MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldpie | 2025-06-23 14:00:54+00:00
I have yet to see a convincing analysis that renewables+storage can cost-effectively power all the homes in Minnesota, where I live, through our 4+ month-long winters. The days get very short, the Earth tilts away from the sun, cloud-cover and snowfall is frequent, and going 24+ hours without power for heat can be fatal, not just inconvenient.

I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.

The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.

Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
by scythe | 2025-06-23 14:01:09+00:00
How many levels of "appear to" are we supposed to tolerate in order to minimize the perspective here? Here's where we started:

>The Germans in this article all appear to be aligned to [...]

So the person we don't like seems like they might be affiliated with a political party which seems like it's pro-Russia — this is unreasonably contrived when you zoom out and look at the whole argument.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-23 14:01:21+00:00
> 200k lines of code per week

Do you seriously think that someone can write/review/maintain that?

Either they are lying about the output or they _are_ creating slop, period.

Ridiculous comments like that should _not_ go unchallenged, I wouldn't want younger-me seeing that and thinking it was normal or a good idea.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-23 14:01:28+00:00
I think solar plus storage will likely be the better play.

I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.

I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.

I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.

Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
Show HN: I challenged 10 AI giants using one open-source PDF (with full results)
by WFGY | 2025-06-23 14:02:00+00:00
Hey HN,

This started as a personal experiment: one person, one framework, ten AI models.

I built a semantic reasoning engine (WFGY: All Principles Return to One) and tested how well each model could handle abstract logic, conceptual shifts, and consistent inference—all using the same PDF.

The results are posted above. No fancy wrappers, no login walls—just raw data, an illustrated battle poster, and the full experiment.

Yes, it's a bit weird. But it's real. And honestly? I just hope someone out there sees the effort and the courage it took to do this solo.

Happy to answer questions. Would love your feedback, criticism, or even memes. Thanks for taking a look
by signaturefish | 2025-06-23 14:02:11+00:00
XRF will go a millimetre or so into the sample AFAIK - it's mainly useful for finding alloy contamination, e.g. "this is 99.99% gold" vs "this is 73% gold and 27% other things" - you really want to use both techniques. Resistivity/conductivity is about average composition, XRF is about elemental purity.
by belorn | 2025-06-23 14:02:11+00:00
Technology neutrality is fairly important. The role of the government should be in controlling the requirements which has a collective/social cost, like emissions, grid stability and price variability (as those are things that voters will demand from the government, as has been demonstrated in EU during the energy crisis). As long any company is willing to provide similar services under similar requirements, what technology they choose to use may be better determined by market forces rather than political choices.

What they should not do however is to simply look at potential generation capacity and have that be the only important criteria. Voters has clearly demonstrated that they will vote for politicians that can promise stable grid and stable pricing, rather than having those being controlled by the market.
by Cyykratahk | 2025-06-23 14:02:30+00:00
It's great to see more progress around scroll snapping - I'll have to check out this scroll-state container query and the new events.

The biggest missing scroll-snap feature I see is the ability to tell a scrolling container to "snap to the next position in this direction", and maybe by extension "which element(s) are currently snapped". In this article clicking an arrow moves the scroll position by a fixed 40px, but it would be very nice to have a proper API that accounts for element sizes, snap alignments, out-of-axis children, etc.

I ended up writing a package a few years ago that does this (scroll-snap-api). It feels so dirty to calculate the styles on every child in the tree just to find scroll snap positions.
by qwytw | 2025-06-23 14:02:54+00:00
> It's value has stayed normal for thousands of years - although in times of inflation or crisis it might become a little overvalued temporarily as people flee to its safety

That hasn't been the case after the Dollar and all other currencies were unpegged from gold. Adjusted by inflation it has been a very volatile asset in the last 50 years:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Gold_pri...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-23 14:03:45+00:00
There is almost no way this doesn't end up wasting an enormous amount of money, while only having a slim chance of ever coming online, while only having a slim chance of actually lowering energy costs.

If you are gonna blow $10 Billion on a 10 year nightmare project, just buy a ton of solar, wind, and batteries to get 2GW in 5 years.
by Fluorescence | 2025-06-23 14:04:12+00:00
Yup. Cities often have lots of impressive public green spaces so I expect this a massive underestimate.

It may be worse for a rural kid. All that countryside that surrounds you is private farmland. Of course, now and again, you trespass and earn stories of being chased off by dogs and puce-faced-shotgun-wielding arses but it's not your daily hang-out.

Truly public land (not just a public pathway) will be concentrated in nature-reserves and odds are it will be out of reach except for special adventures.

