MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harithzahid | 2025-05-08 16:09:50+00:00
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by eterm | 2025-05-08 16:10:29+00:00
I didn't, but I've not had much previous success with these kinds of issues.

Just for the sake of it, I've now tried pasting this whole blog into claude.

It has some strange suggestions, including many things that don't work, such as adding to the client:

// Important: Properly close the stream randomStream.Close();

I read the Stream documentation ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.strea... ), and it points out:

> This method calls Dispose, specifying true to release all resources. You do not have to specifically call the Close method. Instead, ensure that every Stream object is properly disposed.

My stream is properly disposed.

Claude also sticks in things like:

// Simulate some work or add a small delay to prevent CPU spinning Thread.Sleep(1);

I can't see how that do anything to solve my issue. I suppose I should humour the machine, go full-vibe and try everything it suggests, and if I end up with a working solution go back from there, but I fear that would just leave me more confused about the underlying mechanisms here.

On the client side it not only rewrites my reading to read multiple times, but adds in:

await Task.Delay(500, cts.Token); // Small delay between reads

I didn't ask it to re-introduce the loop, and a 500ms delay between reads is horribly long for reading successive bytes from a stream.

The only thing that was interesting was creaitng a linked cancellation token source on the service to pass to the underlying stream and cancelling it on server shutdown.

That's a useful thing to keep in mind to help with helping to shutdown the services, but doesn't actually address the issue for a server you want to keep running.

It does also add send/receive timeouts too, and they're also worth keeping in mind, but that doesn't seem like a good mechanism for dealing with this issue. If anything, it would just mask the issue by having it write to the stream for the duration of the timeout period instead, which if short could cause a problem like this to go unnoticed until it's actually under more load.
by jayd16 | 2025-05-08 16:10:34+00:00
Btw, do any good, modern CI tools support incremental rollout of multiple in-flight changes on monoliths? As in patch A is live, team B wants to rollout A+B and team C wants to rollout A+C. Ideally, A+B+C will eventually go live.

Do cloud/paas providers deeply support this flow anymore? Every dashboard would need to compare across multiple live versions and I haven't tried that in a while.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 16:10:47+00:00
How is that difficult, expensive, or unreliable? What could be simpler than a switch that closes when a lever is closed, and turns on a light?

That sounds much simpler, cheaper, and reliable than "detect changes in the frequency of the wheel rotation".

Also, it works like a car's brake lights, which drivers are accustomed to, rather than "start pulsing when you decelerate", which is when you stop pedaling (unless going downhill).
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-08 16:10:57+00:00
If the general principle were "things to enjoy life", you'd probably want to look at examples like

1. Finding love

2. Raising children

3. Helping others

4. Strengthening your body

5. Learning about the world

6. Participating in sports

7. Music (playing and listening)

8. Art (creating and appreciating)

Does it make people less inclined to seek those things or mute their enjoyment? Things like recreational drugs (alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco included), gambling, and (excess or poor) food sound to me like "self-destructive behaviors" for many people, which generally are things that make life less enjoyable, and the people participating in them know that (but nonetheless struggle to stop).
by codingclaws | 2025-05-08 16:11:02+00:00
I develop a HN/Reddit clone [0] that has high density settings. The home page is fairly high density by default. But if you go into the settings [1], then you can really crank up the home page UI density by setting posts per page to 50 and post spacing to 2. The density is more apparent on desktop since the lines don't wrap.

[0] https://www.commentcastles.org

[1] https://www.commentcastles.org/settings
by r0m4n0 | 2025-05-08 16:11:21+00:00
What is the alternative though? I think it’s fair to question a decision but if people put their foot down when they don’t see the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If all the housing projects are squashed for some decent alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which is potentially worse. City’s that have massive sprawl, people relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.

In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.
by aqfamnzc | 2025-05-08 16:11:24+00:00
The calculator is an extreme example, but I've wondered in the past if the reason they scrub everything is so you can't take the manufacturer part number to buy elsewhere. McMaster is undoubtedly more expensive in many cases, but the service they offer is consolidating a million parts into one catalog with CAD drawings, specs, etc. Hiding branding prevents you from taking advantage of that without making a purchase.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-08 16:12:26+00:00
Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution.

The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)
by dingnuts | 2025-05-08 16:12:33+00:00
It assumes a lot about future administrations too. When Obama was in office I complained a lot about the Executive branch consolidating power and using executive orders, and the Democrats were fine with it because he was a "good" administration.

But guess what? If you give too much power to a position, people who want to abuse the power will try to get themselves there.

I wasn't upset that Obama was consolidating power because I thought Obama would abuse it. I'm upset that he consolidated power and then left it to whoever would come next, and then has the gall to be surprised that consolidating power under the Executive would undermine the power of the Legislature the moment a President who was willing to abuse said power was sworn in.

