MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dkarl | 2025-05-08 16:32:12+00:00
My current take on microservices is that people pay serious attention to modularity and API design in the context of microservices. They work hard to break down the problem properly and design good interfaces between parts of the system.

In monoliths, they generally don't.

There's no logical reason why you couldn't pay as much attention to decomposition and API design between the modules of a monolith. You could have the benefit of good design without all the architectural and operational challenges of microservices. Maybe some people succeed at this. But in practice I've never seen it. I've seen people handle the challenges of microservices successfully, and I've never seen a monolith that wasn't an incoherent mess internally.

This is just my experience, one person's observations offered for what they're worth.

In practice, in the context of microservices, I've seen an entire team work together for two weeks to break down a problem coherently, holding off on starting implementation because they knew the design wasn't good enough and it was worth the time to get it right. I've seen people escalate issues with others' designs because they saw a risk and wanted to address it.

In the context of monoliths, I've never seen someone delay implementation so much as a day because they knew the design was half-baked. I rarely see anyone ask for design feedback or design anything as a team until they've screwed something up so badly that it can't be avoided. People sometimes make major design decisions in a split second while coding. What kind of self-respecting senior developer would spend a week getting input on an internal code API before starting to implement? People sometimes aren't even aware that the code they wrote that morning has implications for code that will be written later.

Theoretically this is okay because refactoring is easy in a monolith. Right? ... It is, right?

I'm basically sold on microservices because I know how to get developers to take design seriously when it's a bunch of services talking to each other via REST or grpc, and I don't know how to get them to take the internal design of a monolith seriously.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:32:32+00:00
> Why close questions?

Because we're trying to build a searchable reference, such that if you try to look for an existing question, you a) find it; b) find the right question; c) find the best possible version of that question; d) can readily tell that you found what you want.

And because we are explicitly not trying to build a discussion forum, social media, "HN but specifically for programming questions", or anything else like that.

You might as well ask: why delete newly created pages on Wikipedia, or revert edits to existing pages?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 16:32:47+00:00
We are at the point in the S-curve where storage goes from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye.

Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...

https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids...

China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...

After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:

- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24

- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24

https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...

In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.

That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.

With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage.

That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight.

In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.

Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?
by xyzal | 2025-05-08 16:32:48+00:00
Excuse me? Of course you can do a lot of things. Talk to your neigbor, share gov't f-ups on social media, learn to argue for democracy and against common MAGA narratives, join protests, donate to good causes, make your political preference visible, spark dialogues.

We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-08 16:33:09+00:00
> Were the doomsayers wrong?

They certainly were, but you've elided the reason why. The doomsayers were predicting that we would have complete civilization collapse when the year rolled over to 2000. Vast quantities of wealth erased by bank computer errors, planes falling from the sky and killing thousands upon thousands, etc. Such extreme scenarios were never plausible. The doomsayers were wrong because there was a real problem and it did get fixed, but that problem would never have amounted to the apocalyptic event they said it was going to.
by beloch | 2025-05-08 16:33:16+00:00
The one problem Gates doesn't seem willing to tackle in earnest is the billionaire problem.

i.e. Somebody close to the control of money funnels a disproportionate (based on expertise, intelligence, effort, contribution, etc.) amount to themselves. They quickly come to view this as the just natural order and view anyone who disagrees as a communist hater.

Elon Musk is the current best example. Despite spending most of his time at twitter last year, Tesla was trying to set Musk's compensation at over $100 billion[1]. For what, exactly?

Bill Gates was every bit the problem billionaire in his own time. Only a tiny proportion of billionaires ever decide to engage in significant philanthropy, much of which wouldn't be necessary if their peers weren't draining society of the capital to do it's own research and building. Some argue that billionaires can serve society by hoarding resources and then directing them intelligently in directions governments are too stupid to consider, but that argument falls flat if most billionaires never get past the hoarding stage. Gates has called on his peers to do more. Few have listened.

It's great that a few former robber barons are engaged in serious philanthropy, but it's like slapping a band-aid on a bullet wound. It would be far better to stop the shooting. Reigning in executive pay would be a solid start. How do we do that?

[1]https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-08 16:33:37+00:00
This dietician blog on the British Heart Foundation website suggests it's wrong but partly right[0], saying "although having low levels of vitamin D is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the low vitamin D is a result of lifestyle factors that increase your risk of heart disease and stroke, rather than the cause of increased risk.".

