MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AustinDev | 2025-05-19 16:22:07+00:00
You're likely not an electrical engineer by training so I will assume you don't know much about power generation and distribution. (It's worth noting my training in this field is nearly 2 decades old so I'm a bit rusty but I still follow several publications in the field) Engineers have been warning about inertia and voltage control being neglected as renewable penetration has soared. These aren't normally of much concern when you are spinning a large mass to generate AC power.

> fyi, the root cause of the Spain blackout (not blackout) is not yet known.

While the final official reports may not be out initial data has been released and indicates frequency and/or voltage oscillations got out of hand causing generation disconnection and cascading blackouts. Renewable penetration in that area of the grid likely contributed to the brittleness especially in voltage control and inertia management.

"Inertia management is increasingly critical for grids with high renewable penetration. Many such systems now implement inertia floors to limit the maximum rate of change of frequency during disturbances. While inertia is often considered primarily for frequency stability, it also plays a crucial role in preventing loss of synchronism between different parts of the grid. As conventional synchronous generation decreases, careful monitoring and management of system inertia becomes essential to maintain stability during disturbances." [1]

>"healthy mix of generation" is quite funny to read, thinking about nuclear and coal which are not too healthy for the people living close to the plants :-D

I'll give you coal as unhealthy but natural gas is much cleaner and nuclear is entirely clean, save waste management which is a solved problem.

How does nuclear effect residents living nearby? I'm not aware of any reporting of systemic illness near any of Europe's nuclear plants but, I may just be ignorant of the latest research. Care to provide a link?

[1] https://www.powermag.com/understanding-the-april-2025-iberia...
by johng | 2025-05-19 16:22:26+00:00
I started an ISP with a friend (whom is still my business partner in another venture to this day) in 1997.

The hardest part of running an ISP was always the end user tech support. It was a never ending nightmare.

We offered fixing computers for free at the store but no one wanted to lug their machine down to get it fixed, so 99% of the time you end up spending hours over the phone trying to fix the problem.

The user is already frustrated because it's not working and after doing tech support for a long time you become very burned out. It's not a good combination for either party. Definitely the worst part of the job.

Remote tools hadn't really been invented yet so it was really an art form trying to decypher what the user was saying and what they meant -- then trying to explain exactly how to click / change a setting and try again... then, rinse and repeat. They usually had to hang up to try, then call back again if it didn't work.

Definitely not an ideal situation.
by brandon272 | 2025-05-19 16:22:29+00:00
It seems like the safeguards around accuracy alone might be nearly insurmountable. If you ask Siri to send an email that it drafts itself and then messes up, or book some appointment for a Tuesday that it ends up booking for a Thursday, that is a terrible customer and user experience. And Apple would have no defense, other than "the underlying technology hallucinates sometimes" which for many people is not an acceptable explanation for why a feature built into an Apple product works the way that it does. I think the expectation is that whatever gets released for iOS end users will not be plagued by such concerns.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-05-19 16:22:34+00:00
> Genuinely curious, which plugins do you mean for example when you say that many heavy features are leaning on them?

Depends on what you are doing. But the whole task & project-management-corner is constantly moving. Everything which modified the editor and preview was also regular breaking in the last years. For example, there were some plugins adding banners at the top of documents, or background-images or some icons. Or plugins modifying the yaml-area. They were all breaking multiple times when Obsidian was switching to the new live-preview-editor, then on changing frontmatter to properties, and on some other occasion IIRC. Usually after some months a new plugin appears, or someone forks the old one and fixes it. But as a user, it's pretty annoying to constantly have something breaking outside your control and getting stripped of features you want/need for various reasons.

Obsidian is useful, but far from being stable long-term yet. It's still very young.

> I could see the dataview plugin as an example

Yes, dataview was also very unstable the first 2 years or so, switching code and concepts, breaking old code along the line. It seems to be stable now, as the focus is on datacore.

> but most other plugins seem like they just add more convenient ways to do something that would be still pretty simple to do manually. (Templates for example).

