MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elif | 2025-04-05 14:21:51+00:00
I wish the author had spelled out the subtextual implications for peak oil demand and the energy costs of solar. I will try to give my perspective I suppose.

We always thought that once solar achieved cost Parity with gas generation, it would be a cascade effect of rapid solarization due to the cost basis alone, finally shedding the necessity of ethical ideology to promote it.

That happened roughly in 2015 for the US, and nothing substantial changed. Then the costs of solar got cut in half. And now as we breach the mythical $1/watt barrier for utility scale solar installation, we still find ourselves breaking oil production records year after year.

We're so far past the "kerosene moment" and barely seeing exponential growth on solar capacity install. Meanwhile China is adding more than 4x as much.

I think the moral of the kerosene story and solar is that it's hard to flip a paradigm that is currently enabling people to get rich. The only time it seems to change is when a law is passed.
by Spivak | 2025-04-05 14:23:09+00:00
Yes, I'm a woman posting about my own experience as well as the experiences of my female friends who I could in no way describe as skewing particularly sexually deviant. They all pretty much consider themselves "vanilla" and yet this article would have you believe that they're deeply depraved for wanting to be "taken," choked, dominated, or receive some light degradation.

These things are so normal that they're not even considered to separate from sex, they're just what you happen to be into— on the level of preferring specific positions.
Show HN: Teletyped – Free interface for multiple AI models
by algoman | 2025-04-05 14:23:42+00:00
We built a clean UI for ChatGPT and Claude that's now completely free. Just plug in your API keys and get:

- Switch models mid-chat

- Edit AI responses

- Saved & temporary chats

- Adjustable temperature

- Multiple themes

No subscriptions. We made this because we were tired of switching between different AI interfaces. Would love your feedback!
by sneak | 2025-04-05 14:24:19+00:00
I don’t think this is true at all.

Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction.

The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened.

The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.
by dan_pixelflow | 2025-04-05 14:24:57+00:00
A genuine confusion for me - as a visual artist - about how two things can be true: this can be a great love letter to such an iconic and brilliant song, and also why generative AI was used to create accompanying imagery in this article. I don't see how an piece about the 'joys of music production' - aka, creativity - should also actively be anti-creative. To me, those two thoughts seem completely opposing.
by sgarland | 2025-04-05 14:25:18+00:00
My current problem is that I feel like I’m only barely managing to not completely burn out via relaxation at night. I used to have a ton of excitement over my side project, but for the past several months, I can’t muster the energy. I play a board game on Steam (Wingspan: 10/10 would recommend the physical and digital version) that has a soundtrack I like, and that’s about it. This keeps me sane, but I often find myself wishing I felt confident enough to extend myself further.

Hopefully when my current large work project wraps up I’ll be able to take a breather.
by tovej | 2025-04-05 14:25:44+00:00
Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes.

The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).
by ath3nd | 2025-04-05 14:25:50+00:00
> So, you can have all the laws on paper that you want, if nobody respects them, they might as well not exist.

Are you talking about the US at the moment?

- https://www.context.news/big-tech/us-prison-social-media-cra...

- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo

- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/un-human-rig...

Basically freedom of expression is fine, as long as you don't:

- criticize the genocide that the US government is partial to (and funds) in Palestine

- criticize the US government for backing out of all climate deals

- criticize Trump for being orange and weird and Musk for being a robot?

I wonder if in recent political history we can find a parallel with some parties in Germany and Italy in the past century.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-04-05 14:26:58+00:00
Ever been in the famous Mer de Glace in France ? In the 1980s they had to build a cable car to descend from the old train station (which the glacier _almost_ reached at some point) to the surface level of the glacier, which had started descending. By the time they finished building the cable car, the glacier had descended so _much_ _more_ that in the 90s an extra 500 steps staircase had to be built to cover the ever-growing gap from the cable car stop to the new surface of the glacier. ~5 years ago, this gap was so large it would take an hour or so to climb up/down, so they had to build _a 2nd cable car_ to cover the new gap.

The new cable car even when it was in construction _already_ did no longer reach the glacier, as the glacier has descended another 20 steps since construction started: https://www.chamonix.net/english/news/chamonix-new-telecabin...

You can see with your own eyes not only how it is disappearing, but how much the speed at it which disappears increases year-by-year. If you ever plan to visit it, better do it so now; I find it unlikely there will be anything visitable left of it by the end of next decade.
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 14:27:00+00:00
I'm familiar with the subject through long study. The sources you identified were not previously known to me but I feel confident evaluating them as I have based on prior knowledge and review. Do you mean to argue whose web search skills are the best - a point I already spent a paragraph conceding - or do you mean to argue the subject actually under discussion?

