MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-05-08 16:16:53+00:00
This isn't the issue. You could get easily get the overwhelming majority of society to agree 'let's criminalize unjustified denials with criminal penalties for the executives of healthcare companies who violate such' and it's simply not going to happen. A handful of corporations' "lobbying" easily trumps the opinion of society.

And getting people elected is no different. Fewer and fewer people identify as either republican or democrat (with independents being the largest 'party' by far), yet lo and behold like 99.9% of politicians at all levels, high and low, are republican or democrat, with basically no independent representation because the system makes it unreasonably difficult to select an alternative. This is further confounded by an utterly worthless media system that further works to entrench the political establishment, and much more.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-05-08 16:16:59+00:00
I am more of a "burn it all to the ground" type of person, but even I know that is true folly to even think that now.

It's a digital cancer that is metastasizing under this perfect storm (a US presidential administration keen on supporting it, easy manipulation of prices through painting the tape, a defanged SEC, etc) and there really isn't anything we can do about it but watch.

The only way anyone will learn is if massive tragedy struck or another major black swan... maybe... or maybe not.
by meew0 | 2025-05-08 16:17:11+00:00
Any EMR (electronic medical record) would probably fit this description. For example Epic, the leading one in the US: https://www.emrsystems.net/epic-ehr-software/ Or Orbis, the leading one in Europe: (there's not many good screenshots of it online but this PDF has a few) https://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Kundeninfos/DE/09/2023/32261...

There's a myriad of other ones as well, they all have similar UIs, with the primary goals being to never hide any important info from the user, and to let the user take important actions quickly. That naturally leads to high density. Nevertheless it needs to be reasonably intuitive, since doctors and nurses tend to not be very tech-savvy, which leads to some interesting design constraints.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-08 16:17:14+00:00
Yes, hydrogen is clearly a much easier technology to make work than fast reactors. Why is this even a question? For example, fast reactors have the issue that in an accident, if fuel melts and rearranges, one can have potentially have a configuration that is prompt supercritical on fast neutrons. This is functionally an atomic bomb.

Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.
by mg | 2025-05-08 16:17:20+00:00
Yes, product selection is not perfect yet. I originally set out to display the 300 most relevant products in each category. It is probably better to have a larger set of products in each category.

I will tackle that. Not sure yet how hard / easy it will be. Because more than 300 items on the screen initially might make them too small. And adding more as one uses the filters might be confusing.
by theamk | 2025-05-08 16:17:20+00:00
This all sounds very reasonable as long as servers/services are involved. Linux has capabilities for this purpose, and systemd goes a long way towards the vision you describe - daemons which do not need root and instead get all capabilities from the supervisore process.

However, were were talking about "sudo" and this is purely interactive tool (I am sure some people run sudo non-interactively, but we can all agree it's a bad security practice). So, how does this nice capabilities vision mesh with the idea of "administrator user"?

From what I see, it's not much different. Instead of "sudo" which verifies user identity+permissions and then gives out "root" or some other user, we have some other hypothetical tool ("become-admin"?) which verifies user identity+permission and gives out powerful system-changing capabilities. Frankly, I don't see much difference - it's the same security model either way.

(A related argument I've seen is "you should not need sudo for common tasks like update software or configure network" - but on modern Linuxes, you don't need sudo for that already, this is done via dbus + polkit calls. No "proper microkernels" required, that is already deployed everywhere.)
by Hizonner | 2025-05-08 16:17:25+00:00
> The point of trying to determine aptitude is exactly that it does not measure current ability to perform specific tasks or possession of specific domain knowledge, but rather general ability to learn/flexibility to be given new tasks.

Great. You can go ahead and do that then... provided that your test actually measures that and not a bunch of unrelated knowledge. Which is a lot of what an "aptitude test" designed by a clueless person will actually tend to measure. And honestly is also a lot of what the ability to get a degree tends to measure.

You might be able to fix the test, but I don't think you can fix the degree.

> IBM straight up gave me math problems (like solving systems of equations under time pressure) when applying to my first programming job in addition to some basic whiteboard coding.

