MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Taek | 2025-04-10 17:21:57+00:00
There's a couple of things at play here (renewable energy is my industry).

1. Renewable energy, especially solar, is cheaper *sometimes*. How much sunlight is there in that area? The difference between New Mexico and Illinois for example is almost a factor of 2. That is a massive factor. Other key factors include cost of labor, and (often underestimated) beautacratic red tape. For example, in India it takes about 6 weeks to go from "I'll spend $70 million on a solar farm" to having a fully functional 10 MW solar farm. In the US, you'll need something like 30% more money, and it'll take 9-18 months. In some parts of Europe, it might take 4-5 years and cost double to triple.

All of those things matter a lot.

2. For the most part, capex is the dominant factor in the cost of energy. In the case of fossil fuels, we've already spent the capex, so while it's more expensive over a period of 20 years to keep using coal, if you are just trying to make the budget crunch for 2025 and 2026 it might make sense to stay on fossil fuels even if renewable energy is technically "cheaper".

3. Energy is just a hard problem to solve. Grid integrations, regulatory permission, regulatory capture, monopolies, base load versus peak power, duck curves, etc etc. If you have something that's working (fossil fuels), it might be difficult to justify switching to something that you don't know how it will work.

Solar is becoming dominant very quickly. Give it a little bit of time, and you'll see more and more people switching to solar over fossil fuels.
by akshayshah | 2025-04-10 17:22:02+00:00
Very cool! This makes Google the only major cloud that has low-latency single-zone object storage, standard regional object storage, and transparently-replicated dual-region object storage - all with the same API.

For infra systems, this is great: code against the GCS API, and let the user choose the cost/latency/durability tradeoffs that make sense for their use case.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-10 17:23:00+00:00
Some people brag. This is known. It might be about hunting or knitting or a car. Im not sure why that should have any bearing on the topic. Should everything that people brag about be banned?

I like to go into nature for all sorts of reasons, sometimes it is to enjoy peace, sometimes it is to enjoy peace with a gun and a dead squirrel. sometimes it is to enjoy a challenge with a gun and a dead squirrel, and I don't care about peace. These ideas aren't in competition, they are synergistic.
by anilgulecha | 2025-04-10 17:23:11+00:00
I read Claude's "Sci-Fi First Contact — First Contact " entry. It's pretty good (and with some editing can be great - some of the ending seems slightly unearned). Has a Ted Chiang/Arrival vibe to it, is a very good first contact story.

Most folks here are communicating things without engaging with the content. We need a the Turing test for creative writing. I'd definitely not have guessed this was LLM written - seems like an experienced hand wrote it.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-04-10 17:23:19+00:00
The brightest will evaluate the tradeoffs properly or will have education that will give them proper evaluations of AI. Maybe some bright people will be handicapped, but it won't be the bright'est'. That handicap on the bright could also lead to new forms of talent and multi-faceted growth.

What percentage of the dumbest will be boosted? What makes a person dumb? If they are productive and friendly, isn't that more important?

What percentage of the dumbest will fall farther or abandon heavy learning even earlier?
by 100k | 2025-04-10 17:23:41+00:00
If you like this movie, I recommend Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz's podcast "Unclear and Present Danger" (the name is a riff on Clancy as well) which covers the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and how they dealt with the United States' changing place in the world after the end of the Cold War.

They have done two episodes on this movie:

https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2021/10/...

https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2022/10/...
by andai | 2025-04-10 17:24:05+00:00
There's a very brief section estimating CO2 impact and a chart at the end of Chapter 1:

https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/resea...

A few more charts in the PDF (pp. 48-51)

https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai-index-r...
by immibis | 2025-04-10 17:24:05+00:00
You need to pay money to people who will put in effort and agency. You can't just throw money at random people and expect something useful to happen. Sometimes, the people who will make things happen if you throw money to them don't exist. Sometimes, you have to turn people into those people (which also costs money).

Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.

The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.
by mook | 2025-04-10 17:25:10+00:00
I worked on a project that used Bazel for a bit (but ended up not being a great fit).

