MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ljf | 2025-05-23 10:21:22+00:00
Isn't it more 'let's store this surplus' - then 'oh man it looks and smells different now but somehow better'.

For example cheese was likely discovered when people tried transporting milk in water carrying bags made from sheep stomachs. While carrying water in them would be fine, putting milk in there for a couple of unrefrigerated days would lead to cheese from the rennet in sheep's stomach that would stay on in the vessel, even after it has been cleaned and even dried.

Same with wine - let's store some fruit juices - it is pretty hard NOT to make wine unless you know about pasteurisation, and even if you do boil it, there are so many natural yeasts just ready to make wine.

Grains that get wet actively want to produce beer :)

Wholemeal flour is chock full of wild yeasts, and wants to become a sourdough starter if you just give it a little water and time.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-23 10:23:40+00:00
Semaphores are woefully too low-level mechanisms of synchronization; you have to be Dijkstra to always use them correctly. Most programmers aren't; Dijkstra's solution to that was "poor mathematicians should stay pure mathematicians", and he lamented that "the computer science current goal seems to be 'how to help programmers write programs even if they can't actually program'" (paraphrased). Well, guess what: he was wrong. Empirically.

And I know the quote's context, thank you. You may too if you want to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11799963 . So I guess I'll follow his lead: Dijkstra may have very good ideas about some technical particulars but his opinions on how programming as a discipline should be approached was simply wrong, and we can and should ignore them.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-23 10:25:03+00:00
The same as for the wood turbine.

It also matters before asking the question of batteries how much turbines it's going to take before the problem actually needs to be tackled

The problem doesn't arise immediately in the duck curve. It depends on how much of the energy mix of the place is composed of controllable sources alongside your wind and solar

I recall seeing that the need for batteries is tiny if you accept a 10% share of carbon emitting energy across the year - so all in all, another non-problem, or at least first you should focus on building the turbines to reach the problem, then think of whether or not it's worth getting batteries for the rest.
by ownagefool | 2025-05-23 10:26:12+00:00
> I have been working in the industry for more than 25 years...

I mean sure, but that's not evidence of best practice with any sort of rigor around measurable outcomes.

> Do not forget the second part of the sentence in my comment.

I think the problem we have here is you're acting like my suggestion that there's other successful ways to run a team somehow detracts from your own success. It's worrying that you've jumped to viciously defending your position by suggesting I'm essentially shit before the conversation really started.

Talk about toxic, eh?

Here's another nugget. Learn to deal with dissenting opinions in a more thoughtful and amicable way and perhaps you might not need to spend so much time "aligning" people.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-23 10:27:51+00:00
WTF….

> Dardaris had entrusted her pooches to the care of a dog-sitter, who was Tang’s then-girlfriend, in the fall of 2019 while she acted in a play in South Carolina, she previously told The Post.

> Tang snuck into his girlfriend’s apartment when she wasn’t home and viciously tortured Dardaris’s white-furred companions Oct. 24, 2019.

> After fatally beating Alex, Tang was accused of taking Frankie to the building’s rooftop and punching, throwing and kicking him.

And he served no jail time and just got a slap on the wrist. Completely insane behavior, who does that?
by testthetest | 2025-05-23 10:30:15+00:00
Maybe counterintuitively, most big tech companies have no dedicated QA & tester roles, rather, they encourage engineers to think about software quality while developing product.

See the book "How Google tests software" (by James A. Whittaker, 2012) and the Pragmatic Engineer blog has a good post on how big tech does QA: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/qa-across-tech
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-23 10:30:39+00:00
> Zapped with controlled electrical jolts from a potentiostat—a shoebox-size lab instrument costing only around US $10,000, compared to several hundred thousand dollars for a high-end analytical mass spectrometer—the different ferrocenes lit up at their characteristic voltages, generating a distinct signal for each step in the chain.

> In the study, the process of degradation, sampling, and electrochemical analysis of each 11-character polymer strand took around 2.5 hours. According to Anslyn, his team has since optimized the protocol to “make it faster”—but speed isn’t really the point of chemical data memory, when compared to today’s instant digital storage technologies.

