MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 22:33:27+00:00
Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.

And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.

A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.

Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.

Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.

I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
by gen220 | 2025-05-08 22:33:35+00:00
It's because by default it'll try to solve most problems agentically / by "thinking", even if your prompt is fairly prescriptive.

I use aider.chat with Claude 3.5 haiku / 3.7 sonnet, cram the context window, and my typical day is under $5.

One thing that can help for lengthy conversations is caching your prompts (which aider supports, but I'm sure Claude Code does, too?)

Obviously, Anthropic has an incentive to get people to use more tokens (i.e. by encouraging you to use tokens on "thinking"). It's one reason to prefer a vendor-neutral solution like aider.
by svieira | 2025-05-08 22:33:37+00:00
They say the same thing to those with other sinful desires. Why is it loving to say "I know you've desired to live without eyes your whole life, but you need to accept that God didn't give you that cross" but unloving to say "I know you desire to act sexually with a member of the same sex, but God didn't make sexual relations for the purpose of unity only"?
by josephg | 2025-05-08 22:33:37+00:00
> That isn't what OOP is good for: OOP is good for evolving maintainable, understandable, testable, expressive code over time.

Whoa that’s quite the claim. Most large projects built heavily on OO principles I’ve seen or worked on have become an absolute unmaintainable mess over time, with spider webs of classes referencing classes. To say nothing of DI, factoryfactories and all the rest.

I believe you might have had some good experiences here. But I’m jealous, and my career doesn’t paint the same rosy picture from the OO projects I’ve seen.

I believe most heavily OO projects could be written in about 1/3 as many lines if the developers used an imperative / dataflow oriented design instead. And I’m not just saying that - I’ve seen ports and rewrites which have born out around that ratio. (And yes, the result is plenty maintainable).
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-08 22:34:34+00:00
From what I’ve seen, NIH funding has been withheld across a massive number of grants. This isn’t even a “stop work order” situation: the checks just aren’t being written. It’s absolutely going to kill everything from ongoing work to trials to hiring of research assistants. It’s already affecting PhD acceptance and hiring. The money is piling up and I’ve read rumors that the plan is to try to retroactively “rescission” it by having Congress vote to throw it back into the budget pool, when they pass their big tax cut budget.
by chasd00 | 2025-05-08 22:35:16+00:00
I’m not even clear on the AI def of “emergent behavior”. The AI crowd mixes in terms and concepts from biology to describe things that are dramatically more simple. For example, using “neuron” to really mean a formula calculation or function. Neurons are a lot more than that and not even understood completely to begin with however developers use the term as if they have neurons implemented in software.

Maybe it’s a variation of the “assume a frictionless spherical horse” problem but it’s very confusing.
by singleshot_ | 2025-05-08 22:35:41+00:00
Well, you’ve come to the right place.

When someone tricks a bank in a way that harms you, the legal question governing your recovery from the bank is, “Did the bank act negligently, and did that negligence cause you harm?”

Unlike normal life, where “negligent” means “I didn’t enjoy it,” under the law there are several required elements that constitute negligence. One required element of negligence is that for a party’s negligence create liability, the alleged negligent party must have owed the harmed party a duty at the time of the breach of that duty.

Duty can arise in several ways according to state common and statutory law. For example, a doctor owes the duty of the standard of care to his patient. A driver owes the duty to drive the speed limit to other motorists. The question of whether duty exists in any situation is a complex question of law.

One thing that isn’t complicated, though: in every jurisdiction I’ve researched, a bank owes no duty to a non-customer.

This is why victims of identity fraud don’t sue the bank that granted fraudulent accounts: there is no negligence and will this be no recovery. (With the caveat that I’ve seen people who were harmed by a bank where they randomly happened to have an account… in this circumstance, duty can be ascribed to the bank because a banker-customer relationship in which duty is rooted exists).

Corollary: open an account at every major bank to establish a duty-relationship everywhere.

Poor startup idea of the day: Accounts-at-every-bank-as-a-Service.
by tkzed49 | 2025-05-08 22:35:45+00:00
The problem is that this is $100/mo with limits. At work I use Cursor, which is pretty good (especially tab completion), and at home I use Copilot in vscode insiders build, which is catching up to Cursor IMO.

