MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-04-18 22:29:19+00:00
Computers have psyched us out. There is no other technology in human history that has ever seen a capability growth curve like Moore's Law. Even aviation, which went from biplanes to moon landings in 50 years, doesn't compare.

Still, there has been huge improvement in batteries. The main improvement has not been in energy density but in cost. Find some graphs of battery cost per kWh of storage. Storage cost has dropped by almost 10X in the last 15-20 years. Reliability and rapid recharge capability have also increased a lot.

Still, for medium to long haul aviation we probably would need at least a 3-4X improvement in energy density per unit volume and mass, and I don't see that happening soon. It's likely that long range aviation is stuck with liquid fuels for the foreseeable future. But as I said it's only 7% of oil consumption. We should just let aviation keep going as-is and cut fossil fuel use in terrestrial transport and power generation.

Part of why we're not recycling batteries much is that lithium isn't expensive enough to make the investment in it profitable. The major cost in batteries is the manufacturing process, not the lithium itself. If lithium prices go up there'd be an incentive to figure out recycling.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-18 22:29:30+00:00
What is a “one-shot” AI Agent? A one-shot AI agent enables automated execution of a complex task without a human in the loop.

Not at all what one-shot means in the field. Zero-shot, one-shot and many-shot means how many examples at inference time are needed to perform a task

Zero shot: "convert these files from csv to json"

One shot: "convert from csv to json, like "id,name,age/n1,john,20" to {id:"1",name:"tom",age:"20"}
by svnt | 2025-04-18 22:29:59+00:00
Most of them seem to perform opportunity charging (while loading/unloading), using direct rapid charging via pantograph.

See eg https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/transport/the-secret-to...

I have also seen designs for ferries to wirelessly charge underwater while docked.

Wireless charging can be quite efficient when the two halves comprise nesting physical features with similar tolerances to actual transformers. But I have not seen this implemented, presumably due to biofouling problems.
by cookie_monsta | 2025-04-18 22:30:30+00:00
(paraphrasing from memory because it's a while since I've seen it)

> Your connection is insecure. Information you send could be intercepted by attackers. Accept the risk and continue?

Explains the problem in simple terms. Calls out the website for being lazy and careless. Gives you the option to proceed if you don't care.

Why is this scareware and how would you word it?
by neuroelectron | 2025-04-18 22:31:41+00:00
What's wrong with CO2? It's not a serious issue, it's just an easy proxy for real environmental damage, focusing on CO2 simplifies complex issues like deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and actual toxic emissions from the rest of the world. The idea is we're going to implement another tax on the plebs to drive a carbon economy and that will compensate for the damage the elites and 3rd worlders are doing. Then on top of that all the other inherent taxes like lithium batteries, transmission, windmill subsidies, solar recycling, and so on. And of course, this has to be done on the back of the most productive people in society because who else is going to do it.
by staplung | 2025-04-18 22:31:43+00:00
Other than potentially reducing maintenance costs, I'm not sure any other part of this stacks up. I don't see how electrification would allow you to save weight in other parts of the aircraft. I don't think electrification adds any new propulsion capabilities that are more energy efficient, not for airplanes or boats anyway. For boats, the electricity would still be turning a screw and for airplanes the only method of propulsion that would work is an old-fashioned propellor. That last is the same reason you can't fly electric planes in new performance envelopes: prop planes can't get that high and wouldn't work if they somehow found themselves up there. Even turbo-prop planes (which have gas turbines that enable them to work more efficiently at high altitudes) are limited in altitude by the fact that the tips of the propellors are going very nearly the speed of sound.
by __egb__ | 2025-04-18 22:32:27+00:00
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.

Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].

In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?

Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...

[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
by jakeogh | 2025-04-18 22:32:47+00:00
I just got bit by device attestation. Tried to install the latest ebay app version via the Aurora Store (on GrapheneOS), and instead of presenting me with the option of using my ebay login, it wanted a google account at a play store login with no way to bypass. I was able to downgrade to the previous version which does not require the Integrity API, but the walls are closing in. Only took 7 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41517159 (I did get ebay on the phone and filed an issue, hopefully others do the same)
by creatonez | 2025-04-18 22:33:05+00:00
Ah, that explains it. We're supposed to remember conventions from the Usenet days. I am sad to report that Usenet users are in their 50s and 60s now, so someone will need to pass the torch or this information will be lost to time!

Snarkiness aside, I genuinely appreciate that email formatting was documented somewhere, even if it turns out that signature rules were just a convention and not a MUST in that RFC2646 document (as I would have expected given how forcefully people say it is the correct way)
by svnt | 2025-04-18 22:33:18+00:00
An analysis of the Nordic ferry systems ten years ago found that 70% would benefit from electrification —- about 45% could go fully electric, while about 25% made more sense as hybrid.

This means for them 30% didn’t make sense to electrify.

This was Siemens making the case for selling electric boat parts, so presumably this was best case at the time.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-18 22:33:26+00:00
Not visionary enuf, too isolationist. Think BIGGR, DIGGR!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recycling_and_Northern_D...

