MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-05-08 19:36:14+00:00
Google may not be the best example. They seem to be poor at measuring and have high tech debt.

As is evident by:

- the decrease in quality of search - Poor response to SEO techniques (seems they embraced it...) - Decrease in spam filtering - I frequently get spam now. A fair number have crazy original messages that are pages long but display a single image in the main interface - Constant drops on projects that someone else makes popular a few years later - A million more things

The best way to reduce tech debt is to slow down and take care. It requires good culture. It requires writing (at least some) documentation. It requires constant review and rewrites. In fact, Google has the advantage in being so big they can just hire teams to rewrite stuff from scratch[0].

I think anyone junior should take a different strategy. Stop trying to be fast. It doesn't matter how fast you are if it is broken[1,2]. Write things 3 times. First is fast and broken. If you're using python or similar, do this in the interpreter. Second, move it over to the main code. Start building some documentation and make sure to explain what things do. Doesn't need to be long. Functions should be simple and not do much, so you also should only need a few lines (a few minutes is usually enough) 3) Rewrite accounting for the things you realized were issues while writing those docs. This strategy will be slow at first, but it gets fast and most importantly, you are saving yourself time in the future. These savings are invisible but invaluable.

I've been trying to say that engineers should be grumpy. Our job is to find problems and fix them. Get complaining! What frustrates you? You have the power to fix those things. It's the manager who is supposed to be thinking about the monetary parts but you should be thinking of the technical and user parts. DOGFOOD YOUR PROGRAMS. Be proud of what you're making. If you aren't using it, why are you making it? (rhetorical) If something is actually an issue, make a fuss. Don't let your manager dismiss it. You have different expertise levels and part of the job is to bridge the gap with communication (it should be bidirectional, but you can't control them, you can control you).

> Signs of unmanaged Technical Debt

these are 100% on point. I think the writer and I are on fairly similar pages.

[0] The advantage of writing from scratch is you get to leverage the knowledge you learned along the way. This can't happen if you don't document though. A big part of tech debt occurring in the the first place is that we don't know all the requirements at the time we wrote. The projects evolve over time and often in ways we can't predict. Sometimes the best thing to do is start over because you can only patch so many times before shit falls apart.

[1] The worst type of broken things are ones you don't realize are broken.

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/7rdp3k/quick_maths/
by jl6 | 2025-05-08 19:36:55+00:00
Sure it does! Investment in all those things creates demand.

Real estate: demand for houses means demand for house building and maintenance.

Crypto: demand for chips and electricity (yes, this is super-dumb demand for dubious benefit, but demand nonetheless, just like paying people to dig holes and fill them in is also demand).

Stock: I almost agree with you, but 1) stockbroking is a whole industry funded by taking a percentage on stock purchases, 2) if you buy some stock for some cash, the counterparty now has cash, which they are either going to keep, spend, or invest in something else, so the transaction is neutral-to-positive in terms of demand generation.

Bonds: why do governments issue bonds? To get money to spend on stuff! Every penny of your bond purchase gets spent on government activities. Some of that is paying interest, but that interest is income for other bondholders (who then typically spend it)

With taxes and transaction fees skimming a little bit off the top of everything, it’s actually almost impossible to engage in any financial transaction without that transaction stimulating all kinds of additional activity. Not all of it is valuable or even ethical activity, but the point is that the scenario posited (“everyone is just investing and there’s no real demand underpinning it”) is very unlikely to happen.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-08 19:37:03+00:00
That's a republican idea (with a small r), or maybe a nationalist one. Monarchs on the other hand had a habit of collecting titles. If you only had one title as the head of one political entity, you were obviously a very insignificant leader. Conquered territories often continued to exist as separate entities that just happened to have the same monarch, rather than being annexed into the dominant country.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-08 19:37:03+00:00
> If you had to flip a coin between Jared Polis and Marco Rubio, how is that not better than it being Harris and Trump?

Without detracting from your explanation about score voting, I would hope that Jared Polis will recalibrate his judgement about other people's medical opinions prior to running for president [1]:

> He has supported Donald Trump's decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.[114]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Polis#Vaccines
by aeneasmackenzie | 2025-05-08 19:37:23+00:00
This document plays at least two shell games, declaring that “homosexuality” as its own concept is recent (within 200 years) but then smoothly omitting this when discussing scripture, instead of analyzing scripture and then inserting the modern concept. No wonder it doesn’t find any condemnation of a concept it excluded from consideration!

It then does a similar trick where the authors of the New Testament are acknowledged to have poor Greek in many cases but then using specific word choice to claim they meant an extremely forced reading, relying on the previous trick a bit too.

