MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:03:51+00:00
> In my case, the questions were closed very quickly.

I'm happy to hear it. This is how it's supposed to work. If the system were properly designed, questions would start out closed - that is to say: the community would have a chance to fully refine the question and ensure that it meets the site's standards, before people were allowed to write answers.

(The new Staging Ground implements a form of this, for a small selection of new questions.)

The point is to ensure that everyone who has the same question can have an optimal experience by finding it: they should see a question that's easy for them to read and understand; they should easily be able to verify that it's the same question (even though it came up in a radically different context for someone else); they should be able to come across it with a search engine (so the title should make sense, etc.); and it should be properly focused. Then they can scroll down - ideally, not very far - and see the answers, already written, without themselves having to ask again and wait.

> you can't expect to have 10 upvotes in the first day for those.

Ultimately, the thing that gets a question 10 upvotes in the first day is off-site exposure. That's not how it's supposed to work, but the Internet is what it is.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-08 16:03:54+00:00
> Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities.

Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore, especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern is intermittence.

Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable other than energy output is most useful in order to compare energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload source".

Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of education and communication.
by no_wizard | 2025-05-08 16:04:30+00:00
>Most “benefits” assumed from separation can be achieved with clear interfaces and modular monoliths, without the cognitive and operational tax microservices impose.

Perhaps yes. Every situation should be evaluated on merits. This came across that there is also an assumption that we didn't try other solutions first - we absolutely did. Microservice is the best solution to solving the problems we needed solved in this case. Even better than modular monolith with clear interfaces.

>without the cognitive and operational tax microservices impose

When done correctly, I don't think there is a tax. Most operational questions should be automated away once discovered. The only 'tax' is that it lives separately from the larger application and is deployed independently, but I haven't seen in practice this add any notable overhead.

>Preventing misplaced logic is a matter of good code structure, well defined software development processes and team discipline

All true, and a microservice can aid all of these things too, but isn't the solution you should reach for when solving for these things and these things alone in my opinion. That said, myself and others have observed there is time saved on enforcing discipline around this issue once we separated the code away from the main application. I can't deny that hasn't been a good thing, because it has. It would be leaving information out about the benefits we'v experienced, and I see no reason to do that.

All told, completely dismissing the value of microservices as a potential solution is no different than completely dismissing other solutions in favor of microservices. Things have their place, there are pros and cons to them, and should be evaluated relative to their merit for the situation.

You may find you never implement microservices, or implement very few, or perhaps the needs of an organization is as such that its a pattern used most of the time, but the technical merits of doing so - with any decision of this nature, not limited to microservices - should have a backing justification that includes why other solutions don't fit
by schmookeeg | 2025-05-08 16:04:47+00:00
> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.

I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.
by dekrg | 2025-05-08 16:05:05+00:00
Yeah, sure. Just cheating.

>In a 2022 interview, Melinda said, “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” per Page Six, adding that she only met the child sex offender once because she “wanted to see who” he was. “I regretted it the second I walked in the door,” she went on, adding, “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/melinda-ga...

If you just Google what Bill Gates later said then of course you will find how he only met a few times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
by deweller | 2025-05-08 16:05:09+00:00
The technical term is "monetary premium".

Gold has a utility (or industrial) value. But that value is significantly lower than the actual price. The rest of the price of gold is monetary premium.

I say Bitcoin's large network, censorship resistance and worldwide adoption give it some base utility value. The rest is monetary premium.

I do agree with your sentiment. Stablecoins (UDSC, etc) are predictable and are much better suited for actual spending.
by delusional | 2025-05-08 16:05:12+00:00
Ignoring AI (don't @ me) what are we doing with all that compute? Google (the search engine) hasn't meaningfully changed. Shopping is still largely the same as when Amazon first started out. Websites are pretty much the same. I don't understand what we're doing with all those operations.

