MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonathaneunice | 2025-04-28 14:05:37+00:00
Also: UCSD p-System, Symbolics Lisp-on-custom hardware, ...

Historically their performance is underwhelming. Sometimes competitive on the first iteration, sometimes just mid. But generally they can't iterate quickly (insufficient resources, insufficient product demand) so they are quickly eclipsed by pure software implementations atop COTS hardware.

This particular Valley of Disappointment is so routine as to make "let's implement this in hardware!" an evergreen tarpit idea. There are a few stunning exceptions like GPU offload—but they are unicorns.
by op00to | 2025-04-28 14:06:01+00:00
Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic. Drivers open their following gaps faster than speed rises, so capacity peaks around 55 mph at roughly 2 000 veh/h/ln. Push limits higher and flow falls while crash energy soars. Because kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity (½ mv²), a 20 mph jump doesn’t give you 33 % more punch, it delivers nearly 80 % more. NHTSA data put it bluntly: fatal-injury odds about double for every 10 mph over 50 mph [1]. That’s an exponential climb in destructiveness, not a linear trade-off.

Higher limits also leak onto the streets that feed the ramps. The AAA Foundation’s 2024 before-and-after work showed a lasting uptick in operating speeds and speed-related crashes on arterials within a mile of interchanges after states boosted freeway limits [2]. Pedestrians and cyclists never set foot on the interstate yet bear some of the fallout.

Saying my analogy shuts down rational thought misreads what the analogy is doing. It's not a substitute for data but a framing device. I'm highlighting that different technologies share a core governance problem. When a private activity's danger rises faster than its utility, society uses regulation to keep expected harm below an acceptable threshold. This invites more rational analysis, not less.

If empirical data showed that 85mph highways or un-regulated assault rifles actually reduced third party harm, the analogy wouldn't block that conclusion, but instead lead to different regulatory settings. Your dismissal flips the burden of proof, hand-waving away the external-risk problem instead of engaging the numbers.

The gun analogy is serviceable once you zoom out from mechanics to externalities. An AR-15 and an 85 mph interstate both offer private utility but impose public risk that scales steeply—ballistic energy for one, kinetic energy for the other. Society uses licensing, background checks, or posted limits to push that expected harm below a tolerable threshold. Arguing that faster roads are safer because “cars clear out quicker” is like saying bump-stocks make rifles safer because the shooter finishes the magazine sooner: it flips the risk calculus on its head.

Think of operating a consumer-grade drone near people on the ground.

Private benefit: You get great aerial photos and save time compared with climbing a ladder or renting a lift.

External risk: If the drone falls from 100 ft it can hit a bystander with far more kinetic energy than if it falls from 20 ft (energy ∝ height, so the risk climbs steeply as you fly higher or faster or fly over people).

Regulatory levers: Aviation authorities cap altitude, require line-of-sight operation, limit flights over crowds, mandate geofencing near airports, and sometimes ask pilots to pass a basic safety test.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/think.pdf

[2] AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, “Uncovering the Spillover Effect from Posted Speed Limit Changes” (2024). https://aaafoundation.org/uncovering-the-spillover-effect-fr...
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-28 14:06:17+00:00
Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked?

In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines.

So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs point B456?

Is this done sort-of-blind? Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)
by taco_emoji | 2025-04-28 14:06:43+00:00
We have a Yoto and it's okay, but my complaint is how difficult it is to get custom stuff on there. The "record-your-own" cards are expensive (and often unavailable, like during this past Christmas season), and off-the-shelf NFC cards don't work perfectly (you have to ensure the content is downloaded onto the device before a generic card will work for that title).
by Jensson | 2025-04-28 14:06:49+00:00
They update that gemini plays pokemon model when it gets stuck with new prompt engineering etc. So there the learning happens by a human and not the LLM, the LLM can do a lot with trial and error but if you follow it there it does the same action over and over and get stuck until the prompt engineering kicks it into self evaluating 20 steps later.

So that isn't just "ask it to play pokemon", that is a large program with tons of different prompts and memories that kicks in at different times, and even with all that and updates to the program when it gets stuck it still struggles massively and repeats mistakes over and over in ways human never would.
by ghssds | 2025-04-28 14:06:50+00:00
Calling LibGen "the pirate site that Meta used for AI training" is very uncharitable. If I was to say something about Liggen, I'd say it's one of the most important sites of today's internet, along with Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and my favorite pirate torrent index I won't name here. Those are the websites that actualy help make knowledge and culture available to current and future generations. Interrestingly, half of these are called "pirate", and the other half is constantly challenged in a few juridictions.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-28 14:06:52+00:00
> As it turns out, “FAB” stands for Fabrice Bellard, who next to being the original developer of widely used programs such as FFmpeg and QEMU, is also the creator of an executable compression utility called LZEXE, developed in 1990.

Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
by ryao | 2025-04-28 14:07:20+00:00
You make a number of assertions, but you omit any concrete examples.

> And it's also quite unclear what you mean with "low speeding limit" and "big difference in vehicle speeds", especially given that lower speeding limits in general limit how big the difference in vehicle speed can be (assuming it's reasonably enforced and as such people somewhat kinda keep to the rules, but if not it's an enforcement problem, not a speed limit problem).

Very few people actually drive according to posted speed limits. They instead drive at a natural speed for the road and conditions. Those that do drive according to posted speed limits when the speed limits are set below the 85th percentile will find that driving at the speed limits is hazardous. This is why in countries with sane traffic laws, the speed limits are set to the 85th percentile and you get an illusion that people are obeying it. Differences in speeds tend to be small when the speed limits are set to the 85th percentile.

In the U.S., speed limits were lowered in a misguided attempt to conserve fuel following the 1973 oil crisis. This never conserved fuel since nobody listened to the new limits and it has made driving at posted speed limit hazardous ever since then.

> In addition there are quite a lot of studies about speeding limits and safety and they are very clear in the conclusion that speeding is one of the more common sources of deadly car accidents.

Having the distance between a vehicle and anything else reach 0 is necessary for there to be a collision. Get the cars off the road faster and the distance between vehicles will naturally increase. Larger distances between vehicles inhibits collisions. Thus, while collisions might be worse at higher speeds, you are not going to have as many of them. Germany’s autobahn has no speed limits and while collisions happen, they are relatively rare. Furthermore, 0 collisions is an unattainable goal. I believe the maxim is that if you make something idiot proof, the world will make a better idiot.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-04-28 14:07:31+00:00
I think there needs to be identification and marketing of whatever EU agencies are already focusing on these issues.

In discussing policy solution hypotheticals for the US, bodies like the Department of Commerce, the FCC and OSHA are household names but I've lived in Ireland for years and can only name Euratom off the top of my head and need the use of a search engine to get the names of any other EU agencies.
by philipswood | 2025-04-28 14:07:49+00:00
> What LLMs can't do is explaining why we have this and why it needs to change to "a = b - 1" in the new iteration.

I did a search on Github for code containing `a=b+1` and found this:

https://github.com/haoxizhong/problem/blob/a2b934ee7bb33bbe9...

It looks to me that ChatGPT specifically does a more than OK job at explaining why we have this.

https://chatgpt.com/share/680f877d-b588-8003-bed5-b425e14a53...

While your use of 'theory' is reasonable Naur uses a specific and more elaborate definition of theory.

Example from the paper:

>Case 1 concerns a compiler. It has been developed by a group A for a Language L and worked very well on computer X. Now another group B has the task to write a compiler for a language L + M, a modest extension of L, for computer Y. Group B decides that the compiler for L developed by group A will be a good starting point for their design, and get a contract with group A that they will get support in the form of full documentation, including annotated program texts and much additional written design discussion, and also personal advice. The arrangement was effective and group B managed to develop the compiler they wanted. In the present context the significant issue is the importance of the personal advice from group A in the matters that concerned how to implement the extensions M to the language. During the design phase group B made suggestions for the manner in which the extensions should be accommodated and submitted them to group A for review. In several major cases it turned out that the solutions suggested by group B were found by group A to make no use of the facilities that were not only inherent in the structure of the existing compiler but were discussed at length in its documentation, and to be based instead on additions to that structure in the form of patches that effectively destroyed its power and simplicity. The members of group A were able to spot these cases instantly and could propose simple and effective solutions, framed entirely within the existing structure. This is an example of how the full program text and additional documentation is insufficient in conveying to even the highly motivated group B the deeper insight into the design, that theory which is immediately present to the members of group A.
by 59nadir | 2025-04-28 14:07:50+00:00
While it's not wrong to be extrinsically motivated (it's not morally wrong, or a value judgment), it's definitely worse and more fickle (it will produce worse results in most cases). Intrinsic motivation is much more likely to lead to long-term growth even in the face of adversity and in general be more resistant to changing circumstances.
by IanCal | 2025-04-28 14:08:08+00:00
> The system you describe appears to treat programmers as mere cogs

Not at all, it simply addresses key issues raised. That they cannot have a theory of the program because they are reading it and not actually writing it - so have them write code, fix problems and iterate. Have them communicate with others to get more understanding of the "why".

