MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-05-08 15:29:48+00:00
> Today, the list of human diseases the world has eradicated has just one entry: smallpox... I’m optimistic that, by the time the foundation shuts down, we can also add malaria and measles.

What is Gates going to do about the anti-vaxxers, especially now that they're running the US government health programs?

Many of the problems that the Gates Foundation wants to solve are effectively political. In other words, the dysfunction of governments allows these problems to fester, such that the only, temporary solution is for someone like Gates to step in. What is Gates doing to solve the fundamental political problems? The foundation is trying to do the work that governments should be doing, so what happens after Gates dies and/or his money runs out?

Gates has a scathing critique of Elon Musk, accusing Musk of killing millions of children, but that's the inevitable outcome of a system where everything depends on the whims of billionaires. Gates himself appears like a rarity among them now, with a bit of a conscience and sense of public responsibility. We may praise Gates for his philanthropy, but it would be irresponsible of us, the non-billionaires, to leave the public's welfare to chance like that, and neither should Gates, about to turn 70 years old, support a world that depends on his personal existence in that world.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-05-08 15:29:51+00:00
So he belongs to a wealthy family then, correct? Poetry is typically the pursuit of the bourgeoisie. It does not pay very well, especially to afford a family and only work three hours per day, as per the article. It’s great that he gets to live this lifestyle, for him, but there are some of us who pursue poetry at a net loss to quality of life. I’d possibly even contend that most people who actively engage in creative writing do so to their own detriment in a consumerist society with little to no safety net such as the US. Perhaps South Korea has a generous public endowment for poetry, and I would love to hear about it if so.

Otherwise, I’m not particularly moved by another chronicle of superior outcomes in creative pursuits due to hereditary wealth articles.
by mrandish | 2025-05-08 15:30:11+00:00
True. In some sense, consumer digital video and audio tech have reached an end game for living room and home theater viewing of TV and movies. Once you have 4K 10-bit HDR+ with 5.1 (or higher) digital audio there's not much new you need in signal decoding, formatting and distribution. For couch-mode, living room viewing 8K doesn't deliver any perceivable difference (8K can be useful for some desktop PC and head-mounted AR/VR scenarios but those use cases are irrelevant to home theater). Hollywood studios don't seem interested in releasing their precious content in even higher quality or bitrate than UHD Blu-ray discs (4K 10-bit HDR+ 4:2:0 up to ~100 Mbps) and two studio execs I know who bridge tech and content doubt that will ever change. Most content is mastered at 4K 10-bit, some at 6K up to 12-bit and very little at 8K.

The HDMI 2.1 standard already supports 4K 10-bit HDR+ (4:2:2 and even 4:4:4) as well as 12-bit 4:2:2 (via tunneling, a trick which packages 12-bit YCbCr 4:2:2 in an RGB 4:4:4 format). This is already as good (or better) than the quality studios distribute for theatrical digital projection. The only meaningful difference is bitrate but for home users that's constrained by streaming service economics and reliable in-home wifi bandwidth but 25 Mbps in H.265 is already more than enough (theatrical distribution is in the 20 year-old JPEG 2000 compression format, hence needing higher bitrate). So, if you already have a media player and AV receiver that are HDMI 2.1 (48 Gbps) capable (which first appeared in products in 2018), it should be able to handle up to 4K 12-bit HDR+ as ICtCp 4:2:2 which is higher quality than even UHD discs and, I think, the highest practical quality that content for living room viewing will be distributed in in the foreseeable future.

Given all that, it's curious Samsung decided to buy these companies at any price. Are they just rolling up adjacent brands for the low-growth revenue and some marketing synergy or is there a bigger plan?
by rendaw | 2025-05-08 15:30:16+00:00
This is assuming that huge wealth inequality is a given and all we can do is pray for a rare oligarch to give some of that money back to those in need.

Edit: I think it's great that he is doing this, but I don't think it's a good system. Giving money is so hard at scale that you need to set up a corporation just to figure out how to do it, and either it's so hard that they can barely shave away at the amount they have or their MO has evolved to include preserving themselves as an entity. If that wealth were more distributed, the social distance between those in need and those with money would be less.
by turnsout | 2025-05-08 15:30:16+00:00
This is the answer! Information density is not inherently a virtue. For many tasks, you want to focus the user's attention, which usually means less density. But professionals often want as much as possible accessible from a single screen, so they don't need to click around too much.

