MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-25 15:42:25+00:00
No, there are capital costs.

You don't have to theorize: you need substantial amounts of spare capacity because with solar, for example, there will be night and winter, the costs of maintaining this capacity have been substantial in practice and have driven up energy costs everywhere (the confusion here is about what the article is claiming to say vs what is actually happening...the article constructs a model to show that energy prices would be higher, the problem is that the model is useless).
by rafram | 2025-06-25 15:43:04+00:00
The Trump administration is doing the opposite of that — they've been aggressively closing regional branch offices and consolidating agencies in the DC area:

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a...

https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega...

https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel...

If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
by akdev1l | 2025-06-25 15:43:23+00:00
are you linking to the fact that “useradd” exists to prove your point…?

Lmfaoooo

I’m assuming you have actually never ran a linux on your desktop. Lmaooooo.

Yeah sure init runs as root, and maybe you have background services that run as some other user.

BUT YOUR ACTUAL DESKTOP SESSION RUNS AS ONE USER. THIS INCLUDES YOUR BROWSER, YOUR PASSWORD MANAGER AND ALL YOUR OTHER SHIT!

https://paste.centos.org/view/f8e5ec76

so multi-user much secure

You know being a know-it-all only really works if you know what you are talking about.

Feel free to dig into the code of gnome-session if you don’t believe me.
by w-m | 2025-06-25 15:43:34+00:00
In the meantime I realized that the apad part is nonsensical - it pads the end of the stream, not at each silence-removed cut. I wanted to get angry at o3 for proposing this, but then I had a look at the silenceremove= documentation myself: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#silenceremove

Good god. You couldn't make that any more convoluted and hard-to-grasp if you wanted to. You gotta love ffmpeg!

I now think this might be a good solution:

ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=start_periods=1:stop_periods=-1:stop_duration=0.15:stop_threshold=-40dB:detection=rms" \ -c:a aac -b:a 128k output.m4a -y
by haswell | 2025-06-25 15:43:52+00:00
> Presumably people are fine with getting "ripped off" by Uber, otherwise they wouldn't keep using Uber and paying for it.

I’m not sure why we should presume people are “fine” with this just because it’s something that happens.

Plenty of things happen in this world that are not “fine” and make people upset, but continue to happen because of market forces, lack of reasonable alternatives, something being the “least bad” option, etc.

I think one of the most glaring issues is that Uber has established dominance in the category, which gives them power of their users and allows them to implement pricing strategies that are user-hostile with less chance of repercussions.
by diegof79 | 2025-06-25 15:43:56+00:00
Google suffers from Microsoft's issues: it has products for almost everything, but its confusing product messaging dilutes all the good things it does.

I like Gemini 2.5 Pro, too, and recently, I tried different AI products (including the Gemini Pro plan) because I wanted a good AI chat assistant for everyday use. But I also wanted to reduce my spending and have fewer subscriptions.

The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One, which is very convenient if you use Google Drive. But I already have an iCloud subscription tightly integrated with iOS, so switching to Drive and losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.

Then there is the Gemini chat UI, which is light years behind the OpenAI ChatGPT client for macOS.

NotebookLM is good at summarizing documents, but the experience isn’t integrated with the Gemini chat, so it’s like constantly switching between Google products without a good integrated experience.

The result is that I end up paying a subscription to Raycast AI because the chat app is very well integrated with other Raycast functions, and I can try out models. I don’t get the latest model immediately, but it has an integrated experience with my workflow.

My point in this long description is that by being spread across many products, Google is losing on the UX side compared to OpenAI (for general tasks) or Anthropic (for coding). In just a few months, Google tried to catch up with v0 (Google Stitch), GH Copilot/Cursor (with that half-baked VSCode plugin), and now Claude Code. But all the attempts look like side-projects that will be killed soon.
by rurp | 2025-06-25 15:44:06+00:00
Same for the Economist. I was on their signup page about to start a subscription when I figured I'd better check how cancellations work. Sure enough there's no simple online cancellation option like there is for signing up. There are a whole bunch of stories out there of people being given the run around and wasting a stupid about of time cancelling their account.

