MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stephen_g | 2025-05-23 11:40:04+00:00
Well replacing the tower reduces embodied emissions from the steel. Sure that's not as big as an issue if the steel was already recycled (and would be recycled again) using an electric arc furnace powered by renewables, but the wood is actually negative since it's storing carbon while it's not decomposing.

The blades themselves isn't really much of an issue if you actually compare it to fossil fuels - for example, coal fly ash was 18% of all waste generated in Australia around 2019 (this is likely a bit less now as one or two major coal plants have since been decommissioned).

I think it's astronomically unlikely that wind turbine blades would ever be that kind of proportion of a country's waste, but it was just a normal thing for coal. And gas and oil have a similar problem, it's just harder to see since it's fine particulate matter belched into the air instead of heavier ash that you have to deal with!

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-become-o...
by skywhopper | 2025-05-23 11:40:28+00:00
Certbot goes out of its way to be inscrutable about what it’s doing. It munges your web server config (temporarily) to handle http challenges, and for true sysadmins who are used to having to know all the details of what’s going on, that sort of script is a nightmare waiting to happen.

I assume certbot is the client she’s alluding to that misinterprets one of the factors in the protocol as hex vs decimal and somehow things still work, which is incredibly worrisome.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-23 11:40:51+00:00
I used a really low-end system for a while some time back, running Linux, and WebKit-based browsers were the only ones with a mainstream (so: actually renders correctly for practically all sites) engine that was usable with even one tab open (I could do 2-3 as long as none of the pages were “webapps”)

This indicates some kind of fundamentally better design, to me. Probably related to why Safari’s by far the most respectful to battery life, of the big three browsers.
by 1a527dd5 | 2025-05-23 11:41:51+00:00
I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.

I know it isn't a skill issue because of who the author is. So I can only imagine it is some sort of personal opinion that they dislike ACME as a concept or the tooling around ACME in general.

We've been using LE for a while (since 2019 I think) for handful of sites, and the best nonsense client _for us_ was https://github.com/do-know/Crypt-LE/releases.

Then this year we've done another piece of work this time against the Sectigo ACME server and le64 wasn't quite good enough.

So we ended up trying:-

- https://github.com/certbot/certbot on GitHub Actions, it was fine but didn't quite like the locked down environment

- https://github.com/go-acme/lego huge binary, cli was interestingly designed and the maintainer was quite rude when raising an issue

- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME our favourite, but we ended up going with certbot on GHA once we fixed the weird issues around permissions

Edit* Re-read it. The tone isn't aimed at the ACME or the clients. It's the spec itself. ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad.
by jinushaun | 2025-05-23 11:41:59+00:00
No, plenty of articles have been written about “illiterate Ivy League students” lately so it’s not just a problem at non-elite schools. These articles have been popping up a lot lately.

Personally, I disagree with the entire premise because it equates literacy with enjoying classic literature. I don’t. So by this metric, I’m also illiterate. I don’t enjoy flowery prose full of allusions and analogy. I prefer science textbooks over Shakespeare.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-23 11:42:11+00:00
In Germany even this wasn't enough, in a couple of bridges they had to constrain the road leading to the bridge in a way that only small cars would still be able to reach the bridge under repairs.

I also imagine it wasn't cheap doing this, but apparently as long as people can get away with something there is always those that will try, regardless of how it impacts others.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-23 11:42:28+00:00
Maybe that's exactly his goal: not to come up with something that beats the competition, but play with the architecture, get a feel for what works & what doesn't, how various aspects affect the output, and improve on that. Design more efficient architectures, or come up with something that has unique features compared to other models.

If so, scaling up may be more of a distraction rather than helpful (besides wasting resources).

I hope he succeeds in whatever he's aiming for.
by sirkbibid | 2025-05-23 11:42:53+00:00
Original Text: "Bruh, that party was straight outta Ohio, no cap. Skibidi vibes only. Tyler’s drip was bussin’, and Jessica was ghostin’ everyone like she hit airplane mode IRL."

Dickens: "Upon my soul! The tale describes an occasion in Ohio, indeed a peculiar land, from the inference here. 'No cap,' evidently suggests none of the attendees wore hats—perhaps a custom or rule strictly enforced for reasons unknown. Fascinating! Now, these 'Skibidi vibes' I take to indicate an exotic form of music or perhaps a ceremonial dance, unique to these Ohio gatherings.

And concerning young Master Tyler—his 'drip was bussin’'—it is clear he suffered from an alarming medical condition! Possibly a wound that would not cease bleeding, creating quite the tragic spectacle. Yet, the narrator sounds oddly approving; perhaps there is some honorable valor attached to enduring such afflictions publicly.