The village-kid hang-out is typically "The Village Rec" (recreation ground) but if you live in something less than a village, i.e. random splats of houses between villages, you end up living half your life at a bus stop waiting for the mercurial 2-hourly bus service before you can even see another human face.
by lan321 | 2025-06-23 14:04:46+00:00
Yes they are. The summons part is essentially what happens when a cop issues you a ticket..

> What happens after I submit my complaint?

> Where DEP issues the summons, you will be informed of the summons number and hearing date. You may need to be available in person or by phone to testify. If the summons is upheld, the respondent must pay the penalty in order for you to receive payment for your complaint, You should submit your request for payment to OATH. If the summons is dismissed, you are not entitled to any payment.

So any random can waste your time severely at no cost to themselves, and you have to prove you were idling legally unless it's a refrigeration truck:

> If you submit a complaint regarding a refrigeration truck, you must document that the engine that moves the vehicle was on and was not being used to run the refrigeration unit.

Where I severely doubt they know which license plates belong to refrigeration trucks to begin with, so you'll likely still have to waste time.

It leads to a hearing date with you on the hook for up to 18000$ the first time and them risking nothing after investing 5 minutes to get in that joyful situation.

The more I read about it, the more it seems like a great scam, though. Film trucks, make them appear to be running for a couple of tokens and drown your competition in fines. Once a day on some trial will likely be enough even.
by fritzo | 2025-06-23 14:04:50+00:00
One thing I prefer about Cursor is that it stores and manages the long prompts I enter. I abandoned Claude Code after I typed in a long paragraph of prompt then accidentally hit an arrow key and lost all my prompt-writing work. Prompts are valuable, and Cursor treats them as valuable, whereas Claude Code seems to expect throw-away one-liners.

Has this been fixed? Does the vscode Claude Code plugin retain prompts more reliably?
by derwiki | 2025-06-23 14:05:53+00:00
Turtles all the way down. We seem to be marching towards a future like that, but are we there today? Some of the AI-generated PRs I’ve seen teammates put out “work” (because sometimes two wrongs make a right) but convince me we still need a human in the loop.

But that was two weeks ago; maybe it’s different today
by zbrozek | 2025-06-23 14:07:32+00:00
I'm not an expert, but I suspect there will be a few driving use cases. Electrifying places far from the equator means heat pumps and/or district heating and providing for their power demand in the dark. In some places wind can do that, but not everywhere.

There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.

At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
by mrtksn | 2025-06-23 14:07:42+00:00
It’s really about fundamental definitions. You define safety precautions as such, therefore your thought process. You are not wrong, just you built it on that kind of basis.

It’s the same about visa etc. It’s always a trade off between things.

And trh definitions are all about what you value and what you’re afraid of.

Afraid of the virus? PCR and vaccinate everyone, those who don’t want to can choose not to work and if this puts then in hard position though luck.

Afraid of people protesting you, sabotage your agenda etc? Check their social media to make sure you are admitting friendlies. Freedom of thought? Who cares, we have bigger fish to fry. Our citizens will do the thinking from now on, will re-asses later.

BTW, I agree that the pandemic was mismanaged horribly in most of the world. It’s just that I disagree with you stance on the vaccine but I sympathize with you that you should not be put in a position to choose between your job and getting vaccinated.
by N_A_T_E | 2025-06-23 14:07:58+00:00
I don’t think this is a science or safety issue, it’s an issue with bad ingredient labeling. They should name these numbered dyes something more understandable. “Red dye 4” sounds pretty sketchy when they could say “Cochineal extract for coloring”. People can reject the product because the ingredients include a bug derived coloring rather than fear of the unknown “red dye” invented by their imagined evil food scientists.
by jihadjihad | 2025-06-23 14:09:08+00:00
OT, but the start in leather goods reminds me of how Nintendo started way back in the 19th century making playing cards, like hanafuda [0]. It wasn't until the late 1960s / early 70s that they got into electronics, and as they say, the rest was history.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda#History
by moolcool | 2025-06-23 14:09:35+00:00
> But lately I've been wondering if the tools available to us now are the key to bringing back what we miss about the old internet.

One of the best things about the old internet was Flash Player. It was an extremely low barrier-to-entry way for creators (especially young creators) to make games and animation which could be played in-browser on extremely low-power hardware. To this day, there's nothing which comes close to filling the vacuum.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-23 14:09:44+00:00
Yet people use container based isolation all the time in practice and the sky doesn't fall.

Also, every security domain in an Android systems shares a kernel, yet Android is one of the most secure systems out there. Sure, it uses tons of SELinux, but so what? It still has a shared kernel, and a quite featureful one at that.