I even double checked with their support to see if it had been changed and got a ridiculous gaslighting response about this being better for customers. I generally think pretty highly of their journalism but these sleazy tactics definitely lowered my opinion of the company and prevented me from giving them my business.
by peterldowns | 2025-06-25 15:44:08+00:00
I use `mods` for this https://github.com/charmbracelet/mods

other people use simon willison's `llm` tool https://github.com/simonw/llm

Both allow you to switch between models, send short prompts from a CLI, optionally attach some context. I prefer mods because it's an easier install and I never need to worry about Python envs and other insanity.
by thimabi | 2025-06-25 15:44:24+00:00
The reason is that billing is separate, via the paid tier of the API. Just a few minutes ago, I was able to test Gemini CLI using a Workspace account after setting up a project in the free tier of the API. However, that seems to have been a bug on their end, because I now get 403 errors (Forbidden) with that configuration. The remaining options are either to set up billing for the API or use a non-Workspace Google account.
by theamk | 2025-06-25 15:44:56+00:00
Agreed, but amazingly high number of people (ab)use the local time notation for things which don't need it, like timestamps of various events (login time, order time, etc..)

It's worth repeating over and over: "Only use local time if the actual moment event happens depends on the timezone, like during future calendar entries. Every other time in the system should be a utc timestamp, converted to local time string at the very last presentation layer"
by joe_guy | 2025-06-25 15:45:30+00:00
I wouldn't assume this is how it works. But it could know your time zone changes and assume departure/arrival times based on it not being able to ping a server, then link this between possible airports based on time zones then possible flights based on the times.

But I suspect the false positives on this would be huge and if you felt so compelled could easily test while at your desk.
by gerardosuarez | 2025-06-25 15:45:34+00:00
It would be great to have a section in the README about how the code looks without using the library, contrasting it with the example you already have. I would need a significant time-saving reason to use a new external library. This is because, for new libraries like yours, we don't know how long you plan to support it. For that reason, using an external library for a core part of my business is a huge risk for me.

My use case: cursor for open-source terminal-based coding agents.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-25 15:45:42+00:00
There was a day they were demonstrating the first commercially available harddisk from 1956 [0], it would be one thing to see it behind glass but the volunteers had built an arduino interface to drive it and interface it to bring it back to life, and hearing them explain how everything works with the requisite enthusiasm was a great experience for a vintage computer nerd. That sucker is pneumatic !

[0] https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/first-commerci...
by tialaramex | 2025-06-25 15:45:56+00:00
Conventional freight wagons are unpowered yes, but I don't see how that's relevant to this claim that somehow if you have multiple electric motors you can't dump power into the traction feed when decelerating. British passenger trains do this today, it's not even a quirk, it's the default. The local train operator boasts that they dump 78,700,000 kWh per year from deceleration back into the traction feed. [No I don't know why they picked those units]
by reyqn | 2025-06-25 15:45:56+00:00
According to this https://github.com/the-pudding/data/tree/master/pockets data, only 27.5% of women's jeans and 97.5% of men's jean could fit a phone wider than 72mm in their front pocket. While not a common truth, it is a little annoying.

For this phone in particular, it's 5% for women and 85% for men. Assuming a lot of things, the majority of the population cannot fit this in their pocket.

It's hard to find research about this, but I think a lot of people might think that yes, phones are too big. (And that's not even thinking about hand size and how it affect comfort of use).
by ecshafer | 2025-06-25 15:46:10+00:00
I work with a LOT of images in a lot of image formats, many including extremely niche formats used in specific fields. There is a massive challenge in really supporting all of these, especially when you get down to the fact that some specs are a little looser than others. Even libraries can be very rough, since sure it says on the tin it supports JPG and TIF and HEIC... but does it support a 30GB Jpeg? Does it support all possibly meta data in the file?
by jfoster | 2025-06-25 15:46:23+00:00
You're conflating things a lot.

This started with me pointing out that the scale of Apollo Go is greater than Waymo, but then you made it about safety, which is quite a different (but still interesting) topic. Then there's this video that has been brought up in the context of safety, but seems more related to ride comfort. Ride comfort is also interesting, but different than safety.

I'm not sure we can actually have a reasonable conversation without objectively separating such topics.

I haven't looked at what the service area is, but I wouldn't assume that a downtown service area is somehow better or worse than a suburban service area, especially not without defining "better". A suburban-focused service seems like it might actually be a lot more useful than a downtown-focused service.

