MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wowohwow | 2025-12-13 22:13:12+00:00
This type of elitist mentality is such a problem and such a drain for software development. "Real micro services are incredibly rare". I'll repeat myself from my other post, by this level of logic nothing is a micro service.

Do you depend on a cloud provider? Not a microservice. Do you depend on an ISP for Internet? Not a microservice. Depend on humans to do something? Not a microservice.

Textbook definitions and reality rarely coincide, rather than taking such a fundamentalist approach that leads nowhere, recognize that for all intents and purposes, what I described is a microservice, not a distributed monolith.
by ak217 | 2025-12-13 22:13:29+00:00
Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-13 22:14:05+00:00
> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities

Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.

But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.

> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity

Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
by perching_aix | 2025-12-13 22:14:07+00:00
I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.

> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.

[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable
by Deathmax | 2025-12-13 22:14:11+00:00
NordVPN calls out when a location is virtual, so unless ipinfo is claiming they have virtual locations that are not labelled as such, they are at least transparent about it. They did document the physical server locations of their virtual locations at launch, but I'm not sure if there's a live doc for new locations. https://nordvpn.com/blog/new-nordvpn-virtual-servers/
by mettamage | 2025-12-13 22:14:15+00:00
I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.

The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.

Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.

I simply want a sane democratic voting process.

And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-13 22:14:37+00:00
I realize that nothing will change until something breaks, and that the status quo is unsustainable. I believe this aligns in some amount with populist sentiment in the US. It's an unfortunate game of chicken because capitalists gonna capitalist until they run out of options. No one gives up power willingly, right? You can only put fear in or control people who have something to lose.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-13 22:14:49+00:00
TLDR: government "savings" on rail (between quotes because the economic loss resulting from large amounts of people not being able to work punctually no doubt far exceed the savings on the rail company)

> Chronic underinvestment in Germany has derailed yet another myth about Teutonic efficiency. The German railway Deutsche Bahn's long-distance "high-speed" trains are now among the least punctual in Europe. In October, the national rail operator broke its own poor record with roughly only half of all long-distance trains arriving without delay.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-12-13 22:15:17+00:00
The Z80 had LDIR which was a string copy instructions. The byte at (HL) would be read from memory, then written to (DE), HL and DE would be incremented, and BC decremented and then repeated until BC became zero.

LDDR was the same but decremented HL and DE on each iteration instead.

There were versions for doing IN and OUT as well, and there was an instruction for finding a given byte value in a string, but I never used those so I don't recall the details.
by Youden | 2025-12-13 22:15:46+00:00
I live in Switzerland and my house currently consumes 35-40kWh of electricity each day. I'm in the process of installing as many panels as possible on my roof and right now in winter, they're forecasted to produce ~18kWh on a good day.

While it'll be possible for me to be more than fully self-sufficient in summer, I'd need roughly 3x more panels to come close to having a chance in winter, plus far more battery storage than is reasonable.

I suspect it might be more doable somewhere with milder winters, like Italy but especially as you go further north and the days get shorter, there's just no chance.

For it to work in places with large seasonal differences, we need something else (e.g. nuclear) and/or storage.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-13 22:15:49+00:00
> 4. Practice, the more I use AI the more I believe prompting is a skill in itself. It takes time to learn how to get the best out of an Agent.

This would have been my tip, as well.

Talk to others who are good with these tools to learn from what they're doing and read blogs/docs/HN for ideas, but most importantly, make time for yourself on a daily/weekly/monthly/whatever basis to practice with the tool.

It's taken me about a year of consistent practice to feel comfortable with LLM coding. It just takes time, like learning any other technology.
by spreiti | 2025-12-13 22:17:15+00:00
I use GitHub Copilot in Intellij with Claude Sonnet and the plan mode to implement complete features without me having to code anything.

I see it as a competent software developer but one that doesn't know the code base.

I will break down the tasks to the same size as if I was implementing it. But instead of doing it myself, I roughly describe the task on a technical level (and add relevant classes to the context) and it will ask me clarifying questions. After 2-3 rounds the plan usually looks good and I let it implement the task.

This method works exceptionally well and usually I don't have to change anything.

For me this method allows me to focus on the architecture and overall structure and delegate the plumbing to Copilot.

It is usually faster than if I had to implement it and the code is of good quality.

The game changer for me was plan mode. Before it, with agent mode it was hit or miss because it forced me to one shot the prompt or get inaccurate results.
by sprash | 2025-12-13 22:17:41+00:00
It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude.

This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.
by wryoak | 2025-12-13 22:18:08+00:00
Kind of. I’m transitioning to something a little more biochemistry-oriented but I expect to be employing a lot of my tech skills

But yeah I hated being an SWE. 90% of my career’s projects consisted of reinventing the spreadsheet and 90% of my time was spent listening to people bikeshedding about the color of buttons. The direction of the industry is less relevant to my choices

I’m sure my new course will feature similar motifs of redundancy and soul-sucking pedantry, but I’ll give it a decade like I did software and move on to career #4 if I tire
by AndroTux | 2025-12-13 22:18:12+00:00
Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China.