I don't buy the idea that we can't do intra-kernel security isolation and so we shouldn't care about local privilege escalation.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-23 14:09:54+00:00
Well, influential people (that is, people fairly close to Putin) in Russia are saying that, after Ukraine, Russia will take Poland. Yeah, that's not Germany, still less Italy. But it's much closer to Germany than I would be comfortable with if I were German...

[Edit: First example I could find: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-says-poland-next-ukraine...

I believe that Medvedev also said similar things, but I can't immediately find a link.]
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-06-23 14:09:55+00:00
You can't reason with these people. They don't understand science or biologics. They think it's ok to infect someone's grandparents with COVID-19 and kill or disable them (as what happened to my mother). It's their right as citizens, to spread their filth and pathogens to everybody and refuse the vaccine. In short, it's all about them.
by lproven | 2025-06-23 14:10:14+00:00
> But I always wondered about Quarterdecks' Desqview/X variant

Dv/X was remarkable tech, and if it had shipped earlier could have changed the course of the industry. Sadly, it came too late.

> It seems to me that this was available in 1987/88,

No. That is roughly when I entered the computer industry. Dv/X was rumoured then, but the state of the art was OS/2 1.1, released late 1988 and the first version of OS/2 with a GUI.

Dv/X was not released until about 5Y later:

https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-1x

1992. That's the same year as Windows 3.1, but critically, Windows 3.0 was in 1990, 2 years earlier.

Windows 3.0 was a result of the flop of OS/2 1.x.

OS/2 1.x was a new 16-bit multitasking networking kernel -- but that meant new drivers.

MS discarded the radical new OS, it discarded networking completely (until later), and moved the multitasking into the GUI layer, allowing Win3 to run on top of the single-tasking MS-DOS kernel. That meant excellent compatibility: it ran on almost anything, can it could run almost all DOS apps, and multitask them. And thanks to a brilliant skunkworks project, mostly by one man, David Weise, assisted by Murray Sargent, it combined 3 separate products (Windows 2, Windows/286 and Windows/386) into a single product that ran on all 3 types of PC and took good advantage of all of them. I wrote about its development here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/18/how_windows_got_to_v3...

It also did bring in some of the GUI design from OS/2 1.1, mainly from 1.2, and 1.3 -- the Program Manager and File Manager UI, the proportional fonts, the fake-3D controls, some of the Control Panel, and so on. It kept the best user-facing parts and threw away the fancy invisible stuff underneath which was problematic.

Result: smash hit, redefined the PC market, and when Dv/X arrived it was doomed: too late, same as OS/2 2.0, which came out the same year as Dv/X.

If Dv/X had come out in the late 1980s, before Windows 3, it could have changed the way the PC industry went.

Dv/X combined the good bits of DOS, 386 memory management and multitasking, Unix networking and Unix GUIs into an interesting value proposition: network your DOS PCs with Unix boxes over Unix standards, get remote access to powerful Unix apps, and if vendors wanted, it enabled ports of Unix apps to this new multitasking networked DOS.

In the '80s that could have been a contender. Soon afterwards it was followed by Linux and the BSDs, which made that Unix stuff free and ran on the same kit. That would have been a great combination -- Dv/X PCs talking to BSD or Linux servers, when those Unix boxes didn't really have useful GUIs yet.

Windows 3 offered a different deal: it combined the good bits of DOS, OS/2 1.x's GUI, and Windows 2.x into a whole that ran on anything and could run old DOS apps and new GUI apps, side by side.

Networking didn't follow until Windows for Workgroups which followed Windows 3.1. Only businesses wanted that, so MS postponed it. Good move.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-06-23 14:12:30+00:00
You are literally saying that hardening the kernel is the same as having the desktop environment hardened and a basis for app isolation. And to add a cherry on top of that both secureblue and kicksecure use almost all the same hardening additions to the linux kernel as grsecurity.

You do not understand what you are talking about because if you did you'd be embarrassed for how braindead your response is.
Show HN: The floor is lava, a body movement + computer vision game
by getToTheChopin | 2025-06-23 14:12:46+00:00
I made a body movement game. You jump around your living room to dodge lava.

Created with threejs and mediapipe computer vision.

You can play the game here, it runs on the web without any installs or downloads: https://www.funwithcomputervision.com/demo7/
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-23 14:12:52+00:00
It's not the argument made in the top level post, they are just saying “What I'm trying to say is that these two do not represent the German political landscape at all. […] This is not a debate happening in Germany right now and no other party has expressed support of any position.”