Back to the original point, you easily see the data yourself. The scale of Apollo Go is slightly larger than Waymo on most metrics that would seem to matter; vehicles, rides, miles, etc.
by GenerWork | 2025-06-25 15:46:38+00:00
I'm just a hobbyist, but I keep getting the error "The code change produced by Gemini cannot be automatically applied. You can manually apply the change or ask Gemini to try again". I assume this is because the service is being slammed?

Edit: I should mention that I'm accessing this through Gemini Code Assist, so this may be something out of your wheelhouse.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-25 15:46:57+00:00
> characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research…

It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.

Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...

> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.

> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)

https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...

"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
by andrekandre | 2025-06-25 15:47:03+00:00
> Personally, my top recommendation is for more transparency, to deepen the research on foreigners in Japan. The lack of data on real estate, for example, is a problem. .... Without facts, evidence-based policy making will become more and more difficult.

agree, but to add some anecdotal observation: i think a big problem with rapid increase of foreigners is the lack of easy integration into japanese society; its a constant source friction ime, so having foreigners and japanese in the same classes, in the same workplaces, and neighborhoods is important to absorb the local culture and have more understanding.. just my 2 yen
by Agentlien | 2025-06-25 15:47:16+00:00
This feels backwards to me when GPUs were created largely because graphics needed lots of parallel floating point operations, a big chunk of which are matrix multiplications.

When I think of matrix multiplication in graphics I primarily think of transforms between spaces: moving vertices from object space to camera space, transforming from camera space to screen space, ... This is a big part of the math done in regular rendering and needs to be done for every visible vertex in the scene - typically in the millions in modern games.

I suppose the difference here is that DLSS is a case where you primarily do large numbers of consecutive matrix multiplications with little other logic, since it's more ANN code than graphics code.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-06-25 15:47:33+00:00
It is interesting how different this plays out in real life. The billboard on the corner doesn’t support anything I use. It is probably making the owner $50k in billings passively a month that they use to screw around with.

Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.

But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
by XMasterrrr | 2025-06-25 15:47:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been neck-deep in AI and LLMs for a while now, and I kept running into the same problem: every learning resource out there for LLMs either tries to teach you all of deep learning from scratch, or throws you into a sea of random “awesome-LLM” repos, hoping you can connect the dots yourself.

So, I wrote up the roadmap I wish existed a year ago: how to actually learn LLMs and build real things, with none of the bloat. It's geared towards folks with a CS (or practical programming) background who want to skip the endless ML prerequisites and get their hands dirty. The approach:

- Concepts first, then phases, then resources/tools - Each phase has concrete projects (build an autograd engine, write a mini-GPT, fine-tune with LoRA, etc) - The goal is to get you actually building and shipping, not just watching lectures

Hope you guys find it useful.

-Ahmad
by em-bee | 2025-06-25 15:47:40+00:00
another example of the XLibre fork making waves. personally i believe this proposal is premature, and i expect that it will be rejected, but evidently some people believe otherwise.

i wasn't sure whether it would be better to share the phoronix post or directly link to the proposal:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/X11Libre

the title for the latter is a bit tricky. maybe: Fedora Change Proposal: Replace the X.org X11 Xserver with the X11Libre Xserver
by Zigurd | 2025-06-25 15:47:45+00:00
I bet Google would prefer to be a technology provider rather than an operator.

The fleet size is very small compared to the number of private cars and ride hailing drivers in any of Waymo's service areas.

I've analyzed the fleet size, the claimed number of rides per week, and the average price per ride, and while the numbers are pretty squishy, it is at least plausible that Waymo is making an operating profit already and maybe a pretty good one. I would bet the pricing is what it is in order to control demand.

Search for the videos about traffic noise in China. EVs are much quieter and when they account for a large fraction of traffic in the city, it makes an obvious difference.

OK, surveillance. Yeah.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-25 15:48:09+00:00
The UK is not an isolated grid, massive amounts of electricity are exported/imported with Europe with all the benefits/costs that come with that (this was an issue, for example, when electricity prices went up in the UK and the UK began exporting huge amounts of energy to Europe...this was effectively why the UK had to introduce a retail subsidy, because EU nations did the same which increased their effective demand for energy).

And the difference is that Finland has nuclear...that is it, which provides the dispatchable demand. It is extremely challenging to replicate this in many other countries because of the planning issues (the UK is building Hinkley, the cost for this is tens of billions, the funny story here is that the government decided not to proceed with this ten years ago because electricity prices were too low...can't think what has changed in the meantime? total mystery...right?).
Show HN: Quantum Cyber Tarot
by unknown_user_84 | 2025-06-25 15:48:22+00:00
Hello everybody!