There’s even a discussion of how nitpicking word choice is bad practice earlier in the same document!
by msephton | 2025-05-08 19:37:35+00:00
Full quote: https://www.famitsu.com/article/202505/41242

(machine translation via DeepL)

"Through this programme, I hope to see the birth of creators who will go on to become global leaders. I myself am still active as a creator, but recently I have been thinking that "AI is encroaching on the world of creation".

In current programming, 80-90% of the code is written by AI first, and then modified by human programmers to create the final form, which means that "80-90% of games are already made by AI" at the moment.

AI is not limited to programming, but is also encroaching heavily into the realms of art, music and planning. It is already becoming common knowledge in the creative world that we can use AI to improve our work efficiency.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-08 19:37:37+00:00
Exactly. He doesn't need 20 years. That's just him trying to draw attention to himself.

If he was really serious about giving away his money, he could write a single check to the Red Cross || Doctors Without Borders || insert charity here and in five minutes be done with it.

The world doesn't need more vanity charities. It needs its existing charities to be better funded.
by switz | 2025-05-08 19:38:07+00:00
It's because inevitably there comes a time where you want some pages (or even sub-pages) to be static, and other pages (or parts) of your application to be dynamic. If the question is "why" the inverse is "why not"?

Dan's blog is rendered as static, works without javascript and still lets him write complex client-side components when he calls for it. And if one day he decides to add a page that renders content dynamically, he can do so in the same patterns and framework that he's already using.

The goal is developer-choice. No need to pick static or dynamic holistically, have access to both when you need them. No need to pick between hydrating the entire website vs. rendering exclusively on the server. No need to pick between writing client-side amenable code or server-only code.

How many platforms have a "marketing" website for / and a platform website for /dashboard? No need to split them, just use a framework that accommodates both seamlessly. It's more powerful, even though it does come with a learning curve.
by arp242 | 2025-05-08 19:38:26+00:00
> The current zeitgeist is that Catholic priests are pedophiles. This is a widely held belief because it is so frequently true.

Just not true; the rate isn't really higher than what you see at football clubs, scout clubs, etc. What made it so bad in the catholic church are the cover-ups. Lots can be said about that. It was really bad. But the notion that many (or all) Catholic priets are pedos is complete bollocks.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-05-08 19:38:50+00:00
> Because we need baseload

This is 20th century thinking dictated by the inflexibility of thermal generation plants.

> reliable power

Nuclear is only as reliable as it's design, operations, and maintenence. Ask the French, they lost more nuclear energy output due to poor management than Germany did by phasing out the entirety of it's fleet.

And these are unproven reactors, you'll get to find out how reliable they are after operating them.

> Chinese dumping makes the uneducated believe it's cost-effective, but not in a geopolitical context that could conceivably involve our largest trading partner going to war with them

A) I would like to see some evidence of them actually "dumping" rather than having better economies of scale.

B) Last I checked, the solar panels don't need constant fueling by the Chinese, so the US starting a war with China has little to do with whether you should build them now.

> that isn't dependent on foreign goodwill

Ontario is choosing to build an unproven technology developed, owned, and fueled by its neighbor whose president keeps talking about annexation.

> this is the solution

This is a solution, and appears to be the only one your government considered. I'm willing to bet there was no actual study including non-nuclear options. Mind you, this is the same government that tore up all of your renewable contracts when they got into power, so they're more than a little biased.

Even if nuclear is the solution you want to go with, why go with unproven technology that is more expensive and isn't build, owned, controled, or fueled, by Candians?

> If you don't like that, feel free to continue investing in natural gas.

From what I can tell, Ontario's grid has been using increasing amounts of natural gas because of its heavy reliance on nuclear and its unwillingness to use renewables.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-08 19:38:50+00:00
> it will be time to turn once again to the task of reindustrialization

Won’t happen. 1) We don’t think like that as a nation and probably never will again. 2) in order for us to reindustrialize, we would have to have significant purchasers from outside our own economy, which means someone else would be the first world nation and we’d be the third-world nation. The people with money and power in this country are incapable of considering this or are so supremely afraid of this, the will precipitate action to prevent it; namely war.

Which is great for reindustrialization, provided anyone with brains, tools and resources survives on an irradiated planet.
by jumploops | 2025-05-08 19:38:57+00:00
For weather data, I'm partial to Wunderground's 10-Day forecast[0] view.

In one component you can see temp highs/lows, precipitation, cloud cover, humidity, wind speed, etc. by the hour, for the next week.

Full disclosure: I worked on this as a junior engineer, the lead engineer was fantastic. The code hasn't changed in 10+ years.

