MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by louwrentius | 2025-05-21 08:06:47+00:00
This solar installation is quite large and quite expensive.

There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.

A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.

The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
by skylurk | 2025-05-21 08:06:50+00:00
Hey! Many of us are doing our part by writing revolting software with no chance of addiction ;)

Maybe we need to establish a metric called "disengagement".

It factors in loading times, UX, responsiveness and reliability into a single, hard-to-game number: seconds of time the software stole from your day (lower is better.)

By this standard, good software starts instantly, works for you, avoids sending notifications, etc.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-21 08:07:45+00:00
> it's hard to think of many use cases where this isn't the case

Especially in 2021 (iirc) the lambda and edge function architectures were being pushed hard, so it's understandable they went in this direction at the time. But like with all things, eventually things balance out and you realise most software is still "old fashioned".
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-21 08:08:27+00:00
Please, Kagi doesn't even have 50,000 active members, it's definitely not "rising" to become a serious contender at any sort of market share, it's a micro-project. You just feel it's bigger than that because for some reason all of its 50,000 users post relentlessly about it on HN.
by pyrale | 2025-05-21 08:09:01+00:00
> the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.

Source: trust me bro.

History books are littered with authors trying to explain that their language/culture is superior and the source of their society's success. They _never_ establish a connection besides a few examples like you did, a lot of handwaving, and the fact that their society is currently thriving.
by biorach | 2025-05-21 08:09:41+00:00
(Not the person you were replying to)

You asked a question, they answered in good faith, and now you've dismissed their answer. I would also point out that you're dismissal is actually about a related, but separate issue - you've suddenly started talking about preferred store of value, when your original question was about how to value production.

I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
by nanna | 2025-05-21 08:10:09+00:00
CTAN is the central repository for all TeX packages, it's the natural link to give. If you want to see examples it's as easy as clicking on the relevant package name (eg XCharter) and then click 'Package documentation' which will request the relevant pdf. TeX outputs into PDF so it's the natural medium for demonstrating and documenting things. It's got nothing to do with not 'living in the current century'.
by vincnetas | 2025-05-21 08:10:58+00:00
If you take film maker comparison with game engine from TFA. i would say there is no difference here. As cameras got more and more accessible (paralell to game engine) more and more people started recording videos (making games). This does not mean that we have corresponding increase in oscars distributed. We just got youtube filled with millions of videos like we have steam filled with lots of indie game developers.
by kortilla | 2025-05-21 08:11:02+00:00
Signal isn’t good engineering though, it just happens to be a decent chat app, of which there is a long history. I only use it because some friends are on there.

None of the builds are actually verifiable so all of the security claims are marketing at best and actively harmful at worst. Safety numbers change and nobody ever bothers to verify them. Random people are added by phone number with no verification (signalgate), etc.

Making a messaging app like this is the “make a TODO” of the single user app world. Which ones achieve popularity has zero correlation with engineering skills.
by nemothekid | 2025-05-21 08:11:47+00:00
In other words the """safe""" stable code looks like this:

let mut data = Vec::with_capacity(sz); let mut dst_uninit = data.spare_capacity_mut(); let uninit_src: &[MaybeUninit<T>] = unsafe { transmute(buf) }; dst_uninit.copy_from_slice(uninit_src); unsafe { data.set_len(sz) };
by jampekka | 2025-05-21 08:12:31+00:00
You are probably meaning that as a slur.

In reality Luddites did not oppose technology per-se, but the dramatic worsening of the working conditions in the factories, reduced wages and concentration of the income to the capital holders. These are the same problems that should be addressed contemporarily.

They initially tried to address these by political means. But with that failing they moved to sabotage and violence.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-robots-take-j...
Show HN: Built a collection of prompts website for various AI agents
by skarat | 2025-05-21 08:12:46+00:00
Hey everyone,

I've been working on a little side project – https://llmprompts.xyz/ a website that gathers and categorizes prompts for different AI agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.

As I've been experimenting with AI, I found myself wanting a central place to find good prompts for different tasks, whether it's creative writing, coding help, brainstorming, or generating images. So, I started putting together this collection, hoping it could be a helpful resource for others in the community who are using AI tools. Its completely open source, and heavily vibe coded, so anyone can edit and add their prompts in there. There are still some quirks to the site, so gonna keep working on it in my free time, in the meantime posting it here, feel free to check it out.

Hopefully we can build this out as poeple add their own prompts in there.

https://llmprompts.xyz/
by Nevermark | 2025-05-21 08:12:50+00:00
I am using syntax in a general form to mean patterns.

