MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ripe | 2025-05-08 15:38:18+00:00
From the article:

The National Institutes of Health, which historically has funded the research behind almost every drug on the market, this month announced that it would shift money that had been spent studying mRNA vaccines to pay for a $500 million grant to study a universal vaccine using traditional, non-mRNA technology. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading critic of the Covid response and the new director of the N.I.H., called it a “paradigm shift.”
by cjustin | 2025-05-08 15:38:31+00:00
I often see this sentiment whenever a billionaire is in conversation, but I don't understand. Can you elaborate on how his wealth was "stolen" from people?

The way I see it, he's wealthy because he founded a wildly successful technology company by first creating something of value (MS-DOS). Microsoft has since grown to be one of the largest companies in the world, which hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily work for in exchange for a high salary, at least for engineers.
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-08 15:38:39+00:00
The sovereign wealth funds of the Nordic countries weren't built with tax dollars, but rather with oil revenue. We could do the same thing here if there were political appetite for holding energy companies responsible and the wealth they produce as belonging to the people living on the land the resources are coming out of.

We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:38:40+00:00
Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their renewable subsidies because they aren’t needed anymore.

Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the world cheaper than coal and fossil gas.

The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
by adrianwastaken | 2025-05-08 15:38:45+00:00
Location: Chicago, IL

Remote: Yes (preferred)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue, React, Python, Django, HTML/CSS, Tailwind, MySQL, GCP, Docker

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pWtXPh4q7_mCB5c8Y--S-pUJwyC...

Email: adrian.rodriguez.dev@gmail.com

Creative, detail-oriented software engineer who loves tackling complex problems and building solutions that genuinely help people. I'm driven by the opportunity to do meaningful work, constantly learning, and finding practical ways to improve systems and experiences. I bring a thoughtful approach to both code and collaboration, and I'm looking for a team where I can contribute to impactful projects and grow as an engineer.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-rodriguez-dev/

GitHub: https://github.com/adrianistaken

Website: https://adrianistaken.netlify.app/
by remus | 2025-05-08 15:38:47+00:00
No criticism of the man, but I think he may fail in this part of his goal

> People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.

It's easy to forget how absurdly wealthy the very richest in society are. Say he started this initiative on his 70th birthday and he's spreading his giving fairly lineraly over the next 20 years but dies just 1 day short of his 90th birthday, he'd still have about $13,698,630 to his name. I think most would consider someone with that money to their name rich.
by jleyank | 2025-05-08 15:40:14+00:00
Don’t know about brain wiring re noise, but severe hearing loss doesn’t do well in such an environment either. Even when fitted with proper hearing aids, noise wins. Things can be adjusted to focus on one’s immediate vicinity but it’s nowhere as good as unassisted hearing. One of the many reasons to be careful turning it up to 11.

Avoid server rooms. At least big iron is only in museums.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-08 15:40:37+00:00
Some video games have them, mostly the ones with customizable UIs like Eve Online [0], World of Warcraft and the like.

"Pro" trading websites, for stocks or cryptocurrencies (e.g. Kraken and Coinbase have different interfaces for regular and "pro" users)

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Panagiotis-Zaharias/pub...

[1] https://mtthwx.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/wowow.jpg (silly example)
by neonsunset | 2025-05-08 15:41:10+00:00
> Thanks. In my experience the CoreWCF team are fairly active, but I didn't want to bother them until I can understand if this is a problem with CoreWCF.

It may not be necessarily a problem but, ideally, the less users have to care about gotchas and knowing how to exactly use the API the better. There are some constraints to this but chances are at least documentation can be improved.

Plus, especially if there are not that many issues, it signals interest and active usage.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-08 15:42:06+00:00
> Weird edge cases like HTTP over non-TCP protocols or rendering without screens start throwing spanners into a tree of assumptions that never needed to be made

yes, but that's true of other abstractions too. Whether you use inheritance or not, you usually don't know what abstractions you need until you need them: even if you were using composability rather than inheritance, chances are that you'd have encoded assumptions that HTTP goes over TCP until you need to handle the fact that actually you need higher-level abstractions there.

If you don't use inheritance, you switch to an interface (or a different interface) in your composition. If you did use inheritance, you stop doing so and start using composition. The latter is probably some more work but i don't think it's fundamentally very different.
by tim333 | 2025-05-08 15:42:08+00:00
It's a mixed blessing. The deal is very similar to remittance basis taxation which we had in the UK until recently. It probably benefited the country in the way you say but was also kind of unfair in that foreign billionaires living here got a much better deal than British ones. It was just scrapped and a lot of millionaires are leaving for better or worse.

