeah but the person you are replying to is Swedish, according to a previous comment of his.
I was thinking about it again recently, but can't tell if it's worth. Have you used it in real life projects? How was it?
Solar seems to be hitting a lot of inflection points recently.

Colombia had 0.27GW total installed capacity as of the start of 2024.

In that year rooftop solar installed .215GW and utility scale installed 1.41GW

So just rooftop nearly doubled all solar installed ever in one year and utility more than 5x'd it
Somewhat surprisingly (to me), this is also found for User Interfaces [0]. The best initial design for a User Interface for a feature phone was done by designers who were not shown previous work by other designers. Iterations based on previous designs were only better if they were shown the "winning" initial design".

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/parallel-design/
This, we really should have unionized several years ago
The trick is to call the people who are using the AI to generate code something other than programmers.
> a landmark project that advances the EU's Digital Services Act

The only thing this advances is government surveillance over which services EU citizens are allowed to use. You should be ashamed for working on this and colluding with oppressing governments.
Is that actually a thing? Anybody here being replaced with AI? I haven't observed any such trends around me and it's especially hard to imagine that happening in "tech" (the software industry). At this stage of AI development of course - if things continue at this pace anything is possible.
What's fascinating to me is how much everyone seems to have accepted the "per week" framing, which puts an implicit 20% lower bound on the ratio. In-office may be useful for some things, but I see very little thought given to how little of those things you actually need, what the optimum frequency is (rather than the overall amount), how clumping days in a row might affect things, or how those in-office days should be coordinated between teams.

My hunch is that team-building and the more social aspects need far less than justifies anything like once a week; and collaboration is always best done at point of need, not to a schedule, in my experience. That need might be week-long! That can happen! But to assume everyone's best served by some arbitrary ratio is patently absurd; so much so that I find it hard to take arguments for it in good faith.

I will acknowledge that new starters and juniors do need hand-holding, and in most companies that's hard to substitute out. The mechanisms for doing that face to face are well established. But I don't think that's impossible to migrate to a mostly remote experience.
Very excited for this - think the age transitions is a great way to spice up the middle game, which often turned into a slog.
Microsoft expects to get fusion power from Helion in 3 years, so (if we are very, maybe unrealistically, optimistic) the wait won't be that long.

Actually, seeing recent developments, I'm afraid the only remotely realistic chance left to limit global warming is for fusion to become widely available and dirt cheap pretty damn soon! Renewables, you say? Nah, those windmills are disgusting and made in China anyway, so we're better off burning good clean American coal and oil (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/03/trump-war-on...).
Except the terms that took hold in London are "West End" and "East End" rather than up-town and down-town.

It may have been used historically, but I cannot recall ever reading the terms in anything historical.

So I think, same principle, but different words.
Under this initiative, no personal data is transferred to companies, as it always stays in control and possession of the user. Please read more about it and about the European Digital Identity Wallet initiative, since it may answer some of your concerns :)
That sounds made up on the spot. I wrote leading commas in SQL for decades, no such thought crossed my mind. I still use and suggest them to people. They look especially good when aligning selected columns.
Also confirming that banning foreign traffic is the go-to eGovernment without CAPTCHA experience in Bulgaria.
These waves of "billion AI investments" across US and EU are and will be an unprecedented fraud and waste. Anyway since COVID and double Trump nothing surprises me anymore. Maybe French AI will design an innovative crocodile skin belt and sophisticated purse which will change our lives.
That's a really great guideline ... if you want to help out malicious people. Not everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Yep, I had a similar experience around a year or so ago. Hooking an LLM up to my RDMBS was really cool for the first 1-2 questions but fell over almost immediately with questions that strayed much further than “how many rows are in this table”.

Sure, you can do some basic filtering (but it would fail here making bad assumptions) and any (correct) joins were a crap-shoot. I was including schema and sample rows from all my tables, I wrote 10’s of lines of instructions explaining the logic of the tables and that still didn’t begin to cover all the cases.

Prompt engineering tons of business logic is a horrible job. It hard to test and it feels so “squishy” and unreliable. Even with all of my rules, it would write queries that didn’t work and/or broke a rule/concept that I had laid out.

In my experience, you’re much better off using AI to help you write some queries that you add to the codebase (after tweaking/checking) then you are having AI come up with queries at run time.
> If you want your idea to make the world a better place, use permissive, liberal licensing and move on.

