MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pknomad | 2025-12-13 21:48:00+00:00
I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:

1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.

2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)

Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.

3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.

For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.
by coryrc | 2025-12-13 21:48:14+00:00
> Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country.

Depends on the country.

In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.

USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?
by chmod775 | 2025-12-13 21:48:31+00:00
In practice most monoliths turned into "microservices" are just monoliths in disguise. They still have most of the failure modes of the original monolith, but now with all the complexity and considerable challenges of distributed computing layered on top.

Microservices as a goal is mostly touted by people who don't know what the heck they're doing - the kind of people who tend to mistakenly believe blind adherence to one philosophy or the other will help them turn their shoddy work into something passable.

Engineer something that makes sense. If, once you're done, whatever you've built fits the description of "monolith" or "microservices", that's fine.

However if you're just following some cult hoping it works out for your particular use-case, it's time to reevaluate whether you've chosen the right profession.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-13 21:48:32+00:00
Consumer-grade hardware generally lacks real confidentiality assurance features. Such a software feature implemented in user-space is moot without the ability to control context switching, rendering it mostly security theater. Security critical bits should be done in a dedicated crypto processor that has tamper self-zeroing and self-contained RAM, or at the very least, in the kernel away outside the reach of user-space processes. No matter how much marketing or blog hype is offered, it's lipstick on a pig. They've essentially implemented a soft, insecure HSM.

Big thumbs down from me.
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-13 21:48:45+00:00
This is going to be like when all the schools were pushing big data because that was going to be the next big thing.

After more than a trillion dollars spent, LLMs can replace: (a) a new secretary with one week of experience (b) a junior programmer who just learned that they can install programs on a desktop computer, and (c) James Patterson.

That's the bright future that Purdue is preparing its students for.

Yes, AIs will be a huge thing...eventually...but LLMs are not AI, and they never will be.
by Someone | 2025-12-13 21:48:47+00:00
FTA: “Heap allocations made by the function are erased as soon as the garbage collector decides they are no longer reachable”

I think that means this proposal adds a very specific form of finalisers to go.

How is that implemented efficiently? I can think of doing something akin to NSAutoReleasePool (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsautor...), with all allocations inside a `secret.Do` block going into a separate section of the heap (like a new generation), and, on exit of the block, the runtime doing a GC cycle, collecting and clearing every now inaccessible object in that section of the heap.

It can’t do that, though, because the article also says:

“Heap allocations are only erased if the program drops all references to them, and then the garbage collector notices that those references are gone. The program controls the first part, but the second part depends on when the runtime decides to act”

and I think what I am thinking of will guarantee that the garbage collector will eagerly erase any heap allocations that can be freed.

Also, the requirement “ the program drops all references to them” means this is not a 100% free lunch. You can’t simply wrap your code in a `secret.Do` and expect your code to be free of leaking secrets.
by shsush | 2025-12-13 21:48:51+00:00
The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing. Very pro agent devs like ghuntley will all say this.

And it makes sense. For most coding problems the challenge isn’t writing code. Once you know what to write typing the code is a drop in the bucket. AI is still very useful, but if you really wanna go fast you have to give up on your understanding. I’ve yet to see this work well outside of blog posts, tweets, board room discussions etc.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-13 21:49:01+00:00
Besides the fact that he abandonned his kid, such trips through inherently hostile countries drive me crazy.

People will go there willingly, then cry because they were arrested. The family would go to tv and the government is supposed to help them.

We should just leave them as they are. They are adults, decided that "do not go there" does not apply to them so bad luck.

The fact that we care incentives the authorities of these countries to use them as exchange money.

We in France have a few people in Iran or Algeria who travelled there to discover the extraordinary culture and views. Their choice, they now have Elle time to address these topics with the guards.

In contrast, this is so much different from the Belarusian oppositionist who was flying from Greece (IIRC) to a Baltic country and got hijacked as he was flying above Belarus. This one we forgot about.
by spopejoy | 2025-12-13 21:50:04+00:00
Not just unpopular, undesirable and unworkable. There's a reason unions have long opposed two-tier as a cynical divide-and-conquer management strategy.