In addition to creative software, look at professional stock/crypto trading platforms, EHRs, POS systems, CRMs, or any software targeted at a vertical—veterinarians, fleet management software, etc. Many of them will run counter to "good UI" best practices. But if you interview their users, you might be surprised by what they love about these interfaces.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 15:30:22+00:00
Yes, Rust compiling is slow. Then again, I wouldn't say that C++ is exactly speedy in that area either. Nor Java. None of those are even in the same zip code to Go's compile speed.

So if you're cool with C++ or Java compile times, Rust will generally be fine. If you're coming from Go, Rust compiles will fell positively glacial.
by abishekr | 2025-05-08 15:30:33+00:00
Most data loss prevention tools rely on brittle regex rules and file scanning logic that miss context and generate false positives. We’ve taken a different route—Raven’s AI Email DLP uses LLMs to detect sensitive data like credentials, tokens, and code snippets in context, even inside images, inline replies, or password-protected attachments. It works natively with Gmail and M365, no agents or heavy setup.

Would love feedback from the HN security and SaaS folks: https://ravenmail.io/ai-email-dlp
by floxy | 2025-05-08 15:30:37+00:00
I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to the rest of the U.S.)?

https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/

Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
by pfannkuchen | 2025-05-08 15:32:04+00:00
I feel like if, in the counterfactual where people continued writing things by hand, as an adult you thought your handwriting was holding you back, you could probably improve it? It’s not an innate property of a human, it’s a practiced skill. And as a child there is not a good incentive structure to make kids who aren’t for some reason perfectionistic learn to write really well.
by asim | 2025-05-08 15:32:07+00:00
> Microservices only pay off when you have real scaling bottlenecks, large teams, or independently evolving domains. Before that? You’re paying the price without getting the benefit: duplicated infra, fragile local setups, and slow iteration. For example, Segment eventually reversed their microservice split for this exact reason — too much cost, not enough value.

Basically this. Microservices are a design pattern for organisations as opposed to technology. Sounds wrong but the technology change should follow the organisational breakout into multiple teams delivering separate products or features. And this isn't a first step. You'll have a monolith, it might break out into frontend, backend and a separate service for async background jobs e.g pdf creation is often a background task because of how long it takes to produce. Anyway after that you might end up with more services and then you have this sprawl of things where you start to think about standardisation, architecture patterns, etc. Before that it's a death sentence and if your business survives I'd argue it didn't because of microservices but inspite of them. The dev time lost in the beginning, say sub 200 engineers is significant.
by kiviuq | 2025-05-08 15:32:21+00:00
- Whoever is paying you is your customer, no matter what alternative word we use for it. If you're an employee, your customer is your "employer." If you're being acquired, your customer is your "acquirer."

That is none-sens.

If that were true, all profits would go to the customers. No, you are hired because the company and its owners can extract the profits from your work. Laying you off could mean nothing to customers, but even more profits to them.
by gwern | 2025-05-08 15:32:34+00:00
He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the foundation being liquidated in his lifetime, and not handed off to administrators like, yes, the Ford Foundation or Harvard...

(And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there is a major question of whether 'keeping your powder dry' is a huge mistake - one way or the other.)
by cestith | 2025-05-08 15:33:07+00:00
$movie_name is not the worst movie out there by a long shot. It certainly doesn’t deserve to ride the coattails of the original movie though. It helps to keep that in mind if you decide to watch it. It prevents some amount of disappointment.

In this case, $movie_name is set to “WarGames: The Dead Code”, but I think we all understand why it’s a template.
by d_k_f | 2025-05-08 15:33:07+00:00
As I understood it, it's less of a real problem and more of a perceived annoyance. People accelerate, let go of the pedal, realize that a deceleration sets in, accelerate again, etc. so their brake lights are flashing all the time (instead of just using their cruise control to have this happen much more smoothly and ideally below the relevant thresholds).
by prvc | 2025-05-08 15:33:22+00:00
Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-08 15:33:45+00:00
I honestly don't think Musk affected 2024 to any real extent. Look at how much narrower Harris's loss was than other incumbent losses in 2024. If anything you could make the argument Musk tanked Trump's lead like Trump tanked Poilievre.

