MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by INTPenis | 2025-11-30 20:16:43+00:00
I'm helping a company get out of legacy hell right now. And instead of saying we need microservices, let's start with just a service oriented architecture. That would be a huge step forward.

Most companies should be perfectly fine with a service oriented architecture. When you need microservices, you have made it. That's a sign of a very high level of activity from your users, it's a sign that your product has been successful.

Don't celebrate before you have cause to do so. Keep it simple, stupid.
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-30 20:16:49+00:00
VSCode feels like it’s in the “brand withdrawal” phase of its lifespan. I’ve turned off the sneakily named “Chat” and yet it still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar visibility.

> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

I’m not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit? How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does that get managed?
by state_less | 2025-11-30 20:17:02+00:00
My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."

I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.
by milchek | 2025-11-30 20:17:30+00:00
One major thing this has exposed is how many people from non US countries are grifting on the cultural war between the left and right in the US by pretending to be on either side.

This kind of content still gets a lot of engagement and can be pretty profitable for people in third world countries.

I think it’s good that has been exposed. There is a difference between me, as an Aussie, commenting on affairs in other countries, vs straight up exploiting peoples fears by pretending to be left or right wing, in the US, and sharing content to further fan the flames between people on the political spectrum.

You could argue they can still post this content, but it’s already pretty clear people tend to disregard or ignore this kind of rage bait when they realise the users are disingenuous.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-11-30 20:17:59+00:00
Interesting selection of models for the "instruction count vs. accuracy" plot. Curious when that was done and why they chose those models. How well does ChatGPT 5/5.1 (and codex/mini/nano variants), Gemini 3, Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.5, recent grok models, Kimi 2 Thinking etc (this generation of models) do?
by rahen | 2025-11-30 20:18:12+00:00
Unless you need horizontal scalability or clustering, Compose + Terraform is all you need.

With Compose, you get proper n-tier application containerization with immutability. By adding an infrastructure-as-code tool such as Terraform to abstract your IT environment, you can deploy your application on-premises, in the cloud, or at a customer site with a single command.

For clustering needs, there’s Incus, and finally, Kubernetes for very fast scalability (<mn), massive deployments on large clusters, cloud offloading, and microservices.

Almost nobody truly needs the complexity of Kubernetes. The ROI simply isn’t there for the majority of use cases.
by Coffeewine | 2025-11-30 20:18:20+00:00
I guess these things aren’t literally exclusive, but it’s pretty amusing that elsewhere the rebuttal argues that we’re deep in a great stagnation which we need space exploration to pull us out of. (In the bit where he is arguing against the idea that we should wait a century and then maybe try to colonize space with greater technology)

> The slowdown in GDP growth is not mere paranoia, but an economic fact. Part of the problem with seeing clearly the stagnation all around us is that we need to compare ourselves to what might have been, not to the 1950s as the authors do.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-30 20:18:30+00:00
This seems like a fairly reasoned screed. I can't find much to disagree with.

I am, personally, quite optimistic about the potential for "AI," but there's still plenty of warts.

Just a few minutes ago, I was going through a SwiftUI debugging session with ChatGPT. SwiftUI View problems are notoriously difficult to debug, and the LLM got to the "let's try circling twice widdershins" stage. At that point, I re-engaged my brain, and figured out a much simpler solution than the one proposed.

However, it gave me the necessary starting point to figure it out.
by politelemon | 2025-11-30 20:18:41+00:00
I'm having a hard time believing any of this, and am tempted to think this might be in bad faith. It's true it's a bit ambitious on their part that they replaced the right side key, but it isn't larger than normal and it's not positioned any differently than normal keys. Working with hundreds of laptops and humans, several ham fisted, on a daily basis I've not seen this at all.

Further, a dark pattern is where you are led towards a specific outcome but are pulled insidiously towards another. This doesn't really fall into that definition.
by echelon | 2025-11-30 20:18:53+00:00
If you have workloads with different shapes, microservices make sense.

If not, do the monolith thing as long as you can.

But if you're processing jobs that need hand off to a GPU, just carve out a service for it. Stop lamenting over microservices.

If you've got 100+ engineers and different teams own different things, try microservices. Otherwise, maybe keep doing the monolith.

If your microservice is as thin as leftpad.js and hosts only one RPC call, maybe don't do that. But if you need to carve out a thumbnailing service or authC/authZ service, that's a good boundary.

There is no "one size fits all" prescription here.
by Quekid5 | 2025-11-30 20:19:44+00:00
I can't speak for the parent poster, but for global function declarations, yes, absolutely.

