gremlinunderway

This has to be a satirical response. Please tell me it's satire. If it's satire it's actually a pretty bad caricature of elon fan boys.

Because I can't believe anyone would seriously make a comparison to a 55+ year old car manufactured in a communist country.

It's like saying that an email server that takes a week to send emails is fine because the wait times for a posted letter in the 1960s could take 2 weeks.

>a rogue ad-blocker app is exactly as dangerous as a rogue VPN service. Fortunately, because these ad-blocking apps are usually open-source, there are limited opportunities for bad actors.

I find it naive to state this when earlier he noted that he's suspicious of free services without a clear funding model.

Sure, open source is certainly better than closed source, but its not like somehow magically it prevents exploitation. There's plenty of examples especially in a small project like this with few eyeballs. So why question the funding model of a free VPN but not question the funding model of an open source project? We just assume its being done out of good will? I find that perspective naive.

From experience I'll say one thing that Polars doesn't have great interfacing with is doing things like string concatenation, like taking multiple columns and combining them in with static string text in complex ways to create new columns.

Pandas has a really simple ability to just define a new column with

`df['col_a'] + "text" + df[col_b']` where "text" can be any string text inbetween your column values from col_a and col_b

If i remember correctly while you can do pl.col("col_a") + pl.("col_b") for plain concatenation, you can't mix in static text strings like you can with pandas and I haven't found really elegant ways to do that personally. Whereas I've found polars doesn't have as simple of a way to do that. You can choose to add one separator and make that anything you want, but only one separator and only inbetween the two values (so no suffixes or prefixes for example).

That being said, I hate everything to do with the pandas API (especially with its indexing system) and really prefer the more polars API for anyone coming from a SQL or database background. Pandas really shows its sort of academia background rather than a data engineering origin.

Would love to know what prompts you used for this. Anytime I've ever tried to make an LLM create funny but satirical jokes it fails terribly and comes across cringey and try-hard. This one genuinely seems funny and absurd.

I mean, in fairness these are two completely different domains. OS development and AI business intelligence are as far apart as one can get.

That being said, given the AI context, it does sound pretty shortsighted to choose an overly saturated existing name for your new product. AI agents or LLM chat bots will definitely be confused with prompts like "hey what's this graphene project?". Dunno how tthey missed that.

Sounds like to me maybe universities should stop focusing on being cash grabbing machines and instead properly teach with a useful instructor-to-student ratio?

Sorry, if your answer as to why using a beneficial pedagogical approach is your class sizes are too large, then it sounds like your class sizes are too large!

It's not meant to "encourage the rich to support" the health system, it's meant to avoid completely gutting the public health system by creating a parallel pay-for-play system where only the richest pay and subsequently suck up all of the already finite resources and talent.

Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.

There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.

Also citing Fraser Institute, a known extremely right-wing hack "think tank" is like citing a used car salesman on the benefits of buying a car. Their entire raison d'etre is to privatize any remaining public good in Canada, so they will always hunt for any kind of information or data they can to paint whatever picture they want from their lobby funds.

Oh give me a break. This argument that people's objections to advertising comes from some Pollyanna naivety over things being free is nonsense. Tell me the last time you have ever seen a company be upfront and explicitly offer a free tier where they tell you upfront exactly what they are harvesting about you and for what purpose (and no, "improving user experience" isn't being upfront) but also offer you a paid version where they explicitly promise not to do that.

"If the product is free then you are the product" is supposed to be a cautionary observation, not an axiomatic proscription.

Does anyone actually trust companies that offer paid services to not harvest their data? Whenever I see this trope I think to myself that whatever lack of regulation, oversight and enforcement lead to that being okay would equally allow for them to both take my money and harvest all my of data anyways.

This is akin to people who criticise socialised medicine or services and pejoratively characterize supporters as just wanting "free stuff", as if the concept of collective payment is naive or something

It's almost as if outside the tech bubbles most people don't understand the tech or implications. HN posters who live and breath in this space are so smug to pretend this esoteric knowledge about networking identifiers or fingerprinting is simple and that anyone can get it. These are the same people who will throw their hands up on any other esoteric topic and give up on it equally. For example, tech people so easily decry how "stupid" the law and legal jurisprudence is (because obviously if they don't understand it, it must be bullshit) but see zero irony in being smug pretentious assholes to regular people who didn't happen to major in computer science.

We shouldn't all have to be PhDs in law and jurisprudence to trust a legal system to look after our interests just like we shouldn't all have to be computer scientists to trust that technical stewards are not exploiting people's lack of knowledge.

Sick of this mentality. Oh these people are sheep idiots who don't understand the EULA euphemisms of "improved user experience " means adtech and behavioural tracking.

There's actually no continental definition in the EU constitution but yes probably in practice this is correct in terms of perception

Yeah but see, we're talking about a functionality that is inherently visual. Ergonomics has nothing to do with esthetics, and it's such a dumb excuse to hand wave aside interface issues as of they are just about "making things look pretty"

I mean, if they aren't even willing to download the one app that actually gets them the content they want to see, then *no* software will ever be something that this type of user will be interested in. Not everyone has to use an app, so why try and cater to an audience who clearly has zero interest? You're not gonna magically make it somehow even easier than "go to app store, download app" to the point that they'll use any piece of software.

I will never understand the point of teaching languages that aren't actually used. To me it just seems like its intended to be easier for the teacher rather than being beneficial for the student.

Python is already a super simple language and has enough functional plus OOP orientation that it can be used to showcase every concept and still be useful for the student.

Completely pointless...

It's because Western governments do a much better job of legitimizing their corruption or just doing it "transparently" (which makes it okay, you see?).

Best example is registered lobbying. If you have the money, you absolutely can brazenly bribe politicians and not only is it okay, in the United States its been backed by the highest courts as a form of "expression".

Bribing is okay in the West because its not bribing, its legitimized entirely with weasel words like "lobbying" or "fundraising". As long as you're "transparent" about it then its fine.