We're cooked because of the fucking team sports. Both parties have had the chance to reign in the Executive and neither has the balls to use it against their own guy
by jmyeet | 2025-05-08 16:12:39+00:00
Microservices are a fad.

Every service boundary you have to cross is a point of friction and a potential source of bugs and issues so by having more microservices you just have more than go wrong, by definition.

A service needs to maintain an interface for compatibility reasons. Each microservice needs to do that and do integration testing with every service they interact with. If you can't deploy a microservice without also updating all its dependencies then you don't have an independent service at all. You just have a more complicated deployment with more bugs.

The real problem you're trying to solve is deployment. If a given service takes 10 minutes to restart, then you have a problem. Ideally that should be seconds. But more ideally, you should be able to drain traffic from it then replace it however long it takes and then slowly roll it out checking for canary changes. Even more ideally, this should be largely automated.

Another factor: build times. If a service takes an hour to compile, that's going to be a huge impediment to development speed. What you need is a build system that caches hermetic artifacts so this rarely happens.

With all that above, you end up with what Google has: distributed builds, automated deployment and large, monolithic services.
by nazgulsenpai | 2025-05-08 16:13:28+00:00
It just seems like common sense that if you impose sanctions, tariffs, embargoes, etc. at a wide enough scale to a determined enough "adversary", they will just become more resilient, self-sufficient, and antagonistic than they were if simply left alone.

I don't know the answers to the questions of international cooperation and economic imbalances, but I am pretty confident that this is not the way. I haven't seen sufficient evidence to the contrary.

All of that being said, it's great to see a new operating system that (if I understand correctly) isn't just derived from an existing one.
Show HN: Checking Pope's election results with smoke test script for chimney
by vasusen | 2025-05-08 16:13:44+00:00
This Playwright test script uses AI to test if there's smoke coming out of the Sistine Chapel chimney and whether that smoke is white. The test only passes if the smoke is white.

Currently, set to use Google Gemini Flash 2.0, but you can switch it to use other LLM providers/models by setting the environment variable in the Github actions workflow: https://github.com/donobu-inc/donobu-papal-election-tests/bl...

I've set it to run every minute during the Papal Conclave election times - https://github.com/donobu-inc/donobu-papal-election-tests/ac...
by pembrook | 2025-05-08 16:13:46+00:00
I find this fascinating as my impression is usually the exact opposite (all I see is lots of open source fetishism and anti-VC, anti-big tech, anti-AI, anti-risk, anti-new stuff, anti-everything sentiment).

However it could be certain headlines attract a certain type of person, allowing for an entirely different subjective experience of what "people on hacker news" are like.
by chermi | 2025-05-08 16:14:09+00:00
You understand there are multiple types of regulation, right? The deregulation you're referring to was with respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.

The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.

Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".

It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.
by johncoltrane | 2025-05-08 16:14:17+00:00
In 2016-17, I was involved with a rather large mictoservice-heavy rewrite project tha didn't go particularly well. The main reason was that microservices were actually a good fit for the _planned_ organisational structure, but not for the one that was eventually put in place. When you go from 4 vertically integrated independent teams to 2 backend devs, 2 frontend devs, and 1 "devops" without stopping 5 minutes to rethink the architecture, of course shit will happen.
by doublerabbit | 2025-05-08 16:14:27+00:00
Doesn't work how?

If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in residence.

If not producing enough power then that's a people's problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and for not enough resources on building efficiency.

Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for such technology to evolve.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 16:14:30+00:00
You only need microservices for massive scale or to enable micromanagement of teams, but that doesn't mean you have to give up on clear module boundaries.

You can get the architectural benefits of microservices by using message-passing-style Object-Oriented programming. It requires the discipline not to reach directly into the database, but assuming you just Don't Do That a well-encapsulated "object" is a microservice that runs in the same virtual machine as the other mircoservices.

Java is the most mainstream language that supports that: whenever you find yourself reaching for a microservice, instead create a module, namespace the database tables, and then expose only the smallest possible public interface to other modules. You can test them in isolation, monitor the connections between them, and bonus: it is trivial to deploy changes across multiple "services" at the same time.
by nandomrumber | 2025-05-08 16:14:30+00:00
The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.

We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.

Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.

And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.

AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.

CSIRO perfidy.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-08 16:15:09+00:00
Given (at least the USA's) increasingly polarized population, I don't think it's at all true that people agree closely about what should be funded, and I'll admit that fact makes my argument weaker: The danger of a particular wealthy person "donating to evil" is similar to the danger that the majority of the country votes to "fund evil."

I also agree that wealthy folks spending their wealth on luxury yachts while the public suffers is also something to worry about. Who knew? Gargantuan wealth inequalities are mostly downside for everyone but the wealthy!
by Ensorceled | 2025-05-08 16:15:19+00:00
Years ago I attended a local meetup where the CTO of a local startup gave a presentation on their, mostly successful, microservice rollout.