Lastly, Miss Jessica, 'ghostin’ everyone,' seemingly invoked spiritual manifestations or perhaps vanished mysteriously, akin to an apparition. Her going into 'airplane mode IRL' must surely mean she fled swiftly, flying away in a vehicle capable of flight. Extraordinary! What incredible advancements have occurred in my prolonged absence from society!"
by rxtexit | 2025-05-23 11:42:56+00:00
I have experienced this for various libraries. I think it helps to paste in a package.json in the prompt.

All the models seem to struggle with React three fiber like this. Mixing and matching versions that don't make sense. I can see this being a tough problem given the nature of these models and the training data.

I am going to also try to start giving it a better skeleton to start with and stick to the particular imports when faced with this issue.

My very first prompt with claude 4 was for R3F and it imported a depreciated component as usual.

We can't expect the model to read our minds.
by dzaima | 2025-05-23 11:43:31+00:00
The only case I recall of denormals specifically being improperly handled is 32-bit ARM NEON; and indeed clang and gcc just don't use it without -ffast-math.

NaNs indeed can get different bit patterns, but my point was that, given that you need to explicitly bit-reinterpret the NaN to have that affect anything, that can't really affect most code. I guess perhaps blindly hashing a NaNs bits? (that of course goes under your "you weren't handling NaNs […] properly anyway")
by stephen_g | 2025-05-23 11:44:03+00:00
A bit more complex, but it doesn't have to be more expensive...

I think this is massively overblown, it was actually hard to manage a grid with baseload generation, since you still needed peaker plants for the morning and afternoon peaks and then had massive amounts of excess power overnight.

It's just that that's what people were used to, not that it's actually the best or easiest model for managing grids.

Highly variable sources bring some different challenges than the old status quo, but we also have much more sophisticated technology in the power space now anyway. And that new and sophisticated tech can produce new opportunities that outweigh the challenges if anything.

So I take arguments like yours with a massive grain of salt. How you put it is not really the case.
by plst | 2025-05-23 11:44:09+00:00
> But imagine saying you’re disappointed the Windows executable format isn’t evolving!

I actually am disappointed about pretty much that. There is still no good permissions/sandboxing mechanism for PC operating systems like what's on smartphones. (to be clear I'm not calling for smartphone-like freedom restrictions on PCs, just more control over what applications can do)

That's one of the issues Flatpak tried to resolve on Linux. AFAIK Windows Store is an idea pretty similar to Flatpak (permissions, solving distribution problems...) but also no one uses it. So it's not like Microsoft doesn't want to evolve exe either.
by immibis | 2025-05-23 11:44:57+00:00
ISPs are basically forced to provide /64 because some end devices insist on SLAAC - if they don't, their customers will call them up and complain their internet doesn't work.

It's server hosts that are sometimes stingy. Hetzner gives a full /64 per server, and a /64 per subnet on cloud, but AFAIK Digital Ocean only gives a /124 per server, and some hosts give a /128 meaning you have to use an exact address.
by 8organicbits | 2025-05-23 11:46:26+00:00
I'll add to this to say that I think there are different kinds of todo lists as well. I wrote about [1] a struggle I had with digitizing a whiteboard household chore tracker.

Lately I've been wondering if LLMs can help personalize software. There are so many difference needs users have, yet software is written with a pool of users in mind. I'm very skeptical of LLMs for traditional software projects, but small one-off personal utilities or tweaking existing tools seems more viable.

[1] https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-23 11:46:43+00:00
Its hard to follow what you try to commounicate at least the last half.

Nonetheless, yes we do know certain brain structures like your image net analogy but the way you describe it, sounds a little bit of.

Our virtual cortex is not 'just a layer' its a component i would say and its optimized of detecting things.

Other components act differently with different structures.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-23 11:46:55+00:00
There's something to be said for implementing stuff like this manually for the experience of having done it yourself, but the author's tone makes it sound like she hates the protocol and all the extra work she needs to do to make the Let's Encrypt setup work.

Kind of makes me wonder what kind of stack her website is running on that something like a lightweight ACME library (https://github.com/jmccl/acme-lw comes to mind, but there's a C++ library for ESP32s that should be even more lightweight) loading in the certificates isn't doing the job.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-23 11:46:57+00:00
Depends on your goal, the nature of the target, and how much damage you want to do.

At one extreme there are precision attacks in silos and airfields. At the other are genocide attacks where you want to kill as many people as possible and leave as much of the land uninhabitable for as long as possible.

In the middle are precision strategic attacks, where you want to leave infrastructure and buildings so you have the option to invade and take over.
by immibis | 2025-05-23 11:47:15+00:00
Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.

Sadly, security is a cat and mouse game, which means it's always evolving and you're forced to keep up - and it's inherent by the nature of the field, so we can't really blame anyone (unlike, say, being forced to integrate with the latest Google services to be allowed on the Play Store). At least you get to write your own ACME client if you want to. You don't have to use certbot, and there's no TPM-like behaviour locking you out of your own stuff.
by throwaway473825 | 2025-05-23 11:48:00+00:00
Apple might also have helped BYD with its $10 billion car project:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-16/apple-sec...

