MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonki | 2025-05-31 11:37:23+00:00
I hear what you're saying but my experience is that dwelling in #2 without seeing the bigger picture does very often just as much result in cost/schedule overruns, because shoving certain features or trying to improve certain aspects just collides with the status quo and sometimes cannot be easily accomplished if things are built "wrong" to begin with (wrong often just meaning that they were based on then-relevant prerequisites/assumption which are no longer relevant). Also, the cost of maintenance is often just not taken into account, which means that in the end you have to spend way too much time to shoehorn a half-baked solution into the status quo which has the appearance of delivering what was requested (but doesn't always, because you had to compromise, leaving everybody unhappy) while taking way too much time and at the same time just piling more bloated poo on top of what's already there, making maintenance in the long run even harder. I can't count how many times I've been in a situation where implementing something shouldn't have taken more than 30 minutes but because the codebase was in a not-so-good(tm) state took several days instead. This piles up exponentially, resulting in frustrated developers, a worse product and cost/schedule overruns. In a perfect world, code should improve over time, not deteriorate.
by JackSlateur | 2025-05-31 11:38:41+00:00
"By contrast, solar energy and electricity grid transmission projects have the best construction track record and are often completed ahead of schedule or below expected cost"

"For Sovacool, the evidence is clear: “Low-carbon sources of energy such as wind and solar not only have huge climatic and energy security benefits, but also financial advantages related to less construction risk and less chance of delays,” he says"

Of course, when you compare electric transportation with nuclear plant, the results are not the same ..

This paper is green washing;
by anistark | 2025-05-31 11:41:09+00:00
ERC-7866 is a draft Ethereum standard aimed at defining a minimal, extensible structure for decentralized profiles as soulbound NFTs. It builds on ideas from DIDs and SBTs, enabling delegation, staking, and verifiable metadata across chains and apps.

The motivation is to reduce fragmentation in how apps and wallets handle identity, while preserving composability and neutrality in trust models. The standard is chain-agnostic, DID-compatible, and avoids assumptions about centralized verification or naming services.

Discussion and review are welcome: → EIP: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7866 → Ethereum Magicians thread: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/erc-7866-decentralised-prof... → Background: https://blog.anirudha.dev/decentralised-profile-standard
by chronid | 2025-05-31 11:41:32+00:00
Isn't this intuitively true?

Building a nuclear power plant incurs in a massive set up stage with a lot of unknowns unknowns and requiring impressive material engineering and QC.

Solar is much more "incremental", you can almost start producing electricity and recouping costs immediately.

But a nuclear reactor is an extremely dense power generator compared to a solar panel plant by orders of magnitude. I'm not really sure why are they compared this way.
by gosolar1 | 2025-05-31 11:42:09+00:00
The article equated "investment risk" to cost overruns, not ROI. It's like a forgone conclusion. If you have to build something, you have to pay construction costs and those can vary. If you can buy most of the stuff you need on Amazon (ok, supplier X), you can predict the cost better.

If you look at ROI, which looks at the demand side risk as well (perhaps transient demand, need for quick build out), and assume utilities are in the business of profit maximization, natural gas wins.
by mistercow | 2025-05-31 11:43:52+00:00
Just to tack onto this, the one thing you could do is just deny real rewards. If someone wants you to take part in their pool in order to load a webpage, you could just refuse to submit any block that will actually pay out. This wouldn’t benefit you, but it would punish them for trying to make you spend resources on their behalf.

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent that.
by j_seigh | 2025-05-31 11:44:32+00:00
Could have been worse https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/05/nyregion/the-terror-of-th... It was really hot and traffic was backed up and at a standstill, so sitting in a car with windows rolled up for hours could not have been pleasant. I had spotted the backup beforehand and avoided it fortunately.
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-31 11:45:11+00:00
> They continue to use AI for math (asking LLMs to split bills, for example) and treat its responses for factual data lookup as 100% reliable and correct.

I don't do this but isn't it basically... fine? I assume all the major chatbots can do this correctly at this point.

The trick here is that chatbots can do a wide range of tasks, so why context switch to a whole different app for something like this? I believe you'll find this happening more frequently for other use cases as well.

Usability trumps all.
Show HN: Wikigen.ai
by priorityfill | 2025-05-31 11:46:05+00:00
WikiGen.ai is a simple article generator. Since the first post, I have made a few updates and would appreciate a revised opinion!

- Support for mobile / small screen

- Simple is now the default mode

- Articles now include images

- Search / external sources are now used during generation, allowing better grounding and more up-to-date content

- Added Dude mode, for casual articles

- Quick follow ups now work on list items

- Search bar is now sticky

- Share & export article

- Quickly pin articles

- Some UI simplifications
by XorNot | 2025-05-31 11:46:29+00:00
I don't love the narrative that it's "over-regulated". It's a dangerous technology when it's not heavily regulated - but that's not the problem. The problem is the regulatory burden is opaque: it's very hard to get into the process in a manner where one can predict both how much it will cost, and what is necessary to meet the regulatory requirements.

