MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-06-08 21:51:15+00:00
From teh Gemini 2.5 Pro AI "expert", with human review:

> For primary titanium production (from ore): Molten Salt Electrolysis (Direct Electrochemical Deoxygenation, FFC Cambridge, OS processes, etc.) and calciothermic reduction in molten salts

> They aim to [sic.] revolutionize titanium production by moving away from the energy-intensive and environmentally impactful Kroll process, directly reducing TiO 2 and offering the potential for closed-loop systems.

> For recycling titanium scrap and deep deoxidation: Hydrogen plasma arc melting and calcium-based deoxidation techniques (especially electrochemical calcium generation) are highly promising. Hydrogen offers extreme cleanliness, while calcium offers potent deoxidizing power.

...

> Magnesium Hydride Reduction (e.g., University of Utah's reactor)

> Solid-State Reduction (e.g., Metalysis process)

Are there more efficient, sustainable methods of titanium production?

Also, TIL Ti is a catalyst for CNT carbon nanotube production; and, alloying CNTs with Ti leaves vacancies.
by jonah-archive | 2025-06-08 21:52:13+00:00
This is an utterly random question, and I'm sure there's a better place to ask it, but does anyone reading this happen to have/know the logic analyzer pinout [0] on the BeBox mainboard? I got a weird rackmount BeBox (an LCS LD-CS1, the controller for their LD-88 audio mixer [1]) and have been rebuilding the blinkenlight board, but I'd love to drop an Agilent on there at some point.

0: https://bebits.irixnet.org/beos/docs/DR8/UserDoc/DR8UsersGui... "The pin-out for the logic probe interface is available upon request from Be, Inc. Be can supply a card and analyzer set-up libraries that connect the CPU bus to an HP 1660A."

1: http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/de...
by lupusreal | 2025-06-08 21:52:16+00:00
Traditional gaming journalism as once existed with magazines and later websites modeled after those magazines is wholly obsolete. For game discovery, reviews, and game tricks and tips, it has been replaced by independent youtubers and streamers. We're all much better off for this too, the new system gives much wider and deeper coverage to much more obscure games than the magazines ever could or would. Just as one example, Master Hellish creates an absolute ton of OpenTTD tutorials and showcase videos. The most the old games journalism industry would ever make for a game like that is one or two articles highlighting it as an obscure novelty, but never going I'm depth with the game mechanics.
by mhh__ | 2025-06-08 21:52:36+00:00
> As the ww2 generation passes on,

I was at a picnic recently that happened to be on VE day, it really struck me that now London is only about 35% or so English as the ww2 generation would've known it, almost no one has a particularly good reason to bother paying attention. I'm sure I was the only person there who knows who Barnes Wallis was.

And yes I miss the boffins. They do still sort of exist but that type of mind has been strangled by the last few decades drive towards left-brained processes where everything basically has to be nailed down before the work actually starts.

That latter point is one reason why we're struggling so much - we owe a great debt to the generations who built all the infrastructure and housing. We didn't pay it off, we now can't really do anything at scale other than extract rent. The victorians were building a HS2 every few years.
by m101 | 2025-06-08 21:54:53+00:00
“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,”

There are so many problems with this article.

Let's just go with the headline- so it might raises energy bills by $250, but on the other hand cut taxes by $500?

Most things that require subsidies don't work because they are more expensive solutions than the alternatives that exist in the market. Supporting those programmes will necessarily cost more overall (hence the 500 number I made up above is bigger than the 250 number they made up).
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-06-08 21:55:49+00:00
> save on the heartbreak of buying an RTX 5090 only to find that even that doesn’t help much with LLM inference and we’re all gonna need the cheaper-but-more-VRAM Intel Arc B60s

When going for more VRAM, with an RTX 5090 currently sitting at $3000 for 32GB, I'm curious why people aren't trying to get the Dell C4140s. Those seem to go for $3000-$4000 for the whole server with 4x V100 16GB, so 64GB total VRAM.