Most examples of this directly contradict what you say. Whilst Apple has contributed somewhat to BSD, the vast majority of their work is closed up and sealed off. It's not making the world a better place.

GPL3 and AGPL are really the only defense against the tragedy of the commons.

> It's the equivalent of screaming "why can't we all just get along" into the Matrix.

You have it the wrong way around. MIT is screaming for people to place nicely and work together. GPL sets a strict contract and rules for playing, there is no screaming and there is no room for people to create their own forks and not work together.
You can just write a gpt wrapper that is really bad for the job and get some seed money I guess.
I would love to see a margin call on the tesla secured borrowing, he'd very publicly lose his marbles.
Such writings, articles, and sayings remind me of the Luddite movement. Unfortunately, preventing what is to come is not within our control. By fighting against windmills, one only bends the spear in hand. The Zeitgeist indicates that this will happen soon or in the near future. Even though developers are intelligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs, they will always be lacking and helpless in some way against these computational monsters that are extremely efficient and have access to a vast amount of information. Therefore, instead of such views, it is necessary to focus on the following more important concept: So, what will happen next?
No one remembers Expert Systems which were supposed to do this before but failed spectacularly due to the complexity of the issues, some of which were political and contractual, and the requirement of actual intelligence to resolve them.
TL;DR: The US Empire needs a shipbuilding revolution for war-purposes to defeat non-allied Republics.
BAML is like building blocks for AI engineers
I'm sure there is a formal proof someone can flesh out.

- Half assed developer can construct a functional program with AI prompts.

- Deployed at scale for profit

- Many considerations were not considered due to lack of expertise (security, for example)

- Bad things happen for users.

I have at least two or three ideas that I've canned for now because it's just not safe for users (AI apps of that type require a lot of safety considerations). For example, you cannot create a collaborative AI app without considering how users can pollute the database with unsafe content (moderation).

I'm concerned a lot of people in this world are not being as cautious.
I hated them! I couldn’t stand the look.

Learned to love the functionality of these though and the looks grew on me.
Why does this never happen? :(
Any real non paid reviews people recommend? Seeing the usual suspects with overly positive reviews that clearly arent representative.
and we also see with what consequences
I wanna hate it but I've done it. It's just tempting to go for the "this looks a bit wonky" or "add CSV import/export to X" ticket instead of the "weird bug, can't reproduce, here are some logs, reassigned 12 times in the past 3 years" ticket.
An ad with a (theoretical) opt out is still an ad. I don't want to see any ads, especially in a paid product.
What is the purpose of culture? It's a way of life. Arguably no culture has purpose, so do we force people to live in a different way?

Cultures and languages die out because they're slowly (or revolutionarily quickly!) replaced by another. It's not like there are people out there speaking no language because their mother tongue has died out.

And who gets to decide that a language has no purpose?

I don't like the way this argument goes.
1. Work for megacorp
2. Megacorp CEOs gloat about forthcoming mass firings of engineers
3. Pay taxes as always
4. Taxes used to fund megacorp (stargate)
5. Megacorp fires me.

The bitter irony.
In my opinion: because the Robustness principle [1] is a non-insignificant cause of bugs and SQL injection is a major player in the vulnerability game.

The first case that jumps to me: if you write "a,b,c," you can't know whether you forgot a parameter, you passed an empty string where there shouldn't be one, or you intentionally left a trailing comma. And SQL already is human-oriented - compare your typical SQL to a data operation in K [2]. It just so happens that some things are hard and off-by-one errors are famously near the top of the list [3].

Whenever a database complains that your SQL query contains a trailing comma it's a sign that you may not have paid enough attention to your arguments (or even worse, that you're building queries by hand instead of using prepared statements). From where I stand, not allowing trailing commas is a feature, not a bug, and I would therefore object against them.

[1] "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle#Criticism

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999650

[3] http://www.randomprogramming.com/2014/09/quote-of-the-week-h...
side effects include bone density loss, muscle loss and blindness.
I will stay podgy, thanks.
>America and its allies, meanwhile, have failed to incentivise poor countries to resist Chinese pressure over Taiwan, partly because of a reluctance (until Mr Trump came back) to link aid to foreign-policy goals.

Since taking office this year Trump has cut off funding to USAID completely and has threatened tariffs against Taiwan.
In (today’s) Persian they go something like this:

Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar
A Sportslike Manifesto