I think the part I hated most about Bazel was the fact that there were in fact two dialects; one for BUILD files and one for .bzl files. The things you do in them are different but the documentation is always vague on what goes where.
by wholinator2 | 2025-04-10 17:25:26+00:00
Now see I'm curious, would it be better if we had no context on what the comic _is supposed_ to be? Or is this only hilarious in comparison to the typical "i hate mondays, how many pieces of flair", type schtick the original goes for. Honestly i think it's the latter, cause after 20 of these or so they kind loose the appeal except for the very occasional guffaw. Though, is that still a higher laugh count than the original? I'm not about to read Garfield to find out
by axegon_ | 2025-04-10 17:25:37+00:00
I too have been on a very aggressive mission to decloudify myself lately(as in, since comrade musk and co took over everything and I have 0 reason to trust him or anyone around him). And to be fair, for all the hundreds of gigabytes of data I have, the migration took no longer than two weeks, on and off, and it works infinitely better than I was hoping. The only service I've outsourced is email since I hate dealing with MX records, IMAP/SMTP. For everything else, the one thing that did wonders was an Asus PN40 with a dual core celeron CPU. It's biggest strength is that it's both accessible and has a slot for an M.2 NVME and a SATA drive so you can have a safe backup in one spot. I too share the opinion that CalDAV is kind of sketchy. That said, Nextcloud covered most of my needs(although it can be slow for some things, even with redis backing it up). Calendars, dropbox/google drive, docs, photos, backups and automatic syncing - it covers everything really well. That, combined with several other open source solutions truly cover all my needs(music and video streaming, monitoring, alerting, vpn, readers, management, and various other utilities). And as under-powered this mini PC is, it handles everything insanely well with lots of room to spare, given that my ISP is a solid 10/10. In fact it would be perfectly capable of handling another 5-6 people like me with ease.
by moomin | 2025-04-10 17:25:45+00:00
But neither Brexit nor the US foreign and trade policy _are_ just other country's politics. All of these things directly affected/affect the EU27. It's not just a football game. e.g. You'd best believe the average polish person cares pretty deeply about what's going on in Ukraine.

In any event, I found they didn't want to tell me what they thought about it, they wanted to hear my perspective on why these things were happening. Obviously I claim no great political insight, but I could tell them what it looked like at ground zero.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-10 17:26:09+00:00
Wow, cool stuff. I never used AgentTCL or D'Agents for anything, but I became aware of both sometime last year and spent a little time reading up on the whole thing. I believe there was a chapter specifically on AgentTCL in one of the books I read.

In some ways, it's a shame it didn't catch on, but the security / access control issues you mention certainly make a lot of sense. That seems to be the big issue that derailed most, if not all, of the various "mobile code" initiatives over the years.
by brandall10 | 2025-04-10 17:26:12+00:00
I've traveled quite a bit over the past few years (including a couple dozen cities in Europe), and I've found at events at many hostels/shared housing I've been at, it routinely comes up, esp. when alcohol is involved.

With young Europeans, it seems to be a point of fascination with them that such stuff is happening in our country. And they will implicitly assume you're progressive because you're traveling in that part of the world.
by SkyBelow | 2025-04-10 17:26:36+00:00
>As someone already said, parents used to be concerned that kids wouldn't be able to solve maths problems without a calculator

Were they wrong? People who rely too much on a calculator don't develop strong math muscles that can be used in more advanced math. Identifying patterns in numbers and seeing when certain tricks can be used to solve a problem (verses when they just make a problem worse) is a skill that ends up being beyond their ability to develop.
by floxy | 2025-04-10 17:26:53+00:00
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification

>Don’t Have Your Acceptable ID?

>In the event you arrive at the airport without acceptable identification (whether lost, stolen, or otherwise), you may still be allowed to fly.

>The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name and current address to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint, where you may be subject to additional screening.

>You will not be allowed to enter the security checkpoint if you choose to not provide acceptable identification, you decline to cooperate with the identity verification process, or your identity cannot be confirmed.

>TSA recommends individuals without acceptable identification arrive at least three hours in advance of their flight time.
by returningfory2 | 2025-04-10 17:27:01+00:00
In the strictly technical sense I agree, however in the Rust community when people say "the niche optimization" they usually are referring only to the simplest case. For example in the book Rust For Rustaceans (written by a pretty serious Rust expert and aimed at intermediate-level Rust programmers) the nice optimization is described as "the Rust compiler using invalid bit patterns to represent enum variants that hold no data". Note the "hold no data" part - it doesn't incorporate the case in the blog.

In any case, the definition of what is exactly niche optimization is besides the point. The point of the post is: the literature gives you the impression that there's one limited form of enum size optimization in the Rust compiler, but in fact there are other optimizations too. And knowing this is useful!
by bblumenfeld10 | 2025-04-10 17:27:04+00:00
We just launched hosted Orpheus on [Gabber.dev](https://gabber.dev/)—an LLM-agnostic voice API for building real-time, emotionally expressive AI agents.