I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
by haarolean | 2025-05-08 16:05:28+00:00
It's hard to take him seriously or consider him a good guy. While advocating for the environment, he doesn't hesitate to short tesla, an EV company (questionable nature aside).

There are two possible reasons for this (the 'why' remains -- not enough money?):

- He's admitting he doesn't care about the environmental mission, just the returns

- He thinks tesla is a fraud, but isn't saying it publicly

Either way, it's sus, so it's tough to trust him.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-08 16:05:50+00:00
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that the wealthy people doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it.

The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are. The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do. You should be a lot more worried about wealthy folks who don't donate to charity and just spend the money on big luxury yachts and the like, because these folks are essentially free-riding on everyone else.
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-08 16:05:51+00:00
> Even though restaurants are meant to make up the gap between the tipped and actual minimums, they often don't.

This is the one thing that really irks me. This is a known thing. But everyone seems to think the solution to that is "well, the customer should fix that". Any attempt to try to fix that through Departments of Labor is met with reasons why not. Servers don't want to report their employer, etc.

And then that leads to tropes like "If you don't tip well, I am being taxed to serve you". No, you're not. The IRS taxes you on an estimate of your tipped income - if you can show that it was less than that, then that's what you get taxed on. The reality is that the IRS's estimate assumes that you get 8% tips (when was the last time you ever saw that?), so most servers are undertaxed on tipped income, and don't want to rock that boat.

Last time I mentioned this here, a few people piped up that this "didn't matter", because there is "no way to document cash tips for the IRS"...