This is the first real web app that I have done the full thing with. Properly used Flask, setup Celery on the backend, got the terms and conditions reviewed by a lawyer, integrated a payment processor. The whole thing. Still working on the visual presentation, but that is a never ending task.

I had the idea for this while getting bored and thinking about things these chatbot APIs could probably handle. After coding up a Qiskit Aer Simulator deck shuffler and testing out some draws manually Quantum Cyber Tarot was born. The site offers simulated QRNG shuffles, true QRNG shuffles via the ANU API and interpretations courtesy of Gemini. I'm planning to add more features, something like the ability to throw in a question with a reading and maybe custom draw types.

The target user for this site is someone who has heard of tarot, is mildly interested in weird things, and likes a cyberpunk aesthetic (still working on that).

I'm somewhere between an amateur and journeyman developer without a formal CS education which has made it difficult to find a job in this market. While I look I've taken to trying to increase my experience with projects. And maybe make a little money too.

Critiques, questions, suggestions welcome.

If you sign up drop me a line at admin@qctarot.com and I'll add some credits to your account. The default is 1 shuffle credit and 1 reading credit per account so my API bills don't get too out of control.
by wagwang | 2025-06-25 15:48:58+00:00
> First, we compare census tracts that received a Starbucks to census tracts that expected a Starbucks but did not ultimately get one due to administrative issues such as city planning, zoning board rejection, architectural board rejection, or community mobilization. These ‘rejected’ Starbucks are a natural control group because Starbucks Corporation also sought to invest in those neighborhoods.

This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
by lars_francke | 2025-06-25 15:49:24+00:00
Agreed. And for me that has nothing to do with announcement vs. notes.

"We sped up new file creation, so you can now create a new file in under 20ms, a 100x speedup from v1.2."

No. You had a big bug. You fixed it. Excellent. When I'm affected by the bug I'd search for "deadlock" or "bug " in the announcement and this is hiding it behind marketing speak. I don't think that's honest. So for me the perfect announcements would be the red ones.
by egberts1 | 2025-06-25 15:50:33+00:00
Secret to smoothest usage of /usr[/local]/lib64 is to leverage Redhat's

config.site

Intensive details:

config.site is the usual way this works on most distros. They do provide suggestions for a workaround: Basically backport whatever Fedora's config.site does.

FWIW, the distro I'm currently using where this works does this by exporting CONFIG_SITE in /etc/profile.d/site.sh:

CONFIG_SITE="/usr/share/site/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu" export CONFIG_SITE

Source link:

https://github.com/egberts/easy-admin/issues/1
by ludwigschubert | 2025-06-25 15:51:08+00:00
“On the Fairphone 6, the battery is firmly screwed in. With the predecessors, it could simply be removed.”

Still awkward to turn that into the headline when it’s such a minor part of the review. The article was “translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed”, but it’s just as off in the original. Maybe headline chosen by an editor, not the author?
by udev4096 | 2025-06-25 15:51:11+00:00
More power usage, need at least 64G of ram to even remotely use it as it's intended, no hardware acc by default, buggy templates, sleep is broken, uses X11 for display, dom0 is not updated as frequently as it should be and I hardly see any effort in documenting the fact that individual VMs's security matter too. That is not to say I hate Qubes. I think everyone, especially people dealing with sensitive data, should use it
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-06-25 15:51:28+00:00
The problem has been big bang policy-making. There is no inherent issue with renewable vs non-renewable, the only thing that matters is can you get energy at a cost that is economic...that is the purpose of the system we have. The problem has been created by policy-makers who want to go very quickly in one direction without regard for any other goal than increasing the share of renewables.
by Someone | 2025-06-25 15:51:38+00:00
> The camera knows which way it's oriented, so it should just write the pixels out in the correct order. Write the upper-left pixel first. Then the next one. And so on. WTF.

The hardware likely is optimized for the common case, so I would think that can be a lot slower. It wouldn’t surprise me, for example, if there are image sensors out there that can only be read out in top to bottom, left to right order.

Also, with RAW images and sensors that aren’t rectangular grids, I think that would complicate RAW images parsing. Code for that could have to support up to four different formats, depending on how the sensor is designed,