We’re hosting [Orpheus TTS](https://github.com/canopy-ai/orpheus-tts) in production, which gives you:

- ~200ms TTS streaming latency

- Expressive voices that sound like humans

- Emotion tags like <laugh>, <sigh>, <cry>

- Significantly lower cost (~$1/hr) compared to ElevenLabs or [Play.ht](http://Play.ht) ($5+/hr)

- Integrate with WebSocket API or Realtime WebRTC SDK

Gabber also handles:

- Memory (long-term + session-based)

- LLM orchestration (use your own or ours)

- Tool calling

With this release, real-time AI voice is finally fast, affordable, and expressive enough to unlock use cases that just weren’t viable before. With cheaper, easier access to high-quality voice, you can now build what you actually want—whether it’s an AI companion, a voice-native coach, a video game NPC, or something entirely your own.

If you're curious about how we’re hosting Orpheus at scale or want to talk memory, GPU infra, SDKs—happy to share.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-10 17:28:49+00:00
Read most hacker news discussions, the top responses often cover other aspects/questions raised. I am responding to someone's question raised, in Hacker News style, not going off on a tangent. You've been here long enough to know that and that you are making a bad faith argument, not actually engaging with what I said.

I don't think grants should be pulled nor do to I support Trump's policies. I don't think all criticism is anti-semitic, but I understand why/how they way some people approach it.

What abouting other situations isn't a response, especially when I am talking about why people have specific feelings about a specific situation. Again you are failing to engage and instead yourself are going off on a tangent.
by Muromec | 2025-04-10 17:28:54+00:00
>My point being: much of the western world seems to move towards openness, inclusiveness, and accessibility, whereas the US currently moves backwards, as exemplified by the OP.

US doesn't just move backwards, it has a very specific behavior mode -- one of a culture that perceives itself to be under a threat of disappearing.

It's usually a behavior of a diaspora community that doesn't want to give in to assimilation or a country resisting colonization. Thus a focus on token symbols -- ash crosses, fetishization of language, grandstanding on the most nonsense and minor token issues.

The group that exhibits this behavior struggles to put up boundary between "them" and "us".
by mauvehaus | 2025-04-10 17:29:55+00:00
For those who didn't know, the rind can also be dropped into an otherwise ordinary pot of soup and add a lot of flavor.

Thanks for the risotto tip; gonna have to try that. I've never tasted the rind after cooking it in soup: it's not an appealing look to my eye.

What size should the rind be chopped up for risotto?
by mmx1 | 2025-04-10 17:30:40+00:00
Pretty sure the answer is yes. I have no direct knowledge of the matter for Gemini 2.5, but in general TPUs were widely used for training at Google. Even Apple used them to train their Apple Intelligence models. It’s not some esoteric thing to train on TPU; I would consider using GPU for that inside Google esoteric.

P.S. I found an on-the-record statement re Gemini 1.0 on TPU:

"We trained Gemini 1.0 at scale on our AI-optimized infrastructure using Google’s in-house designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. And we designed it to be our most reliable and scalable model to train, and our most efficient to serve."
by pseudocomposer | 2025-04-10 17:31:04+00:00
If you can self-host or publish a demo of your work that is open-sourced, I find that that really opens the door for a lot of web dev positions, regardless of what particular languages you know and/or what’s in vogue.

(Mine would be https://jonline.io/jon, part of a larger project that does federated social media, but just a “hello world” portfolio server app that you open source would be quite effective, I think. This is all based on recruiters’, hiring managers’, and other devs’ responses when I link them to it.)
by data_ders | 2025-04-10 17:31:05+00:00
> how so many organizations end up investing humongous amounts of effort rolling their own databases from scratch because none of the off-the-shelf solutions meet all their requirements. But in most of these cases, it's because some of the "requirements" were actually "nice-to-haves" and they could have gotten by fine with an off-the-shelf database, but they talked themselves into building one from scratch.

I love the term "arbitrary uniqueness" for this too. Like how different are your needs, really?
by dzaima | 2025-04-10 17:31:19+00:00
If anything, an emoji is easier to search for, as less things would be using it than a general "warning" (or whatever would make sense, as the emoji'd thing isn't the warning itself). Do have to get a copy from somewhere to search for though. It's also much easier to "visually" search for it.

