MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitcurious | 2025-05-08 16:51:31+00:00
I'll go against the grain and say that microservices have advantages for small dev teams embedded in non-tech orgs.

1. You get to minimize devops/security/admin work. Really a consequences of using serverless tooling, but you land on a something like a microservices architecture if you do.

2. You get can break out work temporally. This is the big one - when you're a small team supporting multiple products, you often don't have continuity of work. You have one project for a few months, completely unrelated product for another few months. Microservice architectures are easier to build and maintain in that environment.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:51:42+00:00
> If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.

Over time we found that hardly anyone asking questions could achieve the kind of "good subjectivity" that we wanted. Questions like this attract flame wars (which are especially obnoxious in a format with answer posts with non-threaded comments) and advertising for alternatives, add-ons etc. that result in a completely derailed discussion in a place that isn't supposed to have a discussion at all.

If you want to ask "what factors should I take into consideration when choosing..." then I would agree that can in principle fit on a Q&A site. But open-endedness again makes it hard to choose the best answers and ensure they float to the top.

The general principles are much the same at Codidact Software (https://software.codidact.com), but the scope is considerably wider than Stack Overflow's (https://software.codidact.com/posts/search?search=category%3...). You might have better luck with that kind of question there.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-08 16:52:01+00:00
> 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.

It's worse than that. It's possible to have a democracy where some of the options are better, e.g. switch to score voting so there can be arbitrarily many parties and candidates instead of major party insiders filtering out every decent candidate before you get to the election.

But the party insiders want that control, so they set up a narrative where every problem is caused by the other team, instead of the problem being caused by there only being two teams.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-08 16:52:14+00:00
I worked on software for doctors to use at clinics for a while and hands down those programs have some of the most information dense UIs I have ever seen. Doctors want everything possible on a single screen, it's wild

Unfortunately I don't really know how to get screenshots or examples for you, given the nature of healthcare data privacy and such

But I would suggest searching around and seeing what you can find for clinic software. I bet you can turn something up
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-08 16:52:17+00:00
Hiring will need to change to stop resume-driven development (can't eliminate it completely though), because you're likely to only get monolith roles if you only work on monoliths. Only being able to speak about microservices puts you in the "talk the talk, not walk the walk" category.

It would also nice to have less fear-driven career advice like "your skills go out of date" which drives people to try adopting the latest things.
Ask HN: For people who've gone viral] which channels lead to virality?
by ArisC | 2025-05-08 16:52:27+00:00
I imagine anyone who publishes stuff on the web is thinking 'I know my stuff's good, if only I could go viral once...'

So - if you have gone viral, which channels sparked it off? X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, Reddit, something else? How did you do it?

And, bonus points, which channels reward quality instead of tricking algorithms with slop?
by dimal | 2025-05-08 16:52:28+00:00
I saw one startup with about fifty engineers, and dozens of services. They had all of the problems that the post describes. Getting anything done was nearly impossible until you were in the system for at least six months and knew how to work around all the issues.

Here’s the kicker: They only had a few hundred MAUs. Not hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of users. So all this complexity was for nothing. They burned through $50M in VC money then went under. It’s a shame because their core product was very innovative and well architected, but it didn’t matter.
by xcskier56 | 2025-05-08 16:52:37+00:00
I think that really depends on your definition. But I will also contend that even splitting your system into 2 or 3 services if it's not for strong reasons will 100% slow you down and cause long term headaches.

One project that I helped design had to split out a segment of the system b/c the data was eligibility records coming from health plans. This data had very different security and lifecycle requirements (e.g. we have to keep it for 7 or 10 years). Splitting out this service simplified some parts but any time we need to cross the boundary between the 2 services, the work takes probably twice as long as it would if it were in a single service. I don't think it was the wrong decision, but it the service definitely did not come for free
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 16:52:39+00:00
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.

Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future.

But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry.

We have research on when we achieve learning effects.

> If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements:

> - It has to be the same site

> - It has to be the same constructor

> - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next

> - It has to be constant labor laws

> - It has to be a constant regulatory regime

> When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world.

From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k

China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix.

From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.
Ask HN: Alternatives to Data Wrangler?
by dwrodri | 2025-05-08 16:53:31+00:00
I deal with a lot of building and debugging data pipelines at work, and the Data Wrangler plugin for VSCode[1] has quickly risen to the top as a quick and easy way for me for inspect and prototype transforms to parquet files and CSVs.