Does it matter what a plugin is doing? If it breaks, it's a loss, whether it's crucial or just annoying.
by colinmorelli | 2025-05-19 16:22:48+00:00
You conveniently left out the first part of the sentence you quoted:

> Currently available software may very well make human drivers both more comfortable and safe...

Which is objectively not what Waymo does, and whether intentional or not, invalidates the progress that has been made.

Also, immediately preceding that:

> Driverless vehicles in closed systems have been in use for a long time.

Which is also not what current frontier self driving technology is.

> Where did anyone make this argument?

The title of the article is quite literally "Is Winter Coming?"
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-19 16:22:53+00:00
Truth is the most problematic problem in philosophy, the introduction of the idea of the truth erodes the truth as seen in Godel's theorem or the reaction you get when you hear "9/11 truther." In many cases you can only determine the truth by physical observation, in other cases it is inaccessible. An A.I. that can determine the truth of things is a god.

A emotional tone or hostility detector, on the other hand, is ModernBERT + BiLSTM for the win. I'd argue the problem with fake news is not that it is fake but that it works on peoples emotions and that people prefer it to the real thing.

You can detect common established bullshit patterns and probably new ones that are like the old ones. 30 years from now there will be new bullshit patterns your model doesn't see.
by jchw | 2025-05-19 16:23:17+00:00
The biggest issue here IMO is the interaction between two things:

- "Upcasting" either to a concrete type or to an interface that implements a specific additional function; e.g. in this case Bytes() would probably be useful

- Wrapper types, like bufio.Reader, that wrap an underlying type.

In isolation, either practice works great and I think they're nice ideas. However, over and over, they're proving to work together poorly. A wrapper type can't easily forward the type it is wrapping for the sake of accessing upcasts, and even if it did, depending on the type of wrapper it might be bad to expose the underlying type, so it has to be done carefully.

So instead this winds up needing to be handled basically for each type hierarchy that needs it, leading to awkward constructions like the Unwrap function for error types (which is very effective but weirder than it sounds, especially because there are two Unwraps) and the ResponseController for ResponseWriter wrappers.

Seems like the language or standard library needs a way to express this situation so that a wrapper can choose to be opaque or transparent and there can be an idiomatic way of exposing this.
by xyst | 2025-05-19 16:23:37+00:00
There is no "better outcome".

People who got bamboozled into paying for this junk service shouldn’t have their DNA data treated as some commodity that can be traded like a stock.

The sale of this data should be treated as PII and "transfers of ownership" should not be implied. The default for every user should be to delete the data upon sale of company and provide a way for users to opt in to the transfer.

Users should be incentivized and trust (if any at this point) needs to be rebuilt with this new company, not implied.
by Teever | 2025-05-19 16:24:14+00:00
The way I see it, it isn't so much about which system is more efficient -- it's about which implementation of either system has less corruption.

The Soviet system failed because of rampant corruption, just like the American system seems to be failing. China seems to be succeeding because they have managed to clamp down on corruption at least as much as has been necessary to keep their economy productive and focused on ascendancy.

If the American people can't get a handle on the open corruption that infects all levels of the system from small town cops to district attorneys to state legislatures to the White House then the debate over the efficiencies of free market capitalism vs. a command driven economy are moot.
by mfranzs | 2025-05-19 16:24:26+00:00
I do like this idea of integrating SRS into doom-scrolling streams! I've wanted to prototype something similar, but built completely around your SRS cards.

For email, I think you're right it would need to be frictionless. There are some new email technologies that let you embed dynamic interactions in your email - we might play with that at some point.

So this is probably hard to do as a plugin tbh, but I'd love to explore eventually as a feature.
by quantadev | 2025-05-19 16:24:33+00:00
I mean it's theoretically possible a 1500s King might have made that book illegal, because of it's general knowledge. That's a legit point.

Sadly the radio carbon dating disproved two of my far out theories, which was, 1) The book survived from some earlier 'iteration' of life on the planet, where all plants were simply different. or 2) All planets form the same 'kind' of carbon-based life, and this book was sent/delivered to us by another planet.

