MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasil | 2025-05-12 15:42:36+00:00
The article mentions that largish batteries are needed for synthetic inertia, which I am guessing use A/C inverters. Spain appeared to lack sufficient batteries.

Obviously, this configuration of solar and battery banks will work more optimally when they are closer to the equator.

Will different types of power grids be required for areas further away, or is it practical to ship power long distances to far Northern/Southern areas?
by graypegg | 2025-05-12 15:43:09+00:00
Use whatever you feel most effective in. I would say Ruby is around much more than you might expect by the sounds of it. (The usual big names touted on the Rails homepage + many start ups + agency products) though it's definitely over the hype period.

For being employable... I'd say Ruby is going to be near the middle of the pack. Elixir is going to be near the harder-side, and JS is going to be near the easier-side... on average IMO.

If you think ruby intrigues you, give it a try! You've got precious time + motivation for this sort of thing, but messing around with a programming language is not much effort if you're intrigued. Getting a feel for it is a sub-weekend project away. It's my favourite language for bodging, the scripts I make in ruby for little data-mashing or system things are surprisingly stable and readable, even a year or two later. (Compared to a nodejs, perl or shell script... which all tend to have understandability-half-lives of a month for me haha) Automate something you find annoying.
Show HN: Grapple, a DIY data platform that uses AI the Right Way
by andrewicarlson | 2025-05-12 15:43:11+00:00
Hello again, HN! My name is Andrew, and my cofounder Jack (@jackonawalk) and I are excited to show off a project years in the making – a data platform where the only prerequisite is data.

Most "self-service" data tools aren't really self-service. They assume you've already set up a data warehouse, configured pipelines, defined semantic data models, and usually, the best escape hatch is to explore the underlying data warehouse yourself. That's an intimidating proposition for most people who don't consider themselves data experts.

Grapple abstracts the data architecture and ships with everything you need to start working with the data you already have. It comes with a data warehouse, an ETL for connecting data from existing sources, semantic data models, and a visualization layer to build dashboards and reporting. All you need to bring is your data.

Oh, and the AI thing? We're bullish on safe, secure, and governable use of AI. We use a LLM to help generate calculations and formulas, but it never has access to the underlying data, only the schema. Everything the LLM generates is auditable and editable by the user. We believe this is the most secure way to get the benefits of a LLM while preserving absolute data integrity – no hallucinated data!

You can try it out with just a CSV upload. No credit card or sensitive data required. There's a demo video on our homepage and a gallery of public dashboards here: https://cloudgrapple.com/gallery

Let us know what you think!
by perrygeo | 2025-05-12 15:43:19+00:00
I'm very sensitive to sugar and starch when "at rest". If I wake up first thing in the morning and drink an orange juice or have a bowl of white rice before bed, my blood sugar and mood are out of control. But the same foods mid-day before/after/during intense mental or physical work are very well tolerated if not beneficial. So my priors agree with yours, timing and context absolutely matters.
by Retric | 2025-05-12 15:43:48+00:00
You can only become wealthy later in life at which point you can’t advantage your past self. Thus new money receives fewer benefits than old money from the exact same policies.

Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.

It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 15:44:13+00:00
Always have been.

What they never were, was "the underdog fighting taxi mafia". That's just propaganda. They beat "taxi mafias", plural, with divide-and-conquer, market after market, and they did that as a multinational corporation with ~infinite money supply thanks to VC funding.

Uber is a story of the Goliath going from town to town and beating everyone's Davids.
by rtkwe | 2025-05-12 15:44:14+00:00
The one line description, of course, leaves tons of holes the actual rule does patch. The impulse to believe a rule or law has been implemented in the most smooth brained way possible is rarely correct. The actual rule includes language that say it should be as easy as the original sign up.

https://www.swlaw.com/publication/ftc-click-to-cancel-rule/#...
by bgwalter | 2025-05-12 15:44:14+00:00
That is fairly easy to answer: When the infringement shifted from small people taking from Walt Disney to Silicon Valley taking from everyone, including open source authors and small YouTube channels.

I find the shift of some right wing politicians and companies from "TPB and megaupload are criminals and its owners must be extradited from foreign countries!" to "Information wants to be free!" much more illuminating.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-12 15:44:29+00:00
The comment quotes the article as stating that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI."

How does this personal anecdote relate to the observation that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI."

Is venture capital involved with the Meta Ray-Ban glasses that we are advised to try for free.
by delfinom | 2025-05-12 15:45:53+00:00
Doomed to blow back on PE firms long term.

The trade businesses for home services have significantly less barrier to entry than the usual established business that they would usually buy. All it takes is a van and some tools in many cases for workers to start a new one after working for some years under someone else to get their license. It's a field where the PE firms will be taken to the cleaners on pricing and even customer service.