Indeed what are you actually "okay with" here? Being on the upper tier, due to a strategy that explicitly wants to chip away at said tier until it's gone? When it goes away will that also be "okay"?
by Nab443 | 2025-12-13 21:50:05+00:00
YMMV, I think I only tried to sign up on 3 websites where it was not working. You can fallback to the original email address in those case.

The funniest part was that for one it work great for the signup part, but they used a third party tool for licences that broke because of my e-mail. For another, only the js code was verifying the e-mail, and I could push it by removing the validation. When the owner had to validate my account, they got a message that the e-mail was incorrect when they tried to submit the form. They called me and had a great discussion about web apps security. We had a good time.

I would point out that it kind of prevents you from checking if your email is in a leak database as you need to test each aliases you used.
by johnboiles | 2025-12-13 21:50:06+00:00
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.

It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
by cheese_van | 2025-12-13 21:50:34+00:00
Back when my daughter was small, I was waiting in a line to get to the ticket window at the ballpark. A woman walked up to us, said my daughter was lovely, and gave us 2 tickets to the premium section of the park (the fancy bathroom section as my daughter called it). We saw Manny Ramirez hit his 500th! What a nice gesture. Whenever we went back, and when I was making a bit more money, I always bought one or two tickets after that to give away. Being unexpectedly nice in an unexpected way not only put a bit of joy in my life, it prompted me to do the same. That reminds me. I need to do something unexpected for a stranger. Thanks for the reminder!
by bloppe | 2025-12-13 21:50:40+00:00
That's great for you. But some people need to pick a specific country. People in different countries often get different prices for things like airline tickets or online subscriptions. Maybe you need to appear from a particular country to access certain media.

I mostly use it to avoid exposing my IP address too, but if I knew my VPN was comfortable with a little light fraud, I'd be concerned about what else they're comfortable with.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-13 21:50:47+00:00
I think there are benefits of interpreters as well as compilers, possibly for the same programming language in some cases (although some programming languages are better for use with interpreter and some are better for use with compilers).

I think JSON is not the best format for the persistence though (despite their claim that it is better than binary formats, it has many problems); it has many problems, such as not a proper integer type and not non-Unicode text types or binary types, etc; and different format would better, such as DER. If you use DER, then you can use better types, better character sets, binary data, and not limits to how big numbers can be, etc. (JSON might work for JavaScript, but even then only for some types; JavaScript has more types than JSON has, including JavaScript does actually have a integer type even though JSON does not.) (With using JSON, it will just mean that you will then have to wrap other data in JSON anyways (e.g. encoding DER as base64) and the meaning will have to be converted.) (Also, you can work around not being a text format, because you can have a program to display them, like a program can be used to display any other kind of data in other ways (e.g. syntax highlighting, pictures, auto formatting, etc).)
by eYrKEC2 | 2025-12-13 21:51:29+00:00
You know what I think is better than a push of the CPU stack pointer and a jump to a library?

A network call. Because nothing could be better for your code than putting the INTERNET into the middle of your application.

--

The "micro" of microservices has always been ridiculous.

If it can run on one machine then do it. Otherwise you have to deal with networking. Only do networking when you have to. Not as a hobby, unless your program really is a hobby.
by onion2k | 2025-12-13 21:51:48+00:00
I'm building an open source Amazon.

No you're not. Amazon is not the software that runs the website. 'Amazon' is the millions of relationships that Amazon has with suppliers and customers. It's the strong brand, the trust that people have that they can shop there safely, the sheer scale of the operation meaning that products are about as cheap as possible and will arrive when Amazon say they will. It's the ease of using an invisible, massively optimized chain of systems from a pretty basic app.

You can't build a new (and hopefully better) Amazon by copying the software. You need to work out how to get sellers and buyers to come to your site before they go Amazon, then build that thing so they do. How good the software is and whether it's open source of not probably doesn't matter. Better software is never going to be enough of a reason for people to switch away from Amazon.
by roenxi | 2025-12-13 21:52:08+00:00
> The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.

> If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.