Maybe there should be a real debate on that topic, or maybe Germany should even pursue such a repatriation of their gold reserves, but as a matter of fact there's no such debate or plan besides fringes parties, that's it.
by usrbinbash | 2025-06-23 14:12:53+00:00
> Until you know how thinking works in humans, you can't say something else is different.

Yes, I very much can, because I can observe outcomes. Humans are a) alot more capable than language models, and b) humans do not rely solely on the statistical relationships of language tokens.

How can I show that? Easily in fact: Language tokens require organized language.

And our evolutionary closest relatives (big apes) don't rely on organized speech, and they are able of advanced cognition (planning, episodic memory, theory of the mind, theory of self, ...). The same is true for other living beings, even vertebrates that are not closely related with us, like Corvidae, and even some invertebrates like Cephalopods.

So unless you can show that our brains are somehow more closely related to silicon-based integrated circuits than they are to those of a Gorilla, Raven or Octopus, my point stands.
by msgodel | 2025-06-23 14:13:22+00:00
I'm fine with naming it although I think there are legitimate practical problems beyond just that.

Why is it wrong to not want to be made a minority in your own country? Most of the time when that's been done to other people it's been strongly condemned for good reasons. Why when it's done to some of the most productive (and I would argue just) people in history is it considered a good thing?

Why is it surprising that people prefer to be around other people like them and don't function as well with people who don't behave the same way?
by quotemstr | 2025-06-23 14:13:47+00:00
The problem isn't even setuid exactly but the size of the TCB. Setuid encourages a design in which tons of stuff that doesn't need to run as root runs as root anyway just because it's part of the same binary that needs elevated privileges. It's a footgun, but one can handle even a footgun safely if you practice trigger discipline and assume every gun is loaded.

Sudo (and other setuid programs) could in principle use privilege separation to punt everything not absolutely essential to an unprivileged context and thereby reduce the size of the TCB.
by zbrozek | 2025-06-23 14:13:47+00:00
I suspect solar + batteries will be dominant (but should not be the exclusive source) in places which get relatively good sun even in the winter. California and Hawaii, for example, will do pretty well with a mix that is heavy on those technologies. But if you're in North Dakota or Alaska and want to electrify your grid, you might not have a good time in December and January.

There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
by jwilk | 2025-06-23 14:13:48+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... says:

> A key factor that made the reaction possible was that [back then] the fissile isotope ²³⁵U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors.
by uberman | 2025-06-23 14:14:05+00:00
This article made me sad. Not because it was mean or at some level wrong but because I feel that while it touched on the core issue here, it missed the chance to directly confront it. Here is an example.

"The infrastructures of intimacy — slowness, curiosity, accountability — have been eroded by haste, convenience and a kind of sanctioned emotional retreat."

I loved her writing but I really wished she had gone on to ask "Why?" Why have men retreated as she says not with hostility but with indifference?

I'm in a decades long loving marriage and have a bunch of loving kids who all want to get married and raise their own families. I am proud as a father to have been a good role model in that manner. I married a woman who was sure she never wanted to marry or have kids. We were married just prior to what I feel was the popularization of the term "toxic masculinity" first coined in the 80s to name (and counter?) the rise of the men's metal health movement. A movement that I freely admit has hyper-toxic off-shoots today.

Here is the thing though. For a generation boys and men have been told that masculinity is toxic not that some extreme elements and fringe behaviors are toxic just as some fringe beliefs of many sub-cultures are toxic but all masculinity. We were told that women didn't need men and in fact preferred if we did not interact with them at all under almost any circumstance. Girls were better off in gender segregated classrooms, boys needed to be medicated at school just to be teachable. Women just wanted to go out in public and do their own thing without being "creeped on". Are there creeps out there? Is sexual assault a problem, sure, absolutely but again, the message from society was not that fringe inappropriate behavior was toxic, but that everything male was toxic.

So, what did men, particularly the "good" ones, do? They retreated, not with hostility but indifference. The last thing "good men" wanted was to offend or be label as a toxic problem. Since any interaction with a stranger was bad and sometimes you needed a written contract to kiss after a date, good men got the message and heeded it. I'm not saying an unwanted kiss is a good thing, but what was the larger message being sent to the "good guys" who might actually care how women feel? The message to those "good guys" was "we don't need you, we don't want you around, you're disruptive in the classroom and at work and we would all be better off if you did not exist.".

One of the more positive vestigial remnants of the men's mental health movement teaches/talks about Stoicism. The retreat of men from social places and society is not due to a desire for haste or convenience. It is a stoic reaction to being told for a generation that being a man was bad for society. The sad truth today is that men don't need women or in fact other men to find purpose or diversion. A hard lesson well taught to us by society.