MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kvemkon | 2025-12-13 23:33:31+00:00
> buttons were clearly marked

Recently some UI ignored my action by clicking an entry in a list from drop down button. It turned out, this drop down button was additionally a normal button if you press it in the center. Awful.

> UI creation compared to MFC

Here I'd prefer Borland with (Pascal) Delphi / C++ Builder.

> relative resizable layout that's required today.

While it should be beneficial, the reality is awful. E.g. why is the URL input field on [1] so narrow? But if you shrinks the browser window width the text field becomes wide eventually! That's completely against expectations.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-12-13 23:34:13+00:00
In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now. There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better. There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users. To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.
by stephen | 2025-12-13 23:34:30+00:00
Can you description the deployment setup, somewhere in the docs/maybe with a diagram?

I get this is a backend library, which is great, but like does it use postgres replication slots? Per the inherited queries, do they all live on 1 machine, and we just assume that machine needs to be sufficiently beefy to serve all currently-live queries?

Do all of my (backend) live-queries live/run on that one beefy machine? What's the life cycle for live-queries? Like how can I deploy new ones / kill old ones / as I'm making deployments / business logic changes that might change the queries?

This is all really hard ofc, so apologies for all the questions, just trying to understand -- thanks!
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-13 23:35:59+00:00
Agreed. What I’m describing here isn’t solely pragmatic it’s axiomatic as well. If you model this as a distributed system with graph all microservices by definition will always reach a state where the apis are broken.

Most microservice companies either live with the fact or they have round about ways to deal with it including simultaneous deploys across multiple services and simultaneous merging, CI and type checking across different repos.
by coderintherye | 2025-12-13 23:37:02+00:00
The missing David Bowie related list ( https://li.st/l/7SmVwCFEU6JDQ2jKQfeJzh ) has an image preview shared on Reddit, though sadly not the text https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/40wkx3/ant...
by kccqzy | 2025-12-13 23:37:08+00:00
> That shared type will break at the communication channels if you do not simultaneously deploy the two services.

No. Your shared type is too brittle to be used in microservices. Tools like the venerable protobuf has solved this problem decades ago. You have a foundational wire format that does not change. Then you have a schema layer that could change in backwards compatible ways. Every new addition is optional.

Here’s an analogy. Forget microservices. Suppose you have a monolithic app and a SQL database. The situation is just like when you change the schema of the SQL database: of course you have application code that correctly deals with both the previous schema and the new schema during the ALTER TABLE. And the foundational wire format that you use to talk to the SQL database does not change. It’s at a layer below the schema.

This is entirely a solved problem. If you think this is a fundamental problem of microservices, then you do not grok microservices. If you think having microservices means simultaneous deployments, you also do not grok microservices.
by hexnuts | 2025-12-13 23:37:20+00:00
I just realized, one of the things that people might start doing is making a gamma model of their personality. I won't even approach who they were as a person, but it will give their Descendants (or bored researchers) a 60% approximation of who they were and their views. (60% is pulled from nowhere to justify my gamma designation, since there isn't a good scale for personality mirror quality for LLMs as far as I'm aware.)
by networked | 2025-12-13 23:37:20+00:00
Even with daemon(8), PID files and the lack of process supervision might be my least favorite aspect of FreeBSD, an OS I like overall. Not long ago, I wanted to avoid running a custom service that way on a fresh FreeBSD server. After researching my options, I found an adequate solution in the daemontools family. I'd heard of daemontools but hadn't paid much attention to it.

My service has been managed by runit and, most recently, nitro (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nitro). Both have run as the service's user. They supervise the process and handle logging. I have found the design of daemontools and its derivatives runit and nitro elegant; it lives up to the reputation.
by dansjots | 2025-12-13 23:37:33+00:00
I wonder if you can hack a LocalStorage sync feature via ATProto PDS, since you can put arbitrary JSON records via /xrpc/com.atproto.repo.putRecord and not just Bluesky posts.

The only drawback I can think of is that all of your commits are broadcast on a megaphone to the network firehose, but encryption can alleviate that somewhat.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-13 23:38:34+00:00
I think you should wait and see how it goes for you. I got an opportunity at big tech right when I was about to have a second kid and I took it, knowing it wold be more stress and hours.

It was worth it for me, not mainly for the money, but because I look forward to work most days. I also look forward to weekends and spending time with my kids though!

