MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2025-06-13 17:36:20+00:00
It definitely is sometimes difficult to dump power at scale. That's the source of the surplus and resulting negative price.

But it doesn't have to be big. A negative price is still a negative price, even on a small scale.

So, for instance: At home, I have electric hot water. I have some baseboard heaters in parts of the house (that I never actually use, but which I could use). I have central aircon.

All of these things could stand to be automated just for automation's sake, and that's something I'll probably do some day even with the fixed-rate electricity I buy right now.

With automation and price feeds, it's a programmatic no-brainer to switch on the electric baseboards on during the heating season during negative price events and get paid some non-zero amount to get ahead on the temperature game.

During the cooling season, I can probably stand to get paid to supercool the house for awhile.

And during any season: I normally run my electric water heater at a fairly low temperature because that's more efficient, but I'll cheerfully accept money to temporarily raise its temperature.

Or if I had an EV: Maybe I might normally like to keep it at 70% SoC for battery health, but if it's plugged in and the price is negative then I might cheerfully run it up to 85 or 90% or more.

So anyway, it's hypothetically pretty easy for an individual like me to dump a few kiloWatts in a useful way.

A thousand such people make it easy to dump a few megaWatts.

A million such people make it easy to dump a few gigaWatts. (And a million sounds like a lot, until one counts the eventuality of smartly-connected EVs.)
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-13 17:38:19+00:00
A nit, but:

> Strictly speaking, a programming language doesn't really need comments. "But Lisp has them, and puts them in double quotes."

Lisp has comments, but they aren't generally contained in double quotes, you've tossed a lot of strings into your program and called them comments. Comments are either marked with ; (comment to end of line, like //) with conventions on how many semicolons to use in particular places, or comment blocks with #| comment |# (nestable version of /* */). You can add documentation to many definitions, like functions, using strings which may be what you're thinking of but that happens inside the definition like with this:

(defun constant (x) "CONSTANT returns a function which always returns X" (lambda (a) x))

Which is a comment, but it's unusual to use strings as comments outside of contexts like that. Also, if you're going to use strings as comments you can make them multi-line instead of doing

"I thought about calling these car and cdr..." "...then decided that I'm not really THAT addicted to Lisp"

with:

"I thought about calling these car and cdr... ...then decided that I'm not really THAT addicted to Lisp"

The other reason I'm posting this nit is that if anyone reads your blog/answer and tries to use comments as you've described them inside of expressions they'll be very confused about why it's behaving incorrectly. There's no reason to mislead people, this is not a comment:

(if (= 1 2) "Should never be true" ;; that's not a comment, it's an expression (print "Never happens") (print "Always happens")) ;; your interpreter or compiler will complain about this code
by qualeed | 2025-06-13 17:39:13+00:00
>It is a PCI requirement

The only requirement for password rotation in PCI DSS v4.0 is if the password is the only form of authentication (i.e. no MFA). Use MFA (which you should be anyways) and you don't need to enforce password rotation.

>Clarified that this requirement applies if passwords/passphrases are used as the only authentication factor for user access (i.e., in any single-factor authentication implementation).

>Added the option to determine access to resources automatically by dynamically analyzing the security posture of accounts, instead of changing passwords/passphrases at least once every 90 days.
by CliffStoll | 2025-06-13 17:39:38+00:00
Terrific article by Nicolas Hatcher! Aperiodic tilings are fun to make from paper, wood, and ceramics. I've cut tiles from ceramic field tiles.

No surprise that concave cuts in ceramics are a high stress, so Kite and Dart tiles don't work very well (the dart is likely to crack). Same is true for the Turtle, Hat, and Spectre.

Rhombus tiles are everywhere convex, and the P3 Rhombus tiles are easy to cut in a diamond saw (or even a snap-cutter). With a diamond band-saw, it's possible to make Penrose rhombs with curved (parabolic) edges.