... which is mostly going to measure how recently you've had to do a bunch of similar mathematical tasks, to the point where that overwhelms almost anything else. And has the bonus of not being obviously related your general ability to learn or flexibility. I suppose how you do on that might have some correlation with your ability to code under similar time pressure... which of course only happens in badly managed projects.

That's exactly the sort of selection process you get when you let clueless fools try to come up with ways to measure things like "ability to learn" or "flexibility".
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 16:17:29+00:00
The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.

Because of nuclear.

By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.

Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.

Because of nuclear.
by weard_beard | 2025-05-08 16:17:47+00:00
I strongly feel that real political leadership in opposition to the current administration running roughshod over the constitution is to promote and support candidates who represent the US military.

If I don't see a democrat in the next presidential primary who is deeply involved with and representing the interests and voters in our US military then the party will have criminally abrogated their duty to the American people.
by delusional | 2025-05-08 16:17:53+00:00
Thank you for both correcting it and answering anyway, that's not a given on the internet :)

I suppose I understand. It's a denial of philosophical realism (he wouldn't do that bad thing if it wasn't for me and therefore I'm part of that bad thing) in favor of idealism (no matter if I want the bad thing to happen, he shouldn't do it). I suppose I hold that same opinion when I advocate for intervening in the market to limit the supply of "bad stuff".

I can respect that.
by advisedwang | 2025-05-08 16:17:54+00:00
Some challenges:

- You get free cooling, but if you use too much you melt the permafrost, which has huge environmental cost.

- Building in remote locations is enormously expensive, especially with the requirements of a nuclear generating station.

- Now you have to run a city for the operators to live in and ship in everything they need (not to mention hardware to the DC.

- Denmark (and so presumably Greenland) has a law against building nuclear generating stations.

Besides, building nuclear power stations with the concept that we accept an accident will happen is crazy. Better to invest in preventing them than mitigating them.
by bko | 2025-05-08 16:18:05+00:00
I could understand some of the criticism for charitable work.

For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.

But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.

It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?
by XorNot | 2025-05-08 16:18:28+00:00
Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.

The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
by xyst | 2025-05-08 16:18:39+00:00
The thought that a _few_ benevolent billionaires will save the world was a preposterous notion in the 2000s and is still an absurd notion today.

This is nothing more than a billionaire (with a rich history of his own in destroying society) trying to buy his reputation back.

Reminds me of all of the billionaire shitheads (Walmart/Walton Family, Purdue Pharma/Sacklers, …) that buy the naming rights on education facilities, dying arts academies, and even libraries. Nothing but trying to wash away the guilt.

Our shitty family contributed to the opioid addiction en masse all in the name of profit, but hey at least you get a reduced or free tuition to pristine art academy or academic institution (if you meet criteria).

Tax the rich. End subsidies given to ultra wealthy.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-08 16:18:44+00:00
Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.)

I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism makes no sense to me. Borderline absurdist.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-08 16:18:44+00:00
>I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.

Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.

Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.

I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.
by siliconc0w | 2025-05-08 16:18:48+00:00
The biggest wins for microservices aren't really technical, they're organizational. They force you to break a problem down and allow each team to own a piece of it, including end to end delivery. This allows specialization of labor which is a key driver of productivity - including an ability to experiment and innovate. Every change is incremental by default, and well-documented external APIs are the only way to talk to other domains- no shared databases, filesystems, or internal APIs. It's not free and definitely takes some discipline and tooling to enforce shared standards (every service should have metrics, logging, tracing, discovery, testing, CI/CD, etc) but you'd need to build that muscle with a monolith as well.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-08 16:18:57+00:00
Assumes a lot about every administration. I don't see how anyone can look at what the US Government has done and failed to do over the last decades and call it the ideal charitable recipient. Even when it's doing the right things, it wastes enormous amounts of money to do so and the primary beneficiary is one of the wealthiest populations in the world.

Of course, you wouldn't expect them to be the ideal charity; they are explicitly not a charity. Anyone who is actually trying to be a charity should have little trouble using funds more charitably than any government in the world.
by PieTime | 2025-05-08 16:19:18+00:00
Yes, https://youtu.be/KO3-xkVACgE?si=suWJxu_TCPq37V6W

Cannot ignore that his communicable disease research and treatment has been effective. But his school voucher and farming initiative have been awful. Ultimately it would have been better as general revenue to provide these services through government.
by nfriedly | 2025-05-08 16:19:33+00:00
Hah!

