frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?

43•UmYeahNo•1d ago•27 comments

Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

17•nanocat•5h ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

8•jlmcgraw•7h ago•16 comments

Ask HN: 10 months since the Llama-4 release: what happened to Meta AI?

42•Invictus0•23h ago•11 comments

AI Regex Scientist: A self-improving regex solver

5•PranoyP•9h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

139•whoishiring•4d ago•510 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

312•whoishiring•4d ago•511 comments

Ask HN: Any International Job Boards for International Workers?

2•15charslong•4h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

4•pera•15h ago•13 comments

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

104•Philpax•2d ago•54 comments

Ask HN: Is Connecting via SSH Risky?

19•atrevbot•1d ago•37 comments

Ask HN: What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?

3•meffmadd•17h ago•7 comments

Ask HN: Has your whole engineering team gone big into AI coding? How's it going?

17•jchung•1d ago•12 comments

Ask HN: How does ChatGPT decide which websites to recommend?

5•nworley•1d ago•11 comments

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

7•justenough•1d ago•5 comments

Ask HN: Mem0 stores memories, but doesn't learn user patterns

9•fliellerjulian•2d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Anyone Seeing YT ads related to chats on ChatGPT?

2•guhsnamih•1d ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Does global decoupling from the USA signal comeback of the desktop app?

5•wewewedxfgdf•1d ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

123•blenderob•3d ago•122 comments

Kernighan on Programming

170•chrisjj•4d ago•61 comments

We built a serverless GPU inference platform with predictable latency

5•QubridAI•1d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: How Did You Validate?

4•haute_cuisine•1d ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Linux without GUI (for writing)

15•locusofself•3d ago•16 comments

Ask HN: Have you been fired because of AI?

17•s-stude•3d ago•15 comments

Test management tools for automation heavy teams

2•Divyakurian•1d ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?

7•buchanae•3d ago•18 comments

Ask HN: OpenClaw users, what is your token spend?

14•8cvor6j844qw_d6•4d ago•6 comments

Ask HN: Anyone have a "sovereign" solution for phone calls?

11•kldg•3d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Has anybody moved their local community off of Facebook groups?

23•madsohm•4d ago•17 comments

How do you deal with SEO nowadays?

5•jackota•1d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: What would you call a package whose purpose is to import data?

7•ctc24•1mo ago
Let's assume you're writing Go, Python, or any other language in which `import` is a reserved keyword. Let's assume also that you're writing a new package, whose purpose is to "import" data.

What do you name this package?

Our team went through this exercise semi-recently, and we're curious about how everyone else would think about it. Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of options we considered: imports, ingest, dataimport, ímport, impørt.

Comments

btilly•1mo ago
I like semantically different words for unrelated things. So I'd stay away from import.

I've called this kind of thing load, initialize, get_all, and so on.

I may also call it something based on where the data is stored if that is important. For example from_csv.

I might also name it based on what it is for. For example load_config.

Whatever seems clearest, and fits best with how the project itself does things.

andsoitis•1mo ago
> imports, ingest, dataimport, ímport, impørt.

a few good principles (not rules) for naming libraries:

a) signal abstraction level

b) avoid being too literal for it constrains evolution

c) pronounceable and spellable

d) prefer nouns over verbs because libraries are things not actions

e) metaphors beat descriptions

Consequently, I would avoid imports, ímport, impørt

"Ingest" feels like it is in a good direction. Any good reason not to use it?

ctc24•1mo ago
Agreed, I like `ingest` as well. It does somewhat violate principle d), but the other solutions violate more of those. And to your point, they're principles, not rules.
scaredreally•1mo ago
How about `importer`?
al_borland•1mo ago
The misspellings of import sound like they’d be a nightmare. Something like ingest sounds much better.

To come up with other names I’d probably think about additional context. What is being imported, how is it being done? Can those concepts be spun into a name?

ctc24•1mo ago
I'm with you on the misspellings. This is why we ultimately ruled out any of those options.
zahlman•1mo ago
What does "importing data" exactly mean in your context? What is special about this data that your package can do something useful that's specific to the data? What is special about the importing task that your users wouldn't rather just `with open(filename) as f:`?

Not rhetorical questions. You presumably have real reasons to create the package; meditating on them will bring you closer to an understanding. The reason that naming things is one of the "hard CS problems" is that it requires actually paying attention to your own work and a solution can't be looked up elsewhere.

tacostakohashi•1mo ago
Sounds a bit like ETL - extract, transform and load.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt•1mo ago
importer

importers

advantage: still single words correctly spelt. describes the library instead of abstractly the topic of the library

horladoyin•1mo ago
Importer seems like a good one.
gethly•1mo ago
Load and related expressions would be appropriate. Import implies the data is being put into the code, just like the plugins/modules.
moomoo11•1mo ago
dataloader

dataloader.loadAll

dataloader.open

dataloader.import