Definitely never underestimate homeowner's desire to price shop and nickle and dime the smallest of repair.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-12 15:46:42+00:00
Similar to Bukele, the House of Thani is making a terrible mistake by catering to Trump's contempt of the rule of law. When this administration ends, El Salvador will be the country which enabled an unconstitutional gulag and sneered at American courts who tried to stop it, and Qatar will be the country which bribed the US president. I don't think whatever Trump is offering will be enough to offset the damage.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-12 15:46:54+00:00
Not only PHP: "modern technologies I've gone on to learn and be experienced with in more recent years."

Although, there's a Lisp-inspired PHP called Phel: https://phel-lang.org/

And PHP typing with version 7.4.0: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph...
by adocomplete | 2025-05-12 15:47:05+00:00
I remember reading about the law going into effect but had never seen the split broken out until last week.

I highly doubt the scheduling, summoning, and advertising infra is close to 60% of the cost. I like Uber, I've been a customer for a long time. It's invaluable when visiting a new place imo. I also think they can and should pay their drivers more.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-12 15:47:09+00:00
Semantic search and classification and clustering. For the first, there is a substantial breakthrough in IR every 10 years or so you take what you can get. (I got so depressed reading TREC proceedings which seemed to prove that "every obvious idea to improve search relevance doesn't work" and it wasn't until I found a summary of the first ten years that I learned that the first ten years had turned up one useful result, BM2.5)

As for classification, it is highly practical to put a text through an embedding and then run the embedding through a classical ML algorithm out of

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/supervised_learning.html

This works so consistently that I'm considering not packing in a bag-of-words classifier in a text classification library I'm working on. People who hold court on Huggingface forums tends to believe you can do better with fine-tuned BERT, and I'd agree you can do better with that, but training time is 100x and maybe you won't.

20 years ago you could make bag-of-word vectors and put them through a clustering algorithm

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html

and it worked but you got awful results. With embeddings you can use a very simple and fast algorithm like

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html#k-me...

and get great clusters.

I'd disagree with the bit that it takes "a lot of linear algebra" to find nearby vectors, it can be done with a dot product so I'd say it is "a little linear algebra"
by cryptonector | 2025-05-12 15:48:13+00:00
> In this case, it seems to me that OpenSSL has chosen to prioritize DX and broader accessibility over performance. Even as we have seen some performance improvements since the initial 3.0 release, it is still not where it was.

Clearly you're wrong. They _chose_ to prioritize some things over performance for 3.0. They did not make the same choice for subsequent versions. Thus it's wrong to say that "OpenSSL has chosen" -- no, they've not! The choice you say they made was temporary. It wasn't even a conscious choice.

> The only issue I see is that this may not have been clearly thought out or communicated,

They did not make a conscious choice, and they did not stick to that choice later. You are twisting things.

> There is another potential issue with rolling out an LTS release that was not "fully baked"

Like everyone else, OpenSSL is moving to rapid release trains. Is 3.0 an LTS? Yes. Is 3.1 an LTS? No. Is 3.2 an LTS? Yes. Just upgrade and move on.

> Overall, we should look to refine and understand the goals for the project, and be clear on the priorities of those leading and maintaining it.

You're crying over spilt milk. The mess got cleaned up. The process was open and the team responsive. That instills confidence and defeats the FUD.
by jmull | 2025-05-12 15:48:38+00:00
I’ve been doing this since the ‘90s. At first I just had a text document with urls. From there it didn’t take a lot of imagination to wrap them in a little basic html, and there you have it.

The author has features I don’t have. But that’s the beauty of this! I have features they don’t have. You can have whatever features you want.. it’s just a matter of scratching your itches. Well, and some basic web skills (these days some basic prompting skills are probably enough).
by jhaile | 2025-05-12 15:48:43+00:00
One aspect that I feel is ignored by the comments here is the geo-political forces at work. If the US takes the position that LLMs can't use copyrighted work or has to compensate all copyright holders – other countries (e.g. China) will not follow suit. This will mean that US LLM companies will either fall behind or be too expensive. Which means China and other countries will probably surge ahead in AI, at least in terms of how useful the AI is.

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.
by fourside | 2025-05-12 15:48:45+00:00
> That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them.

Ok so in your small rural town, where people take up trades because they’re struggling to make ends meet, and where you have to settle for whoever is available, and where if someone screws you over word of mouth on its own is enough of a deterrent and is easily enforced, you can get by without relying on licenses. As far as giving general advice to young people, the original point still stands that you generally need to jump through some additional hoops to make a living off of many of the trades. Yes there are exceptions but most young people aren’t looking for answers that require you move out to the boonies and where you’re going to be scraping by.
by apercu | 2025-05-12 15:48:54+00:00
>Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against.