I still don't understand where the anger is coming from. Why does it piss you off that I want to argue child sexual abuse is more common and more of a problem than it's broadly acknowledged to be? Are you assuming I mean to use that claim as an argument against porn or something? I really can't figure out what's gotten so far up your nose on this, and I wish I could because it's really making it impossible for us to have a conversation.

Last I recall, we spoke cordially enough last year, if not generally in agreement, on the subject of AI capable of CSAM generation, and how it might be regulated. That was coincidentally a very strange day for me, granted, but again, I struggle to see what's changed since to earn this sort of acrimony.

With whom do you understand yourself to be needing to have this fight right now?
by signatoremo | 2025-04-05 14:27:13+00:00
But you stated earlier:

> How were they "pure bread hackers"? Was Gates especially proficient with code? I've never heard that. From what I read, they were the enemies of hackers. This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.

Did you contradict yourself? Also, how do you measure "elite, exceptional, legendary"? Someone not qualifying for that wouldn't be a real coder in your book?
by spacedcowboy | 2025-04-05 14:27:49+00:00
That’s changing “every day” into “per day”. Judging by the downvotes that is how people are reading it, but “specified time” of a rate-quantity is an integration, to me. Which makes it a multiply op over the time specified.

If you pour out one bucket of sand every hour, and you do that for 10 hours, I expect the quantity of sand to be measured in buckets.
by stvltvs | 2025-04-05 14:27:51+00:00
We should be careful not to equivocate between pedophilia which in the technical jargon of research studies is a sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children and child sexual abuse which loosely is the act of sexually assaulting someone below the legal age of consent. They are two different things. An abuser might not be a pedophile in the technical sense, and a pedophile might not be an abuser.

So rates of pedophilic attractions and use of CSAM could be rising while rates of child sexual abuse is falling. I don't know if that's the case, but we shouldn't confuse the two things.
by Globz | 2025-04-05 14:27:51+00:00
I’ve noticed this trend in my life where during winter times my consumption goes way up and as soon as spring time is here then my creativity crawls back from hibernation and I quickly regain motivation to continue my side projects. I wish I could be 100% focus year round but for some reason it very hard to keep the inner flame of creativity going during winter times. At least I did noticed this pattern and being aware is the first step to remedy this problem.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-05 14:28:20+00:00
Other more rational people have absolutely tried to make it about China. About trying to broach a strategic advantage.

Early in the nonsense with Canada, Lutnick and Bessent repeatedly tried to give an offramp by broaching the possibility of a revised CUSMA / NAFTA that included more coordinated action on China. The problem, though, is that Trump is a catastrophically stupid imbecile / self-serving criminal, with his administration of Fox News plastic face morons and criminals -- I will not mince words about it, and every American should feel shameful how far they have fallen -- so all the attempts are for naught. Trump kept barrelling ahead like a particularly dumb rhino, to the net effect of significant damage to the US.

Like, at this point everyone realizes that China is going to take Taiwan right, and it will 100% be because of Donald Trump. The only thing stopping them before was concerns about relationships, trade, being a pariah. Now you have the US repeatedly boasting about taking Greenland, about making Canada a state, and spitting in the faces of every ally, all while pandering to dictator garbage like Putin. Yeah, one China will be Trump's legacy. And from that, the percolating violence that will grow.

It cannot be overstated how catastrophic that clown will be for the US and for the world in general, and he's just getting started. Nuclear proliferation has a decade ahead of going absolutely wild.

It is a many-magnitudes more dangerous world, and Americans that think they will be immune from what is coming, courtesy of that orange faced clown, are in for a very rude reality.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-05 14:28:24+00:00
You are right that water is a green house gas. You are wrong to assume the only water in the air is clouds. Clouds is basically water condensation. That happens a bit less in warm air; but the water is still there. You need cool air for condensation to happen. Warm air can hold more water in gas form.

Clouds reflect light and infrared radiation from the sun. Less clouds means more of that heat gets absorbed and then trapped by green house gases. Like water.
by jijijijij | 2025-04-05 14:28:34+00:00
If you want to be nitpicky about semantics, I think the only valid interpretation then is to take OP by their words and assume they meant energy transfer for 24h, since they did not write "per day" as you suggest:

"Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day"

= 170 PW × 1d

= 170 × P(J/s) × 86.4 × ks

= 170 × 10¹⁵ × (J/s) × 86.4 × 10³ × s

= 14.6 × 10²¹ × J

= 14.6 ZJ

However, I also think "of solar energy" could be read as specifying the type of energy for the "rate of energy transfer", which is already implied in 'watt'. And since it's related to energy usage (rate), there really is no need to leave the "rate of energy transfer" interpretation at all and get hung up on "energy vs. power":

"Earth receives 170 petawatts as solar energy - 10,000 times the energy humanity uses, at any moment.