It's infuriating when a type error can "jump" across global functions just because you weren't clear about what types those functions should have had, even if those types are very abstract. So early adopters learned to sprinkle in type annotations at certain points until they discovered that the top-level was a good place. In OCaml this pain is somewhat lessened when you use module interface files, but without that... it's pain.
by viccis | 2025-11-30 20:20:10+00:00
This is part of the reason I make this point online. People need to understand that there are jobs available if you do the work to make yourself valuable, especially if you aren't demanding high compensated FAANG roles right out the gate. It's just that if you learn absolutely nothing and will be hired to do shit work for a year or two until you become baseline competent and will just leave as soon as you can pass FAANG interviews, companies would rather just pay people in developing countries like India or Colombia. They'll do bad work and, in the case that they do turn out to be great, leave to make more money. But at least they cost 5x less (the US system of employer covered healthcase isn't helping our workers' competitiveness in this either!)
by hak8or | 2025-11-30 20:20:48+00:00
I was curious what instruments this use, looks like a special form of radar? Does this mean it effectively gives us very accurate height maps regardless of cloud coverage, and is able to differentiate between what surface material it's seeing?

> Radar instruments can image Earth’s surface through clouds, precipitation, regardless of sunlight, making them particularly well suited for monitoring polar regions. The Sentinel-1C and -1D satellites also carry an Automatic Identification System (AIS) instrument – improving the mission capacity to detect ships and sea pollution. The Sentinel-1D AIS was also activated as the satellite passed over Antarctica capturing the presence of ships in these extreme areas.
by yowlingcat | 2025-11-30 20:20:51+00:00
I see a lot of value in spinning up microservices where the database is global across all services (and not inside the service) but I struggle more to see the value of separate core transactional databases for separate services unless/until the point where two separate parts of the organizations are almost two separate companies that cannot operate as a single org/single company. You lose data integrity, joining ability, one coherent state of the world, etc.

The main time I can see this making sense is when the data access patterns are so different in scale and frequency that they're optimizing for different things that cause resource contention, but even then, my question would become do you really need a separate instance of the same kind of DB inside the service, or do you need another global replica/a new instance of a new but different kind of DB (for example Clickhouse if you've been running Postgres and now need efficient OLAP on large columnar data).

Once you get to this scale, I can see the idea of cell-based architecture [1] making sense -- but even at this point, you're really looking at a multi-dimensionally sharded global persistence store where each cell is functionally isolated for a single slice of routing space. This makes me question the value of microservices with state bound to the service writ large and I can't really think of a good use case for it.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reducing-...
by crazygringo | 2025-11-30 20:20:53+00:00
> over software critical to exist in society?

I don't know what that means grammatically.

But you could ask, what is so terrifying about exerting democratic control over people's free speech, over the political opinions they're allowed to express?

The answer is, because it infringes on freedom. As long as these AI features aren't harming anyone -- if your only complaint is you find their presence annoying, in a product you have a free choice in using or not using -- then there's no democratic justification for passing laws against them. Democratic rights take precedence.
by scuff3d | 2025-11-30 20:21:59+00:00
The other problem is that very very few people actually know how to design a microservice based architecture. I've worked with half a dozen different teams who claim they're building microservices, but when you look at the system it's just a giant distributed monolith. Most of them are people who worked in legacy code bases, and while they like the idea of microservices, they can't let go of those design patterns. So they do the exact same thing but just out everything behind network calls. Drives me absolutely fucking nuts
by ur-whale | 2025-11-30 20:22:51+00:00
> Switzerland has a wealth tax.

If the wealth tax rate is close to zero, who the hell cares?

The wealth tax in e.g. Kanton Zürich is 0.025% (not the cheapest Kanton).

If you are able to grow your capital at - say - inflation corrected 4%, which shouldn't be overly hard, and you pay no taxes whatsoever on cap gains while paying 0.025% on the total accumulated wealth.

I'll let you do the math as to how good you have it there.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-30 20:23:14+00:00
Mozilla's concentrated efforts took a while, they're right that it's hard to figure out exactly what car manufacturers are doing. Unless you're willing to sue a bunch of them, plain GDPR requests won't be enough to get this information. Companies will happily lie or declare information collected as "non-personal" or "trade secrets" and if they're smart enough about the way they process their data they can probably convince a judge that the end result isn't personal enough that exposing their trade secrets weighs up against the GDPR.

