MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-04-18 21:06:34+00:00
I remember seeing loads and loads of analyses like this back in the 2000s on a site called The Oil Drum about why electric cars would never work at scale. (Spoiler: My family has two EVs.) They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist and therefore that prices don't decrease with scale, that currently developed reserves of resources like lithium equal total reserves, etc.

I do think it will be a while before electrification of long haul aviation is practical. Aviation -- all of it -- accounts for only 7% of global oil consumption as of 2024. We could cut oil consumption by more than 80% without touching aviation. Most oil is burned in cars and trucks and those can be electrified today, so we should focus our energy on that and on replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation and take the win there.

Related tangent:

The popularity of toxic dogmatic pessimism on the political left is really problematic. It stops people from offering positive, expansive visions of the future. It's one reason the fascists are winning by default. They don't buy this shit, so they tell stories about the future that aren't "and then we all die in a great Malthusian catastrophe, the end." The fascist vision of the future sucks, but it's better than that, so it wins hearts and minds.

Ask yourself: what if our civilization doesn't collapse? Then what? The assumption that it will collapse prevents people from thinking about the future. Malthusianism is a thought stopping cliche.
by relaxing | 2025-04-18 21:06:35+00:00
> In theory, perhaps, but in practice nothing is being done to help boys.

Untrue. There’s a ton of work being done on how to better support boys in school.

> In fact, DEI programs in universities continue to favor young women even as they approach 60% of students.

What are these DEI programs favoring university admission for young women?
by DickingAround | 2025-04-18 21:06:58+00:00
We should not under-estimate the need for speed in supply chains. Predicting future demand is hard. To be more specific, we're talking about predicting ~100M unique products (the order of magnitude that moves on the pacific) and some of them have very lumpy demand (e.g. invent a new product, but it depends on 100 other obscure products).
by all2 | 2025-04-18 21:07:02+00:00
> Yeah, so I don't see how helping out the big players and not everyone else is a good thing.

If you want your stuff to be private, you have a legal option.

> Yeah but the open source ones ARE guaranteed. Even if they later become closed source, the code up till that point will remain open source forever. So it is guaranteed whereas "some assurances" mean nothing.

I guess? Is that not the case here as well?
by MegaButts | 2025-04-18 21:08:01+00:00
> reduced weight in other parts of an aircraft

The bigger problem is that the overall weight increases. Rearranging the COG doesn't really matter when most of your energy is spent literally fighting gravity.

This is the first thing that popped up in google when I wanted to compare gravimetric density between gasoline and lithium ion batteries. Gasoline is still approximately 30x denser. That is at least one revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology away, if not several.

https://research-archive.org/index.php/rars/preprint/downloa...
by nickthegreek | 2025-04-18 21:08:19+00:00
I just learned about UML earlier today when I wanted to bring in a mermaid flowchart into lucidchart. If you bring in mermaid using lucidchart, it makes it a raster image. But if you use UML markup, you can ungroup it and modify. I couldn’t get a good way to convert from mermaid to UML markup that lucidchart could handle. Ended up a dead end for me.
by AndriyKunitsyn | 2025-04-18 21:08:45+00:00
A one-way ticket for an Amsterdam - Paris train, taken well in advance (2 months from now), costs $159.30. It's a 3.5 hours long trip.

https://eurorails.com/en/trains/amsterdam-centraal/paris?dat...

A similar one-way ticket for the same date for a flight costs $112 (with no bags), and it takes 1 hour 25 minutes.

https://www.kiwi.com/en/search/results/amsterdam-netherlands... (Yes, some people can say that Kiwi is a shady website, but it can find some good deals if used right.)

I think most of the public would choose the second option. And this is a 500km long trip. Anything longer, and planes win by even larger margin.

If you're talking about the US, there's more about its rail networks density than unwillingness of Americans to build new railroads. It's also because people... don't really like using trains for long-distance transit?
by ty6853 | 2025-04-18 21:09:23+00:00
Well there's also the case that a main component in having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine remorse.