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f4070--2005.pdf - fill this out, once a month. It takes a good three to four minutes.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-08 16:06:01+00:00
```In a modern conflict zone, jamming L-band means blinding drones, degrading targeting, and cutting off ISR. It’s not accidental. It’s deliberate.

The international treaties that say “don’t transmit here”? Those don’t matter much when you’re trying to survive a drone swarm.```

LLM prose, and it's not the only section that stands out. It's an informative article, so I don't mind it as much, but I think it's a shame people don't write things themselves anymore.
by altruios | 2025-05-08 16:06:10+00:00
What a completely unhelpful comment: for all you know they are infertile. Having children shouldn't be done for such selfish reasons as mere personal fulfillment. I care about the kind of life a hypothetical human offspring would have (which is why I choose not to have any currently). Creating a family is a really weird solution to bring up.

But your rage is valid, I think it is just misplaced. The above commenter to you could perhaps be more effective in their decision making regarding filling their existential void. But family planning is a rash and presumptuous 'solution' to filling that need.
by dbl000 | 2025-05-08 16:06:49+00:00
It's not just information density but rather intended use design. A lot of engineering/manufacturing parts suppliers tend to have good information dense websites that are really catered to their customers for finding parts.

Take mouser.com, digikey.com, grainger.com rockauto.com or mcmaster.com. They all have a bit of a "landing page" but once you go to search for parts you've got something that was really designed to be an intuitive parts search. Compare that with jameco.com which competes with mouser/digikey but has a more classic webshop search system. It’s a bit more frustrating to use.

Some news sites also do a great job of presenting headlines and highlights well in a small area. I think semafor.com is probably my current favorite, but I'll readily admit that it's not the most information dense.

CAD software also tends to be good at this, but that might be just because the UI has chugged along since the 90's. AutoCAD/Inventor/Solidworks/SolidEdge/KiCAD/Altium/Virtuoso are all great examples where if you've got prior experience with them (or even similar software) you can sit down and quickly get up to speed on a project and see what's been done. I think the distinction is that a lot of software/websites are designed to keep the average user focused on a single aspect and so they are designed to either remove or hide the complexity but for more “professional” level tools you need all that data and information. You can probably blame (for better or for worse) material UI for a lot of this spaced-out thing. In my mind that was the first mobile first UI scheme that really took off and it's basically influenced everything that's come sense then. Computer first software might be your best bet to get some examples. Because a lot of the web is mobile first/mobile forward now you probably aren't going to find a lot of examples on that. I would love to see examples of information dense mobile first sites.

A few other examples I just wanted to brain dump:

- labgopher.com

- tld-list.com

- The Bloomberg Terminal

- Ghidra

- Most plane cockpits, especially modern fighter planes if you ever get to see/sit on one.

- A lot of “professional level creative software” – Reaper, Affinity

- Train control and monitoring systems
by JohnFen | 2025-05-08 16:07:05+00:00
"Pay yourself first"

Take 10% of any money that you receive and put it somewhere safe and where it takes real effort to get it back out. Then don't touch it unless your need is truly dire.

The idea is that regardless of your income level, you can almost certainly live on 10% less without a substantial hit to your standard of living, so pay it to Future You. The earlier in life you start, the better.
by deater | 2025-05-08 16:07:17+00:00
you can also get a regular interrupt from a Mockingboard sound card, these days it's probably more likely people will have one of those (especially if they are running under emulation) than a mouse card.

when writing demos and games that have mockingboard support it's always tempting to take advantage of the timers on the 6522 chips on it, though it does mean that the programs wouldn't have been useful for most people back in the 80s/90s
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-08 16:07:29+00:00
That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"

If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]

So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.

[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
by Alupis | 2025-05-08 16:07:31+00:00
I suspect a lot of the issues teams encounter with microservices stem from a lack of cohesive understanding of microservices.

If people on the team continue to think about the "system" as a monolith (what they already know and are comfortable with), you'll hit friction ever step of the way from design all the way out to deployment. Microservices throw out a lot of traditional assumptions and designs, which can be hard for people to subscribe to.

I think there has to be adequate "buy-in" throughout the org for it to be successful. Turning an existing mono into microservices is very likely to meet lots of internal resistance as people have varying levels of being "with it", so-to-speak.
by wongarsu | 2025-05-08 16:07:35+00:00
Microsoft's company practices under Gates don't help, but they are far from the main issue people have with him nowadays. Most people aren't even aware of the things Microsoft did.

People think he is the antichrist because he promotes vaccines and because there are multiple quotes of him where he explains that he wants to reduce the world's population. By raising the standard of living and giving healthcare to the poor, which empirically seem to cause lower birth rates, but lots of nutjobs assume he tests weaponized vaccines or something like that. And people are distrusting of people who appear too altruistic in general, thinking it's some kind of con (and often they are right).
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-08 16:08:20+00:00
Every org I've tried to see push microservices did exactly the wrong version.

Rather than 1 micro service per team, which many devs.. it was some team that owns 20 services, generally way more services than developers.