Democrats running a candidate that lost their only attempts during a competitive primary. As well as that candidate being unable to read the room and saying they'd do the same economic decisions as the unpopular _incumbent_ Biden. And they still were within 1% of votes!
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:34:08+00:00
A case study for Denmark. Not even using the latest plummet in price of BESS.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent.

Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm.

Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply.

When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed.

Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 15:34:10+00:00
Hi, I'm intimately familiar with Stack Overflow (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/523612).

It requires either:

* Three votes (it used to be 5) from community members with the close vote privilege (awarded at 3000 reputation)

* Unilateral closure by a moderator (there are currently 24 of these: https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=moderators - compare to 29 million user accounts: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1877958/c... )

* Unilateral closure as a duplicate by a user with the close vote privilege who also has a gold badge for one of the tags originally used on the question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589)

The thresholds are deliberately fairly low, mainly because closure of new bad questions must happen promptly for the site to work as intended (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). This is frankly a major fault in the site design; but the new Staging Ground feature (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430404) helps a lot, on the occasions when the site software actually decides to use it.

However, "closing" content "that's viewed a lot" (this basically only ever means old questions; new questions rarely ever get a lot of views, regardless of quality, unless it's from spambots - see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/431084) is emphatically not wrong. We close old, popular questions all the time, because they don't currently meet site standards (usually, because they are no longer deemed on topic). This is at least partly to discourage new questions along the same lines; but the primary effect of closing a question is to prevent answers from being contributed. These old questions generally wouldn't need new answers (although edits to existing answers may be helpful - and are not blocked) even if they were still considered suitable.
by no_wizard | 2025-05-08 15:34:18+00:00
They have their place. In my experience, a good rule of thumb[0] is if there are actual benefits from being a standalone service.

For example, we have a authentication microservice at work. It makes sense that it lives outside of the main application, because its used in a multiple different contexts and the service boundary allows for it to be more responsive to changes, upgrades and security fixes than having it be part of the main app, and it deploys differently than the application. It also adds enough intentional friction that we don't accidentally put logic where it doesn't belong as part of the user authentication process. It has helped keep the code focused on only primary concerns.

That said, you can't apply any of these patterns blindly, as is so often the case. A good technical leader should push back when the benefits don't actually exist. The real issue is lack of experience making technical decisions on merits.

This includes high level executive leaders in the organization. At a startup especially, they are still often involved in many technical decisions. You'd be surprised (well maybe not!) how the highest leadership in a company at a startup will mandate things like using microservices and refuse to listen to anything running counter to such things.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb
by bombcar | 2025-05-08 15:34:59+00:00
In no way would I want to downplay Gates' effect on the industry (though I personally think it was much more in the 80s and early 90s than in the heyday of the 2000s) I think people would have built computers without him, and its possible that we would have been better off overall in a world where the Amiga won, not the IBM PC, or the Mac, etc.

Gates is more notable for NOT Netscaping or Sunning or Lotus-123ing his company than for any particular decision.
by immibis | 2025-05-08 15:35:04+00:00
The actual value of bitcoin is that you can use it to buy illegal counter-cultural things like drugs, fake IDs, etc. Except you can't, because more anonymous cryptocurrencies were invented and the markets migrated to those. Now Bitcoin is mostly used for more "serious", "wall-streety" crimes, like bypassing international sanctions. Either one can hold up the value of an investment asset.
What to do if another company is using our brand name without permission?
by donzog | 2025-05-08 15:35:20+00:00
If you search on Google for 'EdiFabric', our company name, you get a sponsored result from cdata (unrelated to our company) pointing to their product with a link named 'EdiFabric'. They are obviously infringing our trademark to deceive and lure users. Apart from sending a cease and desist letter as soon as possible, what other steps would be appropriate to respond to that infringement? Should this be reported to Google Ads as well? Thank you.
by immibis | 2025-05-08 15:35:33+00:00
It's fundamentally still a forum for VCs to VC. You see this periodically where some topic comes up that's completely antithetical to VC, and gets quickly flagged or downvoted to oblivion, even though there may be lively discussion. For example, this occurs when open source licenses are being discussed. The remaining undead comments are the ones favouring licenses that favour venture capital interests.
by jollyllama | 2025-05-08 15:35:39+00:00
That doesn't necessarily negate the point that inequality is high and keeps getting higher. It all depends on what your definition of inequality is. Ironically, it is the transfer payments which Gramm decrees that wind up enriching that top 5% the most, they are basically farming the lower classes to line their pockets at the expense of the middle and upper middle, who pay a disproportionate share of the taxes.
by nicce | 2025-05-08 15:35:55+00:00
The primary question is that who is deciding that what kind of information is curated and whether the arguments have been properly voted, and the process itself is transparent.

