MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyrnel | 2025-05-08 16:38:54+00:00
People have been running different levels of privileged code together on the same machine ever since the invention of virtual machines. We have lots of lightweight sandboxing technologies that could be used when invoking a particular action such as tj-actions/changed-files that only gives it the permissions it needs.

You may do a "docker build" in a pipeline which does need root access and network access, but when you publish a package on pypi, you certainly don't need root access and you also don't need access to the entire internet, just the pypi API endpoint(s) necessary for publishing.
by fads_go | 2025-05-08 16:39:12+00:00
Yes, it costs, and yes, to make public transit a valid alternative service needs to be frequent all day.

However, all of the maintenance around allowing private transport is also a cost. That includes all of the private costs for car ownership. If public transport is a valid option, then car ownership becomes a choice.

A tiny city might need 100 busses, but how many cars does that replace? What is the full cost of those cars? If everyone made a monthly "bus payment" instead of a "car payment" (actually payments when you add insurance, maintenance, ...), I think we'd find the bus system much less expensive.
by derektank | 2025-05-08 16:39:34+00:00
As someone who grew up in a Christian faith tradition that said Jesus Christ died for the sins of all of us and that we are all made in God's image, I find this position so bizarre. If we are all children of God, why should I prioritize the well being of a single stranger in Ohio over twenty strangers in Kenya? I can understand an argument for prioritizing one's family, especially if you are a parent, or even one's immediate community, but while I personally love America, the vast majority of Americans are as distant from me as anyone else in the globe.
by bdavbdav | 2025-05-08 16:39:46+00:00
I think your definition of VPN is a very recent consumer misappropriation.

VPN = Virtual Private Network. It’s (historically) a way of tunneling segregated / encrypted traffic over another network - generally to allow access to another private network or similar. That’s exactly what this is.

Protocol wise, consumer VPN is using traditional VPN protocols, but it’s effectively being used as secure proxy.
by alaithea | 2025-05-08 16:40:20+00:00
Pretty sure I saw someone say this in the past, but microservices might as well have been a psyop pushed out by larger, successful startups onto smaller, earlier-stage companies and projects. I say "might as well" because I don't think there's any evidence for it, but the number of companies and projects that have glommed onto the microservices idea, only to find their development velocity grind to a halt, has to be in the hundreds at least (thousands?). Whether the consequences were intended or not, microservices have been a gift on the competitive landscape for the startups that pushed microservices in the first place.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-08 16:40:21+00:00
Not being able to do those things probably nudged you towards revolution.

Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.

People under eastern europe 'communist' dictators didn't have any of that. Just whisper in the shadows, and then suddenly Ceaușescu is swiss cheese, because there was literally no other option than to reject the whole system dominating them rather than exhausting their energies squabbling on twitter.
by duxup | 2025-05-08 16:40:24+00:00
One thing I wonder is:

If you're a business used to selling at a certain price point, and the value proposition is established with your customers .... do you bother risking shattering that expectation if the future is unknown?

Do you risk customers saying "Oh crap my hobby that I did with Adafruit is now untenable ... well I'm out." vs "Well they're low on stock, I'll check back when this is all over."

I don't know if it is all or nothing but it seems like there's a lot of risk either way.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-08 16:40:26+00:00
The main hang ups for fast reactors in the US are: (1) our regulators are less sanguine about occupational safety for plutonium workers then the French and Russians (carcinogenic Pu nanoparticles —- the high energy ball mill can make sand deadly, just think what it can do for Pu) and (2) fear of nuclear proliferation if the “plutonium economy” expands. There is also (3) the economics will never be attractive with a steam turbine and all the heat exchangers that entails, but a power set like

https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-genera...

could fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and could make it competitive. It’s a big if though.
by haswell | 2025-05-08 16:40:39+00:00
There are some people in my circles who have remained convinced that tariffs won’t actually amount to anything and that it’s all bluster.

It seems we’re now entering the “find out” stage, and it’s incredibly frustrating.

As a tinkerer who loves building things, this is heartbreaking stuff. I have projects in progress that may have to be put on hold.