However, as long as Microsoft is offering copilot at (presumably subsidized) $10/mo, I'm not interested in paying 10x as much and still having limits. It would have to be 10x as useful, and I doubt that.
by btown | 2025-05-08 22:36:42+00:00
There's an interesting dynamic here: if McMaster part numbers are searchable on Google, people are going to use Google to search for McMaster part numbers, rather than the McMaster site itself. Which gives all its competitors a chance to bid on those long-tail keywords, or optimize for them.

On the other hand, if you train people that if you want to use McMaster part numbers, you have to use the McMaster site... once you have a customer, as long as your site and inventory don't frustrate them, you have a customer for life.

You're sacrificing inbound for retention, in a highly measurable and testable way, for your unique audience and/or subsets of that audience. I have no doubt this is by design.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-08 22:37:24+00:00
I am at Johns Hopkins and as far as I know all medical research funding is in free fall. We are not Harvard (although why “I am mad at Harvard” makes anything ok, I don’t know.) This research isn’t some favor the Federal government does for Universities. We, as a nation, decided to run medical research by funding it through grants to Universities, and now that’s all being turned off.

Presumably the motivation is some combination of “slash funding so we can give tax cuts” and “kill the Universities as an independent center of smart people who oppose us” but the actual effect is someone you love will die when they could have lived. It’s fucked.
by quesera | 2025-05-08 22:37:40+00:00
If one can disbelieve the Primacy of the Pope, and instead that the Pretender wearing the Pope's garments is in fact the anti-Christ, and still believe they are an adherent of Catholicism, then they have asserted a Schism in the Church and that other Catholics are Apostate. You may choose to continue to use the label "Catholic", for convenience or perhaps because you think you are the One True Catholic, but the word no longer has meaning.

For a Church to place a permanent label on a person who holds Apostate beliefs is simple paternalism. A self-declared Atheist is not a Catholic, no matter what any dude with a pallium or a ferula might have to say about it.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 22:38:19+00:00
Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".

Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 22:38:30+00:00
Heh, I hadn't realized the infamous null pointer/reference question was that well cited. The most egregious cases in the Python tag only have about 3500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20109391) and 1500 (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1373164/) links respectively.

... Okay, I want to walk back something I said in some other comments here. There is definitely a class of SO questions that get closed as duplicates inappropriately. I tend to forget about the first of the questions because it's not generally a suitable dupe target when it's used: it's a meta question, explaining how to fix your question, rather than actually answering it. But, as you might infer, that means your question should still be closed - it lacks debugging details.

I fought against this trend on meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 . Unfortunately, there's another incentive misalignment here: dupe-hammering the question allows users with a gold badge to act more quickly on questions that don't meet site standards but are likely to attract a quick answer that interferes with keeping the site clean.

The second one... honestly probably isn't the best version of the question, but it's attracted good answers and become "canonical". The problem is that thinking in terms of "variable variables" isn't necessarily the right way to think about the problem (dynamically modifying namespaces; or rather, the fact that Python's namespaces are reflected as objects that can in most cases be modified meaningfully) - but it does map pretty well to how a beginner would typically think about the problem. It just tends to overlap with other reasonable questions in a messy way.

On Codidact, I've attempted to address the problem space more proactively, but I think I didn't complete the project I had in mind.
by ikesau | 2025-05-08 22:38:48+00:00
I have no strong feelings on motorbikes one way or the other, but also try to avoid downvoting posts when I disagree with them. It's a harder urge to suppress when I feel strongly about the subject though, and so it's possible that this is just a minority of people who are disproportionately represented because the rest of us don't care enough to make generic pro-motorbike posts in response.
by ryukoposting | 2025-05-08 22:38:48+00:00
Keep using the stuff I have. If you can use a soldering iron, a stereo system's service life is basically forever. Home theater is different because of video standards, but it doesn't seem like 4K and HDMI are going away anytime soon. I need a component input for my PS2 and Wii, so having slightly older hardware actually works out nicely.