Edit: And let's be real, we all only feel very smart here because we just watched the latest Technology Connections video https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OOK5xkFijPc :D
by exyi | 2025-04-05 14:29:55+00:00
It is! Although my test case is probably an unrealistically bad scenario:

It's the classic, why is processing sorted array faster than unsorted one

def f(arr): r = True for x in arr: if x > 128: r = not r return r arr = [ random.randint(0, 255) for i in range(0, 1000_000) ] arr_sorted = list(sorted(arr)) %timeit f(arr) %timeit f(arr_sorted)

Results are (on my machine): 17.5 ms for unsorted, and 13.5 ms for sorted. For comparison, in a compiled language, the difference is 4x
by blacksqr | 2025-04-05 14:30:57+00:00
I don't understand the point of this article.

Was she not working in the US in exchange for accommodation? It certainly seems she was.

Was she not violating US visa rules by doing so? IANAL but it seems plausible she was.

Why did she sign her statement if it was inaccurate? I seem to see a lot of stories of people getting in legal trouble that boil down to 'I signed an inaccurate statement because I thought that would make it all go away.' Is this supposed to be an argument worthy of sympathy?

Is there a reason to see this story as something other than someone was unable to exercise white privilege to avoid consequences for bending (breaking) the rules?
by barney54 | 2025-04-05 14:31:45+00:00
The author had the story wrong. Kerosene did save the whales—that’s the reason they there around to be so relentlessly hunted in the mid 1900s. The reality is that whales had to be saved twice.

The problem with this story about solar is that solar might produce low cost electricity but it’s also low value electricity. It’s much more expensive when you try to replace oil with solar. Those are really apples and oranges technologies.
by amluto | 2025-04-05 14:31:46+00:00
This is nonsense. The “non-reciprocal trade arrangements” mentioned don’t obviously exist at all, and, to the extent they exist, they are certainly not measured in any meaningful respect by the formulas going into the tariffs.

Having spent a whopping ten minutes finding official data (and I have no idea how good this data is as a whole — probably mediocre but far better than whatever nonsense the USTR is doing):

(a) The EU seems to thing that they run a trade surplus with us in goods and a deficit in services, and they’re close to balancing out.

(b) The US’s own data shows a net surplus with some countries and a net deficit with others. See here, page 28:

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_p...

If the US was trying to negotiate sensibly and to identify anything remotely non-reciprocal, they would be rewarding the countries with positive numbers in that table! The US should be delighted to trade with Australia, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc! By all means, we should buy more widgets and sell more fancy services!

As a silly analogy: if your housemate goes on a wild drunken rampage and starts trashing everything in sight while screaming “you need to reciprocate and wash the dishes more often and I will continue trashing things until you wash the dishes reciprocally,” the situation is not a viable negotiation tactic.
by low_tech_love | 2025-04-05 14:32:29+00:00
A government is not a person who “feels” anything. Anyone who is in the USA for work/study has agreed to a contract, and there is nothing in that contract that requires intelectual subservience. If the USA government finds that the person is not doing their part according to the contract, which would mean being taken advantage of, they are more than welcome to act on that. This has nothing to do with what’s happening.

You’re applying social norms that exist between humans, based on feelings, to a completely different relationship that includes no feelings at all. Would you like another government, with another political direction opposed to yours, to start asking you for appreciation?
by jfengel | 2025-04-05 14:33:04+00:00
I'm drawing a narrow but crucial distinction between telling true stories and journalism.

Journalism sets a higher bar. It has to not only tell the truth, but to tell it in a way that informs rather than entertains. That can be messy and dull. It doesn't let you connect things with speculation, even if you identify it as speculation. You can't even quite somebody's speculation unless you've ascertained their sincerity.

That's a very high bar that genuine journalists still hold to. It's unfortunate that this is usually boring and nobody wants to pay for it, and so much of what passes for "news" doesn't even try, but journalists do exist.

TAL tells stories. They are supposed to be truthful and never just outright lie the way Daisey did. But they don't have to double confirm every fact. They have a lot more leeway to shape a story by omission, speculation, opinion, etc. They don't practice journalism, though they do not explicitly say so. And by appearing in a medium best known for its journalism (genuine journalism), by stepping over the line they obliterated it.

