MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ekaros | 2025-06-04 09:34:26+00:00
This make lot of sense. Buying steady production of power almost at cost. So you get that power at lower margin. Your energy consumption is pretty flat so you utilize lot of it. And then you do not need to do futures or other type of contracts with extra costs to offset your price.

Matching base load with base production in this way is actually sensible move. And for maintenance periods you can just plan for and buy the power from market.
by jordwest | 2025-06-04 09:34:29+00:00
Great article, I also have no doubt we're in for some serious changes in society. But I disagree with the conclusion. I think the ideal place to be is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but neutral. A conviction that the future is bright isn't enough to actually make the future bright.

I was optimistic when Facebook first came out, and it turned into a dystopian nightmare. I was optimistic when self checkouts appeared, and now I feel like I'm a criminal by default every time I get groceries. I was optimistic about more people being online, and now we all feel like we can't get off it. I've become increasingly cynical about tech because of these and a thousand other disappointments about the utopia that was promised turning into not much more than an efficient means of extracting money from all of us.

I don't think it's ever a good idea to be totally optimistic or pessimistic about a new technology, because then we're liable to ignore anything that goes against our narrative. Really, we don't know, and we can't know what's best for ourselves, usually until it's too late.
by pas | 2025-06-04 09:34:43+00:00
I enjoyed the thread, and thanks for compiling the list, but I have to add, I haven't found them surprising either.

Automation doesn't have to mean "level 5+: ATC AI on, let's go find an extended happy hour"

I think it's very important to separate the software engineering (and systems engineering, and safety and process design, and other disciplines involved on the object-level) from the challenges at the meta-level (politics, legal liability - insurability, scaling and economics, and procurement issues, avoiding yet another too big to fail boondoggle, and so on).

One obvious problem is that by definition someone sitting there doing their shift has a very holistic view, and asking them what do they need to do their job better might not worth it economically. (The faster horse problem. Though sending a few enthusiastic designers there, also crunching the numbers of the past near-misses and other issues would likely reveal gaps in the current procedures and tools, and ... and of course this all then runs aground because changing procedures and tools is hard, hello FAA, etc.) But, but, of course doing the top-to-bottom design naively is almost a surefire way to burn a few quick billion bucks for nothing. (So, I think this should be something like an ongoing challenge, like the DARPA Grand Challenge for driverless cars.)
by Fredkin | 2025-06-04 09:34:57+00:00
^This 100%. And sometimes I get the argument back: they've become so commonplace now that you're just being unreasonable.

I'm required to wear clothes in public (Indecent exposure laws) and I need to have at least a pen or pencil to sign documents and do tax returns demanded by law. But I have a vast array of options when it comes to clothes and stationery, and most importantly I'm not required to agree to a foreign company's EULA to use them, unlike smartphones.
by Lebu | 2025-06-04 09:35:16+00:00
Location: Nairobi,Kenya

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React js, react native, C, Python, Php laravel.. Code igniter , Java, HTML, CSS, Git, MySQL..... And open to learn new technologies

Resume/CV:https://www.linkedin.com/in/lebu-ayiga-1b93261b6

Email: lebu.a.7@gmail.com

Graduated with a certificate on MIT from Emobilis Training institute then pursued a diploma in computer science and am currently continuing with my bachelors degree. Am open to full-time or internship remote jobs that would help me build my experience. I have no professional experience but i have worked on personal projects as well as group projects from our schools Google Developer Student Club

I would love to work in an organisational level so i canbe able to contribute my skills
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-04 09:35:24+00:00
A couple farms that barely make profit are already going to be unattractive to investors. It really doesn't make much difference to future investment. There's not a massive sea change between 1% profit and 2% loss, they both suck. Investors are going to focus on the higher profit farms no matter what, ones that would still be positive if they lose 3%.

Other things can go right or wrong and change the numbers by a couple percent. That risk is pretty normal. It's not something wild.