But, in all seriousness, this could realistically be saving lives if you go with the assumption that Google was going to use this energy either way, and it otherwise would be coming from anything other than solar.

Every other source causes more deaths per energy produced. Coal is by far the worst, but natural gas, and even hydroelectric cost more lives than nuclear.
by foxyv | 2025-05-08 16:19:41+00:00
This is really common in grandiose narcissists. You get a honeymoon phase where they are amazing and beautiful people. Then they get worse and worse over time once they get their hooks into people. Then when their victims speak out, all their fans react poorly because of how wonderful they were.

This is why a lot of people will defend serial abusers with the phrase: "But he is such a nice guy!"
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-08 16:19:54+00:00
I'll tell only about essential less-known ones:

- Group Speed Dial, to have a list of favorite websites in a new tab, #1 essential plugin in my opinion!

- Awesome RSS, to extract RSS links and put them into my reader (this is only extracting extension)

- Buster: captcha solver for humans, to skip ReCaptcha

- Dark Reader, to turn pages into white-on-black

- Drag-select Link Text, to select text on the page in a proper way, like the old Opera did

- Redirector, to automatically rewrite website domains, like reddit.com → old.reddit.com, and also to rewrite to Tor version of websites, because they are usually uncensored (like archive.is).
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:20:18+00:00
> Never having re-elections makes it useless. For it to be a truly democratic process there absolutely needs to be a way to withdraw consent from a moderator who behaves differently than expected. So yeah, a no confidence vote would be an option, or better yet regular elections to hold a position.

Notwithstanding everything else I said above about how "moderation" is actually almost completely irrelevant here, and the overwhelming majority of what people call "moderation" is in fact curation done by community members in more or less a direct democracy:

We have elections annually (https://stackoverflow.com/election), and so does each Stack Exchange site generally. Moderators generally must voluntarily step down barring a major problem; but this was carefully considered at the start (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/984).
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-08 16:20:31+00:00
Perhaps the government 'should' be the ideal charitable entity; but it most definitely is not.

The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.

Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe; but it could do far more with substantially less.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-05-08 16:21:44+00:00
Being competent at coding is mere table stakes for being a software engineer. Success at being a software engineer is mostly about combining that coding skills with people skills: coordinating with people, negotiating with people, communicating effectively with people, working with people who are difficult, etc. I would have been far more successful if I'd improved my people skills early in my career alongside improving my coding skills.
by nandomrumber | 2025-05-08 16:21:48+00:00
Because apartments don’t have roof tops.

And why would a landlord sink $10,000+ in to a property for no return.

Roof top solar only works for the user who has the roof top solar.

For everyone else it makes electricity more expensive.

Happy to be proven wrong. Show me a majority of places with high roof top solar penetration where per kWh electricity rates have fallen.

And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 16:22:12+00:00
I mean, "GREAT" until you need to do any kind of refactoring, or the company grows, or shrinks, or reorgs, or you have a feature that needs to change more than one service.

The "one team per microservice" makes code-enclosure style code ownership possible, but it is the least efficient way I have ever seen software written.

I've long wanted to hack an IDE so people are only allowed to change the Java objects they created, and then put six Java programmers in a room and make them write an application, yelling back and forth across the room. "CAN YOU ADD A VERSION OF THAT METHOD THAT ACCEPTS THIS NEW CLASS?" "SURE THING! TRY THAT?"

People discount the costs of microservices because they makes management's job easier, especially when companies have adopted global promotion processes. But unless they are solving a real technical constriant, they are a shitty way to work as an engineer.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-08 16:22:17+00:00
Shouldn't we be a lot more worried about how political polarization might impact government choices, compared to private sector ones? Private actors who spend their own money have to pay for their own choices and are accountable to themselves in a way that political operatives fundamentally don't. I see a lot more potential for 'evil' on the political/state actor side.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-08 16:23:02+00:00
Reducing rightly-ordered love to "cruel nativism" is an incredibly uncharitable representation. I'd urge you to do some reading in comparative religion. Although I'm a Christian, I've found it instructive to spend some time going through other religions' texts, other philosophies, because dismissing them as backward or wrong does nobody any good. Learning more makes my conversations more productive and helps me better understand my own beliefs.
by sitkack | 2025-05-08 16:23:10+00:00
I think the major issue that I see, and I could be wrong is that if you want to change some underlying functionality between you and a dependent function to do that you would need to change all the intermediate functions only so that you could call that dependent function and layers deep.