Maybe it's just because they produce heat and noise like a small turbojet.
by neepi | 2025-06-08 21:56:42+00:00
I had an idea years ago for an app but came to the same conclusion after some market research and a risk assessment so didn’t bother. I do not regret that decision for a moment.

I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-08 21:57:04+00:00
From the article:

> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.

Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.
by mshockwave | 2025-06-08 21:57:41+00:00
It was later reverted[1] because "there are devices in the field using usbX interfaces for tethering". Shortly after that, it got re-landed but only supported Android V+[2]

[1]: https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/packages/...

[2]: https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/packages/...
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-06-08 21:58:04+00:00
> You can, but most people won't.

Who is to say that insecure defaults is less good for most people? The reason why things like FDE and other enhanced security mechanisms aren’t enabled by default is because it increases the risk of things breaking for non tech savvy people. I have had to recover installs from peoples hard drives where the messed things up and if they used FDE they would have been screwed. The reality is that it is much more likely grandma forgets her password over somebody stealing her desktop and scraping her data. It would be nice for OS vendors to create profiles for OS installs, and then people who know what they are doing can opt for the “secure” profile, but I don’t think FDE can ever be the default on mass consumer devices.

> Should password managers just store all of your passwords in cleartext instead of encrypting them, since you should be using FDE?

Those are different threat vectors. FDE stops intruders from accessing your system when it is locked/off. Password manager encryption is to prevent rogue processes on an UNLOCKED system. The system can solve the second problem either by having a more granular permissions system (like iOS) so that process A cannot read data of process B, or the OS can have a secure enclave which can store your secrets behind biometrics.

Notably, both of these solutions are implemented in Apple world and I would argue that applications should consider using those system mechanisms instead of rolling their own encryption.

If you are actually serious about security you aren’t using passwords, you are using webauthn and u2f where possible.
by potatoman22 | 2025-06-08 21:58:30+00:00
I mean you can call it AI/a luxury still. Tap water is nice, pathfinding algorithms are nice. It doesn't matter to me if people use "AI" whenever they want. Sometimes it's a little silly, but harmless. It's like if someone called sliced bread a luxury: they're not wrong but it is a bit silly to say depending where you live.
by westurner | 2025-06-08 21:58:42+00:00
Gemini, for example, launched implicit caching on or about 2025-05-08: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemini-2-5-models-now-s... :

> Now, when you send a request to one of the Gemini 2.5 models, if the request shares a common prefix as one of previous requests, then it’s eligible for a cache hit. We will dynamically pass cost savings back to you, providing the same 75% token discount.

> In order to increase the chance that your request contains a cache hit, you should keep the content at the beginning of the request the same and add things like a user's question or other additional context that might change from request to request at the end of the prompt.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43939774 re: same:

> Does this make it appear that the LLM's responses converge on one answer when actually it's just caching?
Show HN: Summarize – I built a tool to tackle my reading list
by gwintrob | 2025-06-08 21:58:50+00:00
I built Summarize (https://www.summarize.stream/) because I've been drowning content from email newsletters, WhatsApp groups, Hacker News, etc.

Summarize lets you paste any text or URL and get a summary with key takeaways and the best quotes. There's also a dedicated page (https://www.summarize.stream/hn) that summarizes the top HN articles from the past 24hr. It's vibecoded with Cursor, Next.js, and Supabase.

It typically shortens thousands of words down to a couple hundred using GPT-4.1 so I can get through 10-20 articles in the time it used to take me to read 1-2. This lets me focus on reading what I actually care about. Would love your thoughts and any suggestions on how to improve it!
by kentonv | 2025-06-08 21:59:02+00:00
> The code that any current-gen LLM generates, no matter how precise the prompt it's given, is never even close to the quality standards expected of any senior-level engineer, in any organization I've been a part of, at any point in my career.

You are just making assertions here with no evidence.

If you prompt the LLM for code, and then you review the code, identify specific problems, and direct the LLM to fix those problems, and repeat, you can, in fact, end up with production-ready code -- in less time than it would take to write by hand.