I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
by elcritch | 2025-04-18 21:09:30+00:00
While English “Easter” might’ve had some relation to a Germanic Eostre goddess, the much more clear relation for Christians would be for “austron” as the word for dawn, and the east, etc. Traditionally all churches faced east as Christian’s was supposed to return from the East like the sunrise:

> Old English Easterdæg, "Easter day," from Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre), from Proto-Germanic austron-, "dawn," also possibly the name of a goddess whose feast was celebrated in Eastermonað (the Anglo-Saxon month corresponding with April), from aust- "east, toward the sunrise" (compare east), from PIE root *aus- (1) "to shine," especially of the dawn.

However it’d be inaccurate to infer that Easter is a pagan holiday or something. Rather the medieval Christian missionaries were very adept at building on concepts and repurposing traditions from cultures to help relate the Gospel.

> Today, the problem of pagan parallels does not concern me at all. Here is why: First, even if parallels do exist between the myths of the gods and the resurrection of Jesus, that does not require us to reduce the resurrection to fiction. Such parallels might be—as [C. S.] Lewis observed decades ago—expressions of innate human longings for atonement and new life.

Assume for the sake of argument that Jesus was the incarnation of the immortal creator of the universe, then it would be natural that said creation would have echoes of this event and people would relate to them . It’d actually be a bit incoherent to not relate concepts of spring, renewal, sunrise, as very physical aspects of our human being to such a theology.

1: https://worldviewbulletin.substack.com/p/the-resurrection-an...
by neilv | 2025-04-18 21:10:37+00:00
In the case of UML, I think enterprise consulting and tool sales might've already obscured much of the real value of semiformal methods, before a CS curriculum could sour students on it.

With ZIRP growth scheme startups hopefully over, and more of us having to get jobs building systems that work reliably and sustainably, we might gain a new appreciation for system modeling.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-18 21:10:54+00:00
In a large enough code base, there is no "your code". There is the code you wrote today, there is the code you wrote two years ago, there's all the code people are writing around you.

I change a function's arguments, I'm _pretty_ sure I caught every place it's called (spoiler alert: I didn't, because someone calls functions dynamically based on their names with call_user_func_array, maybe), and I ran the test suite - everything works, and I've fixed what doesn't.

Except some of that old code written 8 years ago didn't have good tests, or didn't have any tests at all, or didn't cover the specific code path.

And now it's 2am on the production server.

Now, you could tell me - Pavel, you're an engineer, you should be sufficiently dedicated to your craft to verify that the tests are testing those paths, you should find all those instances where that function is called (a few dozen times across the codebase), and check that those tests exist and are good. And you're not wrong! I should be doing cleanup in the codebase as I go, washing those dishes while I wait for pasta to boil or whatever...

... but now I've given myself two more actual engineer-weeks of work for a change that just needed to add a flag to a function to make sure only premium users get emails when something happens. My manager will be thrilled to hear it. Do you think I'll get a raise?
by retrocryptid | 2025-04-18 21:11:46+00:00
i would have given this guy credit if he compared cost of production for petro fuels when talking about energy debt.

also conflates power with energy, but fine.

if you talk about cost (dollar or kilowatt hour) per joule delivered to a vehicle and then compared the total cost of electric vs. the total cost of petro, i would listen. but he ignored the fact that petro fuels cost money, energy and water to produce.

and there some things electric motors can do that ice can't. an electric ekranoplan isn't too infeasible, but we know from soviet studies you can't keep salt water out of an aspirated motor when you're that close to the water's surface. turns out electric motors can be sealed against water.

and dissing physicists? wtf? makes me think he failed out of an engineering physics degree cause he didn't understand math. as we used to say, the limit of a bs or be as gpa approaches zero is bba.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-18 21:13:04+00:00
How is it better than having any phone + a backpack solar charger?