I am submitting this question to HN to perhaps collect more diverse perspectives than I could get from language models and search engines, given the audience here. I have tried to lean into using Visidata[2] a bit, but it has been a steep learning curve so far, and it hasn't exactly been easy to take visidata transformations and apply them to our python codebase.

1: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/data-wrangler-release/

2: https://www.visidata.org/
by bee_rider | 2025-05-08 16:53:37+00:00
The comment they were replying to went out of its way to say “completely closed” which is, of course, not correct.

If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable argument. But then, renewables don’t consume any fuel (but the installations are a lot less durable). We’re rapidly approaching the point where we might have to admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one being universally superior are hard to justify and the differences are complicated…
by Neywiny | 2025-05-08 16:53:40+00:00
You risk a false equivalency (ex: look at what water did to cotton candy. Imagine the damage to a human. We'd dissolve) but your question is valid. Even on HN this has been discussed. According to past discussions, water, which is in the eye, blocks that wavelength. I'm sure enough of it is bad (because blocks really means turns into heat) but it seems animals, being water sacks, are well suited for this.
by jimbokun | 2025-05-08 16:53:48+00:00
I thought the linked article about how Khan Academy eventually migrated to multiple services was a good example of when introducing micro services is a good idea:

https://blog.khanacademy.org/go-services-one-goliath-project...

They had already scaled the mono service about as far as it could go and had a good sense of what the service boundaries should be based on experience.
by energywut | 2025-05-08 16:53:55+00:00
An average US home uses ~10,000 KWh over a year, resulting in about 1 kilowatt average power use.

Figures I can find suggest that a 737 uses approximately 7MW to stay aloft.

So a couple things I learned -- I think it's still a notable amount of power, enough to power ~6,000 homes for a year just to train a single model. But also, I learned that planes use a whole lot more power than I thought!

Training a single model is essentially consuming one plane-year's worth of power, or 3-4 flights continuously while it trains. I had no idea planes used so much energy.

But also, I bet most of these companies aren't training one model and calling it done. There's probably 1s or 10s of models being trained per year per company. That's a material amount of energy use. If we could power tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, that isn't 'trivial' energy input.

I think it's useful to put it into context next to other things we take for granted, but I don't think it's fair to diminish it as nothing either.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-05-08 16:54:25+00:00
In my work, I hardly ever use linear regression, but do use multiple linear regression. Multiple linear regression allows multiple linear predictors, where the method parses shared and independent variances associated with each predictor. These discussions on linear regression hardly ever touches on the very useful multiple linear regression method. In the case of bad variance inflation in models with multi-collinear predictors, robust regression techniques are advised like ridge, LASSO, or elastic net regression.

In relation to gradient descent, I do not know enough if multiple regression is at all relevant, or why not.

And yeah, for non-normal error distributions, we should be looking at generalized linear models, which allows one to specify other distributions that might better fit the data.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-08 16:54:26+00:00
I mean Besset, Trump's Secretary of Treasury, was on Soros' team that broke the Bank of England. According to MAGA he is literally the Soros swamp that got rich basically breaking a friendly country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/business/scott-bessent-wa...
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 16:54:27+00:00
"Need"? Probably not. But unlike microservices they don't really have downsides (at least not with modern IDEs and the automatic refactorings they support) and they do offer some benefits.

Statically-types languages are a form of automatically-verified documentation, and an opportunity to name semantic properties different modules have in common. Both of those are great, but it is awkward that it is usually treated as an all-or-nothing matter.

Almost no language offers what I actually want: duck typing plus the ability to specify named interfaces for function inputs. Probably the closest I've found is Ruby with a linter to enforce RDoc comments on any public methods.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-08 16:54:51+00:00
>and that the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.

What you really mean is that the only way to get them to honor their deal is credible threat of violence.

There might be a million intermediary steps spread across just as many parties but that's what it is at the end of the day.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-08 16:54:55+00:00
> I think we lost something with static linking when going from C to Dotnet. (And I guess Java.) Many C (and C++, especially "header only") libraries when statically linked are pretty good at filtering out unused code.