[0]https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/ca/san-francisco/37...
by fallingknife | 2025-05-08 19:39:16+00:00
If you have more money than anyone else on earth, the highest leverage use of that money is going to be to fund projects that require more capital than anyone else can afford to fund and that governments are unwilling to fund. That way you know you are actually adding to the opportunity set and not just displacing someone else. The difficult part is, of course, deciding which of those projects that only you can fund will actually be a good bet, but that doesn't change the fundamental calculation. Not sure if that's Gates' strategy, but it would make sense if it was.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-08 19:39:33+00:00
The problem is you need to ensure it's not bad in any possible configuration from an accident. This is hard to do. Will the energy release at criticality drive the material into an even more critical configuration? Such "autocatalytic" systems were considered for bomb design, but weren't chosen because of the large amounts of plutonium needed. But a fast reactor might have the plutonium of hundreds of atomic bombs.

Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear industry trade publication in 1967.

The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but worse than LWRs.)
by hajile | 2025-05-08 19:39:38+00:00
The Bible agrees with your musing as it says bishops are to be be married with kids. Peter (who the Catholics claim as the first Pope) was married as the Bible says Jesus healed his mother-in-law.

1 Timothy 3:1-7

[1] This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.

[2] A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;

[3] Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;

[4] One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity;

[5] (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)

[6] Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.

[7] Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.
by ac1990 | 2025-05-08 19:39:44+00:00
Hey everyone, I had this idea months ago but kept overthinking it. Everyone needs a scheduling tool, but they all look the same, boring links, generic calendars, and no way to stand out.

Finally decided to build it. Kept it super simple:

- A booking page that looks good (custom branding, background images, and banners). - Widgets to add videos, images, social posts from X/Linkedin, YouTube/loom videos. - Pre meeting questions to let only qualified leads see your calendar.

Launched it Sunday night, posted on LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter, and went to bed. Woke up to 100+ signups and messages from people asking for integrations, features etc. Spent the day improving it, and by the next night, we had 500+ signups.

The biggest lesson? Just launch. I had so many ideas but forced myself to start simple. Let users tell you what they need instead of over engineering upfront.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-08 19:40:23+00:00
The signal to noise ratio is difficult but now and then a factoid pops up - like the amount of retail investors piling in recently. It aligns with messaging in other forms of media that they, well, only use as indicators and frequently don’t take seriously. I’m using it often as a useful tool for counter-balancing my long term plans with the impatient gambling mentality which feeds the machine there. I learned my lesson ages ago from ZeroHedge about being overly bearish and things didn’t play out, so WSB is helpful in my situation because in principle I agree with the market is distorted assertion but believe the collapse will manifest months from now and this is a sucker’s market. Q2 earnings calls are going to be telling.
by vintagedave | 2025-05-08 19:40:41+00:00
> Thanks to our past experience with switches, combined with the figure-ground principle, a skeuomorphic design for a toggle switch will make it obvious to a user how to instantly turn on a feature.

(Figure-ground is how we perceive three-dimensionality in a 2D space.)

This is one of the best arguments for skeuomorphism I've read. It doesn't address the _look_ (ie, brushed metal) but it absolutely addresses the _style_ (looks like a real toggle switch, a real button, etc.)
by Severian | 2025-05-08 19:40:48+00:00
Kinda related, anyone know of something similar for Windows? This is definitely going in my toolkit, but I need something similar for Windows client traffic inspection (tls 1.2+) to get the full picture. Working with proprietary client/server coms over tls. Can use a special debug build, but requires shutting down and replacing. Need something in-sutu.
by dathinab | 2025-05-08 19:41:07+00:00
I think Catholicism has much bigger problems in the US then evangelicals gaining tracking.

Like people which by the Wikipedia definition of fascist being fascist using Catholicism as a tool to push their believes which are not at all compatible with the current world view represented by the Church in Rome.

A Pope which is able to say "I denounce ... as unchristian and un-american" which isn't some random person in Rome but someone seen as an American is kinda useful if you want to reduce the reach of such influences.
by ryancnelson | 2025-05-08 19:41:13+00:00
i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...

One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-08 19:41:25+00:00
Having a well-made tattoo is one thing. But most of the kids with tattoos these days seem to just have a bunch of random small tattoos sprinkled all over with no discernible rhyme or reason, and that I just don't get.

That said, I'm old enough that most of those could be my kids, so I realize I'm an old fart at this point.
by KaseyZhang | 2025-05-08 19:42:07+00:00
Hey HN! We’re Kasey and Andy from Osmosis (https://osmosis.ai/). We’ve been playing with MCP recently and wanted to share a lightweight open source model that can connect any MCP client* to any MCP server! Check it out here: https://huggingface.co/osmosis-ai/osmosis-mcp-4b

Right now, the only models that consistently work well for MCP are large and closed-source (e.g. 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5). Other models struggle with tool-calling consistency, and in particular, there’s a lack of options that can run locally.