There's no way even a large news corporation is going to buy every model car from every brand that comes out in a year to get the legal rights to demand data, let alone pursue these data requests in court. Renting cars may be easier, but then your contract is with the rental company and they're responsible for getting you the information you require, and after the first three PII requests you're not going to be renting from them any time soon.

I'm not saying they couldn't do a deeper dive with more detailed research, but it's not an easy task to evaluate an industry like this. All they'll be able to produce is general statements about a limited set of car models that'll quickly be outdated once the next software update comes out.
by godelski | 2025-11-30 20:23:24+00:00
> Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.

It is why we have societies. Coalitions.

In game theory a coalition is a group where the group's utility is greater than the sum of each member's utility. In other words: "we're stronger together".

The problem with the self-made man myth is that it frames things as if it is shameful to have help. Having had help does not diminish your accomplishments. Having had help just means you're human.

The same goes for luck. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you didn't work hard nor deserve the rewards. There's a saying I like

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

The way I read that is "by working hard you are able to take advantage of lucky opportunities as they come by." We all require luck in this world. Some are luckier than others. But you have to "strike while the iron is hot" and if you don't work hard then you won't be able to strike in the right moment. Like the having had help part there is no shame in having had luck.

Being able to recognize these things helps us do better and help more people do better. But if we pretend we just did it all on our own then we can't actually recognize how things came to be. Which means we're going to have a hard time replicating that success. By pretending that everything is all on us and nothing else then we'll fail while trying to repeat the successful strategy, we'll fail when offering advice to others, and we'll just be blind to the world around us. We'll never recognize that we have to make the iron hot! Even the best blacksmith in the world can't hammer frozen iron into shape.

Again, having had luck or help doesn't mean you didn't work hard or that you don't deserve what you have. Things aren't binary. There's not a single causal factor to any complex phenomena. The problem is seeing things in black and white. There's a million things that go into success and while most of that will be on you, you can't ignore things like the environment and those that helped you along the way. After all, we're all in this together.
by telotortium | 2025-11-30 20:23:56+00:00
Following up on this, has anyone tried this and seen how well it works in practice?

“ Speedify, a proprietary VPN which allows combining multiple internet connections (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Ethernet, Starlink, Satellite, and more) to improve the stability, speed, and security of online experiences. Available as services.speedify.”
by jcalvinowens | 2025-11-30 20:24:25+00:00
This is the first time I've ever had a problem with the USB enclosures. And its fantastically rare, roughly one corrupt 512b block per TB of data written. With a btrfs-raid1 it's self-correcting on reads, if I didn't look at dmesg I'd never know.

I've figured out it only happens if I'm streaming data over the NIC at the same time as writing to the disks (while copying from one local volume to another), but that's all I really know right now. I seriously doubt it's a software bug.
by kyboren | 2025-11-30 20:24:41+00:00
> are you really naive to believe cyclists wouldn't respect traffic lights on a city designed after walk and public transportation? or are you thinking on the minimal cyclists that get killed by tresspasing this rule by vehicles that get a mild scratch? or the light or mild injuries bicycles at 15-25 km/h are gonna cause between each other?

An excellent demonstration of "cyclebrain syndrome", the urban twin to suburbia's "carbrain syndrome".

> are you really naive to believe cyclists wouldn't respect traffic lights on a city designed after walk and public transportation?

Translation: I am aware of cyclists' ubiquitous poor behavior on the roads but will reach for any justification to shift responsibility to someone else. "Drivers wouldn't be running red lights if you just added a couple more lanes, bro."

> or are you thinking on the minimal cyclists that get killed by tresspasing this rule by vehicles that get a mild scratch?

Translation: And when cyclists' poor behavior causes a fatal collision with a car, nobody cares about the damaged property. Or the mental anguish, or the collisions caused by narrowly avoiding killing an errant cyclist (who survives, oblivious, thanks to the driver's quick action choosing a more costly crash over a "mild scratch" that kills the cyclist).

> or the light or mild injuries bicycles at 15-25 km/h are gonna cause between each other?

Translation: I don't give a shit about killing/injuring pedestrians any more than car drivers do. I only care about collisions with things that are about the size of my vehicle or bigger. And if those other things are bigger than my vehicle--I want them banned! That way I reduce the risk to me, which is what I really care about, and who cares what happens to anything smaller than me?
by AJRF | 2025-11-30 20:24:54+00:00
Another good use case for a microservice - if you are going to have to change the compute size for your monolith just to accommodate the new functionality.

