MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aurizon | 2025-06-16 11:28:27+00:00
Those sat to ground power sources use gallium arsenide switched FETs = synchronous rectification, avoiding the voltage drop of diodes has been tested on a small scale, the 10GW orbital 35% efficient solar arrays, maybe next week... Solar boilers, end to end, are more efficient than solar cells, but mechanical complexity(leaks, corrosion, worker avarice) made one US plan in the South West non viable. As we sit silicon-perovskite tandem solar cells will top out around 42-45% - unless Schockley is end runned? Ternary -??. A good lecture = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0VJX0_Td0&t=2s&ab_channel=...
by ab5tract | 2025-06-16 11:28:32+00:00
Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive.

Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny.

Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome.

But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad?

Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.
by bmn__ | 2025-06-16 11:28:37+00:00
> [Lambdas] get non-descriptive, auto-generated names. When I look at call stack of a crash I can’t map the auto-generated closure name to a function in my code.

Well, HN lazyweb, how do you override the stupid name in C++? In other languages this is possible:

$ node --trace-uncaught -e 'const c = function have_name() {throw null}; c()' $ perl -d:Confess -MSub::Util=set_subname -E 'my $c = sub() {die}; set_subname have_name => $c; $c->()'
by rhelz | 2025-06-16 11:30:25+00:00
The secret to German and French productivity is that when they are at work, they work. They don't spend a lot of time in worthless meetings, surfing the web, or otherwise procrastinating.

Remember the movie "Office Space" when Peter Givens tells the two Bobs that in a week he'd do about 15 minutes of actual work?

If you know you only have to work for 35 hours, its a lot easier to work intensely. If you are expected to work 60 hour a week, you haver to pace yourself. It's just too easy to put things off until the weekend--when you'll have "fewer interruptions" (!)
by chneu | 2025-06-16 11:31:05+00:00
Again, American dairy farmers would never adopt this without massive subsidies. Even then they would fight it like they do every environmental regulation(of which there aren't many). If they can't increase profits they will not do it.

Finland is not the US. Americans will try everything else before doing what other countries do because we believe we are different/exceptional.

I agree it's a good idea. It just isn't feasible in the United States for a variety of reasons.
by mightyham | 2025-06-16 11:31:08+00:00
> English Language is the best general purpose conveyance of arbitrary ideas, and it has syntax rules just like programming languages. It's "best" by the metric of being "easiest for humans to understand". That's what I mean by best, in this case.

This is the point I take issue with. I agree with you that lisp is the simplest and "best" programming language. Unlike lisp, there is no clear "best" natural language that is more simple and composable than all other natural languages (I know that's not what your claiming, just pointing that out). The dimension of your "best metric" for language is pretty bizarre though; all you are saying is that spoken/written language, in general, is better than grunts and pointing. If you actually compare the space of natural language and the space of programming languages, which is much more interesting imo, I think you would have to agree that non-lisp programming languages are more similar to natural language because their development was more practical and unprincipled than lisp.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-16 11:31:11+00:00
> It’s a ballpoint, with all of the advantages, that writes smoother than any gel.

Gel pens are ballpoints. What do you mean by "ballpoint" here?

> Try a Uni-Ball Jetsream

I would never choose to use one of those, since they aren't available in 0.5mm. 0.7mm is too thick.
by muzani | 2025-06-16 11:31:31+00:00
AI Agents used to be a fantasy, but they're completely the norm today. As in you tell the code to write what you want it to do - it'll make the changes then commit them. Just to show how far things have changed, the term "vibe coding" was coined in February 2025.

Also politics have had a significant shift. A lot of power vacuums opened up all over the world at the same time. This leads to some instability. Wealth parity will often dampen political instability. But that pillar was struck during COVID lockdowns. Crypto messes with IS-LM. AI is messing with productivity-wealth distribution in general.

It's like a small cut that got infected, and somehow that infection is heading towards sepsis. The 'sepsis' point might be bank runs. It can be cured. But are we doing enough?

During power shifts, tech is often the weapon wielded. When Americans fight AI and Chinese force it into the school syllabus, I guess we'll just see what happens.
by handsclean | 2025-06-16 11:34:22+00:00
I’ve seen this “next version” trick enough times and in enough contexts to know when to call BS. There’s always a next version, it’s rarely night-and-day better, and when it is better you’ll have evidence, not just a salesman’s word. People deserve credit/blame today for reality today, and if reality changes tomorrow, tomorrow is when they’ll deserve credit/blame for that change. Anybody who tries to get you to judge them today for what you can’t see today is really just trying to make you dismiss what you see in favor of what you’re told.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-16 11:35:34+00:00
In a way, yes, I think that rise smartphones and the resulting proliferation of cheap mobile processors was ground-shattering in terms of what we consider to be a computer. If I'm reading the numbers correctly, there are about 2B people with their own pc/laptop while there are about 5B people with their own smartphone. So 60% of people using computing do so on a type of device that didn't exist in 2005.