The leading causes of death in the UK[1] are heart disease, lung cancer, influenza, dementia, vascular disease (stroke?) and lower respiratory disease. Skin cancer is 1% of cancer deaths, and for melanoma the peak of diagnosis is people 85-89 years old[2]. Considering average life expectancy, people are generally diagnosed with skin cancer a few years after they die.

The partial claim "refrain from going outside which in turn .. is way worse than potential UV induced cancer risks" could be right. Avoiding exercise and increasing your heart disease risk, in the hope that you'll avoid one of the more treatable and less fatal cancers in very late life, is probably the wrong tradeoff. Not to do with Vitamin D or covering up or suncream though. Still, why not do both - cover up and go out, lower heart disease risk and lower your chances of skin cancer diagnosis in late life.

[0] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[2] https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/melanoma/background-informati...
by echelon | 2025-05-08 16:33:40+00:00
If your application has different load or resource requirements, you should build separate services, even in a startup.

You can put most of your crud and domain logic in a monolith, but if you have a GPU workload or something that has very different requirements - that should be its own thing. That pattern shouldn't result in 100 services to maintain, but probably only a few boundaries.

Bias for monolith for everything, but know when you need to carve something out as its own.

At scale, you're 100% correct.
by parpfish | 2025-05-08 16:33:54+00:00
I’ve read a lot of pros/cons about micro services over the last decade, but don’t have a clear definition for what qualifies.

My current job insists that they have a “simple monolith” because all the code is in a single repo. But that repo has code to build dozens of python packages and docker containers. Tons of deploy scripts. Different teams/employees are isolated to particular parts of the codebase.

It feels a lot like microservices, but I don’t know what the defining feature of microservices is supposed to be
by frollogaston | 2025-05-08 16:34:01+00:00
This is also why app backends don't really need statically typed languages, no matter how big the company is. You have a well-defined API on the front, and you have a well-defined DB schema on the back, that's good enough.

The static typing makes even less sense at finer code scopes, like I don't need to keep asserting that a for-loop counter is an int.
by ben_w | 2025-05-08 16:34:04+00:00
> Roof top solar doesn’t work in apartments, and it also doesn’t work for renters.

So it doesn't go on the roof.

Doesn't mean you can't get PV, in an apartment, as a renter:

https://www.kaufland.de/product/502008893/

These are specifically intended for apartments, and Germany has a low home ownership rate.

It may only be 800W, but it's also only €239, not $10,000 like you suggest in the other reply.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-08 16:34:12+00:00
Monolith really is the best path and I question if you couldn't make it work in ~100% of cases if you genuinely tried to.

One should consider if they can dive even deeper into the monolithic rabbit hole. For example, do you really need an external hosted SQL provider, or could you embed SQLite?

From a latency & physics perspective, monolith wins every time. Making a call across the network might as well take an eternity by comparison to a local method. Arguments can be made that the latency can be "hidden", but this is generally only true for the more trivial kinds of problems. For many practical businesses, you are typically in a strictly serialized domain which means that you are going to be forced to endure every microsecond of delay. Assuming that a transaction was not in conflict doesn't work at the bank. You need to be sure every time before the caller is allowed to proceed.

The tighter the latency domain, the less you need to think about performance. Things can be so fast by default that you can actually focus on building what the customer is paying for. You stop thinking about the sizes of VMs, who's got the cheapest compute per dollar and other distracting crap.
by haswell | 2025-05-08 16:34:23+00:00
I have a trusting relationship with a long term therapist, but they do not practice EMDR.

I saw someone who worked in the same practice for the EMDR sessions, but did not have the same depth of relationship with the EMDR practitioner, so maybe that was the issue.

I should mention that what ultimately changed the game for me in a major way was Ketamine assisted therapy as a supplement to my regular talk therapy.

After almost 10 years of weekly talk sessions, three Ketamine infusions was like jumping forward another 10 years in terms of processing/integration.
by jorvi | 2025-05-08 16:34:27+00:00
That is not their argument.

You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.

The government's tax income is allocated by the masses (in theory anyway). It is fair and dispassionate.