I have played around with architectures like this, but I allowed the caller to patch in a dependent function in the call with those function overlay overrides were passed from function to function.

Apologies, used sst
by dzdt | 2025-05-08 16:23:18+00:00
I'm confused by the premise here, as repeated in the title and initial sentence:

Huawei Technologies on Thursday unveiled its first laptop that runs the company’s self-developed operating system, HarmonyOS, following the expiration of its Microsoft Windows license for personal computers (PCs) in March.

What kind of Windows license are we talking about here? I understood that Huawei is a hardware manufacturer. Any Windows license on a laptop they deliver would be an OEM license attached to the device, right? Are they saying that Huawei lost its contract to sell Windows OEM licenses with the devices it manufactures?

Is that a thing? Does Microsoft say to hardware makers that no, you cannot sell your hardware with Windows? What kind of dispute between Microsoft and Huawei leads to that outcome?
by idle_zealot | 2025-05-08 16:23:39+00:00
From the HarmonyOS webpage:

>Make development enjoyable with distributed technologies

>Hardware synergy for resource sharing

>HarmonyOS treats different smart devices into a single super device, behind which all devices work collaboratively and share their resources to offer a seamless experience for users.

Does anyone know what this means, because it sounds amazing. Does the OS natively VPN all your devices and expose their storage/computes/etc in a Plan9-esque way?
by didip | 2025-05-08 16:23:43+00:00
Micro services show their benefits in a large organization.

It’s a tool to solve people issues. They can remove bureaucratic hurdles and allow devs to somewhat be autonomous again.

In a small startup, you really don’t gain much from them. Unless if the domain really necessitates them, eg. the company uses Elixir but all of the AI toolings are written in Python/Go.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-08 16:23:44+00:00
I've found $30 sneakers at Wal-Mart that compare to $90 sneakers from Brooks, they are compatible with my feet like Brooks, they don't last as long as the Brooks but they last more than 1/3 as long.

Trouble is those were only available for a short time, I've gone back and there's been nothing that good.
Ask HN: Where can I find small non-startuppy cos with use for a software dev
by _umiu | 2025-05-08 16:23:48+00:00
Seeing some of the tariff effects in the US, I figure there's probably some people crazy enough to start new businesses doing stateside what's typically done overseas. And given that I work at a huge megacorp that doesn't actually make anything, I'd be interested in working at one of those companies. If they exist. Hence the question, does anybody know places or ways to find leads?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-05-08 16:24:04+00:00
As long as that team built those microservices to solve whatever problem they're responsible for solving I think it's better to let the problem domain dictate how many you need. Better to have seams that make sense in terms of the surrounding code than to have them in arbitrary places based on the org chart.

The trouble comes when some political wind blows and reshuffles the org chart, and now you're responsible for some services that only made sense in the context of a political reality that no longer exists.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-08 16:24:05+00:00
It's ok most of the time, but it's not like they sell McMaster branded stuff in McMaster packaging. They are a supplier, and might want to obfuscate to keep you from buying direct from the actual manufacturers.

On the other hand, on my desk right now is a bag of springs, the info printed on it says it was made by WB Jones, part number 4011. We ordered it from McMaster. Why not? They stock the item and ship super quick. If I want another bag of the same springs, it's not like I can go to McMaster, type in "springs 4011" and expect to find it. Instead, I'll have to search up purchasing requests I've made, maybe ask a coworker if they ordered them, etc. to find the mcmaster number again. If I didn't know Mcmaster sold it to us, I'd have no idea they sold it at all.

To be fair, if they sell things that are interchangeable, like screws, it would be a lot to list every manufacturer they use. They have 5 locations, and probably stock from a different manufacturer or multiple manufacturers at each one.