But cutting tiles from stock field tiles produces sharp surface edges -- you don't want these as bathroom floor tiles. Also, you waste a lot of the field tile as scrap. To get "friendly" tile shoulders, I'm experimenting with making Penrose tiles directly from high-fired porcelain clay.
by qualeed | 2025-06-13 17:39:42+00:00
PCI DSS 4.0 does not require password rotation unless the password is the only authentication (i.e. no MFA).

Use MFA, and you don't need to rotate.

>Clarified that this requirement applies if passwords/passphrases are used as the only authentication factor for user access (i.e., in any single-factor authentication implementation).

>Added the option to determine access to resources automatically by dynamically analyzing the security posture of accounts, instead of changing passwords/passphrases at least once every 90 days.
by SabrinaJewson | 2025-06-13 17:40:50+00:00
Relevant to this is Skolem’s paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skolem%27s_paradox), which states that any uncountable set can be modelled by a countable set.

In that light, the statement that the reals have greater cardinality than the naturals can be thought of as a statement that _our model of set theory_ happens to contain no injections from the reals to the naturals. Not that they can’t exist in a Platonic sense, or even just in the metatheory.
by janalsncm | 2025-06-13 17:41:00+00:00
Stepping back from the technical question of how to lay HVDC undersea, a globally connected power grid seems like a major win for renewable energy. There are a lot of places you’d like to put power plants, and having the infrastructure in place to be able to sell that energy makes it immediately more feasible. We could put nuclear plants anywhere. Solar plants across the Sahara. It would increase the energy available to developing countries without tempting them with dirty fossil fuel plants.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-13 17:41:19+00:00
>like people feel the only two options are 'the singularity is coming' and 'they're useless scams'

No, you are turning a few loud people into a false dichotomy. The vast majority of people are somewhere between "LLMs are neat" and "I don't think LLMs are AGI"

The vast majority of people do not comment. Using only the comments that people go out of their way to make as your data source is a huge sampling error.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-13 17:41:21+00:00
The lifetime of human civilization problem is an odd one, because due to relativity, one-way trips are not an unsurpassable hurdle ( 2-3 generations on a 1 G spacecraft to get pretty much anywhere). But you can't come back, because it's basically guaranteed there'll be nothing left for you to come back to. Because while it might take "only" two hundred years from the passengers perspective to reach the edge of the (current) observable universe and come back, they'll be arriving 90 billion years in the future.
by markx2 | 2025-06-13 17:42:36+00:00
I think it is very probably related to acupuncture.

After decades of pain, and after blood tests, food elimination and an MRI I was told I just had Chronic Daily Migraines.

I then happened to read about the daith. Went into a reputable piercer in the city and asked for a daith.

"Which side are your headaches?" was the reply.

It was the Right, got a Right-sided daith and the next morning woke to no headache. None. Over 30 years of daily pain gone. Even now I do not get headaches.

I know there is no provable evidence but I know what worked for me and those I know.

I cannot dismiss the TMS thing but the way it is framed feels wrong.
by adhdsucks | 2025-06-13 17:43:03+00:00
(throwaway account for anonymity)

> ADHD is the difference between having difficulties starting some tasks and being absolutely unable to start a mundane task until you curl yourself into a corner and cry.

Can't agree with this enough.

I'm currently suffering from absolutely crippling procrastination.

I'm a successful respected principal engineer with 25+ years industry experience but in the last couple of years my procrastination has got so so much worse. I've just got through my third PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) in the last 18 months. Thankfully my employer believes in me and continues to give me a chance, but they're not a charity and they've made it clear that I need to continue to perform or I'm gone.

For example, the last PIP I knew exactly what I had to do, it was agreed in advance and completely fair. I should have had no problem completing everything without having to work silly hours. I just needed to grind my way through it and apply my experience and expertise as and when needed (when to escalate, etc). Instead I sat on things for weeks and weeks until the fear and panic of not being able to provide for my family (I'm the sole earner in the house) started to really hit and give me the necessary motivation. It was an immensely stressful position I put myself in. (To be clear, the company is awesome, they're very supportive and they really want me to succeed.)