Nobody will be storing passwords with this until it's immediate and almost free.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-23 10:30:42+00:00
I think this is modern Nordic engineering in a nutshell: Some of the smartest people you can find working on some of the dumbest projects you can think of.

For any of you wondering why would anybody do this, the full explanation is in the site footer: "This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 959151."
by goodluckchuck | 2025-05-23 10:31:21+00:00
I would read the constitution and come to terms with the fact that the executive authority is vested in a president. It’s not quite a king, because it’s not passed down by inheritance and they can’t enact laws by fiat… but the president is supremely powerful during their term.

And that’s good. There’s no denying that the executive branch (its agencies, officers, regulators, etc) is supremely powerful. The only question is whether the public have any democratic control over the exercise of that authority.
by viraptor | 2025-05-23 10:32:12+00:00
We won't know without an official answer leaking, but a simple answer could be - people spend too much time trying to analyse those without understanding the details. There was a lot of talk on HN about the thinking steps second guessing and contradicting itself. But in practice that step is both trained by explicitly injecting the "however", "but" and similar words and they do more processing than simply interpreting the thinking part as text we read. If the content is commonly misunderstood, why show it?
by cwsx | 2025-05-23 10:33:20+00:00
I've been using `claude-4-sonnet` for the last few hours - haven't been able to test `opus` yet as it's still overloaded - but I have noticed a massive improvement so far.

I spent most of yesterday working on a tricky refactor (in a large codebase), rotating through `3.7/3.5/gemini/deepseek`, and barely making progress. I want to say I was running into context issues (even with very targeted prompts) but 3.7 loves a good rabbit-hole, so maybe it was that.

I also added a new "ticketing" system (via rules) to help it's task-specific memory, which I didn't really get to test it with 3.7 (before 4.0 came out), so unsure how much of an impact this has.

Using 4.0, the rest of this refactor (est. 4~ hrs w/ 3.7) took `sonnet-4.0` 45 minutes, including updating all of the documentation and tests (which normally with 3.7 requires multiple additional prompts, despite it being outlined in my rules files).

The biggest differences I've noticed:

- much more accurate/consistent; it actually finishes tasks rather than telling me it's done (and nothing working) - less likely to get stuck in a rabbit hole - stopped getting stuck when unable to fix something (and trying the same 3 solutions over-and-over) - runs for MUCH longer without my intervention - when using 3.7: - had to prompt once every few minutes, 5 - 10mins MAX if the task was straight forward enough - had to cancel the output in 1/4 prompts as it'd get stuck in the same thought-loops - needed to restore from a previous checkpoint every few chats/conversations - with 4.0: - ive had 4 hours of basically one-shotting everything - prompts run for 10 mins MIN, and the output actually works - is remembering to run tests, fix errors, update docs etc

Obviously this is purely anecdotal - and, considering the temperament of LLMS, maybe I've just been lucky and will be back to cursing at it tomorrow, but imo this is the best feeling model since 3.5 released.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-23 10:33:31+00:00
> The article handwaves over why the chip wasn't a success, which makes my first thought of "how much did each chip cost" all the more relevant.

That's being polite. Attributing the chip's failure to AT&T buying NCR is ridiculous; that happened in 1991.

Here's a rundown of what actually happened:

* After the divestiture, AT&T from 1984 is finally allowed to build and sell computers. (This is also why Unix was not a commercial product from AT&T until then.) Everyone, in and outside AT&T, thinks Ma Bell is immediately going to be an IBM-level player, armed with Bell Labs research and Western Electric engineering. One of many, many such articles that conveys what everyone then expects/anticipates/fears: <https://archive.org/details/microsystems_84_06/page/n121/mod...> If there is anyone that can turn Unix into the robust mainstream operating system (a real market opportunity, given that IBM is still playing with the toy DOS, and DEC and other minicomputer companies are still in denial about the PC's potential), it's AT&T.

