MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgt101 | 2025-05-31 12:38:17+00:00
>"Expensive (or even relatively cheap!) manpads make no sense vs drones economically, and manpads vs low flying/nap of the earth helicopters, especially in forested terrain have always been of limited effectiveness."

My point is that this isn't just an competition of economic exchange. The capability that a viable organic air defence option gives to a military unit shouldn't be understood in terms of "we spent $50m while they spent $500k". This is because if the $50m spend enables your units to successfully prosecute an offensive the value is potentially 1000x, or more.
by intended | 2025-05-31 12:39:07+00:00
Because this statement, unfortunately, ends up moving the underlying goal posts about what self driving IS.

And the point that I am making, is that this view was never baked into the original vision of self driving, resulting in predictions of a velocity that was simply impossible.

Physical reality does not have vibes, and is more amenable to prediction, than human behavior. Or Cow behavior, or wildlife if I were to include some other places.
by msgodel | 2025-05-31 12:39:34+00:00
Yeah up north like that winter is hard and I'd imagine it wouldn't work well. It's a little funny to hear places like Canada and the UK talking about solar. Even here (I'm at the same latitude as Syria) you have to avoid some things in the winter to keep everything on line.

Having to ration power like that is part of the reason I don't think grid solar makes sense anywhere. To get the behavior you need You'd have expose consumers to the fluctuating prices and most people find that extremely unpleasant (many probably more than just maintaining their own array and infrastructure.)
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-05-31 12:39:47+00:00
As with all power laws, my guess is that this kind of incredibly low quality robocalling is being done on a MASSIVE scale by a single digit number of orgs globally - someone somewhere has figured out an essentially bulletproof way to do scam robocalling, number validation and so on on a gigantic scale, such that the quality matters less. I wonder how much global productivity in terms of time spent paying attention to incoming calls or texts would increase if you bonked whoever is orchestrating such a scheme.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-31 12:39:51+00:00
Cantrill is partially wrong:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/redis_returns_to_open...

"Trollope later justified the shift by saying the SSPL license only really "applies to Amazon and Google" – fellow cloud provider Microsoft has agreed commercial terms with Redis."

The latest AGPL shift is great and should have been the default for open source since 2010.
by JohnCClarke | 2025-05-31 12:40:34+00:00
The book "How big things get done" [1] has tables listing the historical cost overruns of construction projects.

It's worth keeping in mind that solar and wind farms start generating revenue as soon as the first panel or turbine is connected. This make financing much easier and derisks the whole project. Nuclear has to wait the whole ~10 years for the entire station to be finished before the investors get anything back.

[1] https://biblio.co.uk/9780593239513:1681820911
by jenny91 | 2025-05-31 12:42:17+00:00
I agree on the first. On the second: I would bet a lot of money that they aren't actually breaking even on their API (or even close to). They don't have a "pay as you go" per-token tier, it's all geared up to demonstrate use of their API as a novelty. They're probably burning cash on every single token. But their valuation and hype has surely gone way up since they got onto LLMs.
by chrismatic | 2025-05-31 12:42:17+00:00
I fully agree. I was also thinking about docker or symlinks, but it seemed hard to design the API without any actual user feedback. Pants environments [0] look interesting.

Very cool that you are also recognizing this issue and working on it. I sent you an email in case you want to exchange further.

[0] https://www.pantsbuild.org/stable/docs/introduction/welcome-...
by skydhash | 2025-05-31 12:43:33+00:00
Requirement gatherings and analysis is 90% of the job, software design is the other 90%. Once that's done, it's very easy to code the project. If it's not, take a step back and fix the error you've made at the previous steps (mostly due to a lack of information).