I had an architect bemoan the suggestion we use a microservice, until he had to begrudgingly back down when he was told that the function we were talking about (Running a CLIP model) would mean attaching a GPU to every task instance.
by zahlman | 2025-11-30 20:25:13+00:00
> Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."

... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)

> If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.

They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.
by steppi | 2025-11-30 20:25:44+00:00
Vladimir Arnold famously taught a proof of the insolubility of the Quintic to Moscow Highschool students in the 1960s using a concrete, low-prerequisite approach. His lectures were turned into a book Abel’s Theorem in Problems and Solutions by V.B. Alekseev which is available online here: https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/abel.pdf. He doesn't consider Galois theory in full generality, but instead gives a more concrete topological/geometric treatment. For anyone who wants to get a good grip on the insolubility of the quintic, but feels overwhelmed by the abstraction of modern algebra, I think this would be a good place to start.
by axiom92 | 2025-11-30 20:25:49+00:00
And even before this work, there was "PAL: Program-aided Language Models" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435, https://reasonwithpal.com/).

Afaik PaLM (Google's OG big models) tried this trick, but it didn't work for them. I think it's because PaL used descriptive inline comments + meaningful variable names. Compare the following:

```python

# calculate the remaining apples

apples_left = apples_bought - apples_eaten

```

vs.

```python

x = y - z

```

We have ablations in https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 showing that both are indeed useful (see "Crafting prompts for PAL").
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-30 20:26:21+00:00
> where your comfort and security are your first concerns and taking risks, doing something new, is not even on your mind?

Because individually, lots of people seek low-risk high-return occupations. Systematically, that doesn’t exist in the long run.

Societies do better when they take risks. Encouraging the population to integrate that risk taking has been a running them in successful societies from the Romans and Chinese dynasties through American commerce and jugaad.
by yorwba | 2025-11-30 20:26:25+00:00
I think they must've messed up validation somehow. The performance drops relative to the base model are sometimes quite dramatic, which should've been caught by corresponding deterioration in validation performance.

They write "we utilize 10% randomly selected from the training set as a validation set and the original validation set as a test set for evaluation. During the validation phase, we measure validation loss and save the weights of the best validation loss for every 5% of the training steps. We train for 10 epochs with a batch size of 4." so it might be as simple as not including the base model in the validation checkpoints, meaning that the first validated checkpoint is after half an epoch, which is plenty of time to do damage if the fine-tuning method/hyperparameter configuration isn't chosen well. Unfortunately, they don't graph their training curves.
by wredcoll | 2025-11-30 20:26:33+00:00
Look, "cancel culture" is almost as vague a term as "communism" and tends to be used in the same way: as a thought terminating pejorative description for anything someone doesn't like.

If we want to have an actual conversation about it we'd have to come up with some kind of working definition of the term that was actually useful enough to discuss existing examples with.

The wikipedia article on cancel culture uses an example of people disassociating from harvey weinstein and ultimately charging him with crimes related to sexual abuse. Is this cancel culture?

If a university employee invites a celebrity to come give a lecture one evening and then a bunch of students ask the university to cancel the invitation, is this cancel culture? Is it morally wrong?

Is the person who makes the original statement deserving of some kind of extra protection for this speech over the responding person who is trying to criticize this speech?

A cursory look at the real world, actual examples, of how people attempted to use the term "cancel culture" it was invariably part of an attempt to prevent criticism of (mostly) right wing ideas.

What actually happened was some number of right wingers tried to give speeches and got yelled at and then started complaining about cancel culture and trying to prevent future criticisms.

Like, at the level we're discussing we're talking about things like ethics/morality/social standards, right? What is good and virtuous for society to permit and encourage. Trying to "cancel" people who are "bad" by using speech to criticize or contradict or even ask people to stop associating with them is a good thing.
by aatd86 | 2025-11-30 20:27:13+00:00
Human intelligence is emergent from physical/material interactions. It is constant and self-evolutive. Artificial intelligence is data processing of a very limited number of inputs, ignoring all others. Less likely to become self-conscious. This is for now just a super calculator/ prediction machine. And it is probably better that way. The "thinking" processi didn't evolve from silicium interacting with oxygen. The gradient is not over physical data but purely digital information.

In a nutshell, we have the body before the brain, while AIs have the brain before the body.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-30 20:28:19+00:00
You don’t! Forges are for collaboration outside of the rhythm of git commits. You’re happy to make a new commit every time you have something to add to an issue. With X issues and Y comments a hour, polluting the git timeline with commentary is going to become unhelpful.

Some forges even include(d) instant messaging!

https://secure.phabricator.com/Z1336