If I was doing something I hated for the 'money' though, I'm not sure it would be worth it. I love coming home happy to my kids, even if I'm seeing them a bit less than I would otherwise. I would hate to be coming home from a job I hate.
Show HN: I built a service to fix NPM's email flood problem
by dgellow | 2025-12-13 23:38:35+00:00
Built this over the past two days after yet another release that resulted in 12+ emails for a single repository. npm has this frustrating notion that spamming you with emails somehow keeps your account secure. I built it for myself, but given that npm staff gave up on that discussion a while ago, why not turn it into an actual micro-SaaS? :)

How it works: you set up an email filter to forward npm notifications to a unique address. npmDigest batches them and sends you a single digest (daily/weekly/monthly). It's a one time setup, and you only pay for months where emails have been forwarded.

Happy to answer any questions you would have when I wake up (Central Europe time), and I would love feedback!
by logankilpatrick | 2025-12-13 23:40:32+00:00
> I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Passing along this feedback to the CLI team, no clue why this would be the case.
by mlhpdx | 2025-12-13 23:42:10+00:00
Wow. Their experience could not be more different than mine. As I’m contemplating the first year of my startup I’ve tallied 6000 deployments and 99.997 percent uptime and a low single digit rollback percentage (MTTR in low single digit minutes and fractional, single cell impact for them so far). While I’m sure it’s possible for a solo entrepreneur to hit numbers like that with a monolith I have never done so, and haven’t see others do so.

Edit: I’d love to eat the humble pie here. If you have examples of places where monoliths are updated 10-20 times a day by a small (or large) team post the link. I’ll read them all.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-12-13 23:42:27+00:00
Do you want to get better at programming? Or at software engineering?

For programming, learn a new thing to do with your language (network programming, say). Or learn a second language.

For software engineering... that winds up being all about the accurate communication of technical information, so work on reading and writing technical documentation. Also more architecture-level issues rather than fits-in-a-few-lines-of-code kind of problems.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-13 23:43:09+00:00
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-compr...

"all as informed by evolving workforce and employer needs"

“At the same time, it’s absolutely imperative that a requirement like this is well informed by continual input from industry partners and employers more broadly."

Purdue is engaging in the oldest profession in the world. And the students pay for this BS.
by Papazsazsa | 2025-12-13 23:43:27+00:00
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)

MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:

1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.

2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.

3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.

4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.

5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.

6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.

P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
by jshaqaw | 2025-12-13 23:43:29+00:00
Would be interested to see real numbers around societal value from marginal added liquidity versus aggregate spend into the zero sum arms race.

I have also seen enough to be quite sure that many hft strategies are quite normie investor predatory.

Again, I’m not zealot. I trade stuff. I love liquidity. I’m happy to pay someone some fraction of a penny to change my mind. Service provided. But the returns from vanilla liquidity provision commoditized long ago to uninteresting margins. That leaves a lot more of the hft alpha pool in the predatory strategies and capital flows where the incentives are.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-13 23:43:48+00:00
Something like that happened to me, my 10+ year account and everything I've ever written just vanishing one morning. Even posts to a subreddit I moderate were repeatedly removed after every approval.

No idea why, (the "wrong" public Wi-fi?) but my appeal was granted and nothing was fixed.

Now I can't contact anyone, and the appeals page falsely claims that my account is in good standing and refuses to operate.

When I went looking for help from a throwaway account that I made many years ago for resume reviews, the exact same thing happened.

So at this point, I only lurk occasionally, because I'm not going to go through that social hell again, and it sounds like moderation failures have only gotten worse in the years since.
by _pdp_ | 2025-12-13 23:43:49+00:00
In my previous company we did everything as a micro service. In the company before that it was serverless on AWS!

In both cases we had to come up with clever solutions to simply get by because communication between services is of a problem. It is difficult (not impossible) to keep all the contracts in sync and deployment has to be coordinated in a very specific way sometimes. The initial speed you get is soon lost further down the path due to added complexities. There was fear-driven development at play. Service ownership is a problem. Far too much meetings are spent on coordination.

In my latest company everything is part of the same monolith. Yes the code is huge but it is so much easier to work with. We use a lot more unit tests then integration tests. Types make sense. Refactoring is just so easy. All the troubleshooting tools including specialised AI agents built on top of our own platform are part of the code-base which is kind of interesting because I can see how this is turning into a self-improving system. It is fascinating!