That isn't a factor in wealth inequality. Inequality is how much money they have relative to people like Musk and Bezos - or just local business owners. The poor side of that comparison always has such little wealth/income that their circumstances don't really matter. Someone poor will be sitting in the +-$100k band and not be particularly creditworthy. When compared to a millionaire the gap is still going to be about a million dollars whether they're on the crushed or non-crushed side of the band.

Part of the reason the economic situation gets so bad is because people keep trying to shift the conversation to inequality instead of talking about what actually matters - living standards and opportunities. And convincing people to value accumulating capital, we're been playing this game for centuries, inter-generational savings could have had a real impact if people focused on being effective about it.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-13 21:52:25+00:00
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary).

People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
by nyrikki | 2025-12-13 21:52:52+00:00
> Once the code for all destinations lived in a single repo, they could be merged into a single service. With every destination living in one service, our developer productivity substantially improved. We no longer had to deploy 140+ services for a change to one of the shared libraries. One engineer can deploy the service in a matter of minutes.

This is the problem with the undefined nature of the term `microservices`, In my experience if you can't develop in a way that allows you to deploy all services independently and without coordination between services, it may not be a good fit for your orgs needs.

In the parent SOA(v2), what they described is a well known anti-pattern: [0]

Application Silos to SOA Silos * Doing SOA right is not just about technology. It also requires optimal cross-team communications. Web Service Sprawl * Create services only where and when they are needed. Target areas of greatest ROI, and avoid the service sprawl headache.

If you cannot, due to technical or political reasons, retain the ability to independently deploy a service, no matter if you choose to actually independently deploy, you will not gain most of the advantages that were the original selling point of microservices, which had to do more with organizational scaling than technical conserns.

There are other reasons to consider the pattern, especially due to the tooling available, but it is simply not a silver bullet.

And yes, I get that not everyone is going to accept Chris Richardson's definitions[1], but even in more modern versions of this, people always seem to run into the most problems because they try to shove it in a place where the pattern isn't appropriate, or isn't possible.

But kudos to Twilio for doing what every team should be, reassessing if their previous decisions were still valid and moving forward with new choices when they aren't.

[0] https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/oea-soa-an... [1] https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2022/05/04/micros...
by chiefalchemist | 2025-12-13 21:53:19+00:00
> The massive Ice Age lake roughly 100 miles long and 600 feet deep dried up between 128,000 and 186,000 years ago as the climate warmed in present-day Death Valley National Park,

A perfect example of what the Al Gore climate change gets wrong. That is the earth’s climate has always changed. Those who side with AG love to use the word deniers. Yeah, there are some. There are always camps at the extremes. But there are others who says “The climate has always changed. Maybe current changes aren’t so man-made?”

To their point, there were no man-made greenhouse gases when this lake dried to the first time.

Note: I’m not judging either position. I’m simply trying to clarify the position that’s often misrepresented.
by alecco | 2025-12-13 21:53:42+00:00
Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
by wowohwow | 2025-12-13 21:54:12+00:00
I think your point while valid, it is probably a lot more nuanced. From the post it's more akin to an Amazon shared build and deployment system than "every library update needs to redeploy every time scenario".

It's likely there's a single source of truth where you pull libraries or shared resources from, when team A wants to update the pointer to library-latest to 2.0 but the current reference of library-latest is still 1.0, everyone needs to migrate off of it otherwise things will break due to backwards compatibility or whatever.

Likewise, if there's a -need- to remove a version for a vulnerability or what have you, then everyone needs to redeploy, sure, but the centralized benefit of this likely outweighs the security cost and complexity of tracking the patching and deployment process for each and every service.

I would say those systems -are- and likely would be classified as micro services but from a cost and ease perspective operate within a shared services environment. I don't think it's fair to consider this style of design decision as a distributed monolith.

By that level of logic, having a singular business entity vs 140 individual business entities for each service would mean it's a distributed monolith.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-13 21:54:54+00:00
Man, I should hope that the warp core controllers on the USS Enterprise were not written in C.