> . Programmers do not simply write and iterate code as dictated by POs.

Communicating with POs is not the same as writing code directed by POs.
by tikotus | 2025-04-28 14:09:06+00:00
Thank you so much for trying out the game and taking the time to write the feedback!

I did! That was the main workload of this project, and is still ongoing. I have ideas for improvements, and I also have to fix some sentences manually sometimes. But it's getting there.

The sharing shows a kind of "health bar". Every time you make an illogical guess, it reduces one. Running out of "health" doesn't prevent you from completing the puzzle, but it does show up in your share. Based on this, you made 4 "illogical" guesses. If you didn't, then there's a bug. But feels like I should anyways clarify this, if it wasn't clear to you. Thanks again!
by Wobbles42 | 2025-04-28 14:09:11+00:00
I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.

I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.
Show HN: Tietoarc – News source and media ratings and bias
by miikka-r | 2025-04-28 14:09:55+00:00
Hi,

I created a website where users can rate and explore news sources. Each source gets three ratings—overall, credibility, and bias—all based on user scores alone. They’re also categorized to help you find sources that match your interests.

The inspiration for this was the current media landscape where there is so many sources with so much variety in writing, bias and coverage. And there was no one place where you could see how other people feel about the news source. I hope this platform helps people navigate and find the best sources for them.

I would like you to test the current experience and if you find it useful, rate some sources. The ratings are what make it most useful—the more ratings there are, the better it gets.

Also currently there are almost 400 news sources added, mainly the most known ones from USA and some from Europe, but if something’s missing, use the request form to let me know. I want to cover as many sources as possible (especially globally), and your help is huge since it’s time-consuming to track them down.

This is completely bootstrapped and currently there is one subscription plan which you get little bit more statistics. The plan is to add more features to subscription but still keep most free to be as open as possible, and I’m aiming to keep ads out for a clean experience.

I will be also doing Product Hunt launch later this week. Currently scheduled for Thursday (1st of May) - check it out if you can. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share thoughts or ask anything.
by Filligree | 2025-04-28 14:10:56+00:00
> Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient?

So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points:

- Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. That's what keeps the grid running second-to-second; while a power plant might pretend it's outputting a constant 4MW, it actually shifts noticeably from moment to moment. The kinetic energy of the generator helps balance that out.

- Going up from the sub-second range, an overload of the generator obviously would cause the shaft to slow down, dropping the frequency and causing brownouts. Brownouts are bad and can damage the grid, so typically breakers will disconnect if it falls below 49Hz; a 2% drop.

- Baseload plants can't cope with this, as they take multiple minutes to spool up. Minimum; for something like a coal power plant, where you have to shove in additional coal and wait for it to catch fire, it's going quite a few minutes. This is what defines 'baseload'.

- Peaker power plants can increase (or decrease) their mechanical power production in a matter of seconds. These days that typically means gas turbines, though hydroelectric power is even better, and nuclear power could be used for peaker plants -- but isn't; most nuclear reactor designs outside of the navy is a baseload design. France does have some load-following designs, and we need more of those.

- Wind turbines can't increase their output, flat out, but they can decrease it (by feathering, or by using brakes). This is good enough, except this would turn them into 'peaker plants' that can't help with peaks. If we had enough wind turbines to cover 100% of the load then we'd technically be fine, but economically speaking that doesn't work; they'd be at less than 10% power most of the time.

- Wind turbines have rotating shafts, but a lot of the time they produce DC power, linked through inverters, which removes that benefit and makes them act like solar panels in effect. However, this is a purely economic issue; they can trivially be upgraded to support grid stability if the pricing scheme will pay for it.

- Solar panels are worse: They have no inertia! There is no rotating shaft there to cover sub-second usage spikes. That's where complaints about 'renewables causing reduction of grid stability' come from, along with issues like domestic solar needing to backfeed power through distribution lines and transformers that aren't necessarily designed for that.

- But batteries can absolutely help. The kinetic energy of a rotating turbine isn't actually that big; it's not that expensive to pair a solar panel with a battery to build a grid-forming system that acts the same way a kinetic power plant would.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-28 14:11:00+00:00
> the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn

You state this casually, but it is one hell of a thing to claim.

