MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reillyse | 2025-06-17 20:42:13+00:00
The USA created the current Iranian regime by installing a puppet and then getting butt hurt when their puppet was ousted. A real freedom for us tyranny for you situation.

Then the USA created the Saddam regime in Iraq to fight the Iranian regime and that went great.

And now the USA is supporting Israel to terrorize the Middle East in their name and with their bombs and that’s going swimmingly too. Top job everyone.
by magicalist | 2025-06-17 20:42:18+00:00
> but we need a lot more nuclear that can be dialed up to compensate for renewables going offline

The problem wasn't the renewables going offline, they dipped in production due to not being winterized, but that was well modelled and they actually outperformed their expected output.

The problem, as mentioned in toomuchtodo's links, was the nuclear and gas plants going offline because they weren't winterized and trying to take the grid down with them. The mix was fine, but the market rewarded the cheapest preparations and the state government didn't step in to intervene.
by dlcarrier | 2025-06-17 20:42:52+00:00
Yeah, outside of Chromium forks the only other option is Gecko-based browsers. I use Seamonkey and Palemoon, to avoid the Mozilla Foundation's shenanigans. The performance isn't great, and I have to occasionally restart anything running on the Gecko engine, althogh the latter is also true for Chromium forks.
by pointlessone | 2025-06-17 20:43:06+00:00
I see what you mean. I do understand the desire to reduce boilerplate. I'd go for a small framework like Lit (I'm sure there are even smaller ones out there) for that but I wouldn't fault anyone for writing their own. I guess, good for you you could get a paper out of it, too. It just doesn't feel particularly novel to warrant one.
by grep_name | 2025-06-17 20:43:09+00:00
This doesn't pass the smell test for me.

It seems like you've taken a system of reasoning that was built through careful consideration (Kantianism), called the conclusions it meticulously built 'presuppositions' and hand-waved it without making substantive counterpoints.

The problem then, of course, is that burning down previous philosophy and starting 'without presuppositions' will lead inevitably to conclusions again, which you can once again call presuppositions and hand-wave.
by toast0 | 2025-06-17 20:43:16+00:00
A stable Iran seems to be doing a pretty good job of breeding terrorism, too though.

If we're being extremely generous, the goal of regime change would be to bring a new stability with economic prosperity and inclusion as well as more meaningful political inclusion, so as to reduce the amount of marginalized population with nothing to loose that are easy to recruit for terrorism.

Of course, when the nation building fails or is never even tried, it's pretty easy for recruiters to say "look around, they destroyed our country (with bombs or embargoes or tariffs or resource exploitation or offensive media), we have nothing to live for, and it's their fault; let's make them pay"

I don't think you can stop all terrorism, but if you want to put a dent in it, you need to give the broad population hope for prosperity, and you need to fulfill that hope on the regular.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-17 20:44:30+00:00
> These comparisons to existing uses of water besides cooling "AI data centers" ignore the fact that water use for "AI data centers" is additive. It is a _new_ use of water not seen before. As such, the comparisons to existing uses are unconvincing.

No, I'm not ignoring that. I'm saying two things:

1) When put next to existing water usage, data center water usage stops looking as crazy large as is implied in TFA. All data centers for all compute purposes in the EU used as much water in 2024 as the creation of a single food product used in 2019. That's important perspective to have when we're talking about additive water usage, because it hints out what percentage increase we're talking about [0].

2) I don't accept the presumption that existing usage has preeminence now and forever by simple virtue of being older. We should be able to look at all water usage that currently stands and decide which usages are worth keeping and which are worth adding.

You're welcome to disagree that data centers (AI and otherwise, because non-AI workloads are included in the numbers) are worth more than chocolate, but it should be as part of a fair comparison between them on the merits, with no grandfathering chocolate and agriculture in just because the chocolate companies and farmers got there before anyone was paying attention to monitoring water usage.