Philanthropy / charity is picking winners and losers based on your personal whims, and for many it is about gaining social capital.
Show HN: Zetta, an automated business intelligence tool
by tyler-zetta | 2025-05-08 16:35:54+00:00
I'd love feedback for our new business intelligence product Zetta (https://zettadata.ai). It's a lightweight, metrics-first approach to analytics that makes it easy to have properly governed dashboards from the jump.

We do require registration, but we have a free tier (and I'm happy to give out coupons for the paid tier). To get started: - Connect a database or data warehouse (we support BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Postgres, and MySQL) - Go to the metric builder and set up a data model and metrics. Data models are just references to tables or queries that create the base dataset for metrics, and metrics are aggregations on those datasets - After a few minutes, your metrics will appear in the automated dashboard and you can start exploring.

A more detailed guide can be found here: https://www.loom.com/share/09bcb14ec97442a396f9260c8dfccb13

Or in our help center: https://zetta-data.notion.site/Zetta-Help-Center-1e4ec7db8f1...
by Lammy | 2025-05-08 16:35:57+00:00
Here you go – I took a look on a Mac OS 9 VM, and the System suitcase is what you want; MENU resources; resource ID -16489 on here but expect that to vary by version. Select the menu item you want and you can set a “CMD Key” in the bottom right corner https://i.imgur.com/wcqQ27j.png

Don't do this on the running System suitcase. ResEdit will warn you about this too. Make a backup copy, make your changes to the backup copy, then boot from some other blessed System Folder (install CD is fine) and swap them out.

The mindset where you can edit anything on everything is what we truly lost when we lost the Classic Mac OS. These themes are merely one embodiment of that mindset. It's just Resources all the way down; Any user-facing String, any UI graphics, any icons, any cursors, any sounds, any menus, any window definitions, any dialogs. ResEdit can even be extended to support editing custom (non-Apple) Resource types, to say nothing of the more powerful third-party Resource editors like Resourcerer.

Applications' code even lived in `CODE` resources in the original 68k days before the era of PowerPC and Code Fragment Manager moved that stuff to the Data Fork. A classic 68k-only Application would be a 0-byte file if one copied it to a PC improperly and discarded the Resource Fork. It's literally all Resources and that's so cool!

Here's Apple's ResEdit Reference if you need it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

Relevant Folklore: https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html

Relevant Inside Macintosh: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum... (warning: massive PDF)

I highly highly recommend you and anybody else interested in Classic Mac OS spend some time with David Pogue's excellent Macworld Mac Secrets 5th Edition: https://archive.org/details/mac_Macworld_Mac_Secrets_5th_Edi... (there's a 6th edition that covers early Mac OS X topics, but that just muddies the water)

edit: and keep your unmodified System suitcase backup somewhere besides the System Folder to ensure the Startup Disk control panel can't “bless” the unmodified one instead of the edited one. You can tell which suitcase is “blessed” because it will have the “Picasso” Mac OS face laid on top of the regular suitcase icon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_folder#Location_and_%22...
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-08 16:36:00+00:00
In the same vein, Karpathy's video series "Neural Networks from zero to hero"[0] touches upon a lot of this and intuitions as well. One of the best introductory series (even if you ignore the neural net part of it) and brushes on gradients, differentiation and what it means intuitively.

[0] https://youtu.be/VMj-3S1tku0?si=jq1cCSn5si17KK1o
by bzmrgonz | 2025-05-08 16:36:01+00:00
I agree, most startups could do with a decent hypervisor plus vps for web visibility, but honestly selfhosting is fine. I'm surprise no one has built a startup environment in a box of boxes (pfsense/truenas/proxmox/minIO/openwrt)<should cover almost any techstack imaginable>, if you want bleeding edge, add microcloud from canonical or incus.
by crote | 2025-05-08 16:36:08+00:00
> It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had been operated under green hydrogen

The only one promising that was the fossil industry, trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green" and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable for silly things like mid-term energy storage.

> 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.

No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is totally fine. At the moment natural gas is excellent for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil mix, solely because the transition mix isn't "green enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying to be holier than the pope.
by reikonomusha | 2025-05-08 16:36:17+00:00
Coalton remains in active development and is used at a couple companies. Like a handful of others in recent history, it's a language that's designed and implemented directly against the needs of either actual products or (PLT-unrelated) research initiatives, so things like performance aren't an afterthought.