In the Q&A after ward, another local startup CTO asked about problems their company was having with their microservices.

The successful CTO asked two questions: "How big is your microservices tooling team?" and "How big is your Dev Ops Team?"

His point was, if you're development team is not big enough to afford dedicated teams to tooling and dev ops, it's not big enough to afford microservices.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:15:30+00:00
> The moderators were elected.

The overwhelming majority of the actions people complain about in this context (never mind that they don't understand the purpose of those actions or the underlying objectives) are not performed by moderators. They are curation actions taken by members of the community.

The rights to do so are awarded based on reputation, in a very poorly thought out and fundamentally broken incentive system; but there are far more people involved than the moderators. You can query by reputation at https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1834631/c... : there are about 29 million total user accounts, 3.3 million which may upvote, 1.1 million which may downvote, 150 thousand which may unilaterally edit posts, 100 thousand which may vote to close questions, 28 thousand which may vote to soft-delete posts (and view soft-deleted posts), 9300 with access to internal site analytics...

and twenty-four moderators (https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators). Who are not the highest-reputation users. (I have more reputation than over half of them, and I frequently complain about users with over ten times my reputation.)
by Nullabillity | 2025-05-08 16:15:36+00:00
> It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?

We have a metric for the difference between what you charge for something and what you paid to provide it, it's called net income. Here's Microsoft's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...

Elsewhere, we tend to call that embezzlement.
by esafak | 2025-05-08 16:15:54+00:00
Your value proposition needs to be clarified, because it naively seems that one could accomplish the same thing by feeding your database' schema to an LLM and having it generate the query. That has the virtue of being almost free and not introducing a new tool. A̶l̶s̶o̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶c̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶k̶e̶n̶.̶
by neuronexmachina | 2025-05-08 16:15:57+00:00
> Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?

For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...

> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-08 16:15:58+00:00
You have to weigh that against the fact that you are much more able to figure out how to actually do what's needed at levels where you see things firsthand. At least, that's been my experience; it's much more realistic to start a nonprofit that can make a real difference locally, then perhaps scale with time, than it is to found something with a global mission, lacking global context on how things manifest around the world.

More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.
by greatgib | 2025-05-08 16:16:33+00:00
As having been through consulting a little bit, I can confirm that most of the times you pay a very expensive price for inexperienced and incompetent consulting work most of the time.

It is not malevolence but more a deficiency by design. First as you said, most consultants are not real "leaders" or "tech leaders" and when you start to get experience, you leave consulting or you raise the hierarchical ladder to become a more senior manager, that spend more time finding contracts, negotiating, dealing with the customer proposals and renewal than doing the actual job.

In the end, you have juniors that are doing the tasks pretending to be sector experts or like the guy in the article, you are propulsed "CEO" of the big entity of a big corp just after 4 or 5 years of basic consultant experience, not even having worked in real non-conducting job.

In the end, when you buy a mission to such a firm, most of the cost goes to structural costs and daily rate of a chain of useless parasitic executives like directors, executive partners, vice president, that will spend 10 minutes per month reviewing slides on the project. The consulting doing the job will be paid at most the double of what a good freelance can expect.

And regarding the spirit, the fun thing is that even when you do bad or evilish things, there is kind of a mental block brain process that makes you truly believe that you are doing an useful and much needed work. Despite it not the case.

In my own case, often I had this bad feeling deep in. A background that a customer that we were negotiating a mission for millions, could have just hired a decent developer for just a few thousands euros and have quite profited from a most good and successful system.

But like, in Matrix, when you are inside the system, it is hard to consider things outside the box.

In the same way that again in the example of the blog post, I'm quite sure that the big company would been able to find hundreds of existing employees that would have fitted the bill well and better for a lot cheaper.
by senko | 2025-05-08 16:16:36+00:00
Or to spin this another way: Americans spend around $200B* annually on education (private spend, on top of federal/state/local education spend), so this would provide all-expenses-paid free tuition for everyone for 18 years, or more than 50 years if focusing on primary/secondary education. In that time, there might be a new crop of megarich to continue the cycle :)

([*] $50B for primary/secondary ed, $150B for higher - figures via Kagi Assistant, which I didn't double-check).
OSUniverse: Building a Better OSWorld
by mountainriver | 2025-05-08 16:16:45+00:00
Hey all,

We are happy to release a new benchmark for computer use. We didn’t set out to build a benchmark but found the current state of OSWorld to be very challenging to work with and numerous tests were faulty.

OSUniverse aims to be dead simple to use, it only requires docker and can run in a single command. It offers test levels that increase in complexity and are easy to extend.

We have benchmarked all the top agents. As new GUI agents are released we will continue to update their performance.

Enjoy!