[0] If you can find a percentage increase from data centers figure that would be even better, but I can't find absolute numbers for total water usage in the EU to construct such a figure.
by tmtvl | 2025-06-17 20:44:31+00:00
The best cure for arrogance is a rough and dirty sparring session with a strong, experienced fighter. It's the most grounding experience you can have. Punches that come through openings you didn't know you had, kicks that seem to bury themselves into your flesh and marrow, and if you get to grappling you'll experience wonders you never knew existed.
by vincent-manis | 2025-06-17 20:44:32+00:00
OS/360 was a victim of over-ambition. Originally, it was to run on all models of System/360 (maybe not the Model 20, which implemented only a subset of the ISA), and it was complex enough that there were challenges in building it. IBM ended up spinning off the smaller models to IBM Germany, DOS/360 came from there, and subsetting OS/360 into 3 levels, so they could get something out the door only a bit late. OS/360 by some measures is one of the most successful operating systems ever: IBM's current z/OS is a remote descendent of it. Yes, it is pretty horrible to use (three letters: JCL), but it certainly was successful.

“The Mythical Man-Month” is not about OS/360 as such, but about project planning and specifically what was learned about project management during the development.
by opan | 2025-06-17 20:44:55+00:00
It's the taste, yeah. Frankly I don't care much about what's "healthy" and I consider that to be a bit of a buzzword as well as a rabbit hole. I do eat a lot of veggies, don't eat meat/dairy anymore, don't drink alcohol, but in my mind I'm not doing this to be some health-freak. Alcohol tastes bad, for example, and I have very low tolerance for that sort of thing. A lot of people will assume I'm religious (I'm not) or otherwise ascetic, but I'm actually just doing what I want. It keeps life more interesting. If we're to look at an energy drink as a fun thing, a pleasurable treat, I think sticking sucralose in there completely defeats the point. I can drink water if I'm thirsty, I can get caffeine from other sources. I wanted the energy drink because it was good. If you make it not good, I'm not going to drink it.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 20:45:15+00:00
The text alone isn't the problem. It's the sum of:

1) Plaintext representation, that is

2) a single source of truth,

3) which we always work on directly.

We're hitting hard against limits of 1), but that's because we insist on 2) and 3).

Limits of plaintext stop being a problem if we relax either 2) or 3). We need to be able to operate on the same underlying code ("single source of truth") indirectly through task-specific view, that hide the irrelevant and emphasize the important for the task at hand, which is something that typically changes multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour, for each programmer. The views/perspectives themselves can be plaintext or not, depending on what makes most sense; the underlying "single source of truth" does not have to be, because you're not supposed to be looking at it in the first place (beyond exceptional situations, similar to when you'd be looking at the object code produced by the compiler).

Expressiveness is a feature, but the more you try to express in fixed space, the harder it becomes to comprehend it. The solution is to stop trying to express everything all at once!

N.b. makes me think of a recent exchange I had on HN; people point out that code is like a blueprint in civil engineering/construction - but then, in those fields there is never a single common blueprint being worked on. You have different documents for overall structure, different for material composition, hydrological studies, load analysis, plumbing, HVAC, electrical routing, etc. etd. Multiple perspectives on the same artifacts. You don't see them merge all that into a single "uber blueprint", which would be the equivalent of how software engineers work with code.
by bmacho | 2025-06-17 20:45:36+00:00
Can you explain how xorg developers removing a lot of their own code and calling it "bad" because they get mad at someone makes you think that xorg is professional and makes the fork look bad? I am only able to see it the opposite way, that is, xorg developers have no idea wtf are they doing.