I'm skeptical that Trump will manage to get the tax changes through the house and senate and that they would remain through the next government which might put people off dropping $5m on the thing.

Also would Musk who has three citizenships be able to drop the US one and get a gold visa?
by mempko | 2025-05-08 15:42:43+00:00
Robert Ekelund, one of the authors, wrote pro-smoking articles for the tobacco industry. It's hard to trust someone like that and any data they present. It would take a lot of work to read those chapters and not only confirm the data they present, but also find data they aren't presenting, or deliberately omitting to make their case.

Is there another book making the same argument that doesn't have this baggage?
by numpad0 | 2025-05-08 15:42:52+00:00
? There are more private stuff in the world than what's public on the Internet. Naively believing that private parts must be the minor part and basically everything should be already on the WWW is pure arrogance.

Google paid a lot of effort a while back into putting up obsolete as hell 130nm Skywater PDK on the public 'net. I've seen people on social media describing their anxiety from just seeing some industry specific shapes and forms out in the open, despite knowing those files were thoroughly cleared for release and completely fine for anyone to see.

Reading up stuffs on WWW and thinking it should cover most of everything is like placing yourself in clothes of pre-war physicists who thought physics is all figured out like a sunny backyard except there's a tiny black pinhole in the sky called quantum physics that idiots are obsessed with. There's a whole universe(s) behind it.
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-05-08 15:42:56+00:00
No. Capitalism is ineffective at solving lots of problems. Particularly problems of the kind where there is universal inelastic demand, where competition makes the end arrive or product less affordable or efficient, where externalities are not priced in, and where there are single/few or a unique instance of a thing that can be used by the public.

Examples: healthcare, food and water for sustenance; insurance; pollution; parks and roadways, residential property; respectively.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-05-08 15:43:03+00:00
Yeah, Datadog's pretty amazing at having an absolute ton of depth but concealing most of the complexity behind a friendly-ish interface. Came into this thread to compliment them in particular.

(If anyone from Datadog reads this, please 1) introduce a hobbyist tier so I can afford to use DD on my Pi bramble, 2) consider hiring me, or 3) both)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-08 15:43:18+00:00
Maybe! It was hard to build Google, but it is rapidly getting easier to train models and serve inference (DeepSeek). The learning rate and cost decline curve are direct inputs into democratization (imho). So perhaps we should hope the gold rush continues for now? That aggregate investment FOMO is our collective opportunity. Until then, keep the racks of storage and GPUs comin'.
by mindcrash | 2025-05-08 15:43:47+00:00
I know about a org with ~2-3 devs who decided microservices would be cool. I warned not to go that way because they would surely face delivery and other issues which they wouldn't have when building the solution based on a architecture archetype which could be a better fit for the team and solution, which I evidently decided should be a modular monolith. (the codebase at that point was already a monolith, in fact, but had a large amount of tech debt due to the breakneck speed in which features needed to be released)

They ignored me and went the microservices way.

Guess what?

2 years later the rebuild of the old codebase was done.

3 years later and they are still fighting delivery and other issues they would never have had if they didn't ignore me and just went for the "lame" monolith.

Moral of this short story: I can personally say everything this article says is pretty much true.
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-08 15:43:50+00:00
Billionaires become billionaires because of preferential treatment by governments, not out of any kind of merit. There are lots of better things the world could have had, Linux and the software commons would be much much much better if Microsoft hadn't hired all the best software engineers to make proprietary software and if the federal government hadn't coddled it and overlooked its monopolistic practices. The Internet would be a much better place without the likes of Google and Microsoft throwing their weight around.

It's perfectly accurate to say that billionaires steal from the public, it's just that what's being stolen isn't easily quantifiable because it's effectively 'potential'. Think of the constant enshittification of everything and you get a sense for what's being stolen.
by metadat | 2025-05-08 15:44:12+00:00
Some dead linked content in TFA is resurrectable courtesy of archive.org (though I had to dig a bit, which is why I'm sharing):

Dubya's Sectera Edge, a BlackBerry-esque Ultra Secure PDA phone:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120922044930/http://www.gdc4s....

Product eventually deprecated in September, 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150926124453/http://www.gdc4s....

The link finally died with a site redesign in Jan 2016:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160131082757/http://www.gdc4s....

Original (now deceased) link: http://www.gdc4s.com/sectera-edge-(sme-ped)-proddetail.html

P.s. The device was somewhat comically proportioned, with thick antenna and bezels, haha: https://gdmissionsystems.com/-/media/general-dynamics/cyber-...