It's probably just how non-lean Mag7 were in peak vs how lean most other orgs that try to ape them are.
by Aerroon | 2025-05-08 16:08:22+00:00
>So they resort to inflationary policies like deficit spending, manipulating interest rates, and "money printing".

Don't forget all the hidden taxes like payroll taxes ("It's totally the company paying the tax!") and sin taxes ("This is for your own benefit!"). These are all ways to "hide" how much taxes regular people have to pay.

I think one of the most interesting charts to look at is "government spending as a percentage of GDP". Seeing it grow from about 10% to 55% from 1900 to today (in France) [0] makes you think about government/social spending and its future. It certainly cannot 'improve' the way it has over the past century -we're hitting diminishing returns after getting to 50%.

Think about it: government spending going from 10% of GDP to 20% of GDP doubles the money available for the government, but people retain 80% instead of 90% of their money. Meanwhile going from 60% government spending of GDP to 70% only gives the government 16% more budget.

Also, as an aside whenever you see US numbers in charts like this you have to figure out whether they're using federal government spending or federal + state, because it's only the latter that's comparable to most other countries (and it's typically about 50% more than federal spending).

[0] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA
by eloisant | 2025-05-08 16:08:30+00:00
1 team supporting multiple services is not great, but a monolith with more than 50 developers working on it (no matter how you split your teams) isn't great either.

That's why I don't like the term "microservice", as it suggests each service should be very small. I don't think it's the case.

You can have a distributed system of multiple services of a decent size.

I know "services of a decent size" isn't as catchy as "go for one huge monolith!" or "microservices!" but that's the sensible way to approach things.
by chasing | 2025-05-08 16:08:57+00:00
> A more serious political observation is that this administration operates on the theory that possession is 9/10ths of the law.

It's just wild to me that people aren't simply arrested when this kind of thing occurs. It's not Trump's money. It's not Republican money. He has a narrowly defined role and anything outside of that is illegal.

It's not exactly surprising, though, given half the government is run by the weakest and most deranged major political party in American history. The simple fact that the GOP has been steamrolled by this guy is the best evidence of the fact that since the 1970s they've been on a steep downward slide to become a party completely devoid of political talent, governing philosophy, or spine.

Even if this gang of dipshits were trying to do good, they don't have the capacity to be able to understand complex situations and make accurate and nuanced choices. An example of this situation being RFK Jr.

Normal people need to be screaming this from the hills. A healthy country in a competitive world cannot be run by grifters and morons. There's no "both sides" here.
by ljm | 2025-05-08 16:08:59+00:00
One place I worked at got sold on microservices by Thoughtworks, along with a change to Java as the main language to be used.

As one would expect, they made bank from their consulting endeavor and rode off into the sunset while the rest of us wasted several years of our careers rewriting ugly but functional monolithic code into distributed Java based microservices. We could have been working on features and product but essentially were justifying a grift, adding new and novel bugs as we rebuilt stable APIs from scratch.

The company went under not long after the project was abandoned. Nobody, of course, would be held to account for it. I will no longer touch a tech consultancy like TW with a 10 foot barge pole.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-05-08 16:08:59+00:00
Yes, there was an agricultural revolution during the neolithic times. We have evidence this for the Southwest Asia aka Middle East, Asia around the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, South, Central and North Americas.

I am open to this hypothesis (conjecture?), it just lacks supportive evidence. On the other hand, we have ample evidence that agricultural revolution did not "turn people white" in the other regions.
by byte-bolter | 2025-05-08 16:09:12+00:00
Your 4060 Ti with 16 GB is perfect for 1080p gaming and light AI work—extra memory really helps with things like Stable Diffusion or small LLMs. The RTX 5060’s GDDR7 is faster, but 8 GB can fill up quickly under those loads. AMD’s new RX 7600/7700 cards with 12–16 GB and better ROCm support might be a solid non-Nvidia option.
by Ukv | 2025-05-08 16:09:30+00:00
> The reason that’s okay is because you aren’t competing against the initial source material.

I don't mean to claim that search engine image thumbnailing is like-to-like in every consideration, just that it demonstrates there's no "human spirit" required in order to qualify as "transformative" as far as fair use is concerned. Search engine image thumbnailing has been found to be transformative, for instance in Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.: "Google's use of thumbnails is highly transformative."

And, though I'm probably being pedantic here, I think it's important to distinguish that the other fair use factor you allude to is not whether you're "competing against" the original work, but specifically the effect of your use on the market/value of that original work. For example if your documentary uses a clip from a TV show and also happens to air in the same time-slot as that TV show - the extent you compete/displace market for the TV show in general (even as you would had you not included the clip of it) is not what's under consideration, but rather only the additional extent you displace its market specifically due to inclusion of that clip.

Because of that, I'd claim that some machine-learning-based tool that partially displaces the market for a work it was trained on (for instance, Google Translate displacing the market for a translated version of a book) might still be seen reasonably favorably under the market impact factor, so long as the extent it displaces that work is largely independent of whether it has trained on that work specifically (such as if the translation tool could already provide a decent translation of the original book even before having trained on its translated version).