I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.
by drob518 | 2025-06-17 20:45:39+00:00
Also, that article about China making as many batteries as the world needs is deceiving if we’re talking about grid scale capacity as opposed to house scale or vehicle batteries. If the world went 100% into renewable energy with grid-scale battery deployment to provide extra capacity to make up for renewable generation variation, there’s no way China could keep up. That’s a LOT of batteries and ongoing replacement as they age and fail.
by yencabulator | 2025-06-17 20:45:48+00:00
Betterment's roboadvisor has tax loss harvesting. It does the basics like selling the right lot; I'm not educated enough about finance to say what it's still missing (that would be easy for a bot to do).

https://www.betterment.com/tax-loss-harvesting

https://www.betterment.com/resources/tax-loss-harvesting-met...
by zhyder | 2025-06-17 20:46:04+00:00
Blended price (assuming 3:1 for input:output tokens) is 3.24x of what was stated before [1], and now nearly 5x of 2.0 Flash. Makes 2.0 Flash a still competitive option for many use-cases, particularly ones that aren't coding-heavy I think. A slightly poorer performing model can net perform better through multiple prompt passes. Bummer, was hoping 2.5 Flash would be a slam dunk choice.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20250616024644/https://ai.google...
by quantadev | 2025-06-17 20:46:08+00:00
> DSLs look like noise

Exactly right. Now that we're in the era of LLMs and Coding Agents it's never been more clear that DSLs should be avoided; because LLMs cannot reason about them as well as popular languages, and that's just a fact. You don't need to dig any further, to think about pros and cons, imo.

The fewer languages there are in the world (as a general rule) the better off everyone is. We do need a low level language like C++ to exist and a high level one like TypeScript, but we don't _need_ multiple of each. The fact that there are already multiple of each is a challenge to be dealt with, and not a goal what we reached on purpose.
by yreg | 2025-06-17 20:46:34+00:00
Wow, I forgot about this place, but 15 years ago it was my favorite source of wallpapers. The art is as beautiful as ever.

So are some of the accompanying texts:

> This picture is dedicated to Kiev (Kyiv), a capital of Ukraine. It is loosely based on a 13-th century map - this is what center of Kyiv looked like ~900 years ago! The original map also included the city wall - however, I decided not to wrap the buildings into the wall, since in my dream world, a city would not need walls.

https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/kyiv/
by an_aparallel | 2025-06-17 20:46:51+00:00
I left whatsapp long ago when it was bought by meta, due to my privacy beliefs. I quit facebook in 2007 when i caught negative behaviour patterns. Im staunchly anti social media, however it would be dishonest not to note that it is lonely, organising anything is tedious, you have no access to the used goods marketplace (fees on sales platforms are too high). I dont really know if privacy is worth it. But tbh the thought of going back makes my skin crawl.
by jcranmer | 2025-06-17 20:47:17+00:00
The main repository's README has essentially a somewhat skeevy general undertone of "we accept all contributions from all kinds of people, but anyone who disagrees with me is clearly an evil paid corporate shill out to get me." At the time I read it, I didn't know or care who it was.

Then someone mentioned that this was the guy who got Torvalds to tell him GTFO off the kernel mailing lists, and when reading the article about it, I saw the name of the individual. Just seeing that name immediately reminded me of some interactions I've personally had with him a decade ago which eventually resulted (IIRC) in him being told to GTFO of that project. And the catalyst for this fork is being told to GTFO of Xorg thanks to his interactions with the rest of the people.

This is someone who is constantly grating on peoples' nerves to the point that they're kicked out of open source projects for being net negative contributors to the project. And given the repeat nature of it, they also lack the perspicacity to realize the commonality of these incidents. Now a thorough description of their behavior is perhaps superior to just calling them a "reactionary nutjob," but their reputation does proceed them and is justly earned.
by MoonGhost | 2025-06-17 20:47:43+00:00
Me thinking, is it time for a new 'programming' language for LLM to use instead of tools API calls? Something high level with loose grammar, in between natural language and strict programming. Then the backend, may be another smaller model, translates it in API calls. With this approach backend can be improved and updated much faster and cheaper then LLM model.
Show HN: Accurate orbital dynamics for asteroids/comets
by ddahlen | 2025-06-17 20:47:48+00:00
I am an astronomy PhD student who studies orbital dynamics for asteroids/comets/dust.

This is a rust backed python package which can handle accurate orbit calculations for all known asteroids at once.

I began writing this while I worked at CalTech on a NASA project, the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope. Its currently being used by NEO Surveyor and the SphereX telescope to identify already known asteroids and comets in images during data processing.