>Today, BYD’s entire car lineup is powered by the Blade system, which uses a battery pack design that people involved in its development say was informed by lessons from the Apple work.
by buremba | 2025-05-23 11:48:23+00:00
Not just for building a new one, it can also complement existing data-warehouse/lakehouses: https://github.com/buremba/universql

The flight extension is excellent as it removes the need to write C++ extensions and lets you use your favorite language to develop native DuckDB catalogs. It's straightforward to build data lake connectors and plug them in as a flight catalog, thanks to Airport!
by fidotron | 2025-05-23 11:49:42+00:00
> We need to spend 40 bytes storing a number.

But . . . why? Assuming they aren't BigInts or similar these are maximum 8 bytes of actual data. This overhead is ridiculous.

Using classes should enable you to be much smaller than the JSON representation, not larger. For example, V8 does it like https://v8.dev/docs/hidden-classes

> not parsing numbers until they are used

Doesn't this defeat the point of pydantic? It's supposed to be checking the model is valid as it's loaded using jiter. If the data is valid it can be loaded into an efficient representation, and if it's not the errors can be emitted during iterating over it.
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-23 11:50:00+00:00
I find it interesting that he dismisses LLMs.

I would argue that if he wants to do AGI through RL, a LLM could be a perfect teacher or oracle.

After all i'm not walking around as a human and not having guidance. It should/could make RL a lot faster leveraging this.

My logical part / RL part does need the 'database'/fact part and my facts are trying to be as logical as possible but its just not.
by oneplane | 2025-05-23 11:50:25+00:00
I personally don't see the overengineering in JOSE; as you mention, a JWK (and JWKs) is not much more than the RSA key data we already know and love but formatted for Web and HTTP. It doesn't get more reasonable than that. JWTs, same story, it's just JSON data with a standard signature.

The spec (well, the RFC anyway) is indeed classically RFC-ish, but the same applies to HTTP or TCP/IP, and I haven't seen the same sort of complaints about those. Maybe it's just resistance to change? Most of the specs (JOSE, ACME etc) aren't really complex for the sake of complexity, but solve problems that aren't simple problems to solve simply in a simple fashion. I don't think that's bad at all, it's mostly indicative of the complexity of the problem we're solving.
by dzaima | 2025-05-23 11:50:27+00:00
If everything goes roughly the same with all seeds, then everything's indeed just fine. If not, I have a paper trail that I did in fact actually encounter the unexpected thing instead of just making up results. (indeed a seed could be cherry-picked, but the more is computed from the seed, the more infeasible that gets)

And that hints at the possibility of using seeds specifically for noting rare occurrences - communicating weird/unexpected(/buggy?) examples to collaborators, running for X hours to gather statistics without having to store all intermediate states of every single attempt if you later want to do extra analysis for cases insufficiently analyzed by the existing code, etc.
by arp242 | 2025-05-23 11:51:30+00:00
The problem isn't so much the words themselves, but the structure. No one really writes these kind of lengthy comma-peppered sentences like this today:

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

A more modern way to write that would be something like:

Mud overflowed the streets, as if the waters had newly retired from the face of the earth. Would it not be wonderful to meet a Triceratops, forty feet long or so, waddling like a giant lizard up Holborn Hill.

I don't know what reasonable expectations would be for English college majors, but to claim that anyone having trouble understanding this text "can't read" seems rather much.
by kalavan | 2025-05-23 11:53:34+00:00
> Every other field is aligned "aligned" when the humans in it are "aligned",

That doesn't seem like the whole story. Pick two countries, for instance, one of which has evolved to be democratic (with high regard for rule of law, etc.) and the other is dictatorial. How did these countries end up the way they did? It probably has to do with rules, not just default human qualities.

Let's say you consider popular participation to be good. Then you could say the humans who live in the first country are more "aligned" than the second, but the mechanisms of their forms of government also play part. E.g. if the bureaucracy is set up so that skillfully stabbing others in the back gets you political clout, the selection process will marginalize or kick out people who don't want to engage in backstabbing.

Any organization's behavior depends on some combination of what its incentives promote and on the qualities of its members. This makes AI alignment just an extreme on a scale, not a thing set apart from all other kinds of alignment. The AI alignment problem is the "all rules" extreme of the scale, and organizational alignment is some combination of rules and the inclinations of the humans who are part of it.