This is an interesting statement because, for example, in C version of Mimalloc you end up paying for opt-in assertions because they still exist in the code unless you compile a different version that strips them away. In C# port, you can set the same assertions/checks early with AppContext switch, and then the values will be cached in static readonly fields. Then, when JIT recompiles the code to a more optimized version, these values will become JIT constants leading to all the unreachable code to be optimized away completely (and to much better inlining of now streamlined methods).

> Even when generating a self contained EXE, the standard toolchain performs no end-linking of the program, it just bundles everything up in one file.

/p:PublishTrimmed=true

or even

/p:PublishAot=true # please note it's better to set it as a project property, but either way it requires non-optional linking

Lastly, consider that JITing the bytecode essentially acts like if everything is a single, statically-linked compilation unit since it's not subject to inconvenient compilation unit restrictions even Rust is subject to, the problems of which need to be cleaned up with link-time optimization.
by joshuaissac | 2025-05-08 16:54:56+00:00
> Too bad they did not go with Linux

The initial smartphone version of HarmonyOS 2 from a few years ago was just an Android reskin,[1] despite claims to the contrary from Huwaei, and unlike HarmonyOS 1 for IoT devices. It remains to be seen if HarmonyOS for PC really is an independent OS, a fork or a reskin/distro of an existing OS.

1. https://www.techspot.com/news/88512-huawei-harmonyos-20-poor...
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 16:55:04+00:00
The President and Secretary of State have less power than you think; they aren't corporate CXOs. They are subject to the laws, and NSA must follow laws made by Congress. That's intentional - the division of power is that Congress makes the rules and the executive branch implements them.

The Secretary of State should have a secure mobile communication device, as should most everyone else in national security positions (and other jobs). It's absurd that they didn't. Just think of the productivity hit and the capability hit - imagine how it interferes with responses to crises.

Who here would tolerate it at their workplace?
Show HN: DiscoMonday – Real-time voice AI guides based on your location
by discomonday | 2025-05-08 16:55:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I built DiscoMonday, a voice AI guide that lets any visitor get real-time narration based on their location — using only their phone and earbuds. No hardware, no app install, and no code required.

This is a tech preview of the core engine, not the full SaaS product yet. You can:

- Use GPS or tap a map to set your location

- Hear the AI start speaking based on where you are

- Interrupt mid-sentence and ask a follow-up question

- Get a real-time, spoken reply via OpenAI + LiveKit

Try the demo: https://discomonday.com

If GPS isn't enabled, tap the map to simulate a location. If the server is overloaded, you’ll still be added to the waitlist (all signups are). Mic and location permissions are required — this is an audio-first experience.

Why I built this: On a city trip, my wife and I kept asking “What’s that building?” and no app could answer. So I hacked together a prototype. The current system is a step toward making voice-based, location-aware interfaces dead simple to deploy — for museums, exhibitions, tourism, and more.

What I’d love feedback on:

- Does the voice feel fast and natural enough?

- Was anything confusing or rough?

- What use cases would you personally want this for?

Privacy note: Your privacy matters. We strip all personal data and only keep anonymized usage stats to improve the experience.

—

I’m Mark I. Matsushima, a solo founder based in Okinawa, Japan. Built this with Next.js, OpenAI’s real-time API, LiveKit, and AWS Lambda / EC2. Appreciate your feedback!
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 16:55:26+00:00
The underlying system has some weird behaviours and moderators are sometimes compelled to mark flags they find helpful as unhelpful. This might happen, for example, if you report something as "rude or abusive" where they agree that the content should be removed, but disagree that the user should be penalized. But also, a lot of problems are better handled by just editing out objectionable content. When you flag a question as a duplicate or as "needs improvement", that goes to the community; but everything else is sent to a team of 24 volunteers overlooking a site that still receives thousands of questions a week and is still full of years-old comments that should be cleaned up but which nobody has gotten around to yet.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-08 16:55:31+00:00
Conway's law is about communication, not team boundaries. There is no requirement that we introduce a significant architectural boundary at the boundary between teams: companies choose to do so to avoid having cross-team communication.

The only way for significant architectural boundaries at team boundaries to not result in incredibly painful software, especially for a growing team, is to let the software organize the teams. Which means reorging the company whenever you need to refactor, and somehow guessing right about how many changes each component will need in the coming year.

It also means you can't have product and engineers explore a problem together, or manage by objective with OKRs since engineers aren't connected to business outcomes.