And any farm that's already running or even half-built is still going to be finished and maintained and make as much power as it can. Once you already spent a big percent of the budget you're not getting it back, and the ROI on the remaining spending is very high.
by rpastuszak | 2025-06-04 09:35:35+00:00
It looks really nice! (tested on Safari/Mac).

Have you considered adding a small popup encouraging people to set it as their home page? I use Ensō (https://enso.sonnet.io) in that manner occasionally.

Also, the "system" button disappears during writing (good), but it's hard to get it back unless I click outside of the editor. In Ensō, I re-enable it on any pointer move - I would suggesting doing something similar.

PS I work on somewhat similar tools (like the one mentioned above), esp. for loose, stream-of-consciousness style of writing https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/stream-of-consciousness-mor... then copy paste the text into obsidian.

If you ever fancy chatting about privacy-friendly, idiosyncratic/home-cooked software hit me up on sonnet.io/posts/hi !
by ljm | 2025-06-04 09:35:37+00:00
Libraries are funded by the tax payer and as such have no expectation to make money - they simply operate within the budget they are given.

A charity or a non-profit organisation is funded by donors. Non-profit doesn't mean 'loss making', it means that all of the money is re-invested in the organisation to support it as a going concern, rather than paying it all out to shareholders or, in the case of PP, re-donating it to their community.

So it's perfectly reasonable to want such an organisation to be, well, financially sound. That way it can continue to make the impact it does, or even increase that impact through growth.

If that doesn't happen then you haven't donated to support a sustainable mission, you simply funded a one-off project. In any other situation this would be seen as catastrophic mismanagement and there'd be some accountability for it.
by zevon | 2025-06-04 09:35:45+00:00
A lot of comments here seem to assume that the goal of PP is to provide a complete solution for the plastic waste problem. It's not and it doesn't have to be. I may be off base a bit but I think the amount of plastic that is actually being recycled is only around 10% on average (with substantial spikes in both directions if you look at it on a country basis). So there is more than enough headroom to do something useful with the stuff that would otherwise have been burned or buried.

I kind of sort of agree with your points about the manual machines but Aliexpress was not as prevalent as it it is now 10 years ago and it's not as if there were already lots of open source blueprints for injection molders, extrusion machines and the like (unlike for example in the 3D printing space), so the knowledge built up and shared by PP is still useful.

I guess it's also a pretty human thing to want to tinker with making your own machines and share them (if not, there also would not be a bajillion static site generators, notes apps and whatnot in the software world).

I don't really agree about your points about the industrial injection molding machines, though. Sure, if you want to produce many of the same parts, that's ultimately the way to go. However, if you want to do small-series stuff, experiment with different ways of making molds, do educational hands-on stuff and so on - which is what PP is much more about than maximizing output - a manual machine is much more appropriate.

Anecdote: I regularly had people from (university) departments who have all sorts of professional injection moulding equipment use our - in comparison ridiculously primitive - setups. Because it was much easier, much faster and the "vibe" in a Precious Plastics lab is usually also very different than in a research lab (and that's also not to be underestimated if it's more about development/experiments/learning than about maximizing output).

Also: Fucking around with old hydraulics can be a rather dangerous activity and requires some safety considerations not relevant in manual machines.
by wodenokoto | 2025-06-04 09:37:54+00:00
That book title is not easily googleable!

Mine, by Kim Faulk, 2022 Synopsis: “ Family is everything... I always knew my father was a cold, heartless bastard.

But the moment he took Elle Castlemaine and her pathetic daughter into our home, barely a month after our mom died, he unleashed something savage inside me.”