Corporations are not humans. (It's ridiculous that they have some legal protections in the US like humans, but that's a different issue). AI is also not human. AI is also not a chipmunk.

Why the comparison?
by polpo | 2025-05-12 15:49:00+00:00
That's a very uncharitable way to put things. Since my original posts it looks like things have cooled and the worst of the tariffs have been walked back, but at the sky-high tariff rates from before today, my options would have been:

- Raise prices to account for tariffs.

- Not raise prices, therefore not make any profit, therefore not make it worth my time, therefore not make any hardware at all.

I'm not operating at big margins but I do make a profit because I want to balance supporting the community and keeping things at a sustainable level for my sanity. Those tariffs would have wiped those margins out completely.
by podgietaru | 2025-05-12 15:49:17+00:00
I wrote a blog post about embedding - and a sample application to show their uses.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/use-language-e...

https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-e...

I really enjoy working with embedding. They’re truly fascinating as a representation of meaning - but also a very cheap and effective way to perform very cheap things like categorisation and clustering.
by x1000 | 2025-05-12 15:49:19+00:00
Not a physicist, but I see it this way too. My understanding of Boltzmann brains is that they are a theoretical consequence of infinite time and space in a universe with random quantum fluctuations. And that those random fluctuations would still be present in an otherwise empty universe. So then this article has no bearing on the Boltzmann brain thought experiment or its ramifications.
by taurath | 2025-05-12 15:49:19+00:00
I leetcode until my eyes bleed and I can't think anymore. I forget almost everything I know about building software and instead focus on memorizing tricks and optimizations and processes for solving leetcode algorithm questions. In my last interview, in an automated screener, they had 7 leetcode easy+mediums in 10 minutes each, with zero partial credit, only final tests passing. That's what companies want now, so that's what I have to deliver - I don't have a fucking choice.

I look over system designs, try to understand what the core aspect is. For the most part I tend to pass those without as much of a problem.

Nothing works best, but doing this has gotten me further than actually practicing and writing code. I have 8 YoE, took a career break on short term disability for burnout/early childhood horrors that I needed to deal with. Its 2 years later, I'm able to code again and am picking up things much faster than ever, but I'm about to lose my apartment and move into a friends basement because a career break is, apparently, career suicide right now, and even contract companies won't even interview me because of the career break. I was getting cold recruited by FAANG before. I just want the opportunity to work so I can have stable housing, and I'm doing everything I can. It gets harder and harder to practice. I consider whether my career was a sham all along often. I don't really care that this is venting, there's nobody to talk to about it.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-12 15:49:23+00:00
> There are so many obvious counter examples you should be ashamed of yourself. Consider Pratt & Whitney working on geared turbofans for decades, they made that investment privately. Or consider Tesla, they brought the roadster to market purely off private investment. That’s a lot of r&d for things like battery management systems, motors, and power electronics which took years.

Both happened before the redefinition of competence to making the most money in 90 days. This is a relatively recent shift; and while its roots start in the 1950s, its completion has only happened recently, within the last decade or so.
Editing multiple codebases with a single editor in Cursor
by localbuilder | 2025-05-12 15:49:33+00:00
Does anyone else use Cursor to edit multiple codebases using a single editor, and if so how's your experience been? I've been using Cursor to open a director with both a frontend and backend project in it and work on them simultaneously. I've found the context can get lost when it switches between the projects though, and I have to be diligent in adding the files I want to edit to the context window.

Curious if anyone has been using Cursor like this, and if you've found success with it? I think codebase rules could be helpful here, I'll be experimenting with that more.
by n_ary | 2025-05-12 15:49:41+00:00
> They don't understand the problem, and when I point that out by explaining my issue another way they just answer "Have I solved your issue?". Well, no, you didn't; you didn't even understand the problem.

This is a real thing. I had similar experience with Discord support. They closed me ticket or sent me to weird chases(restart app, reinstall app, format your phone!, upgrade to latest os version, try a different phone!, update your appstore!, change mobile operator etc). It was insane and in the end, I said I don’t care and will uninstall discord. Then I get a small reply to the ticket, did we solve your problem? If so, we can close this ticket.

And no, I was not doing vague descriptions, I literally sent screen recordings of exact steps to reproduce the issue.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-12 15:49:52+00:00
I think the focus on 'housing first' at a time when every metro region in California has actively prevented adequate housing construction was always doomed to fail. It is a palpable policy failure that you can witness in every city in California.