We used Dr. GRPO to train Qwen3-4B (w/ VeRL + SGLang for multi-turn tool-calling training) for this purpose, and we were able to get performance parity with Gemini 2.5 Pro on relevant benchmarks like GSM8K (https://i.imgur.com/4RXq2Pm.png).

And since the model is open source and lightweight, that means you can also do further fine-tuning / training that’s fully local and customized to your specific needs.

Let us know what you think, or if there’s anything we can answer!

* Any client that supports Qwen3 models (i.e. it works with OpenRouter, local deployments with Ollama, etc.)
by danabramov | 2025-05-08 19:42:23+00:00
Nowadays it’s common for things to not be entirely static but kind of a mix. Some interactive client stuff, some dynamic server stuff. It’s nice to stay within the same programming model for these.

React might sound like a weird choice to you but its composition model including server and static stuff is quite powerful. See here for a slightly contrived but representative example: https://overreacted.io/impossible-components/#a-sortable-lis...
by CIPHERSTONE | 2025-05-08 19:42:37+00:00
I don't see his post as an attempt to self-promote as some commenters here have made. To what purpose? He's already known to most adults, already rich beyond anyone could possibly dream to be. And it sounds like from the post that he already had this path planned albeit several decades after his death.

I think accelerating that timeline is a good thing as I think he will be better than anyone who came after to direct how the funds as applied.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-08 19:42:47+00:00
Yes imagine this amount of abuse and cover ups would be exposed to have happened in mosques. I am 100% we'd be seeing a huge outrage politicians shouting for institutions to be prohibited, police raids and plenty of arrests... While för the Catholic Church nobody even questioned that they just "investigate" internally instead of reporting everything to the authorities. Why did none of those higher ups who helped cover up the abuse get arrested as an associate to a crime?
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-08 19:42:50+00:00
The US's authoritarian tendencies are not in remotely the same league as China and it's absurd to pretend otherwise.

Our right to declare that rule apart from the consent of the governed is unacceptable comes from the fact that it is unacceptable, not because the US has any special rights to declare it so. We hold these truths to be self-evident, now just as we did then.

The US has always had that same fundamental issue with China's government; we've just chosen to react to that reality in different ways over the years. China being more of an economic powerhouse now makes it a larger threat to human freedom than it has been in the past, so there are valid reasons to re-consider the status quo.
by manofmanysmiles | 2025-05-08 19:42:55+00:00
Although I don't usually use react, for me, there is a certain joy and also efficiency that comes from using some of the abstractions that you got from the larger JavaScript/web ecosystem while also having the ability render all that magic to a folder with a couple of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

With LLMs to help wrestle the boilerplate, I've found I can whip up a fast static site using advanced ergonomic abstractions that make the whole process a joy! In the past, wrestling the Node and NPM ecosystem was a a complete nightmare. Now it's, a dream — with the occasional storm cloud.
by immibis | 2025-05-08 19:43:36+00:00
Please note there are two main branches of open source: there is permissive, which is a donation to venture capitalists, and there is copyleft, which is prohibited from use by venture capitalists unless they play nice. This forum champions the former and is generally opposed to the latter, and the more copyleft it is, the more this forum is against it (LGPL vs GPL vs AGPL vs SSPL).
by philipkglass | 2025-05-08 19:44:55+00:00
I thought that Canada was one of the few countries with significant untapped hydroelectric potential to be developed.

This 2023 report says

The updated estimate for hydroelectric potential in northern Ontario is 3,000 - 4,000 MW. Up to an additional 1,000 MW of potential in southern Ontario was not assessed, nor was the incremental potential associated with existing hydroelectric stations, water management infrastructure or pumped storage. All of these resources remain available to expand the system as electrification creates need.

https://www.opg.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Northern-Hydr...
by jjani | 2025-05-08 19:45:00+00:00
> The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not just extensions,

Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining ground, it's biggest current limitation being cost, which is likely to get resolved sooner rather than later (Gemini Code anyone?). You're right about the right now, but with the pace at which things are moving, the trends are honestly more relevant than the status quo.
by immibis | 2025-05-08 19:45:16+00:00
The Cloudfront pricing page you cited is just as bad, except the free tier for Cloudfront traffic is 1TB/month rather than 0.1TB/month. The pricing is just as bad above that. It says "Free for origin fetches" but upon further research, seems like that just means you won't pay twice by also having to pay for your traffic to get from its origin to Cloudfront.