These are N-body calculations, with corrections for relativistic effects near the Sun, Jupiter, and a bunch of other physics. It can handle non-gravitational forces as well, such as solar radiation pressure (AKA: sunlight pushing stuff around).

The python is just a wrapper over the rust, and the rust can be used as a separate crate if wanted.
by alganet | 2025-06-17 20:48:16+00:00
I too have all sorts of secret stuff that I wouldn't share. I'm not asking for that. Isolating and reproducing example behavior is different from sharing your whole work.

> It would have been familiar enough to an ML engineer, I'm sure, but it was pretty much Perl to me.

How can you be sure that the solution doesn't have obvious mistakes that an ML engineer would spot right away?

> When this tech gets another 10x better

A chainsaw is way better than a regular saw, but it's also more dangerous. Learning to use it can be fun. Learning not to cut your toes is also important.

I am looking for ways in which LLMs could potentially cut people's toes.

I know you don't want to hear that your favorite tool can backfire, and you're still skeptic despite having experienced the example I gave you firsthand. However, I was still hopeful that you could understand my point.
by gopiandcode | 2025-06-17 20:48:34+00:00
mhhm yes yes. There's a thread of discussion that I didn't quite chose to delve into in the post, but there is something interesting to be found in the observation that languages that are close to natural language (Python being famous for being almost executable pseudo-code for a while) being easier for LLMs to generate.

Maybe designing new languages to be close to pseudo-code might lead to better results in terms of asking LLMs to generate them? but there's also a fear that maybe prose-like syntax might not be the most appropriate for some problem domains.
by eldaisfish | 2025-06-17 20:48:42+00:00
i get what you're saying but renewable capacity does not drop during the winter. On the contrary, winter months outside the tropics have higher wind speeds.

Solar output drops during the winter, not wind.

that said, economics pose a major problem to building more renewable energy capacity. No one will build a wind farm if it is not profitable. Profitability is a major question if average electricity prices drop.
Show HN: I was tired of bad image translations, so I built my own tool
by coolpool | 2025-06-17 20:48:51+00:00
Hello,

I built VerbaScan because I was tired of image translation tools that constantly failed me.

The usual problems:

Incorrect translations Phrases taken out of context No support for handwritten text

Verbascan takes a smarter approach — it focuses on meaning, not just swapping words. You upload an image and get a translation that actually makes sense.

Would love your feedback!
by dogleash | 2025-06-17 20:49:35+00:00
> And thats why you guys are working with computers and not people

In my experience, even the comically over the top people-persons will be curt to chatty people if they're swamped with a task that doesn't revolve around verbal ability.

They'll also bounce back to "they won't put down <tool> and talk to me" gossip about the nerds once their deadline pressure is released. But whateves, that's life.
by orthoxerox | 2025-06-17 20:49:38+00:00
The curse of Valve. No one there cares about Steam Workshop enough to improve its UX. Every mod you "subscribe" to is automatically downloaded and installed, which means each game has to provide its own way to switch mods on and off.

Nexus doesn't help you to manage your modlists, but at least it is smart enough to step back and let you manage them however you want to.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-17 20:49:57+00:00
Another input format, for HTTP response headers:

{a}[,][ ]{d}[ ]{b}[ ]{Y}[ ]{H}:{M}:{S}[ ]GMT { strptime(yytext,"%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT",&t); xd70f5083A(); } puts(" Sun, Sep 09 2001 01:46:40 GMT");
by newdee | 2025-06-17 20:50:05+00:00
Surely it’s more efficient (for both parties) to type and be able to read the whole thing and then respond meaningfully?

E.g. If you’ve just say “hi”, two hours later I get to my DMs and say “hey what’s up?” and you end up not following up with the “actual” message straight away, let’s say another hour later, this all took way longer than necessary.