If you are looking for a doomsday scenario then LTE isn’t the way to go, handheld radios is the way to go.

In virtually any large scale disaster scenario cell networks are one of the first things to go, they get overwhelmed and if there is a power loss then cell towers go down.
Show HN: Too Many Business Ideas? stop choosing, launch all of them, FAST&FREE
by AzizBelAbed | 2025-04-18 21:13:04+00:00
Hey HN,

If you're like me, you have more startup ideas than free time, but turning those ideas into actual products often feels impossible. Coming up with a name, validating the idea, making a logo, and building even a basic landing page can take weeks of work...for just one idea.

I built StarterPilot to fix that. It's an AI-powered tool that drastically shrinks the time from idea to launch, so you can test all your ideas, not just the one you bet the farm on.

With StarterPilot you can:

Validate ideas instantly: Get quick feedback on market demand, scalability, competitors, and risk.

Generate unique startup names: See which domains and social handles are available.

Create a custom logo/icon: Get a logo tailored to your business.

Build a landing page, fast: Generate (and edit) a professional-looking landing page with AI chat.

It’s web-based—no installs, no complex onboarding. I’m looking for feedback from fellow builders, so I made it free to try. Redeem code: STARTER4NEXT

I’d really appreciate your feedback: what worked, what didn’t, and what features you’d like to see next. Feel free to reply here with your thoughts! Looking forward to hearing what you think.
by aseipp | 2025-04-18 21:14:01+00:00
The goal is to make things safer, yes, but speed is absolutely a major priority for the project and a requirement for production deployment, because the difference in speed for optimized designs vs naive ones might be an order of magnitude or more. It's quite speedy IME. To be fair to your point, though, it's also a moving target; "which is faster" can change as improvements trickle in. Maybe "shouldn't be much slower" is a better statement, but I was speaking generally :)

(You could also make the argument that if previous implementations that were replaced were insecure that their relative performance is ultimately irrelevant, but I'm ignoring that since it hinges on a known unknown.)
by sightbroke | 2025-04-18 21:14:41+00:00
Or Nuclear Propulsion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Merc...

> Nuclear ships are currently the responsibility of their own countries, but none are involved in international trade. As a result of this work in 2014 two papers on commercial nuclear marine propulsion were published by Lloyd's Register and the other members of this consortium.... > This is a small fast-neutron reactor using lead–bismuth eutectic cooling and able to operate for ten full-power years before refueling, and in service last for a 25-year operational life of the vessel. They conclude that the concept is feasible, but further maturity of nuclear technology and the development and harmonisation of the regulatory framework would be necessary before the concept would be viable.

> In December 2023, the Jiangnan Shipyard under the China State Shipbuilding Corporation officially released a design of a 24000 TEU-class container ship — known as the KUN-24AP — at Marintec China 2023, a premier maritime industry exhibition held in Shanghai. The container ship is reported to be powered by a thorium-based molten salt reactor, making it a first thorium-powered container ship and, if completed, the largest nuclear-powered container ship in the world.
by timewizard | 2025-04-18 21:14:47+00:00
> How much "real world experience" do you think I might have?

10 years or so.

> I'm not sure what your point is exactly.

I disagree with you and am attempting to explain why.

> "If high dollar business deals are being made because of personal likes or feelings of the CEO towards a salesperson, AI may just maybe be more optimal".

If. What percentage do you think do? How big of a problem do you think this is /actually/?

Personal likes and feelings may play in but are you suggesting that's the only metric being used in these circumstances? Like if a company has a product that just won't work and will cause tons of problems you're saying a motorcycle ride could smooth that over?

What makes you think AI can optimize this problem that might not even actually exist?

