MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zbentley | 2025-07-26 19:17:38+00:00
> Evaluate ideas (or bills) for their merits, not based on who originated them.

Ideas? Sure. Bills? No.

So much of how a piece of legislation affects society has to do with the agendas of the people behind it (no matter what it says in text) and the means by which the executive implements it (often hand-in-glove with the agendas of the legislation’s originators).

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/understanding-the-cascade-of-...
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-26 19:17:54+00:00
A few different threads based on my limited online research:

1. Absorbing all spectrum of light would provide more energy than the organisms can handle. They need gas to run the engine, and all spectrum would provide jet fuel.

2. Current predominant species of plants evolved from the undergrowth. Original plants would absorb only green, so the undergrowth evolved to absorb the other spectrums because that’s what was left. After a few planet scale extinction events where the sunlight was scarce, being able to absorb a wider spectrum became a successful evolutionary trait and became the predominant one.

3. There are species of fungi that use melanin to absorb radiation for energy source and appear black.
by dvh | 2025-07-26 19:19:06+00:00
I recently used inverted index (with ranked document retrieval) and it all took only 66 lines of JavaScript: https://github.com/dvhx/ngspicejs/blob/master/js/search.js and I'm kinda proud of that code, it's compact, without dirty tricks or without being overtly smart. Well except for using 1/term_frequency instead of logarithms, it's easier to debug (sums of fractions instead of random numbers produced by logarithms) and I just left it there, it works fine.
by barrkel | 2025-07-26 19:19:49+00:00
Life expectancy in the past was heavily depressed by high child and maternal mortality. For those who survived into adulthood (say, 20), dying in one's 30s or 40s was not the norm. Most lived into at least their 50s, and many reached their 60s or beyond. Hard labor and disease made very old age rarer than today, but old age itself is not a modern phenomenon. Skeletal remains and records confirm its presence throughout history.
by skizm | 2025-07-26 19:20:15+00:00
I guess the question is how many other companies did they correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is very possible they would have run one or both into the ground, making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.
by tzs | 2025-07-26 19:21:36+00:00
That's the TL;DR for the least interesting part of the article since most would expect Florida to have the most.

It's well known as a major state to retire to, and many of the things that make a place attractive as a retirement destination also make it attractive as a vacation home location. And it is a high population state so when comparing by absolute numbers it would be the most obvious candidate for most vacation homes.

The interesting part is where it looks at percentage of homes in the state that are vacation homes. Florida is high by that measure too at 8.2%, but behind Maine and Vermont which are each over 15%, and New Hampshire at over 10%.

It is even a little behind Alaska (8.9%) and Delaware (8.6%). I bet not many people would have guessed that Alaska has a higher percentage of vacation homes that Florida.

Hawaii is also interesting. It has twice the population of Alaska, but only slightly more vacation homes (31.6k vs 29.2k).
by kaoD | 2025-07-26 19:22:05+00:00
Just FYI you were downvoted with no explanation because you missed the point in all of these and you're using a smug and off-putting tone which makes it look like only care about "being right" and not finding what "is right".

Also you obviously didn't bother reading the "important concepts" link ([3]).

I was going to assume good faith and reply to each of your comments but it'd probably be a waste of time. As a summary: most of your concerns are wrong due to (1) confusing "timezones" with "location" or "internationalization" (2) confusing internal representations (like Epochs) with what these objects represent as described in the "important concepts" link and (3) just being completely wrong like saying you cannot do reasonable arithmetic with PlainMonthDay or even understand that not every relevant operation is arithmetic (good luck calling `.toPlainDate(2025)` with your string representation).
by pyman | 2025-07-26 19:23:48+00:00
Most EU countries passed laws between 2002 and 2009 raising the tobacco purchase age to 18. And they also introduced regulations on how and where they can advertise smoking, how the packaging looks, and even where the products are displayed.

The EU and Asia are doing a great job protecting their people from harmful US goods and services. On the other hand, South America and Africa are poor continents with little power to negotiate.
by westurner | 2025-07-26 19:24:49+00:00
The article is about LDES Long-Duration Energy Storage.

(I remember learning of Google's early Bloom Box investments many years ago; instead of diesel generator reserves which expire.)

Energy Dome has a CO2 -based LDES which Google has invested in.

Energy Dome's requires compressing CO2 to supercriticality.

> [...] pumped storage hydropower still accounts for more than 90% of utility scale storage in the US, long duration or otherwise.
by eastbound | 2025-07-26 19:25:11+00:00
So, no OSS contribution is valid unless you are using this very library?

Did Microsoft contribute more to the OSS world, or did the OSS world contribute more to Microsoft? I pardon Microsoft because they have donated Typescript, which is a true civilizational progress. You could say the OSS world has contributed to Microsoft because they’ve given them a real OS, which they didn’t have inner expertise to develop. We’re even.

Now you sound like you have a beef against large companies and would find any argument against them. Some guy once told me that I didn’t increase my employees by 30% out of benevolence, but because I must be an awful employer. See, why else would I increase employees.