There are a few software engineering positions in the Boston, MA area to work on the Coalton compiler (algebraic type systems, optimizations, high-performance computing, dev tools, ...) and to use it for autonomous, firm realtime systems (unrelated to quantum). Email in profile if interested.
by kyllo | 2025-05-08 16:36:36+00:00
Only perfect multicollinearity (correlation of 1.0 or -1.0) is a problem at the linear algebra level when fitting a statistical model.

But theoretically speaking, in a scientific context, why would you want to fit an explanatory model that includes multiple highly (but not perfectly) correlated independent variables?

It shouldn't be an accident. Usually it's because you've intentionally taken multiple proxy measurements of the same theoretical latent variable and you want to reduce measurement error. So that becomes a part of your measurement and modeling strategy.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 16:36:37+00:00
Right-wing parties and the center-left have been highly effective allies in getting people to demonize and ridicule the progressive left.

The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.
by xeromal | 2025-05-08 16:37:40+00:00
I'm not a catholic but I decided to watch the new Conclave movie as well as a Tasting History by Max Miller to learn a little bit about it. Very interesting but I'd love a historical movie on some of the past conclaves when the pope managed a standing army.

Edit: The Max Miller video was about the baby back ribs cooked in proto-bbq sauce made from grapes that was eaten by a conclave.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-08 16:37:43+00:00
when something actually happens it ceases to be a strawman. it might not be a representative sample (though the SRO running away and then going to court to fight for his right to run away after the parkland shooting does lend some credibility to the idea that we shouldn't expect help from the police, as does the police fighting in court to assert that they have no duty to protect people in the wake of that subway stabbing), but it is within the realm of possibility.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-08 16:37:45+00:00
Sorry. But you don't get to be a billionaire working as an executive.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm all for reigning in excessive executive pay. We should do so in any case. However, what I'm trying to say is, we can reign in executive pay as much as we like, and billionaires will simply siphon that leftover money to themselves in addition to the money they currently hoover up.
by csomar | 2025-05-08 16:38:33+00:00
If you are looking for a UI framework, checkout IBM Carbon: https://carbondesignsystem.com

I used it to build a merge conflict tool: https://codeinput.com and while it required a much deeper understanding than just reading the docs (tons of bugs), it is by far the most comprehensive UI framework out there. Most UIs either lack lots of components or are made by a couple front-end/react/css guys. This inevitably means that they lack research into things like typography, accessibility, patterns, etc..
by jFriedensreich | 2025-05-08 16:38:38+00:00
One of the motivations i build lanes.pm (a project management tool) was to counter that the only information dense UIs still being around seem to be spreadsheets / table views. Tables have their place but also lots of drawbacks for many workflows. One other great example is ableton live and a few other pro video/ 3d/ music suites. Especially ableton live is as dense as possible while still feeling elegant without tripping over or feeling fiddly.
by jerf | 2025-05-08 16:38:39+00:00
The problem is, ultimately, university acceptance is one dimensional. Fundamentally, the university is going to analyze all its applicants, more-or-less rank them according to its standards, and then take the top X applicants according to its metrics. Since you can't half-accept someone, there isn't a way to do anything else.

And once you have that measure, you are now subject to Goodhart's law [1]. There is no escape.

So, your university gives points for applicants who have extracurricular activities? Here comes someone that joined 15 clubs. Oh, do you want them to be leaders in their activity? Here comes someone who is the president of six clubs, and founded two more. Oh, do you want them academically accomplished instead? Here comes someone who in high school published six scientific papers (please don't look too hard at which journals they were in). No, wait, we don't like what that's encouraging, let's just look at standardized test scores... and here come the perfect scores.

Applicants will make themselves one dimensional. They'll tune to whatever dimension you're measuring on, no matter what you try to do to the basis vector of that dimension. And they'll beat out anyone who is just being normal, or even more cynically, just being honest about their actual activities.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
by mjr00 | 2025-05-08 16:38:45+00:00
Monorepo is orthogonal to services though. You can have a monorepo with multiple services in it.

Even with a monorepo, you will hit a point where you have 1, 10, 100 million lines of e.g. Python, realize you should upgrade from 3.8 to 3.14 because it's EOL, and feel a lot of pain as you have to do a big-bang, all-at-once change, fixing every single breaking change, including from libraries which you also have to update. There's no way around this in current mainstream languages.