Proof: My project. I did this. It worked. It's in production.

It seems like you believe this code is not production-ready because it was produced using an LLM which, you believe, cannot produce production-ready code. This is a cyclic argument.
by galkk | 2025-06-08 21:59:18+00:00
tl;dr:

* Right now, Compiler Explorer costs around $3000 a month (including AWS, monitoring, Sentry for errors, Grafana, and other expenses). * nsjail for security/isolation * 3.9 terabytes of compilers, libraries, and tools * Up to 30+ EC2 instances (EC2 instances are virtual machines) * 4,724 compiler versions * 1,982,662 short links saved (and as of recently, ~14k ex-goo.gl links) * 1.8 million compilations per week

If my napkin math is correct, it's around 3 compilations/sec. and their cost is 0.0004 cents per compilation. Fascinating. If anyone asked me about ballpark estimate of compiler explorer cost, I'd be wrong at least at magnitude. Like - they must be heavy cpu/io/network bound, and this is like the worst scenario for cloud use.

This and lichess (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41922928#41928953) shows that you really can handle very serious loads for quite cheap.
by jongjong | 2025-06-08 22:00:15+00:00
Resonates. I've been thinking about a tech technology bubble (not financial bubble) for years now. Big tech companies have just been throwing engineers at problems for many years and it feels like they completely stopped caring about talent now. Not that they ever really cared deeply, but they did care superficially and that was enough to keep the machines spinning.

Now that they have AI, I can see it become an 'idiocy multiplier'. Already software is starting to break in subtle ways, it's slow, laggy, security processes have become a nightmare.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-06-08 22:02:01+00:00
I don't think those of us who don't work at OpenAI, Google, etc. have enough information to accurately estimate the influence of instruction tuning on the capabilities or the general "feel" of LLMs (it's really a pity that no one releases non-instruction-tuned models anymore).

Personally my inaccurate estimate is much lower than yours. When non-instruction tuned versions of GPT-3 were available, my perception is that most of the abilities and characteristics that we associate with talking to an LLM were already there - just more erratic, e.g., you asked a question and the model might answer or might continue it with another question (which is also a plausible continuation of the provided text). But if it did "choose" to answer, it could do so with comparable accuracy to the instruction-tuned versions.

Instruction tuning made them more predictable, and made them tend to give the responses that humans prefer (e.g. actually answering questions, maybe using answer formats that humans like, etc.), but I doubt it gave them many abilities that weren't already there.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-08 22:02:41+00:00
> For those developers proactive enough to embrace this change, AI isn't a threat—it's an unprecedented opportunity. OregonPastDueRent.com is just one example. It's proof that in the age of AI, "too niche" is no longer a barrier but an invitation to innovation.

It's rather insulting that he also wrote the blog post with ChatGPT.

Every time I see "it's not (x), it's (y)" I know exactly what I'm dealing with.

It's possible to use that construction ironically, but I don't think that's the case here.

(Also lmao at his business idea: Using ChatGPT to help landlords automate legal paperwork. It's simultaneously stupid and evil. Nice work.)
by nativeit | 2025-06-08 22:03:39+00:00
I'm generally in agreement with you (I upvoted your comment), but think it's important not to distort--even unintentionally--the motivations, speech, or work of historical figures like Alan Turing.

"I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"

(Paraphrasing from the Wikipedia entry[1][2]) Turing reckons with the problem of formally defining "thought", so instead chooses to reframe the question, and invent an experiment that uses more specific, well-defined conditions and thresholds, arguing that this would be more likely to produce a concrete answer. This experiment is, of course, what he called the "Imitation Game", and having laid out its rules and conditions, he posed, "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"

He then spends a large portion of the rest of the paper to address nine ostensible objections to the notion that machines could "think".