Taking any significant time off isn't an option. It's not burnout (been there, done that). I can't afford not to be working. We're stretched very thin already due to other medical problems amongst my immediate family but we can get by if I'm working. Changing companies isn't going to solve anything either; my current employer is not the problem. I am. Anywhere else would probably be far worse.

It is utterly crippling at times; and the majority of the time. I can sit at my desk for days and do 30 minutes of "work" each day. Then the deadlines hove into view and I'm doing a days worth of work in 30 minutes.

I'm awaiting an official ADHD diagnosis and expect to be diagnosed with Inattentive type. Hopefully medication will make things easier for me.

I should have gone down the diagnosis route many years ago but, guess what, procrastination.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-13 17:43:42+00:00
Advocacy for "progressive web apps" always fell flat to me. There are a few reasons, such as web workers being a Rube Goldberg machine when people just wanted the kind of facility to control caches and fetching that Netscape Netcaster had in 1997. It was predictable to me that the usage breakdown of push notification was going to be

50% spam 49% scams 1% other

and now people are just catching up to the obvious.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-13 17:44:25+00:00
I always think about the Samsung SyncMaster 173P I used to have once. It was good for its time, but not usable with any kind of subpixel antialiasing (even on Gnome which allowed to you to choose between horizontal and vertical RGB and BGR): the subpixel grid on it was diagonal. Absolutely tractable as far as the signal-processing math, yet would be unlikely to fit in any reasonable protocol.
by psb217 | 2025-06-13 17:44:27+00:00
I don't think current models are capable of making abstract links across domains. They can latch onto superficial similarities, but I have yet to see an instance of a model making an unexpected and useful analogy. It's a high bar, but I think that's fair for declaring superintelligence.

In general, I agree that these models are in some sense extremely knowledgeable, which suggests they are ripe for producing productive analogies if only we can figure out what they're missing compared to human-style thinking. Part of what makes it difficult to evaluate the abilities of these models is that they are wildly superhuman in some ways and quite dumb in others.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-13 17:44:43+00:00
There's been a few Anker Power Bank recalls:

- (this) A1263/PowerCore 10K https://www.anker.com/a1263-recall

- A1642|A1647|A1652/Anker 334 MagGo/PowerCore 10k partial recall in 2024 https://www.anker.com/a1642-a1647-a1652-recall

- A1366/535 Power Bank/PowerCore 20K in 2023 https://www.anker.com/a1366-recall
by Huntsecker | 2025-06-13 17:45:29+00:00
lots of the comments on here focus on the, A isn't as good as B or the cost will be too great, the primary reason at least imo this has come is due to Trump and his focus on Greenland(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/greenland-sp...). The supermarkets here have stars on items to show they are not from the USA(https://www.fastcompany.com/91296407/danish-grocery-stores-h...), their is a concerted effort to detangle Denmark from the USA and I see this as a growing trend across EU.
by shiomiru | 2025-06-13 17:45:34+00:00
> The idea of taking a screenshot of the terminal and then parsing that to determine the true colour support is definitely novel,

A better way to do this is to send `OSC 1 0 ; ? ST` (query foreground color), `OSC 1 1 ; ? ST` (background color), then `OSC 4 ; {n} ; ? ST` where {n} is the nth XTerm color.

See: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h4-O...
by seethishat | 2025-06-13 17:45:42+00:00
When the 20 something 'senior' engineers and 'consultants' don't know how to test network connectivity by using openssl, telnet and ping, you don't won't to work there. It's more like a day care than college or high school ;)

How can a 20 something with very little experience actually consult? Based on what experience?
by taurusnoises | 2025-06-13 17:45:46+00:00
Nice piece. You and I (and I know many others) have come to the same conclusion: (an old video of mine on breaking down tasks into tiny bites https://youtu.be/b3blsuTqN9s?si=W373y92JzDfHIDvS). No doubt informed by our good friend David Allen.

Ps, I linked to your article in my newsletter this week. Hope it sends some visits!
by wccrawford | 2025-06-13 17:45:50+00:00
They aren't going to live there. They're going as tourists.