So I'm trying to draw some careful distinctions. They did screw up, but not just in the obvious fashion. It's a story they should never have fun, not because of the lies (the second mistake) but because it's not their wheelhouse (the first mistake). They should have handed that story off to an actual journalist. Then later Daisey could have reported it his way, though he'd still be required not to simply fabricate. He would, however, have well attested sources.
by janjanmax | 2025-04-05 14:33:15+00:00
The earth has dimmed 1 Watt/Meter. The loss of cloud coverage is due to Carbon Dioxide energy. It doesn’t allow cloud formation as the freezing point is increased. This CO2 effect on clouds was first published in 2017. The weather models of the 80s, 90s and oughts did not account for this. A 2019 Model showed high global temperatures by 2028-2032 in the high improbable range; however, those temperatures were experienced with a very close precision in 2024. You all can look this up.
by dgacmu | 2025-04-05 14:33:33+00:00
Don't give in to zero sum thinking.

https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/31/animal-crossings-over...

> Sugiarto found a favorable cost-benefit analysis. The study estimated each crossing structure could save society between $235,000 and $443,000 annually through collision reductions. The savings varied based on structure size, design and location.
by Jensson | 2025-04-05 14:33:57+00:00
> TikTok only succeed because it came from a large country then?

And USA is going to buy TikTok, just like they did almost every European tech company. You don't see what is happening here, do you? Bigger tech companies eat smaller ones because software is much more prone to networking effects than other industries.

> Fuck I'm sick and tired of hearing the poor EU complain about technology

You are the one complaining, I just explained why it happened like it happened.

> Lets face it, the EU cannot create d) global tech infrastructure (i.e. GPU chips).

AMSL is European, you are just wrong here, the whole worlds tech industry depends on AMSL. Europe is very strong in many industries, just not software. It is USA that can't do tech hardware, its all made in Europe and Asia now.
by Lord_Zero | 2025-04-05 14:34:28+00:00
If you go to NPM the first thing it says in bold is "no longer maintained" and it links to the Google Chrome labs GitHub as well.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@squoosh/cli#project-no-longer...

So to clarify, is the GitHub maintained but the npm distribution is not? Or is none of it maintained unless you use the website/app?
by lxgr | 2025-04-05 14:34:44+00:00
Yes, but I'm not convinced that that's actually (the majority of) what this is.

How many large models are realistically being trained on all of Wikimedia, compared to the number of people using AI search, possibly fetching sites very inefficiently (e.g. using a headless browser spun up from scratch, i.e. with a cold cache, every single time).
by yorwba | 2025-04-05 14:34:48+00:00
Fullwidth Latin characters exist so that you can arrange your text into a grid without the occasional word in Latin script messing up your alignment.

Most people don't really care about this, or, if they do, simply use a font that renders regular Latin at full width (or half width to be more space-efficient) but very occasionally the Fullwidth Latin codepoints get some use. It's more common in Japanese (though still rare) than Chinese in my experience, but e.g. the Project Gutenberg ebook of 阿Ｑ正傳 https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25332/pg25332-images.html uses fullwidth Qs.
by Shekelphile | 2025-04-05 14:34:49+00:00
It isn't a prediction as much as it is a simple fact. Runaway greenhouse is inevitable, if we continue doing things to increase the greenhouse effect while simultaneously dropping the planet's albedo then the runaway greenhouse will happen much sooner.

Pretty much every 'breakthrough' in climate research in the last few decades has been finding new data showing we are dropping the planet's albedo much faster than expected. The biggest climate shock we have experienced in the last 20 years has been reduction in use of bunker oil fuel in ships which was masking the albedo loss from ice melt by flooding the upper atmosphere with reflective particulate pollution.

I am not worried about the increase in severe weather as much as I am worried about runaway greenhouse pretty much instantly destroying all multicellular life on the planet.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-04-05 14:34:49+00:00
So, not knowing any better, I read it as meaning 170k TW/day, so 85k TW/12 hours made sense to me, but you’re right… [1]. The earth receives 14.9 ZettaWatts of solar radiation per day…

[1]: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
by itishappy | 2025-04-05 14:34:59+00:00
No we are not, and a brief look at the history of the planet will show that. We're driving most of the changes today, but the planet itself also changes on it's own (tectonic shifts, for one), as do extra-planetary factors (solar cycles), and both of these impact our upper atmosphere.

From the article, there's significant uncertainty what's driving the currently measured effect:

> Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes.

> The team also found that 80% of the overall reflectivity changes in these regions resulted from shrinking clouds, rather than darker, less reflective ones, which could be caused by a drop in pollution. For Tselioudis, this clearly indicates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, not pollution reductions, are driving the trend.

> But Loeb, who leads work on the set of NASA satellite instruments called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, which tracks the energy imbalance, thinks pollution declines may be playing an important role in the cloud changes, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “The observations are telling us something is definitely changing,” he says. “But it’s a complicated soup of processes.”

To your point, however, we do appear to be the only ones capable of intentionally modifying the environment, so if anybody's going to understand and address this, it'll be us.