We are not planning to break up the monolith unless we grow so much that is impossible to manage from a single git repository. As far as I can tell this may never happen as it is obvious that much larger projects are perfectly well maintained in the exact same way.

The only downside is that build takes longer but honestly we found ways around that as well in the past and now with further improvements in the toolchains delivered by the awesome open-source communities around the world, I expect to see at least 10x improvement in deployment time in 2026.

Overall, in my own assessment, the decision to go for a monolith allowed us to build and scale much faster than if we had used micro services.

I hope this helps.
by why-o-why | 2025-12-13 23:44:43+00:00
i can live without reddit and hackernews. i can't live without online banking, bill paying, insurance, healtchare portals, etc.

it is funny i have been probing HN for years, and i've found a number of cases when everything is normal, but i check the account from another device and it isn't there, or is free of posts despite having made many. yet i would do the same if i was an admin trying to keep a walled-garden free of trolls.
by ricardobeat | 2025-12-13 23:44:43+00:00
I believe in the original amazon service architecture, that grew into AWS (see “Bezos API mandate” from 2002), backwards compatibility is expected for all service APIs. You treat internal services as if they were external.

That means consumers can keep using old API versions (and their types) with a very long deprecation window. This results in loose coupling. Most companies doing microservices do not operate like this, which leads to these lockstep issues.
by 3rodents | 2025-12-13 23:45:28+00:00
"by this level of logic nothing is a micro service"

Yes, exactly. The point is not elitism. Microservices are a valuable tool for a very specific problem but what most people refer to as "microservices" are not. Language is important when designing systems. Microservices are not just a bunch of separately deployable things.

The "micro" in "microservice" doesn't refer to how it is deployed, it refers to how the service is "micro" in responsibility. The service has a public interface defined in a contract that other components depend on, and that is it, what happens within the service is irrelevant to the rest of the system and vice verse, the service does not have depend on knowledge of the rest of the system. By virtue of being micro in responsibility, it can be deployed anywhere and anyhow.

If it is not a microservice, it is just a service, and when it is just a service, it is probably a part of a distributed monolith. And that is okay, a distributed monolith can be very valuable. The reason many people bristle at the mention of microservices is that they are often seen as an alternative to a monolith but they are not, it is a radically different architecture.

We must be precise in our language because if you or I build a system made up of "microservices" that aren't microservices, we're taking on all of the costs of microservices without any of the benefits. You can choose to drive to work, or take the bus, but you cannot choose to drive because it is the cheapest mode of transport or walk because it is the fastest. The costs and benefits are not independent.

The worst systems I have ever worked on were "microservices" with shared libraries. All of the costs of microservices (every call now involves a network) and none of the benefits (every service is dependent on the others). The architect of that system had read all about how great microservices are and understood it to mean separately deployable components.

There is no hierarchy of goodness, we are just in pursuit of the right tool or the job. A monolith, distributed monolith or a microservice architecture could be the right tool for one problem and the wrong tool for another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
by analog31 | 2025-12-13 23:46:15+00:00
I think that since at least from the time jazz began to mature, like maybe in the 1940s, there has been a back-and-forth between crowd-pleasing and dance-able music, and more exploratory and artistic music. The Stan Kenton Orchestra traveled with two separate "books," one for dance gigs and another for concerts. Ellington's material, of which there was a lot, is quite imaginative.

To me that's OK. When jazz ceased to be responsible for forming the backbone of popular music, it triggered a more experimental period, including some ventures that were pretty far out, such as free jazz and free improv. Jazz also experienced a shift in focus -- not uncontroversially -- by becoming an object of academic study.

I think we're in a period right now when bands are seeking more audience friendly material. Now, the big-band I play in is in some sense "enthusiast" music. We have a small but loyal audience of people who happen to like this kind of stuff.

But in another of my bands, two of the players are actively composing new material, and it's arguably listen-able by any standards. Maybe we're in a third era, where we're free from responsibility for making popular music, but also free from responsibility for establishing the stature of jazz as a "serious" art form, and can return to the business of pleasing ourselves and our audiences.
by thecsw | 2025-12-13 23:46:36+00:00
Tell me more—these colors, #2B2B2B for fg and #F7F3EE for bg pass accessibility checks. See something like coolors [1] or WebAIM [2]

You could run something like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ but contrast doesn't mean to run with black/white, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is better on the eyes.