We are talking about LLMs and the debate seems to be around whether learning about non-verbal concepts through verbal patterns (i.e. syntax that includes all the rules of word use, including constraints reflecting relations between words meaning, but not communication any of that meaning in more direct ways) constitutes semantic understanding or not.

In the end, all the meaning we have is constructed from the patterns our senses relay to us. We construct meaning from those patterns.

I.e. LLMs may or may not “understand” as well or deeply as we do. But what they are doing is in the same direction.
by roflmaostc | 2025-05-21 08:12:52+00:00
I use AwesomeWM on Linux since over ten years.

For example, GIMP works without any issues. And the productivity boost is tremendous, for me it's very hard to work on anything else. I barely encounter programs where it does more harm than use.

Especially having multiple desktops with different names allow me to localize windows so much quicker than looking through a dozens of terminals manually.

Right now, I do have: 1 mail, 2 web, 3 gimp, 4 chat, 5 notes, 6 terminal, 7 ssh cluster
by sph | 2025-05-21 08:14:23+00:00
Not sure why you got downvoted, but Rebol is not a Lisp. It doesn't work because of precedence rules or special rules, but because arguments accumulate until there are enough to eval the previous function in the stack, so you can do stuff like

print tostring 5 + cos pi

Works a bit like a shift/reduce parser, with heavy use of fexprs (blocks in Rebol parlance)

I know you enjoy Lisps, so you might like this toy Rebol evaluator written in Scheme: http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/marshall.html
Ask HN: Pros and cons of offering a self-hosted version of your SaaS?
by DavyCreddy | 2025-05-21 08:14:57+00:00
I'm working on a SaaS product that simplifies credential collection for businesses. I'm debating whether to offer a self-hosted version alongside our cloud offering. For those who've gone this route: what were the biggest advantages and challenges? Did you find it expanded your market or just divided development resources? Any technical considerations that weren't immediately obvious? I'm particularly interested in hearing from founders who started with cloud-only and later added self-hosted options (or vice versa). How did pricing structures evolve? Did maintenance become unmanageable? Appreciate any insights that might help inform this decision.
by ochronus | 2025-05-21 08:15:20+00:00
There's one angle which most of these arguments miss (totally not in the scope of the article, which is fine). A couple of statements I believe are true (based on my and my network's limited experience):

1. Juniors grow. Most of them grow fast, becoming solid mid-levels in 1-1.5y (in the right environment)

2. The industry depends heavily on a wide pool of mid-levels. These are the folks who can produce decent quality solutions, and don't need hand-holding anymore. They are the “velocity” of the team. Engineers tend to spend a few years there, before they might grow into seniors.

3. Seniors will age out.

4. AI doesn't grow (as it is today), it's stuck on the low-junior level mostly. This might change, but currently there are no signs for this.

5. Seniors would need to spend _a lot_ of time fixing AI's output, and course-correcting.

Now, all of this combined: the junior --> senior transition takes say, 5+ years on average (I know, depends). If we move on with the "1/2 senior + AI agents" model, how does a company form a new team? When those seniors move away / retire, who's taking their place? What happens to the velocity of the team without mid-levels now?

If we let this go on for a couple of years before a reckoning of "oh crap" happens, it'll be very hard to come back from this --> certain "muscles" of the aforementioned seniors will have atrophied (e.g. mentoring, growing others), a lot of juniors (and mediors!) will have left the industry.

I hope companies will recognize this risk in time...
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-21 08:16:46+00:00
> Eg I tried saying in English “I don’t understand” (even though I know how to say that in Spanish) and it responded in Spanish which may be hard for absolute beginners.

I tried to use ChatGPT as a "live" translator with my in laws and I noticed it is extremely bad at language "consistency" or at understanding your intent when it comes to multiple languages.

It will sometimes respond in English when you talk to it in the foreign language, it will sometimes assume that a clear instruction like "repeat the last sentence" needs to be translated, etc.

I don't know how the person above is approaching the problem but your experience is consistent with mine and I don't think GenAI models (at least OpenAI ones) are suitable for the task.
by woolion | 2025-05-21 08:16:58+00:00
This is the real problem with AI: it generates plausible-sounding slop in absurd quantity, for which verification is very expensive.

Beyond that, it would interesting to check how wrong the AI version is compared to the ground truth (the published papers).