Plenty of industries operate in highly regulated spaces all the time - but there's a difference between regulation and unpredictability.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-31 11:47:02+00:00
For context, nuclear and peaker natural gas are the two most expensive sources of electricity in overall lifetime cost per energy output nowadays. It's not clear what exactly he's comparing there on the natural gas side.

Also, his data is from 2013.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

(warning: the graph on that wikipedia page has a really poorly cut Y-axis.)
by lolinder | 2025-05-31 11:48:19+00:00
No, I was very thorough: I saw every comment and pulled out the obscene, aggressive, offensive acrostic embedded in months of harassing tagging of the target of that acrostic because that recent pattern of behavior overshadows everything else. There's no excuse for that entry no matter how frustrated they get.

Vercel owes them nothing—and the specific employee OP chose as a target owes them even less—and this entitled behavior is a long-standing plague on open source that needs to be called out and soundly condemned. If they need the feature so desperately they can add it themselves (Vercel already said it's something they want to implement!) or switch frameworks.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-31 11:48:36+00:00
This is RFC 4086, which was published in 2005. It's still listed as the current best practice, however much has happened since 2005, especially in the field of security.

So I wonder if there are some areas in which this document is lacking or which aren't holding up as well?

One thing I have picked up is randomness inside virtual machines, and issues surrounding that. Sure if you got hypervisor support you're golden, but what if you don't?
by VladVladikoff | 2025-05-31 11:48:54+00:00
Is it possible to do some other sort of cryptographic trick than simply seeding the mix with known and knowns. Some sort of sum of many answers combined? Maybe it isn’t possible in this use case though (brute forcing passwords). For example is crypto POW really just doing a mix of known and unknowns or is there more cryptographic magic to it than that?
by xorcist | 2025-05-31 11:49:43+00:00
Good question and one that bears repeating. Because if you desire the aspect of free software or open source that is a level playing field, where no vendor has any special status or secret sauce, which in turn is what enables vendors to submit new features to a multi vendor codebase instead of maintaining private branches.

We learned this from X11 and the Unix wars, and history repeats itself in the countless free-core-but-proprietary-enterprise-features projects that never really expand beyond their parent corporation.

This is why trillion dollar corporations must not have special rules and the playing field must be even to any use, despite how unintuitive it may feel. Someone tried to codify it early as the first of the four software freedoms (the keyword being "anyone").
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-31 11:51:02+00:00
> Critical thinking is inconvenient and does not scale, but it's very important for finding the truth. Technology that disincentivizes critical thought makes it easier to spread lies.

True. At the same time, technology that removes the need for critical thinking is bona fide positive form of progress.

Think of e.g. consumer protection laws, and larger body of laws (and systems of enforcement) surrounding commerce. Their main goal is to reduce the risk for customers - and therefore, their need to critically evaluate every purchase. You don't as much critical thinking when you know certain classes of dangers are almost nonexistent; you don't need to overthink choices you know you can undo.

There are good and bad ways of eliminating inconvenience, but by itself, inconvenience is an indication of waste. Our lives are finite, and even our capacity to hope and dream is exhaustible. This makes inconvenience our enemy.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-31 11:51:06+00:00
If you use macOS then it has a great sandboxing system built in (albeit, undocumented). Anthropic are starting to experiment with using it in Claude Code to eliminate permission prompts. Claude can choose to run commands inside the sandbox, in which case they execute immediately.

I've thought about making one of these for other coding agents. It's not quite as trivial as it looks and I know how to do it, also on Windows, although it seems quite a few coding agents just pretend Windows doesn't exist unfortunately.
by helsinkiandrew | 2025-05-31 11:51:40+00:00
One of the reasons for this is that every new nuclear power plant is a little bit different from all the previous ones - 'better', safer, more efficient etc., but different with more risk and expense.

A Solar plant is (very crudely) just purchasing panels from a factory that's already produced millions of them and installing them in a frame so they're pointing at the sun.
by acrooks | 2025-05-31 11:52:05+00:00
I wonder if some of this output will take a while to be visible en masse.

For example, I founded a SaaS company late last year which has been growing very quickly. We are track to pass $1M ARR before the company's first birthday. We are fully bootstrapped, 100% founder owned. There are 2 of us. And we feel confident we could keep up this pace of growth for quite a while without hiring or taking capital. (Of course, there's an argument that we could accelerate our growth rate with more cash/human resources)

Early in my career, at different companies, we often solved capacity problems by hiring. But my cofounder and I have been able to turn to AI to help with this, and we keep finding double digit percentage productivity improvements without investing much upfront time. I don't think this would have been remotely possible when I started my career, or even just a few years ago when AI hadn't really started to take off.