If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!

[1] https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/2b2b2b-f7f3ee

[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-13 23:48:14+00:00
I think you did a great job of bringing fairly nuanced problems into perspective for a lot of people who take their interactions with their phone/computer/tablet for granted. That is a great skill!

I think an fertile area for investigation would also be 'task specific' interactions. In XDE[1], the thing that got Steve Jobs all excited, the interaction models are different if you're writing code, debugging code, or running an application. There are key things that always work the same way (cut/paste for example) but other things that change based on context.

And echoing some of the sentiment I've read here as well, consistency is a bigger win for the end user than form. By that I mean even a crappy UX is okay if it is consistent in how its crappy. Heard a great talk about Nintendo's design of the 'Mario world' games and how the secret sauce was that Mario physics are consistent, so as a game player if you knew how to use the game mechanics to do one thing, you can guess how to use them to do another thing you've not yet done. Similarly with UX, if the mechanics are consistent then they give you a stepping off point for doing a new thing you haven't done but using mechanics you are already familiar with.

[1] Xerox Development Environment -- This was the environment everyone at Xerox Business Systems used when working on the Xerox Star desktop publishing workstation.
by coldtea | 2025-12-13 23:48:48+00:00
Because that would correspond 1 to 1 with the actual visible letter boxes, and the whole system of catching events outside the "real button sizes" was developed to be more forgiving than "you have to click precisely in the box".

My understanding is it's not just about including or not including some extra fixed clickable padding around each square (in which case it indeed wouldn't harm to show the whole area), but about dynamically adapting the area, based on frequent off-target clicks, probabilities, etc.
by stevewodil | 2025-12-13 23:49:04+00:00
I don’t know if this matters much. When I was in school it was rare to actually read a book assignment anyways, and I’m sure with LLMs now it’s less.

I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
by godelski | 2025-12-13 23:49:47+00:00
I'm a bit curious about how that works. I love Mullvad but routinely I find sites like Reddit completely block it. Even yesterday someone posted a Debian wiki link[0] and I was blocked. It's not all of them but Reddit is a big killer. So I thought China would block all of them (aren't they known?)

Fwiw I'm not switching from mullvad

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252366
by PostOnce | 2025-12-13 23:50:20+00:00
If anyone knew the answer to this question, Anthropic would be profitable.

Currently they project they might break even in 2028.

That means that right now, every time you ask an AI a question, someone loses money.

That of course means no-one knows if you can get better at AI programming, and the answer may be "you can't."

Only time will tell.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-12-13 23:51:10+00:00
1) functionally, not that I'm aware of. the only thing right now is running from a specific block onwards, something that we are rolling out this week. you'll be able to run the workflow in debug mode and get really granular information about each node, the inputs and outputs, and resume from any point in the workflow with mock data

2) there is, we also have a code node that uses E2B to run code in isolated sandboxes. it supports python and ts/js

3) yes, in the code node you can use frameworks/libs since we do RCE
I miss the old Internet of 10-20 years ago
by morpheos137 | 2025-12-13 23:52:20+00:00
Now search sucks Organic engagement sucks Anything creative or thoughtful is driven out by slop or not intellectual content

Specifically I am interested in reading about news and geopolitics

With many traditional media sites both being paywalled and eliminating their comments sections it seems my option, only option is reddit which sucks. Is there anything else out there like and international politics forum that is NOT Reddit where I can read what real people think about a variety of issues facing the world today? Or does that not exist anymore. Maybe 4chan or a conspiracy site but again those all have their own bias. I am more interested in what normal people think and seeing free discussion.
by anon7000 | 2025-12-13 23:52:42+00:00
It’s odd, I read ravenously as a kid/teen, as did my siblings. You need to read what you enjoy, and for it to not be forced. (For example, summer reading at the library gave out prizes kids cared about for reading books.) Plus, we didn’t have access to much digital media like TV/video games (though it was the early 2010s) because my parents were strict, so books were a solid source of entertainment.
by tkclough | 2025-12-13 23:52:51+00:00
I'm a big fan of using this kind of thing at work. Rather than setting up a web server or packaging something into an installer, I just pop the bundled HTML file on a shared drive.

The CDN approach works, but I don't love depending on some third-party service just so your app continues working. Instead, I like using vite with vite-plugin-singlefile. This lets you package your JS and CSS into a single HTML: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-singlefile