A lot of people think that coding is hard, but that's because they start to code too soon. And then the really hard activities get mixed in and it becomes a whole mess. Also it's quite easy to code, which is why inexperienced people usually rush to do it. Take someone like that and do proper software engineering, and for the first two activities, all you will get from them is a lot of "I don't know".
by glkindlmann | 2025-05-31 12:43:42+00:00
That sounds neat. What would be really neat is if the language helped to expose the consequences of the ensuing rounding error by automating things that are otherwise clumsy for programmers to do manually, like running twice with opposite rounding directions, or running many many times with internally randomized directions (two of the options in Sec 4 of *). That is, it would be cool if Rust enabled people learn about the subtleties of floating point, instead of hiding them away.

* https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf
by simonw | 2025-05-31 12:44:06+00:00
The lack of documentation for that system is so frustrating! Security feature are the one thing where great documentation should be table stakes, otherwise we are left just wildly guessing how to keep our system secure!

I'm also disheartened by how the man pages for some of the macOS sandboxing commands have declared them deprecated for at least the last five years: https://7402.org/blog/2020/macos-sandboxing-of-folder.html
by gghhzzgghhzz | 2025-05-31 12:44:19+00:00
I have yet to see good argument as to why the reactors on nuclear subs are "proof" of the viability of domestic commercial electrical reactors. They have different commercial viability, enriched fuel and safety requirements. Plus I don't think the primary use of reactors on subs is to generate electricity.

Not dismissing SMR for commercial use, but don't see how military subs / ships are relevant
by basisword | 2025-05-31 12:45:05+00:00
>> The entertainment industry will be transformed drastically. Music and movies will be transformed by AI to such an extent that the next generation will find it hard to believe how the industry operated.

As someone who was very worried about how this would impact artistic output I've started to change my mind. It seems younger people are extremely sensitive to AI content and happy to call out anything that could conceivably be generated by AI as slop. People want real art created by real people with real skill. They want to be able to connect with their art and connect with them in person. The muzak industry is in trouble but I no longer think music in general will be replaced by AI. We'll see improvements to software instruments, plugins etc but AI improving the tools is a different prospect than fully AI generated music.
by huntertwo | 2025-05-31 12:45:06+00:00
Marketers gonna market. But if we ignore the semantics of what full self driving actually means for a minute, there is still a lot of possibilities for self driving in the future. It takes longer than we perceive initially because we don’t have insight into the nuances needed to achieve these things. It’s like when you plan a software project, you think it’s going to take less time than it does because you don’t have a detailed view until you’re already in the weeds.
by secondcoming | 2025-05-31 12:45:43+00:00
Does Valkey provide their own client library?

We use Redis all over on GCP both via MemoryStore and on custom machines. We use both classic Redis and Redis Cluster.

The official C library is sadly quite deficient if you want to use Redis Cluster and then TLS. We have to use an unofficial hiredis-cluster client [0]. It's a real pain for us. We're considering moving to Scylla.

GCP's Memorystore is a joke too.

[0] https://github.com/Nordix/hiredis-cluster
by CharlieDigital | 2025-05-31 12:47:04+00:00
I am the author, my blog is an Astro template and you can see the GH repo here for this post: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn/commits/main/src/...

And of course, the full commit history of all of my writing: https://github.com/CharlieDigital/chrlschn Even a simple look would have led you to the repository with full commit history of my fixes for grammar, spelling, etc.

I've also kept a blog long before GPT existed: https://charliedigital.com [0] so I would point you to that and my long history of writing (e.g. https://chrlschn.medium.com/) that this is hand rolled content. Rather I'd say AI has copied my style of writing.

Please feel free to peruse and use your bulletproof analysis to let me know which of these spanning back to 2005 are AI written. I hope that your takeaway from this is that your AI spidey senses are completely broken and realize the irony of your intellectual laziness here relying on an LLM instead of just following the links in my profile or clicking the link to my GH on my blog. If you have any sense of righteousness, please retract your flag and let the mods know of your error.