* AT&T immediately rolls out a series of superminicomputers (the 3B series) based on existing products Western Digital has made for years for AT&T use (and using the Bellmarc CPU) and, at at the lower end, the 6300 (Olivetti-built PC clone) and UNIX PC (Convergent-built Unix workstation). All are gigantic duds because, despite superb engineering and field-tested products, AT&T has never had to compete with anyone to sell anything before.

* After further fumbling, AT&T buys NCR to jumpstart itself into the industry. It gives up five years later and NCR becomes independent again.

* The end.

>This is such an uplifting story until you think about how the 8086 is just about to wipe it off of the map.

People today have this idea that Intel was this dominant semiconductor company in the 1980s, and that's why IBM chose it as the CPU supplier for the PC. Not at all. Intel was then no more than one of many competing vendors, with nothing in particular differentiating it from Motorola, Zilog, MOS, Western Digital, Fairchild, etc.

The 8088's chief virtue was that it was readily available at a reasonable price; had the PC launched a little later IBM probably would have gone with the 68000, which Intel engineers agreed with everyone else was far superior to the 8086/8088 and 80286. Binary compatibility with them was not even in the initial plan for the 80386, so loathed by everyone (including, again, Intel's own people) was their segmented memory model (and things like the broken A20 line); only during its design, as the PC installed base grew like crazy, did Intel realize that customers wanted to keep running their software. That's why 80386 supports both segmented memory (for backward compatibility with the virtual 8086) and flat. And that flat memory model wasn't put in for OS/2, or Windows NT; it was put in for Unix.
by tylervigen | 2025-05-23 10:36:01+00:00
The explanation is phenomenal. I particularly like the elevation heat map, which helps me intuitively grasp what is going on.

This raises a question for me though: why do we show the tidal bulge graphic in any educational context? Like OP, the "far bulge" was always the most surprising and difficult-to-grasp part of the image. But this explanation would indicate that the far bulge is almost totally pointless as a concept, given the complexities of the system. Given it's the least intuitive part of the image, it invites additional consideration. But it's all the wrong consideration!

The model would be more useful if it only showed the bulge on the moon side, and excluded the far side bulge. It would still be wildly imprecise, kind of like the orbital model of atoms is wildly imprecise, but at least it would be a slightly more accurate (and useful) initial mental model.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-23 10:36:10+00:00
That is hysterical. You know that salaries for most universities are public in Germany? You can just look up your ridiculous lies.

https://vertretungen.hu-berlin.de/de/personalrat/tarif

The highest possible salary anyone in the university gets is 96k Euros. That is 64k Euros a year after taxes.
by mgkimsal | 2025-05-23 10:36:20+00:00
> What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't?

Going in to huge detail about it, not much, really.

A quick "hey, hit an issue yesterday with ABC, Kris helped me out - thanks Kris!" does a few things.

It reminds everyone we all might need to ask for help now and then.

Gives a bit of public recognition to Kris who might not otherwise get it.

Also lets people know Kris (and now you) know a bit more about issue ABC in case they might have a similar issue.

When I hit weird snags, they're not always things I'd detail out in a ticket, especially if unrelated to the specifics of the ticket. "Add links to help documents" as a ticket doesn't benefit much from me documenting out that I hit some weird issue because the security team didn't add accounts to a new policy group, meaning my emails to the accounting team were bouncing. "Kris confirmed it was an issue for her as well, and reached out to Kevin's group to let him know, and we got things resolved yesterday". Yeah, you could add that to a ticket, but feels useful to mention that in a status meeting. Larger discussion about the process behind those changes or scheduling impact should be taken offline outside the meeting.

"...should be set to Blocked..." do you do that the moment you aren't making forward progress on something? It's something I wouldn't typically do until after some amount of time understanding why I wasn't making progress, and trying to 'unblock' things first within a short period. Days of unblocking attempts without raising a flag are generally not good, but 3 minutes of 'being stuck' before pinging others is also not great imo.
by throw_nbvc1234 | 2025-05-23 10:36:51+00:00
This sounds like a problem that could be solved around the corner with a caveat.