If you want to live there, in standard apartments and jobs, then yes, people are going to be annoyed constantly by all the things you do 'wrong'.

But as a tourist or visitor of any kind, all those misdeeds are easily forgiven, and they can even enjoy the difference.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-13 17:46:44+00:00
you're confusing what is legal with what is moral – the two dimensions are orthogonal

importantly, we are not forced to adopt the morality of 1 particular government, out of hundreds of thousands – this is an appeal to authority (and not even a good authority)

if someone thinks that empowering autocrats is immoral, even if it's not illegal, then it is indeed arrogance to say that you have decided their morality is wrong

> You think for some reason... That I should show modesty and let people, such as yourself, criticize Open AI for getting in bed with autocrats

not really: modesty in judging others was your suggestion. you can stand by your suggestion or not, but you don't have the power to "let" or not "let" anybody criticize autocrats or their enablers

remember here: them criticizing autocrats and their enablers, is equally valid to you criticizing them for their criticism; which is equally valid to others criticizing you for criticizing their criticism; etc... we could keep going, but as you undoubtedly see, there is no good discussion to be had in the meta-direction of criticizing criticism, rather than directly addressing the issues raised in the initial critique

as for the jesus analogy: I wish I could follow it, but I could not, likely due to a failing on my part (I'm not familiar with jesus) -- would you mind rephrasing the point as a non-analogy (directly)? perhaps an analogy won't be necessary because the message is clear!
by echelon | 2025-06-13 17:47:01+00:00
We're talking about orthogonal things again.

IP vs distribution vs the means of production.

I'm happy to discuss all of these things, but let's stop flip flopping around.

When the means of production are easier, that changes the supply and demand curves. There's more supply and lower cost, but that opens the gates to larger and new work that hasn't been possible before.

We're entering an era where ONE PERSON can make a Pixar film. That's astounding and amazing. Every artist can become a Makoto Shinkai [1] and make their own Voices of a Distant Star [2] in their garage. All by themselves.

We're going to see an explosion of creators like Makoto Shinkai, Vivienne Medrano, Joel Haver, Zach Hadel, et al.

Garage Band and Indie Music and Steam Greenlight and Indie Games is exactly what is about to happen to art, animation, and film.

Distribution will be hard, but the market for indie creators is exploding. And the work they produce is so much better than Hollywood slop. They put their heart and soul into their work, and you can tell. It's direct and intimate.

I am one of these creators, and I am telling you: this is a good thing !

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Shinkai

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_a_Distant_Star
by ycombobulator | 2025-06-13 17:47:29+00:00
I get it that this is the accepted orthodoxy in Hacker News circles.

But I reject your framing.

You already have the option to choose suicide. Go make your arrangements, and then go do it privately. Nothing is stopping you except yourself, and no one can stop you if you don't make your intentions clear to someone willing and able to do so, in which case it is really a "cry for help."

What the pro-euthanasia/"aid in dying" legalization people really demand is not a right to suicide, but a right to social approval of their suicide. This is what they call "dignity," the right to broadcast their intention to kill themselves on their own terms, while anyone else in a position to intervene is forced to helplessly watch them do it.

And to integrate this into the healthcare system, and we've seen how that story plays out in Canada and in Europe. To the point where desperate people are pushed toward suicide and physically healthy, mentally sick children are killed off with state approval.
by thunky | 2025-06-13 17:47:33+00:00
Interesting, thanks.

From wikipedia:

The Israeli High Court of Justice ruled in 2002 that refusal to serve was legal on the grounds of unqualified pacifism, but "selective refusal" which accepted some duties and not others was illegal.

It also looks like it's not entirely simple to get the exemption, and if you don't do it correctly you could be jailed:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/27/who-are-the-israel...
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-13 17:48:14+00:00
Missing one day of school in your life because your mother or father had something very important to take care of will not have any impact on your education. And the people who pretend that this is the case are just the kind of dishonest people that you don't want to hire. Hackers can down vote me as much as they please, that's not going to change how businesses think about hiring.