So my theory as to why it doesn't appear to be "painfully obvious": you've never heard of most of the businesses getting the most value out of this technology, because they're all too small. On average, the companies we know about are large. It's very difficult for them to reinvent themselves on a dime to adapt to new technology - it takes a long time to steer a ship - so it will take a while. But small businesses like mine can change how we work today and realize the results tomorrow.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-05-31 11:52:30+00:00
Nice - I like that most of the ai scraper bot blocking was done using Nginx configuration. Still, once fail2ban was added to the mix (meaning: additional service and configuration), I wonder if considering something like Anubis (https://anubis.techaro.lol/) would have been more automatic. I’ve seen Anubis verification pages pop up more frequently around the web!
by banannaise | 2025-05-31 11:52:33+00:00
[nitpick] I think it's more the natural result of capitalism that is well-regulated only on the consumer side.

There are very few poultry processors largely because it is difficult and expensive to comply with consumer regulations and maintain food safety standards. That, in itself, is fine. But once you have very few (or only one) processor(s), there needs to be regulation on how they pay and treat both their workers and their suppliers. For the most part, there is neither.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-31 11:54:22+00:00
GDP is PER year metric. so world generates 105T every year...

so you're saying that 4% of gdp every year until 2050... it is peanuts.

so for example if every household ! ! ! !ONLY IN USA ! ! ! lives in passive house, that alone will save more on utility bills, insurance, then your net zero expenditure requires to add. so im not sure if that net zero expenditure is world wide or just USAs, but USA can pay it by themselves, if they were not scammed by building bad buildings for last 20 years.... just for comparison.

also previous powerplants price has to be converted to today's dollars, and inflation metric basket is flawed because it does not consist of building materials, which powerplants are build from. but it contains bread, clothing etc.

so 1.358 T is not todays money that means comparation / ratio is better then you/them suggest.

also NET zero expenditures means, less inputs afterwards, i.e. no/less money sent to canada, mexico, venezuela, africa, persian gulf for oil...... so more money for homeland. which most people forget about to even calculate impact of... positive for usa.

so yes we can do this, but every smartass in TV is saying we can not....
by xg15 | 2025-05-31 11:54:28+00:00
I don't know anything about the chicken farming business, but I imagine if there was a simple straight-forward solution for the farmers to escape the stranglehold ("just build your own packaging plant and hose it down couple times per day") then the farmers would have already done it (or rather the situation wouldn't have occurred in the first place).

I don't say this to despair but to argue that we'd need more details before we can make recommendations how to fix things. Also, there is an obvious power imbalance here, but then it's important to identity the source of that power, so you can address the imbalance.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 11:54:31+00:00
>In this case, "the Lipschitz property" means that the gradient of the distance value is bounded

This is total nonsense. The point of Lipschitz continuity is that it is more than continuity and less then differentiability. If you assert that it is differentiable the concept looses all meaning. It is specifically interesting because you do not have to assert differentiability.
by artman | 2025-05-31 11:55:22+00:00
Most certainly, if the data that the mobile app consumes is bounded and the same data is accessed frequently. Uber for example could have benefited from a sync architecture immensely (I tried to implement one back in the day, but was too late to the party as hypergrowth blocked any attempts at switching architectures). Sync architectures are not only great from a user experience point of view, but also for developer productivity and velocity. Sync takes care of a slew of problems that makes feature development slow. I gave a talk on this at last year's Local First conf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLgmjzERT08&t=4s.
by earthnail | 2025-05-31 11:55:23+00:00
LCOE assumes that electricity generation is comparable. However, renewables have a high variability, which puts a much higher load on the grid.

The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage.

This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
by palmfacehn | 2025-05-31 11:55:52+00:00
Reading this, there's no way of knowing whether the specific program was shut down because of malicious compliance or other reasons.

We might also say that we all love kittens. Should the state fund kitten rescue? If we all love kittens so much, why aren't more individuals banding together to save them? As it stands many people do care about animal welfare and donate heavily to nonprofits which support kittens.

Claiming, "Washington shut down my kitten rescue operation" is a deliberate, politically motivated misframing of the issue.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 11:56:03+00:00
> OpenAI is not at all profitable right now

We really don't know, in part because they're cooking all kinds of costs into R&D. My hunch is we'll recapitulate the dark fibre of the 1990s, with OpenAI et al burning capital to develop models others profit off. But that's predicated on the assumption that large models can be effectively distilled into cheap-to-run small ones. If that doesn't prove right, or the frontier keeps advancing for decades, the operating model of a high-R&D industry could resemble Intel (and semiconductors broadly) instead.
by reconnecting | 2025-05-31 11:56:32+00:00
Creator of tirreno [1] here.