Upgrade with nukkular-powered desalination at the coasts, and pump it upwards/inland.

Combine with all sorts of other pipelines, interstates, MAGLEVed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn high-speed rails, with smartly gridded HVDC-transmission lines.

If you think nukkular is bad, use Yellowstones geo-thermals instead, so it doesn't blow.

Distribute via smartly gridded HVDC-transmission...

Build it with nukkular subterrenes.

Call it 'Department of nuTRAQ', 'DON' , because 'DON' gets things on new tracks, and DONE!

Upgrade, or fade!

Edit: I forgot to mention sprinkling some of these, or built like them https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SRMSC_MSR_HAER_ND-9-... along the lines, for capture of atmospheric CO2, and maybe spraying mists of water in the air for more weather control :-)
by kragen | 2025-04-18 22:33:38+00:00
Some of the things you're talking about are features MS-DOS had in common with RT-11 but where CP/M was totally different; specifically, DEL was called ERA on CP/M, and CP/M didn't have switches. (Except PIP, which, bizarrely, wrapped its switches in square brackets: PIP A:=B:*.COM[W]. See https://ia902808.us.archive.org/23/items/osborne-cpm-users-g...) MS-DOS got drive letters from CP/M; on RT-11, as you might remember, instead of A:, B:, C:, etc., you had SY0:, SY1:, and DK:. (HDOS copied that, as well as /switches.) I'm not sure where the 8.3 filenames are from, but CP/M and MS-DOS had them, and, as you say, RT-11 didn't, using 6.3 instead.

So, of the six similarities you listed between CP/M and RT-11, four were actually differences; only two were actually similarities (the TYPE command and the use of CRLF), with a third debatable one (8.3 is like 6.3 in that a three-character file type code forms part of the filename in some contexts).

If CP/M had used RADIX-50 like RT-11 did, it could have had case-insensitive 9.3 filenames in 8 bytes instead of 8.3 filenames in 11 bytes. I think that would have been a big improvement.

So, I don't think any of CP/M's deviations from RT-11 are a "work of genius", but it wasn't just a copy of RT-11, "little different", as you say. It clearly deviated from RT-11 in a lot of ways, to an extent that suggests drawing from some other source. Maybe RSX-11, dunno.

The page you link to just says "Sign in to Twitter". For the sake of courtesy, I'd rather not go into how I feel about that invitation.
by roenxi | 2025-04-18 22:33:38+00:00
I'd agree with that if you meant "you" as in the US public. It is difficult to respond to a DEI comment without acknowledging that racialist logic is a pretty major factor of DEI policy and it is unfortunate that race discrimination remains a political colossus despite some sterling efforts to weaken it. The fight against racism will always be an ongoing one.
by 3np | 2025-04-18 22:34:21+00:00
Prerendering was old-school back then, too.

Edge caching might not have been as prevalent but was hardly new technology.

> without any privacy or analytics concerns

Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.
by Urgo | 2025-04-18 22:34:25+00:00
Looks like this no longer is included in the FAQ, but here is an archived copy directly on mirc's website about the lifetime license going away. It looks like the lifetime ones were downgraded into 10 year ones. It looks like at least when this FAQ was live you could email him and ask for a new one for free once it did expire so that was nice, but unsure if that is still being honored as the FAQ has now been removed [2]. He did try to make you feel bad about emailing though asking.

Full text copied from [1] for ease of reading

>> Question: I have an old registration that is not working, can you help? Answer: When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that's okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201001000000*/https://www.mirc...

[2] https://www.mirc.com/pfaq.html#registration
by Retric | 2025-04-18 22:35:22+00:00
> The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years.

No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.

Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.

As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-18 22:35:42+00:00
I don't think I've ever heard someone who opposes DEI say "we should fix our broken economy instead". But it's not wrong - the problems of racism and classism are uniquely intertwined and need to be fixed together.

The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.
by everforward | 2025-04-18 22:35:43+00:00
I agree that makes sense, but it makes potential subscribers to the third parties nervous. I like Kagi Assistant because my payment is capped.

I get nervous plugging my pay-as-you-go API keys into random software because of the risk they rack up a $1000 bill doing something I wouldn’t have paid $20 for them to do.

The other three things are that economies of scale make it cheaper for Kagi to buy a bajillion tokens, Google et al don’t want to manage the customer side of things (what service ate how many tokens?), and service providers don’t want you seeing their “magic” in your console. Seems like there’s a lot of power in the system instruction side of things, and Perplexity probably doesn’t want you seeing their prompt.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-18 22:36:14+00:00
I came to the comments hoping for lots of electric apologists not reading the article and I was not disappointed

As a recap (for those who don't like to read)

- 70% of EV cost comes before the vehicle ever moves and must be recouped over the life of the vehicle (and takes much longer than traditional fuels)

- the energy density & cost of certain fuels is the only reason certain vehicles are able to be profitably operated in the first place

- the only way to create enough energy to match said fuels/demand with electrics (at present) would be to hook up coal or nuclear plants to airports, and even then it'd be expensive as shit

- we basically need a 5x improvement in battery energy density at minimum to even think about profitability, and that's only one of the things that would need to be addressed before it's practically feasible
by TZubiri | 2025-04-18 22:38:42+00:00
"Reaffirming our commitment to science" or something similarly self affirming.