[0] Exaxmples:

https://charliedigital.com/2020/11/13/principles-of-speed/

https://charliedigital.com/2020/10/29/how-leaders-fail-their...

https://charliedigital.com/2020/09/20/in-praise-of-simplicit...

https://charliedigital.com/2016/04/11/recipe-crunch-time-exe...
Show HN: I made a simple software licensing platform for developers
by nic13gamer | 2025-05-31 12:47:33+00:00
Hey HN,

A few months ago I realized licensing my app wasn't as straightforward as I expected. There was too much setup just to create a license, and the customer experience was not great. All I wanted was for licenses to be generated automatically when I got paid, and for customers to manage their own licenses.

So I built Keyforge, a simple software licensing platform for developers.

It integrates with Stripe so that licenses are created automatically when someone purchases or subscribes to your product. There's also a self-serve customer portal where users can manage their licenses, devices, and download invoices.

Would love to hear what you think.

Nicholas
by energy123 | 2025-05-31 12:49:02+00:00
Social licensing risk is a big one that gets swept under the rug. While both solar and nuclear has to face off NIMBYs, once those NIMBYs are defeated then the solar project is in the clear basically forever. But nuclear has no such assurances that there won't be an irrational fear-based anti-nuclear craze like what happened in Germany which leads to early plant closures.
by nmcfarl | 2025-05-31 12:49:09+00:00
The horrible thing is there can be lots of differentiation here. I grow my own meat birds for my own consumption, and they taste radically better than anything I’ve ever had in America. (Barring when I eat my friends’ birds.) Artisanal chicken could definitely be a thing, although it would definitely cost more.

I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem - processing your own birds is safely is definitely possible, but what is required to process them for sale makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that’s just not viable.
by mikewarot | 2025-05-31 12:49:20+00:00
I've got a friend who has been at this since learning in TV repair shops in the 1950s. His emphasis is always on fast turn-around. He doesn't believe in slowly turning on things with old electrolytic capacitors, for example. I've learned quite a bit from him.

I've learned not to fear B+, but to give very healthy respect to anything more than 500 volts. (Only use 1 hand, keep the other behind you, always have a safety partner, etc)

I've learned to hate Silver Mica capacitors. I've learned how to track down the bad ones that cause the "crashing" sound in old radios.

I've learned that in very old electronics, you can let smoke out, and things will still work. I've gotten good at seeing where the smoke comes from.

You'll definitely need to learn to solder. I'd suggest starting with something like an Arduino starter kit to get a sense of how components actually interact.

But remember, if something is dead, you can't really make it worse. (Just be careful not to make yourself worse along the way)
by neom | 2025-05-31 12:49:26+00:00
For fun last month I decided to see if i could build a fully functional business of agents. It's 175 python files (employees) build up of internal roles within those files (tasks). So what I have is 175 employees who are able to pass output around each other, understand the work, complete the work, understand where to send the output. The whole system has the ability to do around 275 base processes (same as a business at > 100MM arr) I started on a Friday afternoon and slept a little bit and finished on Monday afternoon. After I had it running I sent it to a VC friend to show them and they sent back the deck of a startup that is in stealth with $25MM doing it the exact same way. With 1 month and a designer and an engineer, I could have it mvp functional for anyone to use ($40k?). Times are changing. Here is kinda how it looks: https://s.h4x.club/9ZuO4XQR / https://s.h4x.club/jkuB8ZED (I've evolved it a little since this, and if you're an engineer and look at my files and think, this guy is a moron: I know!:))
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-05-31 12:50:05+00:00
I'll add to the list of irritations that are out of my control, managers who only value following process instead of achieving outcomes. Even when it is very very clear and foreseeable that a particularly problem should use a different process because of its specific context and constraints, they just don't and won't. Deviating from established process is a greater sin than waste and failure.
by quuxplusone | 2025-05-31 12:50:44+00:00
On Android Chrome, "flinging" the scroll really far really fast sometimes keeps scrolling long beyond when I would have expected it to stop. But the page is so gigantic that that might just be the expected behavior.