I’m guessing it’s not that one!
by PlunderBunny | 2025-06-04 09:38:02+00:00
I taught myself to program on an 8-bit BBC micro-computer in the mid-80s by typing in BASIC listings. I understood BASIC quite well, and could write my own structured BASIC programs, but machine code was always a bit out-of-reach. I would try to read books that started by demonstrating how to add, subtract etc, but I couldn’t see how that could build up to more complicated stuff that I could do in BASIC, like polling for input, or playing sounds, or drawing characters on the screen. Only once I got an advanced users guide and discovered the operating system commands, then it started to click with me - the complicated stuff was just arranging all the right data in the right bits of memory or registers, then (essentially) calling a particular OS command and saying ‘here’s the data you want’.
by ben_w | 2025-06-04 09:38:23+00:00
> You can read anything with the assumption that the writer is an absolute idiot, but I’d give the world’s richest man more credit than that.

Before the pandemic, I would've said similar, even despite some of his errors of judgement.

Since then, and the trend started earlier, it has become difficult to ignore that (1) he responds poorly to experts contradicting him, and (2) outside his actual domains of expertise (rockets and sales/motivational pitches*) he's just as much of a noob as everyone other opinionated loudmouth on the internet.

* the latter of which is, IMO, one of the two big reasons Tesla share price is 10x to 30x what it should be, and that in turn is why he's the richest man on the planet.

The other is that surviving the stock shorters probably burned people off shorting that stock, so the market is mostly now mostly just the exhuberent optimists unbalanced by doubters.
by intended | 2025-06-04 09:38:30+00:00
To the contrary, no one worried about its failure states is dismissing it. They believe that even if it doesn’t match its hype, it’s going to destabilize society.

It’s already trivializing being rewarded for art. You want to be paid while you learn how to make excellent art work and CGI? Well just how will that work?

Phishing scams are now profitable for victim types it wasnt before.

Education is taking a hammering, that biblical is a fair adjective to apply. Most courses will have to resort to pen and paper exams, a reversal of digitization changes since the 90s.

This isn’t even if things hit the hype levels
by bgnn | 2025-06-04 09:38:45+00:00
That's good to hear that I'm foolish. It's always nice to be foolish.

Foolishness aside, all we have to predict the future is the current capabilities of the current technology. Bear and bull alike do this. This is the reason people believe we are closer to AGI than say couple of years ago. I have no idea how close or far off we are. What I'm interested in is the current and predictable near future capabilities of the technology.
by veddox | 2025-06-04 09:39:06+00:00
Replacing stable, working "low-tech" solutions with less user-friendly, unstable "high-tech" approaches is not "progress"!

Just because something is newer doesn't mean it's better. Obviously, the reverse is also true, but there is so much tech naiveté going around that this needs saying repeatedly. We'd have saved our society a lot of trouble if we'd first thought about draw-backs of new technology, before hooking everything in our lives up to it.
by pyman | 2025-06-04 09:39:15+00:00
I understand where you're coming from, but we need to stick to the facts. If there are no court cases, we can't imply that fraud was committed. We don't know what kind of agreements were in place, why the money was being transferred, or what the expectations were on both sides.

We also don't know what was discussed in private. For example, it could have been something like: "We want to be part of this investment opportunity, we'll give you $40 million. But if regulators start asking questions, we want the money back."

Without full context or legal findings, everything else is just speculation.

I'm surprised no one is talking about Microsoft's investment in BuilderAI, a total loss. It's unlikely they'll recover much, if anything. So why aren't they suing the CEO and CFO? Maybe some of the issues were handled quietly behind the scenes to avoid public exposure or reputational damage? I don't know.
by superfish | 2025-06-04 09:39:22+00:00
Wikipedia has a nice size analogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...

> […] if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, […] the average distance between stars […] is analogous to one ping-pong ball every 3.2 km (2 mi).

Intuitively this visualization actually makes it seem like stars are pretty close? Usually with galactic dimensions it’s hard for our mere monkey minds to grasp the scales but this is actually pretty easy to imagine.
by beloch | 2025-06-04 09:40:02+00:00
During WWII, aircraft suddenly became capable of taking on naval ships. Battleships didn't become obsolete, but they did become sitting ducks when not under the protective air screen of an aircraft carrier. Likewise, Russia's navy and air-force, while they still have useful capabilities, have proven to be highly vulnerable to Ukrainian drones. However, there isn't yet an equivalent to an aircraft carrier when it comes to countering drones.