A teardown and chip analysis would be interesting! Though I imagine these devices aren't easy to come by?
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-08 15:44:24+00:00
There is expected to be no inherent stable ratio of RAM consumed to document size because the smallest possible document still requires 100% of the basic app and assets to be loaded in order for the app to work and thereafter this isn't expected to grow linearly with the size of the file.

What you are seeing is the expansion of the baseline app not the expansion of RAM required per kb of data. Indeed multiplying your post to a 3000 page monstrosity through the magical of cut and paste and select all only took around twice as much memory as a blank document.

> As file sizes grow (higher screen resolutions etc), a reasonable expectation would be for code size (=file format complexity + interfacing with the OS) to lag behind.

It is pretty clear that the opposite is always going to be true. Programs that don't die outright accumulate features and file formats over time multiply. Further even if the app were the same there are going to be opportunities to trade RAM consumed for a better experience that are going to make more sense the more plentiful RAM is.

There is no expectation whatsoever that coders targeting machines with 16GB of RAM and TB of storage to produce applications that are as parsimonious as those produced to target machines that have 512MB of RAM and GB of storage.

If you want parsimony you can always run emacs and export to pdf its rather fun.
by johnfn | 2025-05-08 15:44:31+00:00
> I feel like these days people just want quick answers to do very specific things but that's a very inefficient way to learn something like SQLAlchemy.

In defense of OP, a particular frustration I have with SQLAlchemy is that I understand SQL just fine, but the ways in which I translate my SQL knowledge into SQLAlchemy incantations is often pretty obscure. I think I deserve "quick answers to do very specific things" because I already have the exact form of the SQL solution in my head. That it then takes 20 minutes of digging through docs or ChatGPT is annoying.
by lucasfcosta | 2025-05-08 15:44:33+00:00
Co-author and founder of Briefer here.

I used to use em dashes before they were cool. I actually learned about them when I emailed a guy who's a software engineer at Genius and also writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

I asked him for tips on how to write well and he recommended that I read Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style", which uses em dashes exhaustively, and explains when and why one should use them.

It also pains me that I can't use them anymore or else people will think an AI did the writing.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-08 15:44:34+00:00
If real money enabled laundering as seamlessly as fake e-money I would call for its abolition and a return to the carving of giant stone wheels as currency.

Any attempt to say they are on the same level is intellectual bankruptcy.

Like asking "What's the problem with restricting access to VX? Everyone's got a can of bug spray in their cabinet and they're both organophosphates, brah!"
by Bender | 2025-05-08 15:44:51+00:00
Adding to this data-center servers should at very least use a proper set of caching DNS servers at the edge of their network and those should talk to the root servers as to not add to the global abuse of the anycast clusters. I've seen some companies go as far as to run Unbound on each and every server to improve the retry and caching mechanisms to great success. Unbound can also raise the min TTL as some applications get quite abusive if they use really low TTL's and the applications are making requests for every action. i.e. raising every TTL up to at least 30 seconds if they were lower. The excessive retries can compound really fast especially when applications and systems are not properly configured which is often the case. If people are not sure what I mean, run a UDP capture at the edge of your network and one may find that for each request an application makes there could be as many as 12 DNS requests. It adds up very fast.

App1 Unbound -> Data-center edge Unbound instances [1-4] -> Root DNS Anycast clusters

Unbound can be configured to either pick the fastest resolvers or to cycle through all of them and retry in the background when one fails to re-select it when it starts resolving again. This avoids a lot of outages otherwise known as "It's always DNS".
by singron | 2025-05-08 15:45:13+00:00
> You'll have a monolith, it might break out into frontend, backend and a separate service for async background jobs

And when you break these out, you don't actually have to split your code at all. You can deploy your normal monolith with a flag telling it what role to play. The background worker can still run a webserver since it's useful for healthchecks and metrics and the loadbalancer will decide what "roles" get real traffic.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-08 15:47:06+00:00
I've seen microservices get introduced at companies... it never solved a real problem, it was more to scratch a developer's itch, or cargo cult ideas. It started to fall apart when they tried to figure out how to get an order service to fetch the prices of a product from the product pricing service, only to realise they need to hold onto the product price at the time of placing the order (it was a high volume / short product life cycle type of e-commerce), so uhh.. maybe we should duplicate this product into the order service? And then it would need to end up at a payment or invoicing service, more data duplication. And everything had to go through a central message bus to avoid web-like sprawl.