All that said, there's plenty of room to debate whether or not Turing's experiment is/isn't flawed, whether subjective interpretations of a purely language-driven interaction is a valid model for "thinking" more broadly, and whether these ideas can/should be applied to contemporary technology. I personally think that Turing's experiment should simply be accepted for what it is, rather than being wielded dogmatically[3]--it's an exceptionally insightful contribution to a wider body of human knowledge and philosophy, but insufficient for establishing anything like "sentience" in machines.

1. It is insane that the original paper is behind a paywall.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

3. As I have seen frequently elsewhere, I am not suggesting the parent comment is doing so.
by czhu12 | 2025-06-08 22:04:16+00:00
I was able to replicate some of this by building my own hosting platform (https://canine.sh) that can deploy a Github repo to anywhere -- from a Kubernetes cluster to a home raspberry pi server.

I've built tons of stuff in my career, but building the thing that can host all of it for myself has been hugely rewarding (instead of relying on hosting providers that inevitably start charging you)

I now have almost 15 apps hosted across 3 clusters:

https://imgur.com/a/RYg0wzh

One of the most cherised things I've built, and I find myself constantly coming back and improving / updating out of love.
by daveguy | 2025-06-08 22:04:20+00:00
The transformers are accurately described in the article. The confusion comes in the Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF) process after a transformer based system is trained. These are algorithms on top of the basic model that make additional discriminations of the next word (or phrase) to follow based on human feedback. It's really just a layer that makes these models sound "better" to humans. And it's a great way to muddy the hype response and make humans get warm fuzzies about the response of the LLM.
by simonw | 2025-06-08 22:04:39+00:00
I'm really curious to understand more about this.

Right now there are top tier LLMs being produced by a bunch of different organizations: OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Meta and DeepSeek and Qwen and Mistral and xAI and several others as well.

Are they all employing separate armies of labelers? Are they ripping off each other's output to avoid that expense? Or is there some other, less labor intensive mechanisms that they've started to use?
by ptero | 2025-06-08 22:05:36+00:00
It's the same thing in the SV. Unless the company is doing liquidity events the early, but post-founder equity is unlikely to pan out for employees.

And it can motivate employees to stay at the company way beyond what's good for them, as leaving the company means either abandoning your equity or exercising your options and paying real money for a very risky and illiquid asset. My 2c.
by neepi | 2025-06-08 22:05:38+00:00
Yep same. Amazing what you can pull out of the skip these days and run for nothing. I lifted a couple of dead Lenovo P720 workstations out and managed to get a working dual Xeon silver 32 core machine with 64Gb of ECC RAM.

Uses a bunch of power but two orders of magnitude less in cash than buying another ECC ram desktop over 3 years.

If it blows up it cost me nothing other than an hour of part swapping.
by schiffern | 2025-06-08 22:05:39+00:00
Shame to see such (otherwise excellent) writing fraught with mistaken SI usage, as defined by the authoritative SI Brochure.[0] It's a small thing that makes any writing feel less credible.

Hopefully the author sees this post and can correct it. The author is using British English so I have preferred that convention. I include a second option which at least corrects any mistaken abbreviations, but the first option is always the correct version.

>tens or hundreds of Km

"tens or hundreds of kilometres" or "tens or hundreds of km"

>30Km

"30 kilometres" or "30 km"

>10nS

"10 nanoseconds" or "10 ns"

>Khz to low Mhz

"kilohertz to low megahertz" or "kHz to low MHz"

>hundreds of mS

"hundreds of milliseconds" or "hundreds of ms"

>a few Khz

"a few kilohertz" or "a few kHz"

[0] https://www.bipm.org/en/publications/si-brochure/
by esbeeb | 2025-06-08 22:07:18+00:00
DoH is the enemy of all self-hosters. When port 443 is used, you can't discriminate on it - to perhaps monitor it, work towards debugging it, block it, re-route it, etc. DNS shouldn't be a stow-away within some other protocol like HTTP, hiding from network-level scrutiny and control.