Games generally are solvable for AI because they have feedback loops and a clear success or failure criteria. If the "picking up a Joystick" part is the limiting factor, sure. But why would we want robots to use an interface (especially a modern controller) heavily optimized for human hands; that seems like the definition of a horseless carriage.

I'm sure if you compared a monkey and a dolphins performance using a joystick you'd get results that aren't really correlated with their intelligence. I would guess that if you gave robots an R2D2 like port to jack into and play a game, that problem could be solved relatively quickly.
by jyounker | 2025-05-23 10:37:32+00:00
I don't think you'd get the same sort of effects, because a huge part of the mitochondrial regulation and function is carried out by genes and gene products from outside the mitochondria.

It would be an interesting experiment though. I'd expect that they might not live, or that the cell would function sub-optimally, but who knows, maybe the cellular machinery is highly conserved.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-23 10:38:51+00:00
In high school, 17 years ago, I wrote a DBQ (document based question essay) for an AP test about why pennies were a huge waste to the economy. Both in cost to some, keep in circulation, and just dealing with for businesses/consumers.

It’s past time we did away with the penny and honestly the nickel shouldn’t be too far behind. Really anything less than a quarter seems like more trouble than it’s worth at this point. I would never carry change though, I barely carry cash as-is.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-23 10:39:04+00:00
"Uneven electricity output"?

The variation on output is over a matter of hours (wind powerful enough to spin entire wind farms is not something that comes one second and is gone the next), and large grids with import and export capabilities are largely self-regulating.

Cost fluctuations in the electricity market regulate whether e.g., power storage sites will charge or dump power, whether district heating plants will source more heat from giant electric kettles, when EVs will start to charge, when private smart water heaters will preheat, when people decide to schedule washing machines and dishwasher, whether offline fossil fuel power plants will be fired up to sell as the rate becomes more lucrative or shut down as power becomes too cheap, whether any "idle" plants will throttle up or down, and whether windmills will engage brakes and turn away from the wind or release brakes and turn into it.

Power grids have also always had the ability to load shed by dropping customers off the grid, starting with factories that have special agreements, in case the combined local production and import is insufficient, and can detatch from neighboring grids and countries if there are import/export issues that could destabilize the grid.

The grid needs to change when supply or load conditions change significantly (e.g., every house in a city suddenly having an EV or heat pump, every house in a city suddenly having solar cells and supplying a ton of power, a power plant or wind farm being built somewhere power has not previously been routed), and can be optimized (e.g., power storage, smart load scheduling), but that is entirely orthogonal to windmills.
by paffdragon | 2025-05-23 10:39:06+00:00
Most of my family was using FB Messenger, but now it's WhatsApp, unfortunately still Meta, and I hate it, but at least it's encrypted and old messages are autodeleted. I couldn't convince them yet to use Signal or Matrix. Signal might work, I used to use it with my brother, but he was the only one, so wasn't really effective. I had hopes that I can move everyone to my own Matrix instance, but that looks unachievable right now. Edit: I forgot to mention calls, if something is very personal (not secret, just personal) we usually make call.
by Attrecomet | 2025-05-23 10:40:43+00:00
Vlaada Chvatil games just tickle something for me. Space Alert is hugely fun, probably best due to the chaos and also the fact that at least we can see the inevitable failure that's coming together, and nobody is the lonely runt, but so is Galaxy Trucker, Dungeon Lords, and as a quick social game, Codenames.
by rhgraysonii | 2025-05-23 10:41:12+00:00
I wrote this up after having written a tutorial on doing this in GenStage around a decade ago, and thought it was interesting to have the two of them side by side to consider. I linked the original in the document linked to here.

Overall, I'm wildly impressed at how this Elixir code held up, and it was a joy to revisit this.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-05-23 10:41:31+00:00
Honestly, having gone through the slides, it's a bit painful to see Carmack "rediscover" stuff I've learned in a reinforcement learning lecture like ten years ago.