FYI, I've also noticed that on Android (but not on desktop Chrome) sometimes single-tapping to remove a black square will leave a stray X behind. I think this is not a logic bug but rather a mobile input-recognition problem — that on mobile a single-tap is sometimes being recognized as a single-tap followed by a double-tap. (Quickly double-tapping an empty cell usually marks it with an X; although quickly double-tapping a filled cell usually just clears it, no X. So the symptom here is "I meant to single-tap a filled cell, but the game acted as if I'd single-tapped and then double-tapped the same cell again.")
by legobmw99 | 2025-05-31 12:51:08+00:00
This is fine if the method you’re talking about is static — as you point out, it’s really all Rust has — but is absolutely a design mistake if it is not, which I think is what the poster above is referring to. It’s a common anti pattern and means you have an object that is at-best useless and at-worst completely broken after you call the constructor but before you call some member function on it
by intended | 2025-05-31 12:52:11+00:00
I'd apprecite that we dont hurry past the acknowledgement that self driving will be a cultural artifact. Its been championed as a purely technical one, and pointing this out has been unpopular since day 1, because it didn't gel with the zeitgeist.

As others will attest, when adherence to driving rules is spotty, behavior is highly variable and unpredictable. You need to have a degree of straight up agression, if you want to be able to handle an auto driver who is cheating the laws of physics.

Another example of something thats obvious based on crimes in India; people can and will come up to your car during a traffic jam, tap your chassis to make it sound like there was an impact, and then snatch your phone from the dashboard when you roll your window down to find out what happened.

This is simply to illustrate and contrast how pared down technical intuitions of "driving" are, when it comes to self driving discussions.

This is why I think level 5 is simply not happening, unless we redefine what self driving is, or the approach to achieving it. I feel theres more to be had from a centralized traffic orchestration network that supplements autonomous traffic, rather than trying to solve it onboard the vehicle.
by msgodel | 2025-05-31 12:52:47+00:00
I think it's a good thing. I've personally never been a huge fan of the culture that developed around VC (which sounds a little funny coming from someone who's been on Hackernews for ten years I guess) so it means there's a nice little niche for people who want to go a little slower.

Put on some ambient music, grab a trackball, do some CAD, don't think about equity.
by throw0101d | 2025-05-31 12:53:04+00:00
> Not really, but each new reactor is treated like a completely new design which makes regulations incredibly expensive.

There are already-approved designs that are pre-approved can can be constructed without review:

* https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/design-c...

AIUI, one can get approval from the NRC (under Part 52?) by building a plant as-drawn with a pre-approved design:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Construction_and_Oper...

* https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part052/f...

If you deviate from the plan then you have to get approval for that deviation. Apparently this was part of the problem with Vogtle (Unit 3): they had a design and got it approved, but because the hands-on knowledge of building had atrophied, they found complications in construction in the drawings, and wanted to make change to simplify things. These changes then had to be approved, which add to delays.

There is another regulatory process where you get approval in phases, and this would have been better for Vogtle. The Decouple podcast has a four-part series on Vogtle that goes into a lot of detail about Vogtle:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyouH0mkPJXHR0hKW_iLk...

One can get an initial site license without actually picking a particular design, so the process can start with decisions are being made:

* https://wyoleg.gov/InterimCommittee/2023/09-2023071715-03Nuc...
by recursivedoubts | 2025-05-31 12:53:17+00:00
_shrug_

Pointing out the lack of precision and accidental aspects of custom in discussing morality is typically used as an excuse for immoral behavior, often personal.

Today, I don't view moral certainty as a primary or even secondary moral problem. Instead, I view it our primary moral problem as the idea that: "there are no absolute moral principles."