Anti-drone warfare is in it's infancy, but will need to develop if states expect to actually preserve and use their conventional capabilities. The struggle for air superiority now starts on a nation's own airstrips.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-06-04 09:40:11+00:00
Yeah it's definitely changed the internet. All of sudden every site is behind anti-bot garbage (usually Cloudflare). Sites I use (like Sourcehut) are getting DDOS'd by AI scrapers. It might be a wee bit reductive to say that AI is destroying the internet, but this certainly is the death of the open internet. AI has just handed a huge amount of power to companies like Cloudflare and made it that much more difficult to avoid being tracked.
by kragen | 2025-06-04 09:40:59+00:00
We already have the technology to move a planet; it's just orbiting rockets. (Ion thrusters are especially promising here because of the small amount of mass you lose from the planet in the process.) We just don't have the necessary industrial scale to supply enough rockets and energy. A planet-sized space station is almost certainly possible with carbon nanotube ropes, but those have not yet been demonstrated to work in practice.

However, smaller O'Neill-cylinder space stations are feasible even with just steel cables, and I look forward to a future where the vast majority of inhabited land area is in such contraptions. It will take at least 30 years, probably more like 300. The danger is that we collectively take a more destructive course.
by papaver-somnamb | 2025-06-04 09:41:00+00:00
Perhaps narrow your role and allow someone else to be responsible & accountable for driving the business side of things?

Take an honest assessment of how you can meaningfully contribute and concentrate on that, and pass the reins over to someone else who specializes in handling reins. Where are you best? Pushing forward on a long-held vision, planting a flag in the ground and rallying everyone to it, while ignoring petty concerns like a positive balance sheet? Great! Delegate that latter one to someone who specializes in it and then cooperate & thrive with them.

On the other hand, the plastic industry needs reform. Only about 1/3 of plastic produced is recycled in practice, and even then only once. Hardly the recyclable miracle that the plastic lobby has been messaging on since at least the 1990s. And what is the industry's response? Increased production YOY! Want truly recyclable materials, in practice? Glass. Steel, and some other metals. Fibers, like paper, to an extent.

That being said, I see a need for "base-load" plastic. Plastic is useful and we may forever need it, until at least something better comes along. Particular in key single-use applications like health services.
by shakna | 2025-06-04 09:41:14+00:00
I started building a Forth recently, but decided that instead of interpreter or transpiler or whatever, I'd map to bytes in memory and just straight execute them.

This non-optimising JIT has been far, far easier than all the scary articles and comments I've seen led me to believe.

I'm already in the middle of making it work on both Aarch64 and RISC-V, a couple weeks in.
by mtrovo | 2025-06-04 09:41:35+00:00
I don't get your point.

JDK 11 LTS is from 2018 and after that Oracle pushed two LTS releases: JDK 17 in 2021 and JDK 21 in 2023. On top of that Oracle is commited to releasing a LTS every 2 years with the next one planed for later this year.

Using an LTS doesn't mean you have to create applications on the oldest available release, it means that if you target the latest LTS release your application is going to have a predictable and supported runtime for a very long time.

If they had to start a Java 11 project in 2024 that just points to a deeper organizational problem bigger than just GC.
by veddox | 2025-06-04 09:43:28+00:00
That depends on what threat scenario you're looking at. If your government wants to track you, they'll find a way, regardless of what phone you're using (or not).

But the privacy gains of not installing a load of third-party apps from a dozen different data-selling businesses (or using an operating system built by the mother of all data-selling businesses) are very substantial.
by lrvick | 2025-06-04 09:43:35+00:00
I use Matrix because, among other reasons, it does not require you to be a cell service subscriber, which I am not.