And, to be fair, not all new stereo equipment is malware-infested trash. I'm sure there are plenty of new receivers that quietly go about their job - but not from Samsung subsidiaries, apparently.

Now if only the Logitech Harmony remotes would come back.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-08 22:38:55+00:00
I've always assumed that making a fast and responsive website isn't a technical problem, but a social/political one.

It's easy to create a website where interactions simply fetch the necessary resources and update the DOM as required. But managers then insist on adding 20 trackers so every little click and interaction gets logged somewhere for analytics.

Or are frameworks REALLY that slow?
by toast0 | 2025-05-08 22:39:25+00:00
> One is the lesson you draw, which is that the NSA should have secured her damn Blackberry. The second is that this was really about egos, and Clinton couldn't accept that she was less important, and deserved a less important phone, than Obama, so she went ahead anyway.

It could be ego. It could just be the hold of the crackberry. I didn't know many people that were full on in thrall to the Temple of Blackberry, but those few were willing to do what it takes to keep using them (until eventually they gave in and accepted the inevitable loss and usually moved to iPhone)

I had to spend about a week to figure out how to get a Blackberry to send DKIM compliant email before I could turn on DKIM. One of the acceptable alternatives for the CEO was just enabling anyone with a blackberry to send email from our domain.
by Kuyawa | 2025-05-08 22:39:27+00:00
As a Firefox user since phoenix 0.6 who used to develop tens of extensions I can say that only uBlock Origin is a must have. Alternatively I am using Brave with absolutely no extensions (ad blocker at the core) except Metamask and sometimes Safari for multiple browser web testing. After twenty years in web dev I can fairly say browsing the web without seeing ads is an extraordinary experience thanks to the exceptional effort of Mozilla in the early days.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-05-08 22:39:32+00:00
> Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Ha ha, well here's mine. First, I'm way ahead of Mr Gates: I'm already worth almost nothing.

But if I had billions to give, I would be supporting Science Education, Democracy and Journalism. Scholarships for bright, motivated students.

With all due respect to Mr G, I don't believe any of his objectives is possible with stable, educated, science-orientated social progress. Humanity depends on it.
by colek42 | 2025-05-08 22:40:20+00:00
We just built a new version of the witness run action that tracks the who/what/when/where and why of the GitHub actions being used. It provides "Trusted Telemetry" in the form of SLSA and in-toto attestations.

https://github.com/testifysec/witness-run-action/tree/featur...
by ivape | 2025-05-08 22:41:28+00:00
I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future.

There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" (paraphrasing). If this philosophy is used for the right purpose, we can get some cool things happening sooner. Recent events also show that there are people who are not interested in being charitable at all, so it's even more of an imperative.
by gen220 | 2025-05-08 22:41:40+00:00
Seconding aider, which was recommended to me months ago on HN. They don't integrate with vim directly per-se, but I'm a heavy vim user and I like the workflow of `aider --vim`, `ctrl-z`, `vim`.

They also have a mode (--watch-files) that allows you to talk to a running aider instance from inside vim, but I haven't used it much yet.
by jrockway | 2025-05-08 22:41:46+00:00
They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.
by cyanydeez | 2025-05-08 22:41:57+00:00
Counter points:

1. Scam artists are more successful when they prepare lures that _most_ people dont fall for because if they don't fall for it, they won't swallow it, which saves the scam artists time. If, like many, we think of sales as fancy scams, AI will definitely improve their scope and capabilities.

2. The odds of predicting the right teams to win a football match are typically quite low. But if you generate all the predictions and isolate those predictions, say weekly, to a good sized group of people over several weeks, you're bound to have atleast a couple of parties who observe that you are either completely correct or very largely correct.

3. Grifting seems to be winning on all fronts, witness donald trump.
by mil22 | 2025-05-08 22:42:47+00:00
I tried all the type checkers available as of ~1 year ago, and Pyright worked the best for me. It's not perfect, but it's better than any of the pure Python checkers. Memory is cheap (unless you're buying it from Apple I guess...). Would I take a faster type checker with better memory footprint? Heck yes, assuming equal or superior functionality.
by renjimen | 2025-05-08 22:42:50+00:00
As a data scientist, my main gripe with all these AI-centric IDEs is that they don’t provide data centric tools for exploring complex data structures inherent to data science. AI cannot tell me about my data, only my code.