On the other hand, if the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation were writing the show now, rather than 35-40 years ago - and therefore had a more expansive understanding of computer technology and were writing for an audience that could be relied upon to understand computers better than was actually the case - maybe there would've been more episodes involving dealing with the details of Future Sci-Fi Computer Systems in ways a programmer today might find recognizable.

Heck, maybe this is in fact the case for the recently-written episodes of Star Trek coming out in the past few years (that seem to be much less popular than TNG, probably because the entire media environment around broadcast television has changed drastically since TNG was made). Someone who writes for television today is more likely to have had the experience of taking a Python class in middle school than anyone writing for television decades ago (before Python existed), and maybe something of that experience might make it into an episode of television sci-fi.

As an additional point, my recollection is that the LCARS interface did in fact look slightly different over time - in early TNG seasons it was more orange-y, and in later seasons/Voyager/the TNG movies it generally had more of a purple tinge. Maybe we can attribute this in-universe to a Federation-wide UX redesign (imagine throwing in a scene where Barclay and La Forge are walking down a corridor having a friendly argument about whether the new redesign is better or worse immediately before a Red Alert that starts the main plot of the episode!). From a television production standpoint, we can attribute this to things like "the set designers were actually trying to suggest the passage of time and technology changing in the context of the show", or "the set designers wanted to have fun making a new thing" or "over the period of time that the 80s/90s incarnations of Star Trek were being made, television VFX technology itself was advancing rapidly and people wanted to try out new things that were not previously possible" - all of which have implications for real-world technology as well as fake television sci-fi technology.
by Kirby64 | 2025-12-13 21:55:01+00:00
> They do not behave meaningfully different in any way from a good convection oven, countertop or otherwise, and are less versatile (and yes, cheap convection ovens do have worse circulation, but good ones do not have this problem, or even just have an air fry mode anyway).

Chris Young, of Modernist Cuisine and Chefsteps fame, disagrees with you. There’s a difference in the physical construction of actual air fryers vs just fast convection ovens. Every convection oven/air fryer combo I’ve ever seen has the fan on the side, so the behavior and performance is different.

See: https://youtu.be/yw--NLjZBNk
by Zigurd | 2025-12-13 21:55:04+00:00
Historically the biggest impediment to nuclear power has been incompetent construction management and project management. Incompetent is a strong word for it but nuclear power plants are the largest capital equipment purchases on the planet. Even modern so-called modular designs can't save poor project management, and learn as you go engineering.

That so mundane and should be easy to fix, right? That's why I bring up scale. Nobody has experience running projects that big. Some things are just too big to manage.
by phil21 | 2025-12-13 21:55:05+00:00
I was driving to my first “real” tech job about 500 miles away from home at the age of 18. All my assets in my beater of a car, and about $120 in my bank account at the time.

My car broke down at a rest stop due to overheating and would not start again. I called a local shop on a Sunday afternoon and some guy in a tow truck pulled up and brought me to his place.

He knew immediately it was some fuel control module that dies when overheated, and just so happened to have a car he was working on to resale with the same one. I truthfully told him I probably couldn’t afford to pay him for it until I got my first paycheck and he asked how much I had. Told him about $120 to my name and he just charged me $100 and said I was good to go.

I (barely) made it to my new spot at 4am or so going 35mph to keep from overheating again. Flashers on the whole way there. Used my change jar to pay for my final tank of gas.

I didn’t fully realize how much that repair should have cost - plus the tow - plus the same day off hours service.

I think about that guy a lot and it’s informed my charitable giving ever since. I like to think I’m still paying it forward to this day when situations arise for me to help out someone in need who isn’t asking for a favor first.

Given the response I got from family when I called them to ask for a $100 loan to pay for gas on that trip informed my relationships with them for life. A stranger went out of his way more than supposedly close family did during my most dire (at the time) emergency I had ever experienced.
by thinkcontext | 2025-12-13 21:55:12+00:00
Its fair to do an accounting of externalities. However, I generally find those raising externality issues with solar and wind wildly overestimate their impact and wildly underestimate the externalities of fossil fuels. You mention the 20 year lifespan, this is a huge benefit compared to fossil fuels. The externalities of oil and gas add up for every second they are used.