California needs a serious approach. Adequate shelter could be deployed in a matter of single-digit months to get everyone off the street. Focus on that tangible win. It should be clear that the public commons will never, ever be up for grabs again.

At the same time, we need a ruthless crackdown on the metro regions that thumb their nose at the state's housing needs. The state should pass a 'shall issue' rule for new permits which stipulate that if state-level requirements are met, permits are automatically granted. Combine this with a severe paring-down of California Environmental Quality Act rules and a de-fanging of the California Coastal Commission. If we're not pushing every NIMBY in the state into a clinical depression, we're not trying hard enough.
by ryukoposting | 2025-05-12 15:49:57+00:00
In the industry, we called "normal" barcodes "2D," and stuff like QR and Aztec were called "3D" barcodes. Think of the "Z" axis as the coloration of a given point.

In all barcodes I'm aware of, that Z axis only has one bit of resolution (i.e. black or white, 1 or 0). If you had an encoding with more colors, you'd be increasing the resolution of that axis, but you wouldn't be adding a new axis per se.

Honestly, I also think 1D/2D would make more sense. But, 2D/3D is the nomenclature I saw being used among industry professionals on both the marketing and engineering sides.
by throwanem | 2025-05-12 15:50:07+00:00
Oh, I see what you mean. The option is surfaced where a page has "enough" text according to Readability's heuristic. Where absent, it wouldn't be able to do anything useful anyway. (It is doing something a lot more sophisticated than just document.write(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('')).map(({ innerText }) => `<p>${innerText}</p>`).join()).)

I can't really speak to the details of that heuristic this decade, but I believe an early version of Mozilla's reader-mode implementation (maybe also the basis for others) still to be available on Github under the name "Readability.js", which should provide a suitable reference implementation for further review. (This is also why I keep calling it "Readability;" that was the name it wore when we met.) I assume a current version is also available in the Firefox source.

iOS Safari's implementation is always available, even when the "Show Reader" menu option is grayed out, the equivalent of Firefox hiding the button: long-press the "aA" context-menu icon in the URL bar. But if the page can't be rendered usefully in reader mode, all that will happen is the regular haptic to tell you the system recognized your input.
by podgietaru | 2025-05-12 15:51:10+00:00
I built an rss aggregator with semantic search using embeddings. The main usage was being able to categorise based on any randomly created category. So you could have arbitrary categories

https://github.com/aws-samples/rss-aggregator-using-cohere-e...

Unfortunately I no longer work at AWS so the infrastructure that was running it is down.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-12 15:51:18+00:00
Windows' Bluetooth stack is an absolute dumpster fire. They trashed the perfectly good BT stack from windows 7 and apparently had an unpaid intern write the replacement.

My day job is building widgets that connect to a windows PC over Bluetooth. The situation is so bad that we're building a dedicated RF adapter so we can have a sane stack under our control.

If your program is scanning for a particular device in the background, that device will never show up in the windows BT pairing menu. I can't even imagine how that happens. Many API calls do nothing or return garbage, many BT features are just not exposed at all, despite windows clearly having that data internally.

W10 never even had BT audio sink. You could not play audio from a remote device to your PC. W7 had it and I think W11 finally got it a few years back. Linux has always had it.

Windows' Bluetooth stack is no contest the worst available on the market. It's astonishing how poor quality Microsoft products are these days.
by usrbinenv | 2025-05-12 15:51:23+00:00
I disagree. I've also been working with Ruby for almost 20 years and quite a few times I came across a situation where I definitely wanted to wrap my library in a module for name-spacing and it was almost always cumbersome. I'd rather not wrap it and let others (or myself) use the library name-spaced under whatever name they choose. Right now, if you're working on a gem, you have to think really hard how to name it so its top-level classes an modules don't conflict with any other modules and classes found in the Ruby ecosystem.
by tyho | 2025-05-12 15:51:31+00:00
> The 2D map analogy was a nice stepping stone for building intuition but now we need to cast it aside, because embeddings operate in hundreds or thousands of dimensions. It’s impossible for us lowly 3-dimensional creatures to visualize what “distance” looks like in 1000 dimensions. Also, we don’t know what each dimension represents, hence the section heading “Very weird multi-dimensional space”.5 One dimension might represent something close to color. The king - man + woman ≈ queen anecdote suggests that these models contain a dimension with some notion of gender. And so on. Well Dude, we just don’t know.

nit. This suggests that the model contains a direction with some notion of gender, not a dimension. Direction and dimension appear to be inextricably linked by definition, but with some handwavy maths, you find that the number of nearly orthogonal dimensions within n dimensional space is exponential with regards to n. This helps explain why spaces on the order of 1k dimensions can "fit" billions of concepts.