I tend to order things as I need them, but it’s tempting to stockpile the basics. But I don’t think it will help much in the long run if this continues, and truly hope this madness will be seen for what it is and an appropriate backlash/correction will follow.
by convolvatron | 2025-05-08 16:40:48+00:00
microservices can also cause organizational dependencies and coordination that wouldn't otherwise be necessary. i've seen it create at least as many people issues as solve them. one seemingly innocuous example is the policy of 'everybody just uses whatever services they want', which can hugely increase the ongoing maintenance requirements and seems to require that everyone learn everything in order to be functional. which never happens, which means you're always chasing people down.
by setr | 2025-05-08 16:40:58+00:00
Any input data has the same problem. Type safety exists after validation, and its guarantees hold only if your original validation was upheld.

Files, database, user input, network protocols, etc. I don’t know why the network would be any way special. You parse/validate unstructured binary blobs into structured data, and what’s left is type safety. It’s not in the runtime only because, if the compiler has done its job correctly, it is typesafe by construction.

In other words, how many times are you going to check your data structure is correct, before you start assuming it’s correct? Once — at parsing and validation — after that, you’re working with structured data, and your types are just recording the fact
by chermi | 2025-05-08 16:41:18+00:00
Are you really denying the learning curve based on one paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction.

*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.

In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)

-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design

-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.

- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".

-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out

For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
by srvo | 2025-05-08 16:41:24+00:00
This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate.

Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality.

I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations. But i've seen the institutional desire for self-preservation supersede essential purposes at a few of them, with disastrous implications for their effectiveness.

The Gates foundation probably controls ~5% of the ~$2T that charitable foundations have in endowments globally. If the majority of these organizations adopted these sorts of depletion goals, their program budgets could probably more than double.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 16:41:25+00:00
People misunderstanding Conway's Law is a big part of the problem for sure. The law says nothing about team boundaries: it talks about communication pathways.

The paranoid socialist in me thinks big companies like team-sized microservices because it lets them prevent workers from talking to each other without completely ruling out producing running software.

When companies instead encourage forums for communication across team boundaries, it unlocks completely different architectural patterns.
by dinfinity | 2025-05-08 16:41:25+00:00
That is a silly comparison.

1. Humans and blow up dolls feel massively different, physically. 2. Blow up dolls don't do anything autonomously.

The comparison would have to be with a sex bot that is virtually indistinguishable from a human when having sex with it, just like text chatting with an AI bot versus chatting with a human can be.

What human connection are you and I currently forming? Does it really matter that I am a human for this interaction we're having?
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 16:41:48+00:00
Any large group is composed of different motives; here are a couple of possible ones:

- Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits for big business. They don't require the capital investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they don't have the large moats of those businesses.

- Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm. Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about 'Communists', etc.)
by croes | 2025-05-08 16:41:52+00:00
Germany is a net importer since 2023, what was also 2023 in France?

>2023 when several reactors were switched off for longer unexpected maintenance periods.

Who exploited Niger for four decades for its Uranium?

France

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

Who is the main buyer in the EU of Russian Uranium?

France

https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re...

If they aren’t dependent on Russian fossile fuels why do they still buy from Russia?

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-reve...
by geerlingguy | 2025-05-08 16:42:17+00:00
I just got an email this morning from ARACE, one of the main suppliers of Radxa boards for global shipping.

I ordered their Orion O6 Mini ITX board back in December, for $430.49 total ($85 shipping).

The email this morning said they had to cancel all un-shipped orders, and I could re-order and prepay the tariff through 4XL (they dropped DHL and FedEx due to tariff complications).

I put the board in my cart, and now the total is $1500.90 ($1,150 in shipping).

I'm happy to pay for the actual cost of shipping a single item across an entire ocean, but maybe that increase is a bit much...
by jorvi | 2025-05-08 16:42:18+00:00
I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom).

One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows.

Meanwhile open source image editors go out of their way to have keybinds, workflows and button placement that deviate significantly from Photoshop. Smells strongly of NIH.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:42:18+00:00
There is: you can appeal to the community in general, and most curation (not "moderation"!) was done by agreement between community members in the first place.