Sadly, it's probably just someone's form of "art", and not even "real".
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-19 16:24:33+00:00
A sad example is Amazon Prime Video. 'I see you're from Belgium so I'll serve you a lott of films dubbed in French exclusively. My native tongue is Dutch, but I prefer watching films in their original version, not dubbed.

(Btw, my Prime sub is on the German Amazon, but they don't care. You're from Belgium so French it is)
by lupusreal | 2025-05-19 16:24:45+00:00
He said loss for the environment. It's a win for the "environmental movement" which has a hate boner for nuclear. For every nuclear power plant they got delayed or canceled in the 20th century, many megatons of carbon dioxide were added to the atmosphere.

These days it's arguably different, insofar as solar is viable, but evidently it's not viable enough for Taiwan to not expand their use of natural gas. Still, it's better than in the 20th century when a nuclear power plant obstructed by activists almost always meant coal was burned instead.
by rbanffy | 2025-05-19 16:24:46+00:00
> Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition

I don’t think they neglect the migration of workloads to cloud platforms. Mainframes can only cost so much before it’s cheaper to migrate the workloads to other platforms and rewrite some SLAs. They did a ton of work on this generation to keep power envelope in the same ballpark of the previous generation, because that’s what their clients were concerned about.
by number6 | 2025-05-19 16:24:57+00:00
Bittersweet - I reached them to ride a bike about a month ago. I still have to look out for the little one and as I see the older one ride to the next crossing I feel proud and afraid and a bit melancholic seeing his silhouette growing faintly smaller hoping I teached him enough to stop at the crossing fully knowing that I couldn't intervene at this distance. I am afraid that I might not have, deeply afraid, regardless that there is not a single car on the road. The I am relieved and proud as he looks back at us, waiting as we catch up to him.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-19 16:25:06+00:00
KDE has been building tools for decades now. Browsers, email clients, contacts management, you name it. KDE 1 already included a file explorer and [was already developing an office suite at the time](https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/1.0/). KDE's suite goes back to its very beginnings.

Plasma is only a small part of KDE's toolkit, and that's why KDE is so popular. Hell, most of Plasma has no business being part of a window manager.

If you just want something to render windows, there are much more minimalist alternatives, such as LXDE, Hyprland, Sway, i3, and so on.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-19 16:25:18+00:00
100% not true in my case and probably not true in the generally case, it’s a common misattribution. The cause of mine is hEDS which has ME/CFS as a comorbidity. I’ve done a WGS and found that I have 2 TNXB SNPs. By my math a lot of ‘burnout’ especially in tech is related to TNXB or CYP21A2 SNPs. The treatments that I take specifically targets IL-1B cytokines that are linked to brain fog.

I was able to predict that I had these SNPs before taking the WGS test and once confirmed able to divise a treatment that worked. The probability of that happing by random chance is incredibly small.
by _tqr3 | 2025-05-19 16:25:52+00:00
The TypeScript compiler is only needed during development, the compiled JavaScript code contains no TypeScript-specific logic. Zod’s validation is entirely JavaScript-based, relying on simple checks (e.g., typeof, regexes, comparisons).

Also, the 2kb bundle just for the zod/v4-mini package, the full zod/v4 package is quite large.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-19 16:25:57+00:00
There’s also an image a bit down the page:

https://www.inventwood.com/technology

But I’m not sure if it a real photo or some sort of… analogy? Under “INTRODUCING SUPERWOOD: THE NEXT GENERATION OF BUILDING MATERIALS,” we can see one piece that looks like an actual piece of wood, and then some other ones that looks like an artificial wood-looking finish wrapped around some core which visually looks metallic (but which, I assume, is actually their engineered wood).