I’ll be sticking with VSCode until:

- Notebooks are first class objects. I develop Python packages but notebooks are essential for scratch work in data centric workflows

- I can explore at least 2D data structures interactively (including parquet). The Data Wrangler in VSCode is great for this
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-08 22:43:10+00:00
You’ve written something like five comments implying they’re moving the money. They’re not. Then you say they could move the money. In fact they can’t because the research teams and labs to do this work just don’t exist in other places, and it would take years to rebuild them there even if the money was being sent somewhere else. But even if they could re-allocate the funds somewhere else, they’re not doing that. The money is just piling up and being unspent. You seem very determined to find some explanation for this that isn’t as terrible as the actual reality, and I’m sympathetic! But there isn’t one. It’s just a disaster in every sense.
by opo | 2025-05-08 22:43:47+00:00
In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily subsidized by everyone else. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.

As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
by mysteria | 2025-05-08 22:44:15+00:00
One thing I like about TWS is that related widgets (candlestick chart, newsfeed, L2 table, etc.) can be easily linked or separated. For example I can link a chart and a newsfeed together and if I switch the chart to a specific stock the newsfeed will switch over as well. Another commenter has mentioned that this is a TOS feature as well.

Those widgets can be resized and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs with separate layout for each.
by mouse_ | 2025-05-08 22:45:29+00:00
Don't type commands from the Internet, especially as root, especially when dd is involved. That being said,

If you're ever bored, from a TTY, type

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/fb0

This provides a nifty demonstration of how both the framebuffer and urandom works.

you can also take a sort of "screenshot" in a tty by typing dd if=/dev/fb0 of=./shot.fb

and then you can view it by flipping those filenames around, so that the shot.fb is now the input and /dev/fb0 is now the output.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 22:45:30+00:00
> It's a recipe for disaster.

Government is a recipe for disaster? Democratic government has worked for centuries without disaster.

> it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.

Yes, that is the trick of every human endeavor, the great ones and the failures. It depends on you and me - let's make it happen.
by andy99 | 2025-05-08 22:47:14+00:00
Different initialization converge to different places, e.g https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02757

For LLMs (as with other models), many local optima appear to support roughly the same behavior. This is the idea of the problem being under-specified ie many more equations than unknowns so there are many ways to get the same result.
by mmooss | 2025-05-08 22:47:30+00:00
> Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority.

It is not - that would be some theoretical pure democracy, also called 'mob rule'. Democracy, as the word is actually used, requires universal human rights which protect the minority. For example, freedom of speech means the majority can't control the minority's speech, whether they like it or not.

Democracy also includes separation of powers, usually between legislature, executive, and judicial, which prevents the concentration of power.

> It's nothing to be proud of.

It's only something to be proud of if we make it that way.
by tallytarik | 2025-05-08 22:48:16+00:00
We and many others use the same techniques too. This is a concept introduced 20 years ago, and RIPE Atlas/IPmap has been a public implementation of this idea for the last decade or so.

(However, the vast majority of IPs can't be geolocated in this way, and there are caveats to those that can be.)

In any case, the difficulty with all providers in this space is how you prove accuracy at scale. If we assume some provider has some proprietary technique that nets 100% accuracy, that's great, but what do you compare it to? There is no ground truth data source - we are supposed to be that.

Marketing plays a big role, and admittedly, these guys have much better marketing on this point :)
by gmuslera | 2025-05-08 22:48:25+00:00
I don't think the meaning that you give to that word is the same as the one used in the rest of the world. Democracy is about elections (presidents, referendums, whatever), where every citizen is able to participate and vote freely. And in that, US may well is (and has been for quite some time) functionally an oligarchy.

That a legally elected government then oppress part of the population, put weird laws or sink the economy is within the rules of the game. Citizens are responsible for what they choose, at least if they all can choose for it freely.

But if whole sections of the population can't freely participate, or can be punished somewhat if doing so, then you didn't had a democracy to start with, even if the government was a symbol of peace and prosperity.