MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martinald | 2025-05-01 12:55:51+00:00
This isn't quite correct. It is more like this

- They had too much power being generated ( largely solar ).

- Their system handles too much power by turning off fossil fuel generators.

- Cloud coverage/HV line failure/something else happens, causing a drop in output from those solar plants

- Because you have turned off the fossil fuel generators, you cannot compensate for this quickly enough. There is not enough inertia in the system and no ability to ramp up power to compensate quickly enough

So it's not a system that cannot handle too much power, it is a fragile system that struggles when there is 'too much power' to recover from outages of that.

What should have happened solar was disconnected by the grid before CCGT when there is 'too much power'. Instead they ramped down CCGT and kept the solar, leading to a very fragile state.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-01 12:56:10+00:00
Yeah the Outlook search function is... exotic.

It's so annoying when I KNOW I sent an email to someone a year ago and I put TO: Their name and it still doesn't come up.

Also: Smart folders still don't exist (e.g. a folder that automatically lists every email with a flag on it or some other condition). At least not in the "New Outlook" which we have to use at work. Apple had this back in 2007.

Same with OneNote by the way and the web version can't even search in whole notebooks, just single folders.
by thechao | 2025-05-01 12:56:17+00:00
Millions of rows in minutes sounds not ok, unless your tables have a large number of columns. A good rule is that SQLite's insertion performance should be at least 1% of sustained max write bandwidth of your disk; preferably 5%, or more. The last bulk table insert I was seeing 20%+ sustained; that came to ~900k inserts/second for an 8 column INT table (small integers).
by _7acn | 2025-05-01 12:56:26+00:00
I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work.

It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual).

I've been working within the Microsoft tech stack for around 25 years now (mostly SQL Server). I used to be a huge fan of their products because they were one of the best companies when it came to developer experience (developers! developers!). Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Things are very different now. Of all the things I once liked, only SQL Server really remains (ironically, it's a technology they acquired - it used to be Sybase). I still think C#, F#, and PowerShell are great, but I actively discourage people from using most of their so-called "products" because the quality is just appallingly low.

Even something like Visual Studio is better replaced with Rider + LINQPad. Their GitHub repositories are full of open issues that have been dragging on for years. There's virtually nothing left of the old Microsoft that I still respect or admire.

That said, I have to admit that most other corporations aren't any better - there's a general trend of maximizing profit while offering the lowest quality that customers are still willing to tolerate. If I were starting IT studies today, I would go 100% down the open-source path.
by RegW | 2025-05-01 12:56:53+00:00
No. No. No.

Microsoft need to update the spec for all new personal computers to include mandatory pre-load hardware. This would have a secondary CPU, RAM and storage used for pre-loading licensed Office products before your laptop boots. AI would analyse your usage patterns and fire-up Office for you before you even get to work in the morning.

Perhaps, this could even allow you to have Office on-hand, ready-to-use on its own hardware module, while you develop Linux application on your main CPU.

Further down the line. Someone see an opportunity to provide access to compatible modules in the cloud, allowing re-use of older incompatible hardware. But there would be the danger that service (without the support of MS), may go bust, leaving those users without their mandatory instant access to licensed Office products, forcing upgrades to even newer hardware.
by bambax | 2025-05-01 12:57:06+00:00
From your linked comment:

> The scenario of "I just sent you an xlsx where the rows highlighted in red are problems and if you can just add your notes to column K, that would be great. Thanks!" -- is not easy in other tools that are not spreadsheets.

There are no words to tell how much I hate that!!! ;-) Users are too creative. Some will merge some cells and not others and boom the file can't be properly sorted anymore. Many will use font color, font weight or background color to mean wildly different things, which is very difficult or impossible to sort or do a sumif over. Others will add footnotes, because why not?, and links to spreadsheets that never leave their own device, or mini-blank-rows for spacing and general layout, etc. It's completely insane.
by jeltz | 2025-05-01 12:57:17+00:00
But is it actually faster by any significant amount on your workload? Did you benchmark? Temporary tables in databases rarely actually do disk IO in any blocking code path but mostly just dirty buffers in the OS or in the database itself and then something writes it to disk in the background. This limits throughput but does not add much extra latency in the common cases.