While our platform is primarily designed for live, logged-in users, it also works well for bot detection and blocking.

We anonymize IP addresses by replacing the last octet with an asterisk, effectively grouping the same subnet under a single account. You can then use the built-in rule engine to automatically generate blacklists based on specific conditions, such as excessive 500 or 404 errors, brute-force login attempts, or traffic from data center IPs.

Finally, you can integrate tirreno blacklist API into your application logic to redirect unwanted traffic to an error page.

Bonus: a dashboard [2] is available to help you monitor activity and fine-tune the blacklist to avoid blocking legitimate users.

[1] https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno

[2] https://play.tirreno.com/login (admin/tirreno)
by noxer | 2025-05-31 11:57:32+00:00
This is pointless math instead of bad math. 0.1% isn't the issue, the issue is that it isn't actually paid by taxes, it is instead paid by money printing. It's not 0.1% of peoples taxable income going to USAID, it's billions in additional debt that is "funding" USAID.

The actual true cost to the people for the additional debt is hard to measure and likely hits a different generation that the people who created most of USAID. Instead of saying people payed 0.1% to fund USAID you should say they made at least that much additional debt every year. You could not spend 0.1% more than you earn over the course of like 60 years but USAID did that for everyone.
by K0balt | 2025-05-31 11:59:08+00:00
I think the key here is twofold. First “the cloud” as commonly understood isn’t what anyone here is talking about. The subject is commercial inference providers.

The “cloud”, or Commercial offerings in storage, VMs, etc are reasonably “secure” in a very general context these days, that is generally true.

OTOH “cloud” AI (commercial inference) is going to use your data for training, incorporating your business processes and domain specific competencies into its innate capabilities, which could eventually impact your value proposition. Empirically, this will happen, eventually, regardless of the user agreement that you signed.

Leakage of proprietary competencies is what is meant by being insecure, in this context.

Second, “cloud isn't secure enough for the enterprise” should be replaced with “enterprise actually cares about security except as a cost/benefit analysis”.

Sending your data to someone else’s data center is a really good way for your data to potentially end up on someone else’s computer. In fact, it’s pretty much the point. If security was the priority, they wouldn’t do that.
Show HN: pglockanalyze - See the locks your Postgres migrations will acquire
by pasxizeis | 2025-05-31 11:59:36+00:00
Hello! I created this tool to make reasoning about Postgres locks a bit easier.

Given a database[1] and a set of DDL statements/migrations you want to check, pglockanalyze will open a transaction, execute the statements, read the pg_locks view to analyze the locks they acquire and rollback (or commit, depending on the flags you passed) the transaction. Then, it will output the results for each statement.

I think there's merit in this idea, that said it's very much an experiment so there could be flaws and/or corner cases that this strategy won't work well for.

It's meant to act as a complement, not a replacement, to things like static analysis and the official Postgres docs.

Curious to see what others think; feedback is more than welcome!

https://github.com/agis/pglockanalyze

Thanks in advance

[1] typically an ephemeral database spawned by your CI pipeline
by delusional | 2025-05-31 12:00:01+00:00
> Assessing the right amount of tax is non-trivia

I disagree. The "right amount" is pretty trivial. Structuring it such that it's politically favorable, precise, and robust is the actual issue.

There's a general tension between precision and robustness in law, and finding that tradeoff is often the difficult part once public opinion is secured.
by andyferris | 2025-05-31 12:00:22+00:00
There was a specific and particular expectation (and even patience) for inflation to drop naturally as the supply chains again reached equilibrium after Covid.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine however caused a whole bunch of economic inputs like energy and fertilizer to spike, and central banks world wide didn't want economies to "get used to" constant high inflation rates, causing a perpetual problem.
by pydry | 2025-05-31 12:00:58+00:00
The relative cheapness (as opposed to feasibility) of storage tech vs natgas is the main reason why storage tech hasnt really taken off.

Natural gas is just too cheap as a battery (i.e. peaking).

Nuclear power, batteries and pumped storage all require subsidies to be cost competitive and while nuclear power has a powerful champion in the military industrial complex to offset its ridiculous expense, storage tech has no such champion.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-05-31 12:01:00+00:00
over the last year, i’ve mentally split the two separate concepts like so

* ML - actual backend models etc

* AI - user interface that appears “intelligent” to humans

LLMs UIs tend to have more appearance of intelligence because their interface is natural language — it’s basically the Eliza Effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

i know it’s not the classic definition of the terms, but it’s helped me with my frustration around the bs marketing hype