I asked my friends if they were seriously asking me to sign a contract with Apple and Google and Meta etc against my personal beliefs about privacy rights in order to be friends with them.

They respected it and installed matrix and many even use that now between each other because auditable end to end encryption sounds better than not.

Social graphs can pull both ways, and ethics are on your side.

Would you stop being friends with someone that went vegan?

Stick up for the rights for -anyone- to be an integrated member of society without signing data sharing agreements with a cell carrier, apple, or google.
by herbst | 2025-06-04 09:43:36+00:00
I am undecided about AI coding.

Ive done some vibe coding with working but code wise horribly results. But I have had working prototypes faster than ever.

But I recently starting doing some redesign and architecture changes (manually) in an old code base and notice that i tab trough whole files auto fixing code one by one with suggestions which is amazing.

I think we need to find a way to work with it and keep it far away from making architectural decisions for now.
by AriedK | 2025-06-04 09:43:45+00:00
That's a bit of a cynical take in my opinion. For a community focused initiative, I'd say they deserve a bit more slack in terms of expectations of professionality, scale and sustainability. They now leave it up to the community to decide to pursue that or abandon altogether. Fair thing to do I'd say.

Also: the original forums aren't suddenly deleted: https://davehakkens.nl/community/forums/index.html He explains the process of migrating into 'One Army': https://davehakkens.nl/index.html
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-04 09:44:20+00:00
> and he doesn't even think about those:

Author here. I am absolutely thinking about those too. I just also happen to think that all those issues are not dramatically changing because of AI. Disinformation has been a problem prior to AI too, and social networks are a much bigger harm in comparison and income inequalities or global warming were a problem prior to AI too.

I absolutely see a trend of piling all world's problem on top of AI and I think that this is wrong. These problems need to dealt with in isolation of AI, because the are largely non AI issues.
by koonsolo | 2025-06-04 09:44:23+00:00
Well, Belgium stores their airplanes in hangars. It's great to protect them against the weather. You know what we don't do? Put tires on the wings.

You know what else is great about hangars? It's a super cheap defense against drone attacks that you saw from Ukraine.

Sure, you can give some examples of planes stored outside, and I can give examples of planes stored in bunkers (there are plenty of pictures from Russian airplane bunkers).

I have the feeling your comment is made in bad faith (=Russian propaganda). If not, please explain why Russians put tires on the wings.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-06-04 09:44:30+00:00
That's being anti mass immigration and populist, not "far right" and I can tell you that outside of Western liberal circles this is considered a mild, if not matter of fact, take on things.

The Chinese even have a term for this Western/European ideology that is self-loathing and accepting of anything on the altar of "diversity" and refusing to face issues such as mass immigration: "white left" (and that's coming from a country ruled by a Communist Party). So, apparently most of the world is actually "far right"...

"In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards" [1] (Can't accuse the BBC of being biased in favour of right-wing politics, I think)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-06-04 09:45:18+00:00
The technical term for this is "additionality" and Google has been aware of this for over a decade when purchasing green power, so there's no real excuse for Meta to be doing it.

https://sustainability.google/operating-sustainably/stories/...

> To ensure that Google is the driver for bringing new clean energy onto the grid, we insist that all projects be “additional.” This means that we seek to purchase energy from not-yet-constructed generation facilities that will be built above and beyond what’s required by existing energy regulations.

Unless the nuclear plant would shut down without their money, they're just taking carbon credits from the wider grid. Amazon had one of their nuclear plans rejected for this exact reason.
by vintermann | 2025-06-04 09:45:26+00:00
> It's more data, but that's rarely an issue these days.

I do think it's a bit annoying that a program gets updated, and you have to download the whole 130 gb again.

But especially how quickly and easily you can compress two almost-identical files, I think your approach has a lot going for it. It may even be possible to get clever and send over just a hash of the original file, and a version of the new file which has been compressed with the original file as prefix (but without the actual compressed data for that).