Edit: It still might be a bad idea to waste the IO if you do not have to but the latency of a temporary table is usually RAM latency, not disk latency even for temporary tables on disk.
by sumtechguy | 2025-05-01 12:57:27+00:00
When I first switched to the front load washer I started getting a terrible smell pretty quickly.

How I got rid of it.

1) do not use liquid detergents. powder only. My working theory is the medium used to make it gooey was sticking and giving the mold a good medium to live in.

2) do not use liquid fabric softeners. see #1. I use a fabric sheet on drying.

3) clean cycle once a month

4) washer tablet in with the wash clean cycle, I alternate with bleach every other month.

5) leave the door open between washes

6) drain out the water from the 'pigtail' once every 6 months, or whatever the documentation recommends. It is not just for when you move it. It is meant for the next step.

7) clean out the lint trap. Many have this just before the drain out and before the pump. That thing can get really gunked up. especially with liquid detergents/softners. I use the same schedule as the drain out.

#1 and #2 were the main sources for me. Took about 2-3 weeks before the smell was gone.

For my samsung I would say about a 1/4 gallon is left in the hoses.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-01 12:58:05+00:00
Same (perceived) reason my bank and brokerages (and I think even my kid's school website does this) pop up a warning every time I click on a link that will take them outside their website.

I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".
by bdavisx | 2025-05-01 12:58:08+00:00
>If you ask a US citizen who to blame for this trade war, it'll be trump.

Not the MAGA/Fox News Watcher, they simply don't live in reality.

Luckily the "swing" voters aren't that dumb, they will realize they fucked up voting for Trump and he's to blame even if they won't admit it.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-01 12:58:18+00:00
Great thank you. Side topic : anyone knows a way to have a centralized proxy to all LLMs services, online or local, that lets our services connect to it and we manage access to LLMs only once there ? And also records calls to LLM. Would make the whole UX of switching LLMs weekly easier, we would only reconfigure the proxy. I know only LiteLLM that can do that but its record of all LLMs calls is a bit clunky to use properly
by conductr | 2025-05-01 12:58:46+00:00
If Google is forced to stop the funding of competitors, I don’t quite understand why they also have to exit the market/stop working on Chromium/Chrome?

There’s the leveling of the playing field, each competitor has to fund their own products, but then why also do they have to be kicked out of the game?

I feel like consumers should ultimately make the decision of who wins and has the better product. The fact Google has found the best way to get value out of “free” browser use, shouldn’t be held against them. If consumers choose to use a browser that’s highly connected to Googles paid services, then perhaps that’s what the consumer wants. I view it as the other competitors job to lure those customers away from Chrome with their own product enhancements.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-01 13:00:13+00:00
Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.

OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.

Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)

There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
by alias_neo | 2025-05-01 13:00:44+00:00
A lot of the time, it's underlying libraries and tools that are updated to fix bugs, security vulnerabilities or just because they got a new version. In the case of binaries (the thing you download as an end user; compiled code), even the smallest 1 character change in the source code, can mean you have to download the entire binary again, whether it's a 5kB binary, or a 1GB one. There are patching techniques that can work around this but they're rarely used at a binary level and usually at a "package" or "archive" level.

For performance, it's a harder one to answer, because there are potentially many reasons, I have my opinions as a Software Engineer myself, but others will have different opinions. Ultimately, software moves "forward", which can mean more code, more features, more bug fixes (and thus safety checks etc) and potentially worse performance, although _better_ performance is also possible with optimisations.

That said, as hardware advances, it enables writing more powerful software with more features, which then become more of a struggle for older hardware to run.

From a device manufacturer perspective; they want to sell you new devices, so there's little incentive for them (in my opinion) in spending developer time on trying to optimise new code for older devices.
by stubish | 2025-05-01 13:01:28+00:00
It depends on the climate, and I think the smell you are talking about is more likely mold or mildew. In the tropics I found anything left wet for more than an hour needed to be rewashed, as it was already smelling. In colder and drier climates it is much more forgiving (but we still leave lids and doors open to allow the machine to properly dry).
by jordanb | 2025-05-01 13:01:36+00:00
The upside is that executives are cowards (also there's no way in hell I'm going to prison for my employer and most people I know feel the same) so even one high profile successful prosecution will have enormous deterrance effect.