If you ask a question on Stack Overflow and it gets closed, you are generally expected to edit it to fix the identified problem and submit it for re-evaluation. It gets put in a queue that other users can review; and everyone with close-vote privileges also has reopen-vote privileges, and can come along randomly and evaluate the question anew.

If you believe the community has misunderstood something about the question or has misapplied policy, you can ask about it on https://meta.stackoverflow.com . However, when you come to the meta site, you are generally expected to have a basic understanding of what the policy is and what our goals are (hint: not helping you, personally, make your code work), and to accept that you may have misunderstood something. And you should be prepared for the fact that voting works differently on meta (https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-meta).

People who vote to close your question (or downvote it) are explicitly not required to explain this (again for well considered reasons, largely around the risk of harassment or abuse: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436). But usually, if the standard close-reason advice won't be obvious, someone will try to explain. If they think the question is unclear, they'll try to say specifically why they are confused; if it seems to lack focus, they'll highlight the separate problems you're asking about or explain what seems irrelevant; if it "needs debugging details" then they'll explain how your code sample falls short of the https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example standard.

If you need an explanation and don't get one, you can again ask on meta. Despite the downvoting, if you're polite and understanding (i.e. don't come in with the mindset that we must have made a mistake or are doing something wrong by having a site that works differently from other sites), we'll be polite and sympathetic, and try to explain as best we can.
by clarkbw | 2025-05-08 16:42:35+00:00
cold starts are 500ms on average, and that's only for the first call that wakes up the db from hibernation. people still seem to think that this latency happens for every call (see other threads here) but once the service has woken up (cold start over) you're back to regular (sub 10ms) latency timings and the service continues to run that way. you'll only hit a cold start again if (you have this option turned on) your service goes idle for > 5 min. You can turn scale-to-zero off and you'll run 24/7, have zero cold starts.

$19 plan is going away, will launch a better $5 plan soon.
by postalcoder | 2025-05-08 16:42:35+00:00
I'm working on a Hacker News front page with the idea of UI density as a foundational concept.

https://hcker.news

I haven't did a Show HN yet but I'd love to get some feedback on it first.

It's got a lot of configurable views and can be made extremely dense (dense mode on + columns: auto). The aesthetic itself was made to deviate as little from the HN frontpage as possible.

It's got a lot of filtering knick knacks like being able to view by top comments/points, view hn as a timeline of top stories by comments or stories or view hn by top n over day/week/month/year/custom.
by utmb748 | 2025-05-08 16:42:53+00:00
From my experience, microservices were great if there are more devs, organizational advantage over tech.

CI/CD - infra can be as code, shared across, K8s port-forward for local development, better resource utilization, multiple envs end so on, available tooling, if setup correctly, usually keeps working.

Not mentioned plus, usually smaller merge requests, feature can be split and better estimated, less conflicts during work or testing... possibility to share in packages.

Also if there are no tests, doesnt matter if its monorepo or MS, you can break easily or spend more time.

You should afford tests and documentation, keep working on tech debt.

Next common issue I see, too big tech stack cos something is popular.
by dang | 2025-05-08 16:42:53+00:00
A couple bits of past discussion:

Using Coalton to Implement a Quantum Compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36413832 - June 2023 (1 comment)

Using Coalton to Implement a Quantum Compiler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32741928 - Sept 2022 (1 comment)
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-08 16:43:06+00:00
The more detailed simulations have gotten the less bad a meltdown looks in a fast reactors. Usually some of the molten core flows away and no more critical mass. If it goes over critical there can be some energy release but over time it looks less and less and not a problem to contain.

Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium. The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the sodium. Either way they stay put and don’t go into the environment.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-08 16:43:26+00:00
You'd be saying the same thing about Epstein if he hadn't been caught.

What I don't understand is the comradeship I see in people competing to effusively praise oligarchs. Bill Gates fought against technological progress, fought against free and open source software, fought against antitrust, even bribed officials to push out competitors. Why would people pat each other on the back for admiring him?