It's amazing to me that people think AGI is going to come about while simultaneously doing exactly what you tell it to do. I mean I'm literally trying to picture the world you say you would prefer and I just can't. Worse even if I blur the definitions I actually can't see it being more "efficient."
by hathawsh | 2025-04-18 21:15:35+00:00
Here is how I read it: CPython has a hashlib module that has long been a wrapper around certain functions exported from OpenSSL, but since a SHA3 buffer overflow was discovered in OpenSSL, the CPython project has now decided to wrap a library called HACL*, which uses formal verification to ensure there are no buffer overflows and other similar bugs.
by rayiner | 2025-04-18 21:16:00+00:00
> I'm curious, how do you feel about it in the context of your arguments made here? Do you think ethnic groups should fight for survival and a safe harbor (homeland)? (Rereading your prior answer, it sounds like a definitive "no")

If an ethnic group can realistically achieve self determination, that is the best course. Bangladesh's independence came at a terrible human cost, especially to the Hindus that were purged from the country during and after independence. But the result is a country that, for all its myriad other problems, doesn't suffer from significant sectarian or ethnic conflict.

If that's not realistic--and in the U.S. it isn't--then the best course is aggressive assimilation. In China, for example, 90% of the population is considered "Han Chinese," even though in reality that designation papers over a tremendous amount of underlying diversity.
by dang | 2025-04-18 21:16:17+00:00
It's inconsistent but I wouldn't necessarily call that selective, because randomness plays a major role.

It's not possible for moderation to be consistent because we don't read, or even see, most of what gets posted here. There's far too much.

There are other, less obvious factors affecting this too. Here's a post where I went into this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306.

Btw, regarding this:

> insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now

HN's moderation system downweights those even more regularly than we downweight (some) political posts. Here's an explanation from a few years ago, which caused quite a stir if I remember correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 (May 2020).

In both cases—incremental product releases on the one hand, and political news on the other—some posts still make it through through to the front page, and in both cases the users who want more of that category feel like it's unduly suppressed, while users who want less of that category feel like HN is overrun with it.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-18 21:16:36+00:00
The Oil Drum was converted to a static archive site in 2013, in part because they were finding it hard to attract quality content.

Gee, maybe that was because it was clear Peak Oil (in the we're running out sense) wasn't happening?

This comment was made to the shuttering announcement: "8 years means The Oil Drum came online in 2005, basically matching the start the current plateau in crude oil production."

Global oil production has increased since then. The price of West Texas crude has gone from $100 (which would be $136 in today's dollars) to $64 now.

The left wing pessimism stems from a moralistic view. The underlying idea is that we deserve to suffer, so suffering is predicted.
by beloch | 2025-04-18 21:17:22+00:00
His beef against physicists is likely rooted in confirmation bias. Musk has a BA in physics that some debate if he even completed, but one bad egg does not prove the rule. It would be just as easy to point out engineers who have gone on to lead dodgy enterprises but, again, a few bad eggs do not prove the rule.

His reason for attacking another group is likely to make his own group look superior. This works on the playground and in more professional situations than it really should. He might also just be airing his prejudices thoughtlessly.

Either way, it's probably going to limit the audience he reaches and invite some nasty responses. He'd do well to avoid spewing such nonsense in the future.
by james_marks | 2025-04-18 21:19:03+00:00
This is about the simplest description of chord progressions you're going to find.

There is something peculiar that people who understand music theory tend to have a difficult time explaining it without stacking concepts and new terms.

While I'm sure those concepts are necessary for completeness, to a beginner in becomes a brick wall, and this is blessedly direct compared to, to e.g., the linked wikipedia entry.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-18 21:19:19+00:00
Random walks only progress if they don't get trapped in a local minima. GP example is but one entirely contrived scenario. The point is that technological development depends on many factors and it's entirely plausible that some of them aren't strongly selected for.

This seems to be supported if you consider how long it took for humans to emerge and the fact that other fairly intelligent species exist alongside us but didn't follow the same path. If you suppose that technological development has a clear selection path then why isn't there any evidence of space fairing dinosaurs?
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-18 21:19:25+00:00
It doesn't, the actually sorting steps take 16 comparisons and up to 16 swaps. This can be implemented with a sorting network as shown here: https://bertdobbelaere.github.io/sorting_networks_extended.h...