DoT is the friend of all self-hosters. Self-hosters need to control their own DNS if they want to use SSL within their LANs, within their self-hosted VPNs, and within their own self-hosted VPN subnets especially (I use Wireguard subnets a lot). Secure DNS with TLS, sure, but this control-ability, at the port level (853), is what a self-hoster needs to keep their life sane.
by kbolino | 2025-06-08 22:07:43+00:00
Better for whom? If you want a dead-simple time type, use time_t.

There are plenty of improvements needed in the C time APIs, like sub-second precision, thread safety, and timezone awareness. What benefit is there to making the struct fields unsigned beyond some arbitrary purity test? This is still C, there are still plenty of ways to make invalid values. And it is nice to be able to subtract as well as add.

Heck, there's no way to encode the full Gregorian Calendar rules in the type system of any language I've ever used, so every choice is going to be a compromise. February 29 Not-A-Leap-Year and April 31 are still invalid dates even if you can outlaw January 0 and March 32.

Making all the fields in struct tm signed ints is clearly there to allow them to be manipulated and consistently so, since other types would obviously be better for size if nothing else.
by Topfi | 2025-06-08 22:12:05+00:00
A few hardware design decisions, mainly focused on ergonomics, etc. were made with direct input from the Xbox team. On the software front, this is (supposed to be) a version of Windows that has significantly stripped down background processes and improvements in terms of efficiency and standby performance. Whether this will be available for installation or remain an OEM option remains to be seen, same on how much will flow into regular Windows.

Seeing as they couldn't answer how the OS will handle running tasks after switching into and out of regular desktop modes when asked by Dave2D and Linus Sebastian, I fear that this is all far to early for anyone inside MSFT to have a proper plan as of yet if they don't have a clear answer for such key questions.
by russellbeattie | 2025-06-08 22:13:33+00:00
I grew up outside of Boston and as a kid we went to the Museum of Science's Omnimax dome quite a few times.

As I grew up, I started seeing/hearing about IMAX movies, and didn't realize they were different until I went to one in another part of the country. I was very excited to go, as it had been a long time since I had been to an Omnimax.

I was pretty confused and disappointed, which is a weird reaction to have the first time in an IMAX theater. "It's just a big screen... Where's the dome?"
by tzs | 2025-06-08 22:16:11+00:00
The "One Big Beautiful Bill" (OBBB) is changing some of that. It will be $23 a month after their application of the tax credits is approved.

Currently you get the credits immediately and if it turns out they are too high or too low that is taken care of next year when you do your taxes.

With the change in the OBBB you will have to pay the full amount while the application for tax credits is being verified.

Also currently if you are happy with your current plan you don't have to do anything to reenroll for the next year. The marketplace can automatically enroll you in the same plan next year (or an equivalent one if your insurance company has changed their offerings). The marketplace can automatically get your tax information and handle getting you set up for the tax credits for the next year.

The OBBB is changing that so that every year you have to reapply for the tax credit, and so potentially each year you might have to pay the full amount while that is being verified.

The net result of the OBBB will be about 1/3 of the people currently on ACA not being able to remain on it [1].

[1] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-06-05-fact-sheet-one-bi...
by robocat | 2025-06-08 22:17:11+00:00
A worthwhile video on the topic of making a product in the US - although the purpose of the video is overall commercial (to sell the grill scrubber they designed).

Somewhat painful to watch:

* he suspects he's been had by a supplier reshipping from China. But fortunately honest about it in video

* has a sort of amateur feel - perhaps lack of experience developing a product. But great if you're an amateur.

* it isn't clear whether the scrubber would work very well

Favorite part: the 3D printed mold prototyping system
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-08 22:17:42+00:00
Talk it out? Why would an intruder, whatever his "cool" drunken motives were, deserve her attention or anyone's for that matter? Why should anyone assume that such a person is a good boy, adept at 18 century manners? The risk isn't worth the bother.

On the one hand, we live in a busy word and if you consider drunken characters a waste of time, you should have a way of distancing yourself from them.

On the other hand, and far, far more important, not having such a way leaves the door wide open for abuse. "Oh sorry"... "Oh, Oh sorry again, may shake you hand again?"... "Oh, oh, oh..." FT.