I guess nobody could disagree, that it benefits all if the site is useful and whether the content is factually correct and up-to-date and follows Q&A format.

I admit, I haven't followed what happens closely for some time, but here is some older example post: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389834/statement-fr...
by noddybear | 2025-05-08 15:36:34+00:00
1. These are additions to our existing Factorio Learning Environment, which is an extensive agent environment for evaluating pre-trained LLM agents in an unbounded/open-ended setting in the game of Factorio. I don't agree that it is trivial, as there is significant infrastructure in place to support Factorio as an LLM eval.

2. Factorio is an unsolved game in multi-agent research.

3. This is a research environment. You can read our paper on Arxiv if you're interested! Nobody will make any money of this.
by coryfklein | 2025-05-08 15:36:35+00:00
> a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.

Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-08 15:36:36+00:00
It's the common trap of trying to teach, and why teaching is so much more difficult than it appears.

When you intimately understand a topic, you have an intuition that naturally paves over gaps and bumps. This is excellent for getting work done, but terrible for teaching. Your road from start to finish is 12 minutes, and without that knack for teaching, you are unable to see what that road looks like to a beginner.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-08 15:36:55+00:00
Nah we do something. We threaten to break the probation of anyone going in to save their children, beat up parents trying to get in, then scroll on our cell phones and furiously maintain hand hygiene with sanitizer while standing outside the door.

The lesson is clear. Fight your way in to get your kids or die trying. No one is coming to help.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-08 15:37:15+00:00
They're not interested in facts or outcomes, they just want to ban transness and gender non-conformity in general.

Similar to the abortion policy; see the Pulitzer winning article https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-wins-pulitzer-... . Sure, it might kill some women, but they're never going to pay attention to that.
by gambiting | 2025-05-08 15:37:35+00:00
>> The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people.

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?

What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
by rsynnott | 2025-05-08 15:37:38+00:00
Every time I see a quote from him, I assume it must be parody.

This one seems to be real, though, complete with the bit at the end where his brain broke down entirely.

It’s kind of reminiscent of early GPT-2, where it would seem kinda comprehensible for a bit and then just trail off into nonsense.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-08 15:37:43+00:00
I'm going to go against the crowd and say that I prefer DigiKey and Mouser's sites over McMaster. The filter/apply pattern they use when trying to narrow things down is a lot quicker than waiting for Mcmaster's auto updating window. Usually, when I'm looking for something, it's not for an exact specific item, but to know what options are even there in the first place. Selecting ranges of things in McMaster has always felt a little cumbersome, but Digikey has always had it right.

The other thing McMaster does that's kind of annoying, but also kind of funny, is that they go out of their way to purge the branding of the items they stock. Very understandable why they do that, but sometimes they do it when it doesn't make sense. Want to buy a generic "graphing calculator" for $126 which is definitely not a Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus? Here you go! [1]. Look, you're not fooling anybody here.

[1] https://www.mcmaster.com/8392T11/
by turnsout | 2025-05-08 15:37:46+00:00
Agreed—I spent the 90s idolizing Jobs and despising Gates. But today I have deep respect for Gates and the way he's using his wealth as a positive force in the world. Jobs had better taste and was a more effective product leader, but I'm sorry to say that he sucked as a philanthropist. It's disappointing that he spent ANY of his mental energy at the end of his life building that dumb $100M yacht, rather than focusing on his legacy.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-08 15:38:00+00:00
We used to listen to a lot of music with Dolby ProLogic enabled even though the music clearly isn't encoded with that in mind. Since ProLogic works off of the audio phasing to decide what is sent to the rear speakers, a lot of the effects used in the music mix trigger ProLogic to send random things to the rear. It's an interesting experience. Maybe less so without the use herbal remedies too.??? Some of the call&response type lines from Beastie Boys would very clearly come from the rear, and was quite startling the first time hearing it. With 5.1 and beyond, everything is discrete tracks, so that trick no longer works. Do modern surround units even do ProLogic any more?