The other one was a microservice architecture in front of the real problem, a Java backend service that hid the real real problem, one or more mainframes. But the consultants got to play in their microservices garden, which was mostly just a REST API in front of a Postgres database that would store blobs of JSON. And of course these microservices would end up needing to talk to each other through REST/JSON.

I've filed this article in my "microservices beef" bookmarks folder if I ever end up in another company that tries to do microservices. Of course, that industry has since moved on to lambdas, which is microservices on steroids.
by Lalabadie | 2025-05-08 15:47:39+00:00
I don't think I've read it written directly in this thread yet, but philanthropy ideally exists to fix gaps that public services and initiatives don't address.

It is a way of acting and holding public power outside of democratic accountability. I'm with Gates' implicit vision here, that the end-goal is for philanthropic initiatives towards a given problem to eventually not be needed.

Philanthropy is often used as a way to curry public (and government) gratitude for a rich person who deigned to direct crumbs of their wealth towards the public, which in turn one uses to amass or solidify power – again, outside of democratic structures.

By demanding that matters of public welfare be properly handled by the state, shift power back to democratic processes. As a bonus, government has an incentive to actually address issues. Performative philanthropy thrives on the continued existence of the problems they claim to address.
by ruined | 2025-05-08 15:47:47+00:00
california electric rates are so high because the state board keeps raising them

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2025/02/pge-reco...

PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
by ipaddr | 2025-05-08 15:47:58+00:00
He is not the greatest. He is literally taking the playbook from Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller who amassed great wealth then gave it away. These days you have Warren Buffett or Saros doing the same.

Many in tech were along for the Bill Gates show and felt he was a negative actor to the industry in many ways. The fact that he is taking that wealth and channeling it through charity to achieve what he believes is important worries many on both sides of the political divide because of the enormous amounts of power he has.

Specifically over the foundation: 1. Influence Over Public Policy Criticism: The foundation’s massive financial power allows it to heavily influence public health, education, and agricultural policy, sometimes without democratic oversight.

Example: In education, their support for charter schools and Common Core standards drew criticism for pushing reforms without enough input from teachers and communities.

2. Pharmaceutical and Vaccine Influence Criticism: The foundation has been accused of favoring pharmaceutical-based solutions, sometimes at the expense of broader public health approaches.

Example: Critics argue that funding pharmaceutical companies during vaccine rollouts (especially during COVID-19) prioritized private profits over equitable global access.

3. Corporate Ties Criticism: The foundation has invested in companies that contradict its stated goals (e.g., Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil), raising ethical questions.

Example: Investments in fossil fuel companies were seen as inconsistent with health and development goals.

4. Global South Criticism Criticism: Some argue that Gates Foundation programs in Africa and other regions can be top-down, lacking local input, and continuing a form of “philanthropic colonialism.”

5. Agricultural Interventions Criticism: Through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the foundation promoted industrial farming and GMOs.

Response: Some say this undermines traditional, sustainable farming practices and increases dependence on multinational corporations for seeds and fertilizers.

6. COVID-19 Vaccine Access Criticism: Gates opposed waiving IP rights for COVID-19 vaccines, which some argued delayed access in poorer countries.

Defense: The foundation claimed that maintaining IP was key to quality and speed, though many public health experts disagreed.

He is an interesting and unique character who achieved much but don't polish those angel wings just yet.
by devin | 2025-05-08 15:48:36+00:00
In my experience, it seems the majority of folks know the pitfalls of microservices, and have since like... 2016? Maybe I'm just blessed to have been at places with good engineering, technical leadership, and places that took my advice seriously, but I feel like the majority of folks I've interacted with all have experienced some horror story with microservices that they don't want to repeat.
by abhisek | 2025-05-08 15:49:05+00:00
GitHub Actions by default provide isolated VM with root privilege to a workflow. Don’t think job level privilege isolation is in its threat model currently. Although it does allow job level scopes for the default GitHub token.

Also the secrets are accessible only when a workflow is invoked from trusted trigger ie. not from a forked repo. Not sure what else can be done here to protect against compromised 3rd party action.
by belorn | 2025-05-08 15:49:07+00:00
It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built natural gas power plant as the solution to that intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the government responsibility, and thus the bill for that natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees.

I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
by netsharc | 2025-05-08 15:49:13+00:00
I've read of a language, or I guess dialect of English called "European english", i.e. English as spoken Europeans that learnt it as a second language. Another example is how a Brit using too many idioms like "Bob's your uncle" would confuse English speakers that haven't been exposed to Britishisms.

Searching on YouTube just gives me this relevant result, an English that has some new/odd words that's been adapted by the Euro-bureaucrats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf8KxvRYvQU