In Python, you can use parallel assignments which let you express it easily with something like:

def sort7(l): if l[0] > l[6]: l[0], l[6] = l[6], l[0] # repeat for each comparison return l

That'd be 16 lines + 1 for the function definition + 1 for the return.

You could even just generate the code or run the network using the representation from that site:

[(0,6),(2,3),(4,5)] [(0,2),(1,4),(3,6)] [(0,1),(2,5),(3,4)] [(1,2),(4,6)] [(2,3),(4,5)] [(1,2),(3,4),(5,6)]

If that's in a data structure called layers:

for layer in layers: for a, b in layer: if l[a] > l[b]: l[a], l[b] = l[b], l[a]

I'm also pretty sure that a brute force "unrolling" of bubble sort would have resulted in fewer lines. There shouldn't be more than 21 comparisons needed for 7 elements.
by retrocryptid | 2025-04-18 21:19:49+00:00
i wish there was more talk about this. it seems i heard a lot about making hydrocarbons from co2 in the air + solar or algae a couple years ago. if your hydrocarbons are made this way it seems they would be carbon neutral.

i'm guessing there's more research to make it feasable since i haven't seen "carbon neutral gas alternative" at the local Chevron.
by relaxing | 2025-04-18 21:19:55+00:00
> My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways.

No it doesn’t. We have other means of support for people whose lives are impacted by e.g. poverty.

> When we have a flat reductionist as our view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities.

There are already significant class divides in the community. Our system specifically encourages that sort of thing. The idea that a few high performers get the same benefits (ones that aren’t already means tested) as the poorest is irrelevant in the scheme of things.

> The point and the problem is that there is no coordination

A interesting point. I suspect it’s not true, but either way this is the first I’ve heard anyone arguing for better coordination. I don’t see that present in any of the current efforts.
Ask HN: Should I change my job?
by kopopops | 2025-04-18 21:20:22+00:00
Hi folks, I want to get some tips from real experience.

I work as a software engineer remotely the company is so great, the people, the projects we work on is what i actually love to work on my entire life and its used by real users so every change i make has real impact. The company is small to mid, we work on projects mostly for the gov and also we work on our own products. The salary i get is a senior/staff level salary in my country, even tho i only have 1 year of experience, but i dont get other benefits. Working hours are very flexible and there are no very big pressures.

I actually made a good relationship with CEO, and he has a lot of connections, so its another benefit too, i believe.

Its now almost 2 years for me working, and i always think about looking for another challenge, but i just cant, i cant find any place that offers what im currently at. But i dont want to imagine my self working here for 5 or more years.

So i want to ask you, should i change the job?
by ein0p | 2025-04-18 21:20:57+00:00
One thing that screws it up is ironically the memory across conversations. I gave it some _really_ obscure photos from some godforsaken ass cracks of the world I've been to, and it was able to guess most of them correctly. However, in its reasoning trace I saw that it's having a heck of a time letting go of the idea that the photo N is not roughly from the same location as the previous photos. What's even more impressive, even when it guesses incorrectly, it can often follow up and guess correctly with minimal hints. And it reasons about it much like a human would, and searches for the same things a human would. Note: I used o3, YMMV with a smaller/weaker model.
by protz | 2025-04-18 21:21:42+00:00
the performance was pretty much identical, however, as an added benefit, Blake2 got quite a bit faster due a combination of 1) our code being slightly more optimized, and 2) python's blake2 integration not actually doing runtime cpu detection, meaning that unless you compiled with -march=native (like, Gentoo), at the time, you were not getting the AVX2 version of Blake2 within Python -- my PR fixed that and added code for CPU autodetection

bear in mind that performance is tricky -- see my comment about NEON https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/119316#issuecomment-2...