Current technology cannot do logic, but biology is even more perverse. For instance, suppose you ask to remove starch. If you degrade it, starch is actually removed. However, it's most likely that the point was actually to remove sugar, but degrading it actually made the sugar more readily bio-available. The relationships are complex, and there's a lot of implicit knowledge that is not communicated again at every sentence.

It would be good if the effort towards hype ideas like that was redirected in making a great tool to find and analyze the papers in a fairly reliable way (which would have prevented this blunder).
by drusepth | 2025-05-21 08:17:48+00:00
Windows is adding an OS-level LLM (Copilot), Chrome is adding a browser-level LLM (Gemini), it seems like Android is gearing up to add an OS-level LLM (Gemmax), and there are rumors the next game consoles might also have an OS-level LLM. It feels inevitable that we'll eventually get some local endpoints that let applications take advantage of on-device generations without bundling their own LLM -- hopefully.
by whizzter | 2025-05-21 08:18:26+00:00
Like mentioned, groupby,etc all operate on functions, (map/reduce/filter/etc) are just named differently (select/aggregate/where/etc).

What makes people love Linq is that it handles 2 different cases (identical syntax but different backing objects).

1: The in-memory variant does things lazily, select/aggregate/where produce enumeration objects so after the chain you add ToArray, ToList, ToDictionary,etc and the final object is built lazily with most of the chain executed on as few objects as possible (thus if you have an effective Where at the start, the rest of the pipeline will do very little work and very few allocations).

2: The compiler also helps the libraries by providing syntax-tree's, thus database Linq providers just translates the Linq to SQL and sends it off to the server, letting the server do the heavy lifting _with indexes_ so that we can query tables of arbitrary sizes with regular C# Linq syntax very quickly without most of it never going over the network.
by nickdothutton | 2025-05-21 08:19:08+00:00
The British have umpteen ways to describe rain storms/showers. Drizzle, deluge, mizzle, pouring, bucketing, lashing, and quite a few words for wind. Speaking of which the wind, which is the major feature of the weather in Arab countries... has given rise to umpteen different words for explaining what kind of wind they are experiencing, some of which don't really have an English translation. The "proof" was always right there in front of them.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-21 08:19:12+00:00
For me, that was the YouTube recommendations. Between the clickbait and the algorithm just being good, it could suck hours of my life.

Thanks God I found out about unhook extension, i disable absolutely everything but the video, and I use freetube to monitor my subscribed channel, so that I don't even need a Google account and the only thing that appear in my 'feed' is video of channel i subscribed to.

And even then, freetube has a setting to remove clickbait title and thumbnail..

It's been years like that and it feel so much better.

I believe there are tools, extensions, to fight back against the addictiveness of these websites but the general population doesn't know about them and once you're hooked you don't even think about it.

Smartphone just make it even worst but it in no way enabled it.
by nopinsight | 2025-05-21 08:20:49+00:00
Words are more than just symbols; they represent concepts and patterns we observe in the world, in our society, and inside ourselves.

Translation is only possible because we are all humans and have experienced broadly similar concepts, but there's a limit to it, especially in social milieu and in how we conceptualize ourselves in society.

To truly understand another people and culture at a deep level, you need to learn their native tongue and their living environment -- This is what I've internalized as a long-time learner and teacher of languages.
by rjmunro | 2025-05-21 08:20:53+00:00
> solar power inverters are not exactly military and high security stuffs

I'm only familiar with the UK grid, but yesterday, the UK generated a peak of about 11GW of electricity from Solar power.

If you can control 10% of that, and turn it all off simultaneously, you will probably kill most of the UK grid for about 24 hours, similar to the breakdown that happened in Spain recently. I imagine that other parts of the world will be similar.
Show HN: CodeBoarding – interactive map of your codebase for onboarding
by brovatten | 2025-05-21 08:20:57+00:00
Hey HN, we are Alex and Ivan, two developers who’ve spent too many afternoons trying to understand unfamiliar repos. Like most devs, we don’t enjoy wading through dense docs to get up to speed — so we built CodeBoarding to make codebase onboarding a more interactive experience.

Last year, I (Alex) was onboarding at a biotech company in the R&D phase applying ML. As you can imagine, when a team of scientists from non CS-background come together, the code gets pretty messy and full of domain-specific quirks. During my time there, I asked a lot of questions, yet when my internship came to an end, I couldn't explain to a new hire in under thirty minutes what "preprocessor_KLN_v3.py" was doing. I had gotten used to the mess.

Our diagram generation combines static analysis and LLM agents to scale to bigger projects, that otherwise could not be processed by pure LLMs, and to reduce hallucinations. We create "abstract" components you can click to go to a lower level, along with short summaries for every component.