I dunno. I guess “being wood” is more about the ecological impact in this case. If it is replacing steel and it looks ugly, well, a lot of steel looks ugly and then gets covered up.
Ask HN: How do you handle licensing and revenue leaks for self-hosted software?
by lexokoh | 2025-05-19 16:26:14+00:00
I’ve been exploring the hidden costs of self-hosted software, specifically, the silent revenue leaks that come from unauthorized deployments, lingering trials, and unmonitored usage.

Most devs I spoke to shared stories of enterprise clients spinning up “temporary” instances that ran for months, or trials that never actually ended. If you’re selling self-hosted, how are you tackling this?

I wrote up my findings and what can be done about it here:

https://kagehq.com/blog/hidden-revenue-leak-self-hosted-software

Would love to hear how the HN community is handling this.
by rootsudo | 2025-05-19 16:26:14+00:00
Yep, this is common - especially for monday mornings where jobs failed on Thursday/Friday. Said department would run to IT/Cloud computing team to see what was going on - and it always led to an instant ticket because nothing was wrong and the status page did not reflect accurately the service outage.

Reddit usually was the only place that reported an outage, the o365 support twitter is dead now, and the staus page per tenant is reporting is unreliable because they are manually updated.

AFAIK the SLA for fabric/PowerBI does fall under M365 if you have it.
by stephen_hn | 2025-05-19 16:26:25+00:00
I am not totally sure what your API's look like but if you know the API only has a certain type (or subset of types), you would only validate that type on the method. Don't use a single union for everything.

Here is some pseudocode.

Person = { name: string, height: number }

Animal = {name: string, capability: string}

A = { post: object, methodType: string, person: Person }

ModeratorA = { post: object, moderatorField1: string, moderatorField2: string, person: Person }

UnionA = A && ModeratorA (There's probably a better way of defining A and ModeratorA to share the shared fields)

B = { post: object, animal: Animal }

endpoint person parses UnionA

endpoint animal parses B

You don't put all of your types in one big Union.
by johnfn | 2025-05-19 16:26:26+00:00
I think I can do this, yes, but it becomes a very large amount of repetitive work.

Let's say I have api/profile (which has `.posts`) and api/user-directory (which does not). I define User as a discriminated union - one has type `user-with-posts` and one has type `user-no-posts`. OK, good so far. But now say I have a photo gallery, which returns photos on user. Now I have to add that into my discriminated union type, e.g. `user-with-posts-and-photos`, `user-with-posts-but-not-photos`, `user-with-no-posts-but-yes-photos`... and it gets worse if I also have another page with DMs...
by not_your_vase | 2025-05-19 16:27:26+00:00
Until now I believed (without a reason) that the Github Actions Runner is Java based, was a bit surprised why it needed special treatment on a new platform. And now I look at output of lsof, and it has a lot of dll(!) files open on my Linux machine. It is based on .net/mono? I am flabbergasted.
by lxgr | 2025-05-19 16:27:53+00:00
Ironically, given TFA, it seems to be primarily using the user's IP:

> How does Universal Language Selector determine which languages I may understand

> ULS queries a service that determines your originating country based on your IP address. This is inaccurate in some cases. Based on the country code, most often spoken languages are suggested for you.

(from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/F...)
by ashf023 | 2025-05-19 16:28:46+00:00
If I understand it correctly, this is only catching ownership violations at runtime, so it doesn't actually prevent writing/shipping the bug? But it does seem to be able to improve the detection rate and determinism, and also help with diagnosing the bug when it's discovered. If this does let simple unit tests in CI discover concurrency bugs, that's a big improvement, even if it's not as strong as static analysis. I imagine there are still cases where the ownership violation is not deterministic though, e.g. depending on the data or the app's configuration, and maybe will not be caught until production
by rolph | 2025-05-19 16:28:51+00:00
"Insect flight mechanisms are highly efficient and involve complex hinge structures that facilitate amplified wing movement through thoracic deformation. However, in the field of flapping-wing robots, the replication of thoracic skeletal structures has received little attention."

that nails it right there. even bird flight employs skeletal elasticity to move energy around rather than counteracting and wasting it.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-19 16:30:03+00:00
In my experience, KDE is more responsive (especially under load) but its code base is less stable. It makes sense: Gnome is pretty minimalist in terms of available UI, uses JavaScript and shell scripts to provide integrations, and exposes quite a small native surface area.