And now we're reaching the core of the "ageism" discussion. Every person will have some things that they consider more important than work; their health for example. But as people get older, the more things get added to that list, because they are more established in life. But do you want to hire a person which considers everything more important than their job? Something which businesses value highly is when people are reliable. If the boss can rely on that a certain employee can be counted on to take care of things, that means that the boss can also work to 100% of his potential where they are needed.

A good run company will make sure to hire enough people, or in other ways make sure that emergency situations don't become something frequent. But we can never get away from the fact that the earth spins around the sun, meaning everything in the economy experiences the ebb and flow of seasonal demand. Even Hank Hill has to take care of propane emergencies at times.

>As far as being on-call goes, there are many different ways to be a part of support without a brute-force approach. For example, create a more robust QA process. Another is to create actionable alerts. There are many ways workers can work peacefully and meet director goals.

I completely agree with this.
by z500 | 2025-06-13 17:48:31+00:00
> The disembodied others are pretending to be god in the minds of others.

> My friendlies tell me the dirty secrets of others, my enemies tell others strange lies to mess with me.

This is exactly what my mother believes, and I can tell you that everything they've told her about me or the rest of the family has been 100% dead wrong every time.
by groby_b | 2025-06-13 17:49:01+00:00
> reduces programming or math to a checklist

I mean, you can. "Have an initial idea. Define a utility function. Apply gradient descent".

It's just that all three steps are really really hard.

TDDs insight is that gradient descent is relatively easy if the utility function is one-dimensional and monotonic. (Bonus point, it still works with the set of initial ideas being empty)

The "tricks in your toolbox" are ultimately all about simplifying the utility function from "exhaustive mapping of problem domain to solution demain proves valid" to a simpler one. In your example, you mapped the problem domain from "solve order two polynomial" to "complete square, take square root, solve order one polynomial".

You _could_ apply these tricks mechanically (hey, that's what symbolic algebraic systems do in your example), but it would require an initial formal specification of the problem - that's ultimately what Norvig does for his Sudoku approach - and, for a general approach, a way to reason over formal specifications.

It always boils down to "how well do you understand the problem, and how well can you describe it formally". TDD works best for "not at all, not at all".
by Applejinx | 2025-06-13 17:49:18+00:00
Earlier today in a conversation about how AI ads all look the same, I described them as 'clouds of usually' and 'a stale aftertaste of many various things that weren't special'.

If you have a cloud of usually, there may be perfectly valid things to do with it: study it, use it for low-value normal tasks, make a web page or follow a recipe. Mundane ordinary things not worth fussing over.

This is not a path to Einstein. It's more relevant to ask whether it will have deleterious effects on users to have a compliant slave at their disposal, one that is not too bright but savvy about many menial tasks. This might be bad for people to get used to, and in that light the concerns about ethical treatment of AIs are salient.
by apwell23 | 2025-06-13 17:49:21+00:00
> I was picking a standout phrase to respond to your protest.

A sentence isn't a group of "standout phrase"(s) that can be interpreted independently.

How does your own comments not blatantly break this rule?

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Again, please read your own rules before trying to enforce them.

> . Please make an effort to make HN better not worse.

You too by not purposely misinterpreting by picking out "standout phrases" from sentences.

here is what chatgpt said about what you did

============================================================

"Yes — I can respond just to a phrase within a sentence, but it’s important to understand that doing so often removes context, which can lead to misinterpretation (just like people do in heated conversations).

For example:

Sentence: “You have to be a total selfish prick to not choose medically assisted suicide…”

If I respond just to the phrase “total selfish prick”, I might say:

“That phrase is emotionally charged and judgmental.”

But if I ignore the rest of the sentence, I miss that the speaker is reacting to a situation involving end-of-life care and burden on family.

⸻

So yes, technically: • I can isolate and respond to a noun phrase, verb phrase, or even a prepositional phrase • But it’s often more constructive to respond to the clause or full thought

===========================================================