You can explore sample maps here: https://github.com/CodeBoarding/GeneratedOnBoardings and generate new ones (Python only atm.) here: https://codeboarding.org/demo. In two weeks, we’ll open up a small batch of free hosted licenses for a VSCode extension - post below if you’d like one.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the demo to improve onboarding. Cheers!
by pjc50 | 2025-05-21 08:22:44+00:00
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.

Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
by cyri | 2025-05-21 08:23:24+00:00
I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.

Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.

I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.

All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.

I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.

Should write a blog post about it :-)

Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-21 08:23:57+00:00
If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But probably not.

Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
by yanhangyhy | 2025-05-21 08:24:29+00:00
I mostly agree with your points. Social inequality in China is pretty serious, and it’s gonna take a lot of smart policy moves to fix it.

But when we compare China to other countries, we do have to consider some unique factors. The cost of living in China is really low, which means that even if people have similar income levels to places like Thailand, their actual quality of life can be better in some ways. For example, China’s “vegetable basket project” keeps food prices super low across the country. There’s no property tax, firefighting services are free, and rural healthcare is cheap—even if it's not on par with what you'd get in big cities.

That said, the government still needs to do more to boost domestic consumption. The current setup is okay, but it’s still nowhere near the living standards in developed countries.
by isoprophlex | 2025-05-21 08:24:30+00:00
- Subsidy starts: prices drop.

- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.

- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.

(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
by marcus_holmes | 2025-05-21 08:24:49+00:00
When I got into the industry (back in the early 90's), a large minority of new developers didn't study CS at University. We learned to code on the new, fun, microcomputers that were around, and then later just landed jobs as programmers almost by accident because we could already code.

I suspect this will be the future; the vast industry we're in now will shrink (as we're seeing now), and will rely on self-taught programmers more as AI removes the Junior role.

There will always be people who enjoy writing code and will do that for fun, I think. It'll be interesting to see what happens to all the other folks who never wanted to do this in the first place and only got into it because it's a good career.
by zkmon | 2025-05-21 08:24:59+00:00
The big assumption being made here is that the software work involves really coding a lot. Not it doesn't. In my company, actual coding, design, logic etc all are only about 10% the overall work. Software engineers are not employed by technology companies alone. We call these tech companies technology vendors. The situation described in this article might be a bit applicable to these technology vendor companies, but not for non-tech companies who employ the bulk of the global software workforce.

There is hardly any real logic or coding work involved. You would believe me if you work in a non-tech company. Most of your time goes into navigating the company's process, tools, and people. Yes, it is called People-Process-Technology for a reason. Even the word "Technology" here refers to engaging the tech vendors and consultants to get some work done, or just figuring out how to use a legacy software or constant chasing others to get dependencies resolved. Weeks and months pass by, waiting for a dependency to get resolved so that your last code commit could actually finish it's build. Tons of JIRA tickets and INCs would have flown around meanwhile which creates an imaginary realm of huge work and productivity - all resulting in a single line of code change getting tested. It could even be celebrated via huge email thanking every one (100s of people), making it look like a big achievement.

The point is, AI doesn't replace junior engineer roles. Junior engineers are preferred for assigning all dirty drudgery, who can be blamed if things go wrong and who can give away their credit to bosses when things work well and who kind of flexible with good attitude. That's very attractive!

Basically we hire people to own some risk and accountability. Distribution of work is primarily to distribute the risk, blame and accountability, not really to get the work done. Actual work is done by non-employee consultants in India, eastern Europe or Vietnam etc.

For example, we don't use opensource because we can't hold someone accountable. The fact that opensource simply works, doesn't count. However if some vendor offers the same opensource tech with enterprise support or as a managed SaaS, we would buy that.
by dzonga | 2025-05-21 08:27:20+00:00
GDP numbers can be "imaginary" but production numbers are not.

China produces more ships in a year than the US. Generates More Power from Hydro than the whole of Africa.

We could dig more -- but that's just on top of my head. Just like how the US was able to help the allies win WW2 by producing more. It will lose a war against China - because of incredible chinese production
Ask HN: Are We Living in a Bubble?
by psikomanjak | 2025-05-21 08:29:47+00:00
Seeing the latest developments in AI and using a lot of them to speed up my work and development. Also getting that feeling that I am missing out by not building products myself and stuff.

What do you think will happen to the normal devs or even normal population that are not on track with this?

At my work none of the devs use it max a copilot or something, they all say ah it's just a bubble but I don't feel like it.