On the other side, KDE consists of almost exclusively native (C++) code, although I believe some tools are written in Python. Great for performance, but C++ has a reputation for a reason.

For what it's worth, the last major release has been very stable. It has also always been stable for me on my Steam Deck. I have a feeling KDE's issues are similar to WordPress': external plugins hooking deep into the native API, making it seem like the software they're integrating with is unstable.
by edg5000 | 2025-05-19 16:31:17+00:00
I wrote a large enterprise JavaScript application that was behind Apple/Google update approval, was used daily by businesses whose entire operation depended on it.

I will never touch loosely typed stuff again. I want every keystroke checked for errors. I want autocomplete to select from possible members/fields/variables/functions/classes rather than doing constant global find/replace operations and having the customer be the beta tester
by constantcrying | 2025-05-19 16:31:35+00:00
I think it is important to understand why you are doing what you are doing. Sure, enjoyment and "authenticity" can be part of it, but it clear that e.g. static vs. dynamic typing is an engineering tradeoff. Making a decision in either direction should be based on those tradeoffs.

One important consideration is the importance of the project, hobby projects are for enjoyment mostly, so there "authenticity" is really important. At the same time you shouldn't make decisions on how to develop aerospace software based on how "authentic" the development process feels.
by geodel | 2025-05-19 16:31:51+00:00
Yup, no big deal. One of my cousin has like 2 housekeepers full time and 2 comes are different time of day like help with cooking and cleaning during lunch and dinner. Their luxury car is however lowest end Audi and another is Corolla.

On flip side he had to change 2 jobs because travel distance as ~20 miles but in term of duration it was 4+ hrs daily. And no such thing as peak hours there, day-in/day out, morning, afternoon, late night, week day, weekend, same worst possible traffic.

Any interaction with real world outside of home can wear people down specially the kind who keep multiple household helps. From traffic, to pollution, medical care, school admissions, doing groceries, shopping, parking and on and on.

One way to think is at absolute top level like senior most politicians, industrialist, CEOs, other types of super influential people, developed vs developing countries' lifestyle can match, but as one start moving down the ladder, the quality falls very rapidly in developing world and serious compromises can start just 2 step down from top.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-19 16:32:05+00:00
Sure, but only if you choose a steel with a low tensile strength. There are common steels with between 200 and 2000 MPa tensile strength, whereas I understand this wood material has about 500 MPa.

This is (imho) impressive, and much better than untreated wood, but I think it's misleading to say "stronger than steel" when that labels a huge range of materials.
by w10-1 | 2025-05-19 16:32:10+00:00
Most HN posts are how to program, mainly focusing on new tools and ideas.

But now the tooling is so good and the competition so fierce that the real question now is not how but what to program.

For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.

This post imagines how Nadar saw his subjects, and how his subjects saw things. Not only is it a different time, but in most cases the subjects had a hand in history, we know now.

To me that's the essence of product design: imagining a different world through the eyes of another, and understanding how to make a real difference.

Products mostly focus on the present-market scale, but investments incorporate the full life cycle. The real power of the historical perspective is understanding how it's the latent value in the context that gives a new product its power, and how significant that can be over time, particularly when a technology becomes pervasive.

Here the photograph far outdoes the samurai's sword in its influence, not just for images and history but as a demonstration of the power of recording light for science, medicine, etc.

May this post inspire someone to make the next photograph.
by RedNifre | 2025-05-19 16:32:33+00:00
Could we also agree that bilingual (or more) people exist? I hate playing whack-a-mole with YouTube captions: Apparently me turning them off on English videos means I only speak English, so the next time I watch a German video, I'll have to turn off captions again, which apparently means I forgot English and only understand German.

I mean, doesn't Google have employees from multiple countries? Shouldn't diversity fix this in the sense that some bilingual person there notices this?