There is this despondent feeling among most people that the law no longer applies to the powerful and we watch the behave with ever more brazenness. The saving grace is the amount of pushback needed to put them back in line is very small. Once they see any consequences for their actions they will fall in line.
by namaria | 2025-05-01 13:01:44+00:00
> LLM's build an internal representation that let's them efficiently and mostly successfully manipulate source code.

No, see, this is the problem right here. Everything in this discussion hinges on LLMs behavior. While they are capable of rendering text that looks like it was produced by reasoning from the input, they also often are incapable of that.

LLMs can be used by people who reason about the input and output. If and only if someone can show that LLMs can, without human intervention, go from natural language description to fully looping through the process and building and maintaining the code, that argument could be made.

The "LLM-as-AI" hinges entirely on their propensity to degenerate into nonsensical output being worked out. As long as that remains, LLMs will stay firmly in the camp of being usable to transform some inputs into outputs under supervision and that is no evidence of ability to reason. So the whole conversation devolves into people pointing out that they still descent into nonsense if left to their own devices, and the "LLM-as-AI" people saying "but when they don't..." as if it can be taken for granted that it is at all possible to get there.

Until that happens, using LLMs to generate code will remain a gimmick for using natural language to search for common patterns in popular programming languages.
by gymbeaux | 2025-05-01 13:02:05+00:00
Do you know how it compares to Dolphin for interacting with very large (100k+ files) directories? Dolphin is the only file manager I’ve found that keeps up with the large directories- GNOME (Nautilus) and Windows Explorer are dogshit slow, even after the file list populates. macOS Finder is somewhere in the middle but still very slow.
by HPsquared | 2025-05-01 13:03:30+00:00
I'm lucky enough in terms of layout that I can leave the door wide open AND the detergent drawer open when it's not in use. That allows a kind of "fresh air circulation" between the drawer and the door. That ventilates the whole system. I don't get any smells. I use powder detergent, no cleaning cycles except the occasional wash at 90 Celsius. This is a UK machine though, US may be different.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-01 13:03:42+00:00
The US does have a rich history of labor movements and it's sad that they've been diminished - arguably because of perceived and actual corruption in living memory - while working conditions for many haven't really improved.

In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved.

However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in.

I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old.

What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out.

It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
by sega_sai | 2025-05-01 13:03:47+00:00
For every sort of measurement, or constraint derived from data, you have uncertainties related to random noise (either related to do measurement error, or sampling error caused by finite number of objects in your sample). But you also have systematic errors, for example, if your measurements are biased in some way.

For supernovae, we know that the galaxies in which they explode are different in different redshifts, so it is possible there are effects that make supernovae brighter or fainter in different redshifts that have nothing to do with dark energy, but instead are related to chemical composition of stars. This is an example of systematic effect that can affect any cosmological measurement using supernovae. People try to control for those, but at the moment the uncertainty on cosmological parameters from SN is dominated not by random component of the error (i.e. related to number of SN), but the systematics and our ability to constrain them.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-05-01 13:03:48+00:00
This may not count as practical, but with high-enough resolution on time we can start to make direct observations of relativistic effects. There are physicists like Ivette Fuentes starting to do direct experiments with time dilation [1].

When Einstein made his thought experiments with light clocks and described what should be observed, he didn't think we'd actually make light clocks... but we have the technology to do that literally (really, truly, actually... so sad we no longer have a word in English that means that).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5V9qAETcw8
by munksbeer | 2025-05-01 13:04:01+00:00
Flossing my teeth. I can't remember where I read it, possibly on here, or reddit, but a post suggested a good way to get started.

I set my goal to floss one tooth a day. And the trigger for it was always before I could brush my teeth I need to complete that one goal, and then give myself a big smile and raise my arms in triumph. And then I could brush my teeth.

I did that for a few days and found that it was quite easy to stick to. I then started flossing a few more teeth, until I was doing them all. That was six years ago, and to this day I floss every night. Sometimes I'm very tired, but my goal remains the same, floss one tooth, so some nights I just floss one tooth, but most of the time I do them all.
by acdha | 2025-05-01 13:04:19+00:00
Signal’s encryption algorithm is fine. The problem is the environment in which it runs: a consumer device connected to the general internet (and it’s hard to believe that someone who does this installs patches promptly). He’s one zero day or unwise click away from an adversary getting access to those messages and potentially being able to send them. Signal’s disappearing message feature at least helps with the former risk but runs afoul of government records laws.