And this is before we talk about new modalities that might take over in the future, like VR/AR, wearable AI "pins" (which is what I assume that Johnny Ive is working on), neural interfaces, and maybe even quantum computing. So I personally don't see any issue of thinking of what happened 20 years ago, and what's happening at the moment as "early days for computers".

This is of course a semantics argument, but in my mind "early days" is a term for the time before things stabilized, and I'm very unclear on what that means for a field that's continuously undergoing rapid growth. As another extreme case - what would you say were the "early days" for life on planet Earth? I assume that most people wouldn't be thinking of just the first 50 years after the first RNA molecules got enclosed in a membrane.
by bsenftner | 2025-06-16 11:35:53+00:00
Well duh. Writing is thinking ordered, and thinking in your mind is not ordered unless one has specific training that organizes and orders their thinking - and even then it requires effort to maintain an organized perception. That is why we write: writing is our thoughts organized and frozen in an order that will be remain in order when related, without writing as the communications foundation the ideas/concepts would drift. Using an LLM to write is using an LLM to think for you and unless you then double your work by validating what was written, you are just adding work that regulates your mind to a janitor cleaning up after the LLM.

It is absolutely possible to use LLMs when writing essays, but do not use them to write! Use them to critique what you yourself with your own mind wrote!
by ecocentrik | 2025-06-16 11:36:44+00:00
For the same reason that nonprofit consumer advocacy and safety organizations like Consumer Reports and the Center for Auto Safety exist. Lobbyists and wealthy private individuals exert a lot of influence over the operations of publicly funded oversight agencies. They have the power to censor these agencies or as we've seen recently, fire all their staff, defund them or close them completely.

As for the fanbois and f*cbois, they have always existed and will always exist. They are the pawns. Smart mature people learn to lead, direct, manipulate, deflect and ignore them.
by fragmede | 2025-06-16 11:37:08+00:00
Or cigarette companies having doctors show that cigarettes don't cause cancer. It turns out that the bar for science is really really high, and for stuff that's less obvious and takes time and lots of money and effort, it's really hard to show. You'd think I was a loon if I told you gravity wasn't a decided matter of physics, since we're all glued to this Earth every day, but we still don't know that dark matter and the ramifications for the theory of gravity are. Science still doesn't know how to test psychedelic medicine because it's obvious to the control group that they're on the placebo. That doesn't mean we should lower the bar for science, just that we should be aware of shortcomings in our beliefs.

So if you want to get into the details and figure out why a video from "Tesla Takedown" should or should not be believed, in all ears, but I'm some random on the Internet. I don't work at NHTSA or anywhere that could affect change based on the outcome of this video. It's not going to affect my buying decisions one way or another, but it'll only divide people who have decided this matters to them and can't get along with others.
by gavinray | 2025-06-16 11:37:19+00:00
I asked several LLM's after jailbreaking with prompts to provide viable synthesis routes for various psychoactive substances and they did a remarkable job.

This was neat to see but also raised some eyebrows from me. A clever kid with some pharmacology knowledge and basic organic chemistry understanding could get up to no good.

Especially since you can ask the model to use commonly available reagents + precursors and for synthesis routes that use the least amount of equipment and glassware.
by saberience | 2025-06-16 11:37:35+00:00
The problem with your argument is the idea that there is this special thing called "consciousness" that humans have and AI "doesn't".

Philosophers, scientists, thinkers have been trying to define "consciousness" for 100+ years at this point and no one has managed to either a) define it, or b) find ways to test for it.

Saying we have "consciousness" and AI "doesn't" is like saying we have a soul, a ghost in the machine, and AI doesn't. Do we really have a ghost in the machine? Or are we just really a big deterministic machine that we just don't fully understand yet, rather like AI.

So before you assert that we are "conscious", you should first define what you mean by that term and how we test for it conclusively.
by zokier | 2025-06-16 11:38:46+00:00
The thing that piqued my curiosity was this note from the paper:

> This strongly suggests that the recommended frequency value for the secondary representation of the second is offset from the unperturbed transition frequency by approximately twice its assigned uncertainty of 1.3×10^-15.

> the recommended frequency value is strongly dominated by a single absolute frequency measurement [53], which in light of recent results is to be considered suspect.

So I guess we don't have a usable theoretical reference value here.
by throwaway43156 | 2025-06-16 11:39:20+00:00
They're saying "The effects of the first ton of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is much higher than the effects of the next ton. Now there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that dumping any more into it will have a negligible effect."