The no-hello approach just makes sense when dealing with asynchronous messaging platforms such as Slack. IMO, not following the no-hello approach is bad etiquette and there’s a ton of people out there who still don’t really get that.
by behnamoh | 2025-06-17 20:50:26+00:00
> on the other side it is a beta 1, please file feedback

This beta OS update is, frankly, disappointing. A fundamental feature like the Control Center suffers from incorrect contrast, which is a significant oversight. This isn't a niche problem; it's a core, frequently used function that should have been thoroughly tested. It makes me question the design process and how such a basic issue was missed.

While the underlying engineering concept might be impressive, its practical application falls short, especially considering it will be used by billions.
by hirako2000 | 2025-06-17 20:50:48+00:00
You feelings of a little brain in there, and stable code are unfounded. All these models collapse pretty fast. If not due to context limit, then in their inability to interpret problems.

An LLM is just statistical regressions with a llztjora of engineering tricks, mostly NLP to produce an illusion.

I don't mean it's useless. I mean comparing these ever evolving models is like comparing escort staff in NYC vs those in L.A, hard to reach any conclusjon. We are getting fooled.

On the price increase, it seems Google was aggressively looking for adoption, Gemini was for a short range of time the best value for money of all the LLMs out there. Adoption likely surged, scaling needs be astronomical, costing Google billions to keep up. The price adjustment could've been expected before they announced it.
by tristan957 | 2025-06-17 20:51:10+00:00
Government is not a business, nor is it 0-sum. Well-functioning societies with low rates of recidivism invest much more in their prisoners. We should be investing money into prisoners, so that they can re-integrate into society and become successful tax-paying citizens, just like the premise of the blog post we are commenting on. As the co-founder said, the Department of Corrections in Maine takes a cut of the inmate's salary.

NPR did a great article on the prison system in Norway: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/31/410532066/.... They are quoted as spending $90,000 per prisoner with a recidivism rate at half the US rate.
by shmerl | 2025-06-17 20:51:22+00:00
I'd say it's the result of the use cases being so broad, that some get more focus than others. There were obviously pain points that only gradually got better. But it doesn't mean Wayland isn't suitable for addressing those scopes. Someone has to do the work though rather than complain.

In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
by api | 2025-06-17 20:51:41+00:00
One of my big concerns (a little tangential) is that LLMs will have the effect of fixing programming language design and the current language landscape into stone. This could occur in proportion to their use by programmers. The languages that LLMs do the best and have in their training data will be the languages programmers use, and getting any new language into LLM data sets will be very hard.
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-17 20:52:23+00:00
(I did some research. Apparently, Bulldozer was initially supposed to be a fairly "fat" core single-threaded, just with more multithreading. Something didn't work out, and the crisis was managed by scaling back things that really hurt performance.)

https://www.osnews.com/story/135785/bulldozer-amds-crash-mod...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-17 20:52:36+00:00
Well yeah, if you consume it. I'm worried about it splashing out and touching your hand. That's how LSD was discovered, Hoffman accidentally touched it and got a massive dose. I'm just saying that its much more dangerous to be near several grams of LSD than it is to be near several grams of MDMA, which means that the only person who can tell you the potency is likely the person who was crazy enough to make it in the first place.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-17 20:52:43+00:00
>Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist.

Why as in "what set of circumstances led to your existence" or why as in "what purpose did a creator have to want to create you"? Two different people can hear why, and there are two different (though possibly overlapping) questions. Even if there were a creator, only the first question is interesting.

You're all overthinking it though. If you want more people like you to exist in the future, if the thought of our extinction disturbs you, then there are some basic rules to live by or you risk that ending. Some of these rules are as much about attitude as they are about behavior, and nihilism is extraordinarily maladaptive.

>then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics,

Even if we substitute in non-biased language (perhaps "manifestation" instead of "creation"), this question assumes very much.
by MrArthegor | 2025-06-17 20:52:50+00:00
It’s more a criticism of breaking certain things, which is inevitable when your try to refactor something. The matter is in the end if the behavior remain the same when you finish.

But it’s just a supposition at this stage, let’s see on the next’s month if it a complete mess or if it’s the XFree86 to Xorg transition