Even afterwards, when he bought his redemption by showering money upon dubious nonprofits, and by creating other, even more dubious nonprofits - simply paying everyone who could possibly have a problem with him, including dozens of journalistic organizations and hundreds of individual journalists - all of his charitable efforts are still obviously ways to play with various social theories that he has, not to help people.

It takes a real psychopath to accumulate that much power, with so few principles, and then to use it to play games with people's lives. His entertainment and the entertainment of his class is endangering the world.

And I still listen to Michael Jackson, so whatever, but we know that his relationship with Epstein was pretty extensive, and what was said during his divorce (in relation to that) was alarming, as well as the fact that he immediately crumbled and gave her the farm. There's your conspiracy theory; I'm not going to be caught praising a guy for mosquito nets whom I pretty much knew hung out with Epstein for a time as intensely as anyone else did. Epstein was giving away money for elite approval, too.

What's money for if not for patronage? You can't take it with you.
by esafak | 2025-05-08 16:43:29+00:00
In general you do, because the unbiased estimates have higher generalization error. You are already dealing with sampling noise. I am not an expert in optimization, and what "poorly understood" means to you, but I know there is quite some research on the properties of SGD noise; e.g., https://francisbach.com/rethinking-sgd-noise/

Dissecting the Effects of SGD Noise in Distinct Regimes of Deep Learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13703
by kccqzy | 2025-05-08 16:43:39+00:00
The desktop version of Charles Schwab's expert trading platform, thinkorswim. Or TWS from Interactive Brokers. Basically these are trading platforms designed for day traders and the highest end of the retail investors market. These necessarily have to good high-information density UIs: imagine trading an option showing all strikes (SPX has hundreds of strikes), both calls and puts, and showing the option Greeks (delta/gamma/vega) and pricing information (bid/ask) for each option. Then you need to give users ability to quickly send trades. You need to support complex strategies: an iron condor has four legs for example. You need to support complex orders like stops and limits and combinations thereof and these need to be built via an UI with THEN/AND/OCO relationships. Some will want a fast-updating candlestick chart; others will want to see the order book; still others will want to plot probabilities or expected prices using Black Scholes model. It's complex.

You should sign up for paper trading and see these UIs feel like.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-08 16:43:41+00:00
> It does, the Linux kernel maintainers eventually said that's the reason for banning Russian maintainers.

As craftkiller interline in a sibling post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927430): would this not rather imply that you should ban US-American maintainers (at least on some subsystems)?

If Russian maintainers write some Linux kernel code, this will cause no problem for a US export ban. On the other hand, if US-American maintainer does, it might.
by gavmor | 2025-05-08 16:44:06+00:00
Ha! I always feel more than a little embarrassed when it happens, but I can't sit idly by while TDD is slandered, especially from so seemingly oblique an angle!

While I agree with you regarding microservices (eg language abstractions provide 80% of the encapsulation SOA provides for 20% of the overhead) and I readily acknowledge that 100% test coverage is a quixotic fantasy, I really can't imagine writing reliable software without debuggers, print-statements, or a REPL—all of which TDD replaces in my workflow.

How, I wonder, do you observe the behavior of the program if not through tests? By playing with it? Manually reproducing state? Or, do you simply wait until after the program is written to test its functionality?

I wonder what mental faculties I lack that facilitate your TDD-less approach. Can it be learned?
by mikeocool | 2025-05-08 16:44:37+00:00
I pretty much agree with everything in this article — it’s next to impossible service boundaries right in a startup environment.

Though, if you’re on a small team and really want to use micro services two places I have found it to be somewhat advantageous:

* wrapping particularly bad third party APIs or integrations — you’re already forced into having a network boundary, so adding a service at the boundary doesn’t increase complexity all that much. Basically this lets you isolate the big chunk of crappy code involved in integrating with the 3rd party, and giving it a nice API your monolith can interact with.

* wrapping particularly hairy dependencies — if you’ve got a dependency with a complex build process that slows down deployments or dev setup — or the dependency relies on something that conflicts with another dependency — wrapping it in its own service and giving it a nice API can be a good way to simplify things for the monolith.