In my experience this is not true at all. Porn shaped my opinion on sexuality and relationships like GTA informed my social norms and my stance on the use of violence. Sometimes things just are .. relief and don’t mean anything. It’s an escape not an education.

Ironically it is the organized religions that are by and large the most dominant factor in all types of dysfunction surrounding relationships and female rights. Porn is 1,5% of the problem compared to what those guys are doing.

Your 125 IQ mother being a stay at home mom while your deadbeat barely literate dad gets to work and rule “the household”. Now that’s a potent toxin to mess up youth. Funny how those guys tend to focus on porn, but now I’m just ranting. Excuse me.
by 90s_dev | 2025-04-28 14:11:33+00:00
It's not just the web, native apps have always had free open source clones that technically render them useless, often just as good quality, yet they didn't go out of business. There are other considerations people make when deciding to use an app, including network effect, a strong community, sheer level of quality and passion from the developers, etc.

For fonts, I just went with a simple raster bitmap font and pixel grid storage format. Creating these limitations makes it easier for me and for developers and artists. I choose 320x180 because it fits the 16:9 perfectly, which would make full screen ideal on most monitors.
by flipgimble | 2025-04-28 14:11:47+00:00
If I'm reading this right, the last full zim archive of all of english wikipedia is wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2024-01.zim which is now about 16 months old. Is that right, or is are another more recent sources?

The current US administration is actively trying to interfere with Wikipedia and censor public speech or information that is detrimental to their disinformation campaign. [1]

Do you know if there is an effort to publish more recent archives ? Or do you have any advice how outside developers could jump in to help with that project?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799302
by Jolter | 2025-04-28 14:12:01+00:00
Really? You’re writing that “Being quarantined for expressing an opinon is bad”, as if that’s a thing that happened.

People were quarantined in order to slow down spread of a disease. When they broke quarantine, they were hunted down and detained because they broke (Australian) quarantine laws. If you can contort yourself into believing any of those cases were about freedom of speech, let me know.

Likewise, laws were passed to mandate vaccines for certain jobs. Some who refused lost their jobs over it. This was not about speech or freedom of opinion. It was about protecting the lives of people they interacted with in their jobs.

As far as I know, millions of people around the world protested in public about the lockdowns, quarantines and other measures. I the US, at least, they were allowed to do that. I know China didn’t permit such protests, but this debate is not about China. You are intentionally conflating freedom of speech and freedom to do various other things, and then accusing me of not debating in good faith.
by Ni3l55 | 2025-04-28 14:12:24+00:00
B2B SaaS for Sponsorship ROI measurement (https://wehave.io)

We use data from club & sponsor to measure conversion over time. Our challenge lies in attributing a select group of people who appear in both datasets. Sponsors spend millions on their sponsorship, and they have no idea what comes back.

We also got funded last week & looking for a founding engineer (2nd employee) :)

https://wehavenotes.notion.site/backend-engineer-aws-python
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-04-28 14:12:25+00:00
I'm currently working on Academy Referral* (https://academyreferral.com). It's a referral platform for martial arts academies, allowing owners to reward their students for bringing in new members.

I've trained martial arts for a few years, and have always been that person who tries to introduce those close to me to the community. I know a lot of other people do the same.

Now, I don't care that I wasn't rewarded for it, but why not? We have point-based programs for nearly everything. Why not for martial arts as well?

* Have a few academies in the process of testing it out. Still a lot to do, including the demo video that isn't going to load on the main page.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-28 14:13:35+00:00
Frequency is effectively more important than voltage. Or rather it collapses first. Frequency reduction for a rotary generator means that more energy is being taken out than the rotary shaft energy is being put in, so it is effectively an early warning that voltage is about to drop.

Frequency coordination is absolutely critical, via phase coordination. A large generator must not get significantly out of phase. So frequency going out of spec triggers the generator to "trip" (disconnect).
by philipswood | 2025-04-28 14:13:51+00:00
As Naur describes this, the full code and documentation, and the resulting model you can build up from it is merely "walking the path" (as the blogpost put it), and does not encode "building the path".

I.e. the theory of the program as it exist in the minds of the development team might not be fully available for reconstruction from just the final code and docs since it includes a lot of activity that does not end up in the code.
by david_guda | 2025-04-28 14:14:07+00:00
Yes, this is so true. Too many people just want the immediately useful information, but this is not what universities is for! In Uni we should learn things that can be relevant decades later. Not just learn the most modern tools that is currently used in industry. It should be coupled with that too, but not only. The short 2 year educations to learn CS basics are kind of like the fast food of learning. It gets you there, but something is missing.