The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-06-16 11:39:25+00:00
Part of that may be drugs, but my guess is that its a minor one. The messianic savior ego trip behavior is probably more because the type of person who would be prone to narcissistic hubris is now entering tech because that's where all the money and power is. Whereas in the early days, this wasn't so clear. So now we have all these tech-bros where we used to have tech-nerds.
by angusb | 2025-06-16 11:39:32+00:00
I agree it's a major mistake + should get a lot of focus from the FSD team. I'm just unsure whether that directly translates to prohibiting a robotaxi rollout (I'm open to the possibility it should though).

I guess the thing I'm trying to reconcile is that even very safe drivers make critical mistakes extremely rarely, so the threshold at which FSD is safer than even the top 10% of human drivers likely includes some nonzero level of critical mistakes. Right now Tesla has several people mining FSD for any place it makes critical mistakes and these are well publicised so I think we get an inflated sense of their commonality. This is speculation, but if true it leaves some possibility of it being significantly safer than the median driver while still allowing for videos like this to proliferate.

I do wish Tesla released all stats for interventions/near misses/crashes so we could have a better and non-speculative discussion about this!
Show HN: BatchShots – In-browser batch editor for image and SEO optimization
by banandre | 2025-06-16 11:39:56+00:00
My aunt runs a small side business selling handmade figures, which means she takes a lot of photos. I became her photo editor, and the job was always the same: fix dark images, remove background clutter, find the best shot from a group of duplicates, and get them ready for her online store.

The manual work was slow. It wasn't just photo editing, it was also getting the images ready for the web. I had to resize and compress them, then create SEO-friendly filenames (slugs) and product descriptions to help her store show up in search results.

I started with Photoshop and Lightroom, but the process was slow. I tried open-source tools like GIMP and wrote my own scripts with ImageMagick, but it was still not fast or easy enough. I needed one tool for everything: batch processing, AI-powered improvements, image optimization (compression + resizing), and generating SEO content. So, I built BatchShots.

Here's a quick look at how it was built:

- I began with the backend, experimenting with various open-source models for identifying duplicates, removing backgrounds, and generating SEO-friendly text. I chose to use ONNX to run small models directly in the browser.

- I used opencv.js for the image editing features, all the standard tools you would expect.

- As a backend developer, I've vibe-coded the UI components :) After a lot of tries, I got a UI that I liked.

A few things I learned:

- Localization sucks, it just makes everything more complicated

- Always double-check the model license

- OpenCV.js is complex: At first, I added too many features and had to remove some to make the tool easier to use

- Mobile is hard: Running AI models in a mobile browser took a lot of work to optimize and stop it from crashing

Most of BatchShots is free. If you need to edit more photos at once or want all the AI and SEO features, there's a one-time payment of $19.99.

I'm here to answer any questions and would love to hear your feedback.
by fsh | 2025-06-16 11:40:02+00:00
The accuracy of atomic clocks is much better than our understanding of fundamental physics.

The best calculable atomic system is atomic hydrogen, and state-of-the-art quantum electrodynamics calculations reach a relative accuracy of around 1E-13 for its energy levels. However, already at the 1E-10 level, the structure of the proton becomes significant which can currently not be calculated from first principles. Instead, the proton size is taken as a free parameter which is determined from the measurements.

In contrast, the best realizations of the SI second are caesium fountain clocks which achieve relative uncertainties in the 1E-16 range. Clocks based on optical transitions (rather than microwave transitions) have now broken the 1E-18 barrier. Calculating atomic structure to this level is currently completely unthinkable, even for a system as simple as hydrogen.
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-16 11:40:04+00:00
> How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" their program?

Why on earth is that the program developer's job and/or duty? If the user (stupidly) wants to run a program completely un-sandboxed, that's their right. If they want to run all programs by default somewhat sandboxed (which is quite reasonable), that's also the user's right and their system's job. Not of the original developer who made the program.

But if you want to run some other program sandboxed, I've heard that "podman run --network=none" works reasonably well.
by adornKey | 2025-06-16 11:40:08+00:00
The essence is that each frequency alone is eventually saturated. (can't absorb more than everything). If you add more CO2 you'll start to absorb more in new frequencies, but the effect is getting smaller. To calculate how much the numbers add up, there is HITRAN-Database with a lot of data about the absorption lines.

About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.
by GrayShade | 2025-06-16 11:40:09+00:00
The recursive solution has a stack depth proportional to the number of disks. That's three pieces (two pegs and how many disks to move) of data for each recursive call, so for 6 disks the "stack" will contain up to around 15 values, which is generally higher than an unaided human will be able to track.

In addition, 64-256 moves is quite a lot and I suspect people will generally lose focus before completing them.
by chneu | 2025-06-16 11:40:18+00:00
>Glass and metal aren't eco friendly either, not even comparing to plastic.