While I understand that something is more genuine if done in secret, it doesn't stop being a real commitment to science just because you make a pr post about it.

If company X contributes to Y open source foundation, that's real and they get to claim clout, nobody cares about a post anyways.
by gschaible | 2025-04-18 22:38:47+00:00
Hi there, first author of the paper here. We would argue that they are a true multicellular organism, which is rather unconventional for Bacteria. They do indeed have some level of genomic heterogeneity between individual cells within a single consortium but it appears this is actually purposefully maintained by the organism, likely to facilitate their evolution. They have a large genome (8 Mb) compared to E. coli (4 Mb) and have duplicate genes that are under higher rate of evolution (dN/dS) compared to the rest of the genome.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-18 22:39:00+00:00
Yeah, I absolutely and honestly loved cities most of my life. I grew up in London, lived in Seattle and Philadelphia, spent a semester teaching in Berlin, frequently went to NYC ... loved it all.

I'm 61 now, and for the last 6 years I've lived in a very small village in rural NM. Those big cities? Well, I'll go if I have to and will not complain the way some folks would. But I certainly do not love them the way I once did, and it's not because they changed.
by ryanobjc | 2025-04-18 22:39:07+00:00
So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities"

This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".

Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?

One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
by kumarski | 2025-04-18 22:39:24+00:00
Sulfur Hexafluoride and Nitrogen Trifluoride proliferate under a CO2 minimization regime. Nobody is arguing with Arrhenius proofs.

Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential (GWP) of 17,200 over a 100-year period, meaning it's 17,200 times more effective than carbon dioxide (CO2) in trapping heat in the atmosphere. This GWP value is used to calculate the CO2 equivalent of NF3 emissions.
by muzani | 2025-04-18 22:39:29+00:00
Cursor is the popular one now for good reason. It does have gemini-2.5-flash-exp, along with all the claudes, openAI, deepseek, and their own free ones.

It comes down to about $16/month, which includes limited use of claude sonnet and gemini 2.5 pro. Which feels extremely bloody cheap to me as my usage for both of these would far exceed that cost. You can give it your own API key instead of using their subscription model as well.
by Alupis | 2025-04-18 22:39:46+00:00
Why is it not possible both are/were true?

At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.

Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question.

There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
by abracadaniel | 2025-04-18 22:39:49+00:00
I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing post affirmative action?
by pugworthy | 2025-04-18 22:40:25+00:00
I have used VI for many, many years and honestly use perhaps 25% at best of its abilities. But still I get comments about how fast and smoothly I can use it from other developers. Which I think speaks to how powerful even the basic editor can be.

And yes, you can also take my VIM plugin (for Visual Studio) from my cold dead hands.
by belorn | 2025-04-18 22:40:43+00:00
Interesting to learn a bit about US law. I did not know that things like traffic violations did not count as a crime. It make some sense that crime is that which carries the risk of jail, while everything else is then a civil infraction. Since overstayed visa only can result in fines, deportation, and bans/restrictions from future visiting of the US, it would then count as a civil infraction.

Naturally, it is still illegal to break the law, even if the law do not carry the risk of jail time, so the correct name would be illegal immigration when overstaying a visa.

Is resisting deportation a crime similar to resisting arrest, which then carry the risk of jail time?
by reaperducer | 2025-04-18 22:40:54+00:00
They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back.

This was one of the methods that CompuServe used back in the 1980's, though using a checking account.

It's sad that so many aspects of technology have completely failed to improve in half a century.
by cynical_german | 2025-04-18 22:41:03+00:00
One thing I want to add to the other (so far) good responses: They also seem to build Jai for a means to an end, which is: they are actively developing a game engine with it (to be used for more than one project) and a game, which is already in advanced stages.

If you consider a small team working on this, developing the language seriously, earnestly, but as a means to an end on the side, I can totally see why they think it may be the best approach to develop the language fully internally. It's an iterative develop-as-you-go approach, you're writing a highly specific opinionated tool for your niche.

So maybe it's best to simply wait until engine + game are done, and they can (depending on the game's success) really devote focus and time on polishing language and compiler up, stabilizing a version 1.0 if you will, and "package" it in an appropriate manner.

Plus: they don't seem to be in the "promote a language for the language's sake" game; it doesn't seem to be about finding the perfect release date, with shiny mascot + discord server + full fledged stdlib + full documentation from day one, to then "hire" redditors and youtubers to spread the word and have an armada of newbie programmers use it to write games... they seem to much rather see it as creating a professional tool aimed at professional programmers, particularly in the domain of high performance compiled languages, particularly for games. People they are targeting will evaluate the language thoroughly when it's out, whether that's in 2019, 2025 or 2028. And whether they are top 10 in some popularity contest or not, I just don't think they're playing by such metrics. The right people will check it out once it's out, I'm sure. And whether such a language will be used or not, will probably, hopefully even, not depend on finding the most hyped point in time to release it.