At least in the blog there are a two spaces after the emoji so it can freely draw past its boundaries rightwards without colliding with anything for a good bit; and nothing to its right is used assuming monospace alignment. So at worst you just get a half-emoji.
by manter | 2025-04-10 17:31:45+00:00
I'm a big fan of Cloudflare's offerings in general, including D1 (despite the fact it admittedly has flaws).

That being said, the pipe dream statement is accurate IMO. I do think they'll get there, but like you said - a lot of the ideas put forward around a DB per customer just aren't present at all in the DX.

If I were to hazard a guess, Durable Objects will slowly gain many of the features and DX of regular workers. Once they reach parity workers will begin end-of-life (though I'd guess the workers name will be kept, since 'Durable Objects' is terribly named IMO).

This is kind of what happened (is happening) with pages right now. Workers gained pretty much all of their features and are now the recommended way to deliver static sites too.

For me, this can't come quickly enough. The DX of workers with the capability of DO is game changing and one of the most unique cloud offerings around.

It'll bring a few new challenges - getting visibility across that many databases for example, but it completely removes a pretty big chunk of scaling pain.
by saltcured | 2025-04-10 17:31:48+00:00
I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal story.

From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did.

The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision either, and it wasn't listening to the drumming sounds at all, but merely dispersing some odors to do a better sniff test.
by disqard | 2025-04-10 17:31:48+00:00
Whenever such concrete realities are revealed, I chuckle at Marc Prensky's ideas from "Digital Natives" (that still linger on today):

> Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work.

Even reading this back when it was published, it came across as drivel. Now, we have doomscroll-optimized short-form video which does precisely what Prensky recommended, and nobody in their right minds would suggest that it is healthy/good/beneficial for kids to consume that kind of media.
by sklivvz1971 | 2025-04-10 17:32:10+00:00
It wouldn't. Not for now

It's not only the sound, it's the sound, the bounce, the response to different strengths, the smell, the color. Humans are multimodal, machines are not, yet.

The moment we have a Michelin star level robot cook, then we can start thinking about automating this kind of stuff. For now, we have better results with humans!

Italians have absolutely zero problems replacing manual processes with technology. Creating each wheel is more science than art, everything is done in highly sterilized environments with exact temperature control, as an example.
by supplied_demand | 2025-04-10 17:32:25+00:00
==There’s like five Trump republicans on HN==

Neither true nor relevant to the comment. The comment was about the propensity to demand more from one side than the other. In this case, you put the onus on Democrats to positively interpret a Republican administration policy that Republican politicians can't even articulate.

==after being between 466 and 657 between 2019 and 2022. Did Trump’s policies cause air quality to get better and then suddenly get worse halfway through the Biden administration?==

No, COVID did that, as other people have explained in this thread. Let's be more specific to try and remove the COVID outliers:

- PM2.5 unhealthy days fell 41% during Obama's term (1,195 unhealthy days in 2008 down to 702 days in 2016).

- PM2.5 unhealthy days increased by 9% from 2017 to 2018, after Trump changed the rules.

It should also be noted that wildfires can have a large impact on PM2.5 levels.
by donatj | 2025-04-10 17:33:32+00:00
Everything old is new again.

Back in the early 2000's I used Mozilla Sunbird to host my calendar on my personal Win2k server via IIS's WebDAV module… I don't think CardDAV was a thing yet but I might be mistaken.

I ended up importing all that data from it into my Google Calendar which is kind of fun because I've got all my homework and whatnot for college courses on there if you go back far enough.
by Straw | 2025-04-10 17:33:38+00:00
Adam Smith would be considered a right wing economist today, similar to Milton Friedman, perhaps with more support for certain government functions such as education. However, even on that issue, given the wildly different level of education available today, its not easy to predict what he would think.

Often quotations from him are taken wildly out of context to support a 'progressive' viewpoint. An example (From David Friedman's blog):

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

But, if we keep reading:

It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.

Adam Smith was a proponent of free trade, free markets, and flat taxation (proportional to income). Not very socialist.

(https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/discovering-what-is-tr...)
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-10 17:33:41+00:00
Here's a passage from a children's book I've been carrying around in my heart for a few decades:

“I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see."

"Everyone has to do those things," she said.

"Rich people don't," I pointed out.

Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.

"They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that--keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward--that's what life's about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well."

"Men don't do those things."

"Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside--you'll see.”