The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of the main reasons for using VPNs.
by Applejinx | 2025-12-13 22:18:57+00:00
It's an AI. You might do better by phrasing it, 'Make a plan, and have questions'. There's nobody there, but if it's specifically directed to 'have questions' you might find they are good questions! Why are you asking, if you figure it'd be better to get questions? Just say to have questions, and it will.

It's like a reasoning model. Don't ask, prompt 'and here is where you come up with apropos questions' and you shall have them, possibly even in a useful way.
by mrob | 2025-12-13 22:18:58+00:00
I can think of two big improvements to desktop GUIs:

1. Incremental narrowing for all selection tasks like the Helm [0] extension for Emacs.

Whenever there is a list of choices, all choices should be displayed, and this list should be filterable in real time by typing. This should go further than what Helm provides, e.g. you should be able to filter a partially filtered list in a different way. No matter how complex your filtering, all results should appear within 10 ms or so. This should include things like full text search of all local documents on the machine. This will probably require extensive indexing, so it needs to be tightly integrated with all software so the indexes stay in sync with the data.

2. Pervasive support for mouse gestures.

This effectively increases the number of mouse buttons. Some tasks are fastest with keyboard, and some are fastest with mouse, but switching between the two costs time. Increasing the effective number of buttons increases the number of tasks that are fastest with mouse and reduces need for switching.

[0] https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/
by rgovostes | 2025-12-13 22:19:14+00:00
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.

I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)

They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
by sbuttgereit | 2025-12-13 22:19:15+00:00
Fair enough, but to be fair to my statements, the quotes I chose were largely from gleam-lang.org or the Gleam OTP library.

Take for example this section of the Gleam website FAQ section:

https://gleam.run/frequently-asked-questions/#how-does-gleam...

"Elixir has better support for the OTP actor framework. Gleam has its own version of OTP which is type safe, but has a smaller feature set."

At least on the surface, "but has a smaller feature set" suggests that there are features left of the table: which I think it would be fair to read as a subset of support.

If I look at this statement from the Gleam OTP Library `readme.md`:

"Not all Erlang/OTP functionality is included in this library. Some is not possible to represent in a type safe way, so it is not included. Other features are still in development, such as further process supervision strategies."

That quote leaves the impression that OTP is not fully supported and therefore only a subset is. It doesn't expound further to say unsupported OTP functionality is alternatively available by accessing the Erlang modules/functions directly or through other mechanisms.

In all of this I'll take your word for it over the website and readme files; these things are often not written directly by the principals and are often not kept as up-to-date as you'd probably like. Still even taking that at face value, I think it leaves some questions open. What is meant by supporting all of OTP? Where the documentation and library readme equivocates to full OTP support, are there trade-offs? Is "usable as normal" usable as normal for Erlang or as normal for Gleam? For example, are the parts left out of the library available via directly accessing the Erlang modules/functions, but only at the cost of abandoning the Gleam type safety guarantees for those of Erlang? How does this hold for Gleam's JavaScript compilation target?

As you know, Elixir also provides for much OTP functionality via direct access to the Erlang libraries. However, there I expect the distinction between Elixir support and the Erlang functionality to be substantially more seamless than with Gleam: Elixir integrates the Erlang concepts of typing (etc.) much more directly than does Gleam. If, however, we're really talking about full OTP support in Gleam while not losing the reasons you might choose Gleam over Elixir or Erlang, which I think is mostly going to be about the static typing... then yes, I'm very wrong. If not... I could see how strictly speaking I'm wrong, but perhaps not completely wrong in spirit.
by laurencerowe | 2025-12-13 22:19:27+00:00
I don't think this makes sense. Rail freight is about 20x more expensive than transmission at current battery densities.

Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf

Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
by zephyreon | 2025-12-13 22:19:39+00:00
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.

Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.

It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
by bane | 2025-12-13 22:20:34+00:00
During COVID, by father was dying in a hospice center (from something else, not COVID). Because of the circumstances and the condition of the medical system, it was impossible to get into where he was to see him, and the staff was too overworked and understaffed to find a way to connect us to him. He was alone, fragile, dying, and terrified.

As my mother and I sat in the reception area fighting with the hospice administrator, a medical transport pulled up and unloaded another patient. After putting the new patient back in their room the driver walked up to us as we were sliding into a heated argument with the hospice administrator.

She asked the administrator what the problem was and was told that policy was visitors can't be going into the patient area and it was very firm. They'd had issues with the local government about being slack about it. The driver turned to me and said something along the lines of "here's what we're going to do:

Since I can apparently run around freely in this place, I'm going to find your father and put a star in his window so you can always find where he is.

Number two, I'm going to give you a set of full hazard gear.