The ethics problem of "what does 'aligned' mean anyway" would both apply to the AI situation and the mixed organization situation. A dictator might want an AI "aligned" to maximize his own power, and would also want a human organization to be engineered in such a way as to be both obedient and effective. Someone of a more democratic predisposition would have other priorities - whether they are of what AIs should do or what human organizations should do.
by immibis | 2025-05-23 11:53:41+00:00
I've been thinking about offering some kind of independent free hosting for the last few months or so. It seems like there's some need for more free, unenshittified hosting services aimed at non-commercial projects (like Miraheze is for wikis), but I'm very concerned about the legal risks, being outside of the USA (not that it's any better in the USA right now but traditionally it was). Servers are plenty cheap now, but lawyers aren't.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-23 11:54:03+00:00
Would you expect that 19% could not read contemporary English at the level expected of a 10th grader?

To establish a baseline, they had the students first take a standardized reading comprehension test, the Degrees of Reading Power test, designed for the 10th grade level. Almost all the students scored above 80, indicating they read at or above a 10th grade level.
by ogogmad | 2025-05-23 11:54:11+00:00
Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the Triceratops wouldn't be appropriate here. The point here is that the Megalosaurus was a real-life sea monster. The metaphor in the text is that it would appear that a flood had come and gone - which in prehistoric times, might have deposited a sea monster. No flood actually happened though.

EDIT: Damn, I'm mistaken. Before anyone points it out, the Megalosaurus was a land animal. It was a dinosaur whose bones were first discovered in the 1820s. I got it confused with a Megalodon or Mosasaurus.
by z3t4 | 2025-05-23 11:54:39+00:00
At some stage you need to update your TXT records, and if you register a wildcard domain you have to do it twice for the same request! And you have to propagate these TXT records twice to all your DNS servers, and wait for some third party like google dns to request the TXT record. And it all has to be done within a minute in order to not time out. DNS servers are not made to change records from one second to another and rely heavily on caching, so I'm lucky that I run my own DNS servers, but good luck doing this if you are using something like a anycast DNS service.
Ask HN: What do you use for personal crypto wallet AML screening?
by harry011 | 2025-05-23 11:55:12+00:00
For folks doing P2P or DeFi stuff, checking where you're sending BTC is critical. I’ve tried AMLBot and WhoAML, but Satoshi Eye stands out. It’s built for personal users — fast, intuitive, and very human. You just paste a wallet and get an instant crypto wallet checker result: risk score, scam tags, and more. It’s honestly the crypto AML compliance lite version we all needed. I used it before a USDT transfer — turns out the wallet had darknet ties. It’s like a crypto website checker but for wallets — and it might save your funds.
by sciurus | 2025-05-23 11:55:17+00:00
I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.

To help highlight where there are changes and where there is continuity at the top level, here's a table of who was the MoCo CEO, MoCo and MoFo Board Chairs, MoFO President, and MoFo ED over time for the last ten years.

https://imgur.com/a/OLD9EiI
by cedws | 2025-05-23 11:55:28+00:00
I can completely empathise with that. I think a hard lesson I’ve had to learn at some point is that people just don’t want to debate or have hard conversations because it exerts mental effort. Most don’t have a drive to discover the “truth” or arrive at the most optimal solution. This makes you the enemy when you try to engage them, even if it’s not something they’re particularly invested in. In addition many people have an immature mentality where changing their position and adopting yours is losing. They see it as a battleground.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-23 11:56:40+00:00
> But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?

Pride? Dignity? I wasn't tested but still read the text with the intent to comprehend it. The people tested made nonchalant guesses, but given they were all English students, you'd expect them to have intrinsic motivation / pride.
by noir_lord | 2025-05-23 11:56:49+00:00
I am - hard to be a life long avid reader in the UK and not read Dickens at some point.

I found his books worth reading (and considered in their context as a reaction against the unfairness of society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience.

That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country to do that well on Dickens because that is simply not the modern style of written/spoken English but they are English majors so you would expect the overall level to be higher than the general population as a whole.

In the UK reading is on the decline and what people read has fundamentally changed (I'm not competent to say why but to me at least it feels like we have a horrible streak of anti-intellectualism that runs across society).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-23 11:57:51+00:00
Granted, domain or general knowledge is important in reading comprehension; I kinda know what a megalosaurus is but had no idea what Michaelmas Term was.

But, you can only gain that by having a broad interest and reading a lot in the first place. Call me grandpa but over the past 100 years or so of radio, TV, then internet, people have been reading less and less, so naturally reading comprehension has gone down too.

Flip it around and have an avid reader watch a modern gaming video and you'd see similar poor comprehension I suspect.
by onion2k | 2025-05-23 11:58:07+00:00
That assumes that every problem can be solved with money, and that the money (or the PRs the money funds) will be welcomed by the community. By talking about what OpenAI needs Bohan is hopefully starting a conversation with the community in order to engage with everyone respectfully and to work with them.

Railroading an open source project with money or dev time in order to force it to go in the direction you want is not the right way. Those things should be available if the community asks, but they shouldn't be the opening offer.