This is a self-contradictory statement, as a moments reflection will make apparent. Most people who advocate it either haven't thought about it or are sophists attempting to smuggle in a different absolute moral principle: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Say what one will about this latter absolute moral principle, but at least it's a self-consistent ethos. I can understand why the rich, powerful and debased should prefer to see it established, as they have. A (bad) part of me certainly prefers it.
by jhbadger | 2025-05-31 12:54:55+00:00
I mean, even assuming the technical challenges to self-driving can be solved, it is obvious that there will still be human drivers because some humans enjoy driving, just as there are still people who enjoy riding horses even after cars replaced horses for normal transport purposes. Although as with horses, it is possible that human driving will be seen as secondary and limited to minor roads in the future.
by intended | 2025-05-31 12:55:41+00:00
To quote someone else, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle.

This is a semantic discussion, because it is about what people mean when they talk about self driving.

Just ditching the meaning is unfair, because goddamit, the self driving dream was awesome. I am hoping to be proved wrong, but not because we moved our definition.

Carve a separate category out, which articulates the updated assumptions. Redefining it is a cop out and dare I say it, unbecoming of the original ambition.

Networked Autonomous vehicles?
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-31 12:56:03+00:00
Non-continuous power sources like solar and wind are viable as long as there is a backup supply for those times when it is dark and quiet. That backup can be some form of power storage in regions where the quiet/dark periods are reliably predictable and predictable short, e.g. between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. This is not the case for where I live (Sweden) as it reliably gets dark and quiet for several months on a stretch. Fortunately we have hydropower as a reliable backup but that is only a solution because we happen to have mountains which allowed for the construction of dams to catch the run-off from spring snow melt. Elsewhere in the more northern and southern regions as well as the more foggy/cloudy places another form of backup power is needed: nuclear, gas and other hydrocarbon sources, coal.

At protests against the use of fossil hydrocarbons for transport an often heard claim is that the true costs of this practice are not paid for by the taxes put on fuel and vehicles. The claim is that there are many other costs which are paid for by society, from costs related to pollution and related health problems to costs related to international conflicts which stem from the presence of hydrocarbon sources in conflict-ridden regions.

The same claims can be made for non-continuous power sources like solar and wind: these power sources are only viable just as long as there is a backup power supply with the same capacity while the costs for those backup power supplies are not factored in the claims for investment risks. Just like cars and trucks depend on an infrastructure which is only partly paid for by their users non-continuous power sources depend on an infrastructure which is paid for by others, in this case those who invest in reliable base load power generation capacity like nuclear power.

I have a 14 kW solar array on the barn roof feeding a 10 kW 3-phase inverter which currently provides enough power to feed our farm and our neighbours - we export about 8 MWh yearly. There's a big cloud getting close to the sun, once it moves over it power output will drop to 2 kW or lower in an instant. The slack is taken up by 'the grid', the costs of which were not factored in when I bought the panels + mounting hardware, inverter, cables, over-current protection, switches and other bits and bobs I used when I installed the array. Of course I did pay for the grid in other ways, mostly through decades of taxation. An investor in a solar farm will not pay for that grid though, he'll only see the costs for the hardware and the grid hookup which leads to the claim made in this article: 'investment risk lowest for solar'. This may be true but it is not the whole story and using only investment risk as a guideline for building a power grid will lead to dark power-less winter nights because investing in base load generation capacity was deemed to be too risky.
by mystraline | 2025-05-31 12:56:21+00:00
Even regulated capitalism exploits. Surplus labor theory easily shows that even in the best of intentions, businesses absolutely must exploit the worker.

Even the local artisan bread-baker must pay workers less than their economic output. This isn't to say that the owner is exploitive and treating people with subsistence. But the pay/surplus split is still there as exploitation.

Reforming capitalism also doesn't work either. Hell, people can't get past page 30 of Adam Smith's treatise that discusses all the 'reforms needed' to instill capitalism. Turns out monied interests has always wanted to strip controls from the get-go.

No, its time to relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history. It was tried. As it lifted some up, more and more were ground into a gritty paste to feed the machine.

I don't know what to replace it with either. But whatever it is has to not have weird effects of infinite or 0 cost breakdowns (like copying software and data), and also aware of how to handle algorimthic labor (LLMs), amongst other concerns.