Number three" and she turned to the administrator put her finger up into her face and very sternly said, "they are going to hire you as a part time employee, in maintenance, or IT support or whatever, and your hours of employment here are going to be whenever you need to visit your father."

she turned back to me, "but this doesn't mean it's a free pass, you are going to wear all of this hazard gear whenever you come 'work' here, promise me that okay?"

She then took the administrator off to a side room, had a conversation, and I had a piece of paper to sign about 30 minutes later making me an employee of the hospice.

I made it into and out of the hospice without incident for the next week until we decided to bring my father home to die as he wasn't receiving almost any care there. I don't know what the ambulance driver and the administrator discussed, but I suspect it was the absolutely woeful state of the facility.

The look on my father's face when a head-to-toe masked man entered his room the first time, and when I took my mask off to show him I was there for him, and how the terror just simply fell from his face, is something I will always remember as is the kindness of the driver who put herself out there for us.

The period was incredibly hard, beyond the situation with my father, the medical system was in absolute shambles, and as my father's health was rapidly deteriorating, it was among the only kindness we received during that wretched journey.
by fragmede | 2025-12-13 22:20:34+00:00
Heh, the number of points you've probably gotten for that comment, I don't think that it's that unpopular. Win 98 was my jam but it looks hella dated today, but as you said, buttons were clearly marked, but also menus were navigatible via keyboard, soms support for themes and custom coloring, UIs were designable via a GUI builder in VB or Visual Studio using MFC which was very resource friendly compared to using Electron today. Because smartphones and tablets, but even the wide variety of screen sizes also didn't exist so it was a simpler time. I can't believe how much of a step back Electron is for UI creation compared to MFC, but that wasn't cross-platform and usually elements were absolute positioned instead of the relative resizable layout that's required today.
by eudamoniac | 2025-12-13 22:20:43+00:00
> I was using USDA figures for median food costs

Median people in the USA eat extremely lavishly. Your series of comments, to me, boils down to a complaint that you can't maintain this extreme luxury while having children. Yeah, nobody ever could. The time frame in which people were "able" to have a lot of children was the time when they weren't living such extravagant lives of consumption. So yeah if the complaint is "Why can't I afford a lifestyle that would make my grandparents blush with shame at its luxury, and have as many kids as them, wtf?!" then I'm not very sympathetic to it.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-13 22:21:39+00:00
He didn't just chicken out, he invited the formerly sanctioned judge to the white house.

> the sanctions were lifted since the U.S. saw the passage of an important amnesty bill by Brazil's lower house as a signal that lawfare conditions in Brazil are improving

This is complete bullshit. No amnesty law was passed. Even if it had passed, the judges have already declared their intent to render it ineffective by simply declaring it unconstitutional regardless of legal basis. What's currently being discussed is a "dosimetry" law which reduces jail time, nothing more.

The truth is Trump leveraged the Magnitsky sanctions into a rare earths deal with the brazilian authorities, giving the US privileged access to the resources until 2030 and increasing their leverage against China.

A truly disgusting turn of events, indeed. The judge joined the president of Brazil in giving a speech on national television, like a supreme leader. He won.
by mettamage | 2025-12-13 22:21:49+00:00
I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.

I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
by the_gastropod | 2025-12-13 22:22:58+00:00
> if the post were about ballot stuffing by the Democrats with irrefutable evidence like I've seen

That's incredible. You're not even American, and have seen irrefutable evidence of "the Democrats" participating in blatant electoral fraud? Why haven't you shared this? There's no shortage of literal billionaires who'd reward you handsomely for such proof!

Beyond this, why I constantly make fun of "both-sides!" guys is because they tend to ignore degree. To a vegetarian, eating hamburgers is wrong (some might even call it evil). But you'd be hard-pressed to find one who'd consider hambuger-eaters and murderers basically the same. You'd rightfully consider someone with such beliefs insane. Between murderers and hamburger eaters, one is considerably worse than the other.
by alephnerd | 2025-12-13 22:22:58+00:00
These are the same people who would pooh-pooh teaching Excel and basic coding skills to non-STEM majors or have CS students take ethics or GenEd classes.

AI/ML isn't going to completely shift the world, but understanding how to do basic prompt engineering, validate against hallucinations, and know what the difference between ChatGPT and GPT-4o is valuable for people who do not have a software background.

Gaining any kind of knowledge is a net win.
by quesera | 2025-12-13 22:24:04+00:00
It's a combination of things: marketing (difficult to quantify, but > 0), interest/appreciation on the float (4-10% annually), forecasted overspend (30-40%), and breakage (5-10%).

The GC face value is a liability on the books though. It's treated as debt when doing cash calculations.

They actually do want you to use the cards though. The overspend is more valuable to them than the other disposition possibilities. Recognized revenue is always the best outcome. The interest/appreciation is the same for the merchant, whether on float or on revenue, but revenue is better for reports.

More broadly: All benefits of the cards definitely accrue to the merchant. There's absolutely nothing valuable to consumers about the deal!