I know that all the ex-Amazonians are convinced this is the only way to build software, but it really, really isn't.
by CSSer | 2025-05-08 16:55:35+00:00
On a podcast I listened to yesterday (Marketplace, from American Public Media), they mentioned that many businesses seem to be approaching this with an "We're in this together" type of attitude. They played some audio clips of business owners on their social media channels saying things like, "Don't worry [company name] is going to do absolutely everything to fight this. We'll do everything we can to avoid raising prices on you!"

The reality, of course, which they reveal when interviewed, is that they know they're completely powerless. In the best case, all they can do is delay the inevitable and they know it. This approach exists purely to keep themselves from being made into the enemy. As you noted, some business owners admitted to considering if they should just shutter their business too.
by sReinwald | 2025-05-08 16:55:39+00:00
Semantic router is on my radar, but I haven't had a good look at it yet. The primary bottleneck in our current setup, isn't really the routing decision time. The lightweight LLM I chose (Gemma3 4B) handles the task identification fairly well in terms of both speed and accuracy from what I've found.

For some context: this is a fairly limited exploratory deployment which runs alongside other priority projects for me, so I'm not too obsessed with optimizing the decision-making time. Those three seconds are relatively minor when compared with the 20–60 seconds it takes to unload the old and load a new model.

I can see semantic router being really useful in scenarios built around commercial, API-accessed models, though. There, it could yield significant cost savings by, for example, intelligently directing simpler queries to a less capable but cheaper model instead of the latest and greatest (and likely significantly more expensive) model users might feel drawn to. You're basically burning money if you let your employees use Claude 3.7 to format a .csv file.
by QuercusMax | 2025-05-08 16:56:06+00:00
You'd think these big companies would want to stand up against this nonsense. Microsoft fired their law firm who sucked up to Trump's threats.

Why doesn't Wal-Mart or whoever make a loud pronouncement that they'll fund primary campaigns against any congressperson who supports these tariffs? These companies got Citizens United passed so they can spend unlimited amounts of political money, so why don't they use this power when their business is threatened like this?
by mjr00 | 2025-05-08 16:56:25+00:00
I was at AWS RDS when they upgraded the shared control plane code from Java 7 to 8. IIRC it was about 6 months for 5-10 developers more or less full-time. Absolutely massive timesink. The move to separate services happened shortly after that.

> I don't think it's much better if you have to spend a year and a half updating 400+ different repos, though.

There's two things going for separate services (which may or may not be separate repos; remember a single repo can have multiple services):

1. You can do it piecemeal. 90% of your services will be 15-minute changes: update versions in a few files, let automated tests run, it's good to go. The 10% that have deeper compatibility issues can be addressed separately without holding back the rest. You can't separate this if you have a single deployable artifact.

2. Complexity is superlinear with respect to lines of code. Upgrading a single 1mLOC service isn't 10x harder than updating ten 100kLOC services, it's more like 20, 30x harder. Obviously this is hard to measure, but there's a reason these massive legacy codebases get stuck on ancient versions of dependencies. (And a reason companies pay out the ass for Oracle's extended Java 8 support, which they still offer.)
by tlogan | 2025-05-08 16:56:37+00:00
> products we couldn’t manufacture ourselves even if we wanted to, since the vendor has well-deserved IP protections

Tariffs are working as intended: if somebody can manufacture similar things here they will be in advantage.

This isn’t an endorsement of tariffs, just an observation: their goal is to give domestic manufacturers an edge when similar goods can be made locally. In that sense, they’re functioning exactly as intended.
by tinix | 2025-05-08 16:57:28+00:00
I also recommend "The Sense of Style"; knowing how to wield punctuation and grammatical structure is critical for clearly and successfully articulating your ideas. I use semicolons, colons, and parentheticals heavily (but en dashes and em dashes are great too).

vs

I also recommend "The Sense of Style"--knowing how to wield punctuation and grammatical structure is critical for clearly and successfully articulating your ideas--and I use semicolons, colons, and parentheticals heavily (but en dashes and em dashes are great too).

I find that dashes are great for conversational style flowing sentence structure, but sometimes they can become too long and tiring to the reader.
by x0x0 | 2025-05-08 16:58:19+00:00
We are being run by abject morons who will never be able to understand simple truths, one of which is China is in a far stronger position: their factories are missing dollars. We are missing goods. One of those is easy for a central bank / government to replace.

Watching these people discover where the world's rare earths come from is equally amazing and terrifying.