They require remelting which is energy intensive but it's still way better than plastic. This is more of a "how is the energy created" problem and not really glass/metal's fault.

Sand mining is an issue but glass recycling is the goal, which reduces virgin sand use. Lots of industries use way more sand than glass production anyway. Metal production isn't great either but the goal is RECYCLING, not mining all new material.

Remember that plastic recycling is mostly a myth. Especially in consumer goods. Double especially in the US where basically no consumer plastic is recycled, it's mostly from industry.

There's a reason you can get cash for glass/metal at recyclers. Can't do that with plastic.

I really don't understand how recycled glass/metal are anywhere near as bad as plastic. You can use them forever whereas plastic breaks down quickly. This kind of sounds like misinformation put out to muddy the waters and give people an excuse to use more plastic.

Wood is fine but expensive/time consuming. If someone wants to use all wooden stuff great, but most folks aren't doing that so it's a moot point.
by PlasmonOwl | 2025-06-16 11:40:37+00:00
Ok so I am always interested in these papers as a chemist. Often, we find that the LLM are terrible at chemistry. This is because the lived experience of a chemist is fundamentally different from the education they receive. Often, a masters student takes 6 months to become productive at research in a new sub field. A PhD, around 3 months.

Most chemists will begin to develop an intuition. This is where the issues develop.

This intuition is a combination of the chemists mental model, and how the sensory environment stimulates that. As a polymer chemist in a certain system maybe brown means I see scattering hence particles. My system is supposed to be homogeneous so I bin the reaction.

It is often known that good grades don’t make good researchers. That’s because researchers aren’t doing rote recall.

So the issue is this: we ask the LLM how many proton environment in this nmr?

We should ask: I’m intercalating Li into a perovskite using BuLi. Why does the solution turn pink?
Show HN: Socket-call – Call socket.io events like normal JavaScript functions
by bperel | 2025-06-16 11:40:54+00:00
Hello HN,

I built a Typescript library (named socket-call, for lack of a more sexy name) whose goal is to be able to call socket.io events as regular functions.

So you declare your server-side like so:

... const listenEvents = (services: UserServices) => ({ // Add your events here, the name of the event is the name of the function login: async (username: string) => { services._socket.data.user = { username }; console.log(`User ${username} logged in`); setInterval(() => { // Calling an event that's handled client-side services.showServerMessage(`You're still logged in ${username}!`) }, 1000); return `You are now logged in ${username}!`; }, });

and then on the client side you call them like normal async Javascript functions (and you can also create client-side event handlers):

... const user = socket.addNamespace<UserEmitEvents, UserListenEvents>( '/user' ); // Calling an event that's declared server-side user.login(username.value).then((message) => { console.log('Server acked with', message); }); // Handling an event that is sent by the server user.showServerMessage = (message) => { console.log('Server sent us the message', message); }

I use this library for my own projects and would be interested to receive feedback about it :-)
by squircle | 2025-06-16 11:41:26+00:00
Cognitive decoupling is an awesome concept.

Interesting this advocates against unbridled free-market capitalism. An issue I see right now is corporate personhood. This, coupled with the tendency for humans to anthropomorphize and see aspects of themselves in LLMs may be a hazard. But hey, computers are really just an oscillators/clocks at their core, right? (If there's any built in logic to the US simultaneously witnessing "No Kings" protests paired with a dictatorial display of military power makes me think the trend is/must necessarily be to finally and completely turn away from cults of personality in any form or fashion.)

Also, noting the bio-singularity, if our built environments change our internal clocks and biorhythms to the point where we're not compelled to mate, perhaps its time to similarly consider the tendency of the "free market" (which, ostensibly, is not free at all if it's bottlenecked through institutional, organizational, and individual decision makers rife with their own biases.) But, at the same time, to automate economic decisions feels similarly foolish. Imagine the bias an LLM with tool-calling capabilities might exhibit.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-16 11:44:10+00:00
I don't quite see their point. Obviously if you're delegating the task to someone/something then you're not getting as good at it as if you were to do it yourself. If I were to write machine code by hand, rather than having the compiler do it for me, I would definitely be better at it and have more neural circuitry devoted to it.

As I see it, it's much more interesting to ask not wherther we are still good at doing the work that computers can do for us, but whether we are now able to do better at the higher-level tasks that computers can't yet do on their own.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-06-16 11:44:22+00:00
Living in Chelyabinsk, I believe I'm rather capable to recognize the difference. Yekaterinburg is at least 300km from the nearest part of Kazakhstan (which up to a few days ago wasn't even officially permitted there). So no, there is no indication that there is any kind of geo-fencing for roaming devices, be them in Russia, China, Iran or Afghanistan.