But don't get me wrong! Since this is a long-term research endeavor of his, I believe really starting from the basics is good for him and will empower him to bring something new to the table eventually.

I'm surprised though that he "only" came so far as of now. Maybe my slight idolization of Carmack made me kinda of blind to the fact that this kind of research is a mean beast after all and there is a reason that huuuuge research labs dump countless of man-decades into this kind of stuff with no guaranteed breakthroughs.
by chickenbig | 2025-05-23 10:42:04+00:00
> we are far, far away from the massive (hundred of tons) dumps from the previous era

Mass of material dumped is not the same as radioactivity or potential harm caused. It looks as if "de minimis" is the key phrase in the convention, in Annex 1.3 . However the IAEA defines "de minimis" in terms of effective dose to people (10 microSieverts/year) per [1] page 14. So point still stands, some level of radioactivity being discharged to the sea is deemed acceptable by experts. If it can be shown that radioactive materials will leach out of the containers very slowly, can this "de minimis" still be met.

> We may consider opinions of the current generation as reasonable approximations.

So we should be able to vote on it?

> Nowadays the low-and-ever-lowering-LCOE of renewables more and more threatens the very business model underlying the nuclear industry which finds its foundation in a high load factor.

Intermittent generators also suffer from cannibalisation (duck curve and all of that), hence the need for subsidies and/or guaranteed prices.

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_244_web.pd...
by woolion | 2025-05-23 10:42:20+00:00
You OS system theme is dark, so the page uses a dark theme. However, the math is rendered in black... The CSS for MathJAX `mjx-container[data-theme="dark"]` should include to put a white background to avoid this issue. Note that in the upper right of the page, you can force the light version.

That's one reason why I generally rely on the Dark background and Light text extension, as in such cases it's obvious the readability wasn't checked.
by dustingetz | 2025-05-23 10:42:21+00:00
$30M Series A by Tiger in 2018, acq by Fastly in 2022 for undisclosed price, shutdown in 2025. Fastly is a CDN and edge network. Glitch was used by Fastly for “internal training” and “internal sales tools” (kinda?), a far cry from “fullstack application platform in the edge”.

https://blog.glitch.com/post/my-last-day-at-fastly/

https://www.fastly.com/blog/fastly-announces-acquisition-of-...
by jokethrowaway | 2025-05-23 10:44:53+00:00
This is a great first step!

But even if they get something cooler working it would still take 20 years before we see them emerge out of testing (if ever).

I'm still waiting to get supervision with https://ocumetics.com/ and they're stuck doing and redoing tests

They do get acquired every once and then so I suspect they are being stalled with wads of cash so that they don't destroy the eyewear sector
by 9dev | 2025-05-23 10:46:11+00:00
> Some might feel like challenging the silverback

That would be about as smart as challenging an actual silverback. Trump, and his administration by extension, are just past their power zenith right now. They ignore the judicial branch, send people to gulags without fair trial, accept 400 million dollar bribes on live TV, fuck over allies, suppress the press, force universities and schools to align with propaganda, lie openly about about government affairs, prioritise personal acclaim over national security, trash the global economy due to an elementary school level understanding of trade relations… This list could go on for quite a while and would still miss critically dangerous and unprecedented acts.

The democrats can't find a coherent voice; the republicans have been dismantled and are firmly in MAGA control; the people trust random TikTok influencers more than reputable journalists; judges must fear being imprisoned over doing their job; scientists and activists could get detained, deported, or imprisoned at any time and are fleeing the country.

That is the setting. That is what is happening right now. Even on the highest echelons of power, rebelling against this tsunami of corruption, delusion, and destruction is futile. All you get is a demotion, a muzzle, or a sentence. Just look at Marco Rubio; I seriously doubt he believes even a shred of all the bullshit he has to proclaim with a straight face, but he's as trapped in this as the rest of us, whether he's behind his administration or not.