The reason why the policies restrict access to government systems isn’t because anyone thinks that those systems are magically immune to security bugs, but that there are entire teams of actually-qualified professionals monitoring them and proactively securing them. His phone is at risk to, say, a dodgy SMS/MMS message sent by anyone in the world who can get his number, potentially not needing more than a commercial spyware license, but his classified computer on a secure network can’t even receive traffic from them, has locked down configuration, and is monitored so a compromise would be detected a lot faster.

That larger context is what really matters. What they’re doing is like the owner of a bank giving his drunken golf buddy the job of running the business, and the first thing he does is start storing the ledger in his car because it’s more convenient. Even if he’s totally innocent and trying to do a good job, it’s just so much extra risk he’s not prepared to handle for no benefit to anyone else.
by raincole | 2025-05-01 13:04:50+00:00
> Perhaps with 80% of their funding gone, Firefox will be forced to stop wasting money on all those harebrained non browser initiatives and concentrate on ... the Firefox browser.

Why the hell would they?

Mozilla does all the "harebrained" stuff to make money. Especially to diversify their income and rely on Google less. Developing Firefox is a net loss of money.
by bsrkf | 2025-05-01 13:05:12+00:00
Hope this doesn't come off as disrespectful, as in that I don't believe you, but out of personal interest, would you consider expanding on that? I'd love to hear about the particular example you were thinking of, or in what ways self-taught coders surprised you over academically-taught ones, if you've had experience working with both over a meaningful span of time. Also, if the case, in what ways self-taught coders were/are maybe lacking on average.

If you've ever given answers to that in another comments on HN or elsewhere, feel free to link.
by mnholt | 2025-05-01 13:05:39+00:00
I’ve been looking for this for my team but haven’t found it. Providers like OpenAI and Anthropic offer admin token to manage team accounts and you look hook into Ollama or another self managed service for local AI.

Seems like a great way to roll out AI to a medium sized team where a very small team can coordinate access to the best available tools so the entire team doesn’t need to keep pace at the current break-neck speed.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-01 13:05:49+00:00
And we have laws that say that the government cannot make obviously stupid decisions in a lot of domains. For example, a number of challenges to DOGE's activities have been under the Administrative Procedure Act, which limits how the government is able to make changes to regulation and staffing.

The mechanism that Trump is using to deny funding for the universities he hates is through statute. Courts can conclude that this action does not match the statute.

> I don't particularly like what he's been doing in his second term so far but in online discourse I've seen this worrying trend recently where people think that unelected bureaucrats who were hired because other unelected bureaucrats liked their resumes should be able to hamstring the president and overrule him

I'm very sorry, but this is the law. This is not just vibes. If you do not like this, then advocate for changing the law. But you are doing the precise thing that you are insisting that others are doing here.
by bambax | 2025-05-01 13:05:52+00:00
> If it takes a long time to copy a database and it gets updated midway through, rsync may give me an invalid database file. The first half of the file is pre-update, the second half file is post-update, and they don’t match. When I try to open the database locally, I get an error

Of course! You can't copy the file of a running, active db receiving updates, that can only result in corruption.

For replicating sqlite databases safely there is

https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-01 13:07:12+00:00
To you and me, sure. On the other hand, I wonder if is intended to scare people who like and want the safety of the apple ecosystem and perceive everything as outside of it as dark web. Come to think of it, that is kinda how I see dark web.. is there a scarier place on line than that?
by crazygringo | 2025-05-01 13:07:24+00:00
Oof. I wonder what makes it so bad?

In my experience LLM's tend to be pretty good at basic logic as long as they understand the domain well enough.

I mean, it even gets it right at first -- "This lowers the average temperature over the 2 minutes, so less heat is lost to the air." -- but then it seems to get conceptually confused about heat loss vs cooling, which is surprising.
by altcognito | 2025-05-01 13:08:33+00:00
UVB kills covid, and sunlight is a pretty good disinfectant in general.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/2/214/5841129?login...

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/study-reveals-ultravio...

I think the idea that sunlight doesn't breakdown the virus comes from people trying to "cure" cases of covid-19 with sunshine, which yeah, that's not going ot work.