This behavior is actively harmful to the rest of the world. You are depriving good actions from a “thank you” and hence you are depriving recipients of good actions from more of them. With this attitude, the world becomes exactly like you project it to be: Shitty.
by bena | 2025-07-26 19:26:28+00:00
Exactly. If Yahoo was capable of nurturing Google into what it became, it was also capable of simply becoming that first. But it didn’t, because it wasn’t run by the same people who ran Google.

And I’m not saying that only Page and Brin were the only ones who could have made Google, only that they clearly were two people who were capable of doing it. However, Yahoo was not run by such people. So Yahoo would have bought Google and would have made Google conform to Yahoo’s culture, probably relegating Page and Brin to lesser roles where they couldn’t drive company culture.
by Jommi | 2025-07-26 19:27:47+00:00
SF scene doesn't "come together", it just has many many many sub scenes of people that exist. In most other cities only a few tech sub scenes exist.

You will need to do the work to find them, but the quality of them will be higher than random luma events in SF.

but do try luma in London, thast the modern meetup.com (meetup.com is for old farts)
by toyg | 2025-07-26 19:28:08+00:00
The funny thing is that none of those aims will be achieved with this act. The only way to make the net safe is by turning it into a heavily-sanitized cage, where only government-approved players are allowed; an outcome that the average voter would likely not support (but who knows - fascism is back in fashion, after all).

All legislation will have "issues" until it's made physically impossible for a website to be accessible unless the government approves it. Until then, it's just a way to promote VPNs across the general public, which will have a bunch of collateral negative effects (since it will become much harder for the security services to actually monitor actual bad guys).
by mcswell | 2025-07-26 19:29:54+00:00
"A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity." I won't address the legality issue, but: First, I'm not sure about the no electricity; if the heater has a pilot light, then I suppose no, but otherwise it requires electricity at least for the igniter.

Second, you're missing another reason for getting a heat pump water heater. We just last week replaced our 13 year old (and therefore on its end of life) gas heater with a heat pump water heater. It requires no gas :). One reason for doing that is that using electricity to run a small heat pump is far cheaper where we live than gas. (We have solar panels, which makes it still cheaper--in fact, free.)

The only things remaining in our house that use gas are the stove and a gas log fireplace. We've used the latter twice during the 13 years we've lived in the house. If we replace the stove (which we'll need to do some day, it's almost 25 years old) with an electric one, then I'd be easily persuaded to turn off the gas fireplace, and end the delivery charge on gas.

As an electric appliance owner, I'll take that chance.
by ac130kz | 2025-07-26 19:31:39+00:00
Somewhat solved by type annotations + a good static type checker, such as pyright (it's 2025, there must be type annotations everywhere), and dynamic cases (very rare, probably due to poor or unfortunate design decisions) can be solved with validators, e.g. the aforementioned Pydantic. This isn't a silver bullet, but it works really well.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-26 19:31:42+00:00
Because its hard to define the parts that are really sensitive. At our work people must classify every document but a lot of people choose public for everything because it doesn't enforce any restrictions. So they can just dump it in a folder and share it with the whole company. This is not what we want them to do obviously but people are lazy, don't like to create access lists. But anyway it means we can't rely on the classification. And indicator detection like credit card and social security numbers is far from perfect. A lot of sensitive info will just be text, like about new products being developed. 3D models, code, strategy emails.

Also, if people start rooting around in everything they can take things out of context. If I send a message to my boss that I think that something we're doing is stupid, if that were public it could make some waves even though internally it's inconsequential because I'm a nobody. Also, many documents might have one or two bits that hint to really important information and having them can help finding those

As you probably know, there's tons of information in a multinational and the hardest part is finding the right stuff. This is one of the main tasks I use Copilot for. Also because outlook and SharePoint search are really terrible though. If those actually worked I wouldn't need copilot so much.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-26 19:31:51+00:00
While all the phototrophs that are able to split water and produce free oxygen use chlorophyll a, which absorbs only red light and violet light, resulting in a blue-green color, which can be seen as such in some lichens and cyanobacteria, most of them have some accessory pigments, which absorb other parts of the solar spectrum, and then transfer the energy to chlorophyll a.

The green algae, which live only in shallow waters, and the terrestrial plants use as accessory pigment only chlorophyll b, which absorbs a different band of red light than chlorophyll a and also blue light, resulting in a green color.

This is enough for green algae and land plants, because where they live there is abundant light. For land plants the problem is that they have too much light, not too little, with the exception of those which grow under the shadow of trees.

On the other hand, most marine algae use accessory pigments that absorb much more of the solar spectrum, so that the color of chlorophyll is no longer visible and they have overall colors like red, yellow or brown, even very dark brown. This enables such algae to live down to greater depths in the water, where there is less solar light.

So there are a lot of living beings that make very efficient use of light.

Moreover, under water there are many places where practically all light is captured, by multiple layers of algae and bacteria, each layer absorbing some part of the solar spectrum. Even the near infrared light is absorbed by a bottom layer of bacteria, which do not produce oxygen, because the energy of infrared photons is insufficient to split water.
by westurner | 2025-07-26 19:33:57+00:00
Additional forms of CO2 storage and capture?

- Concrete that absorbs CO2; developed with Allegro-FM AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44677145

- Bicarbonate + CO2 + (...) => formate at 96% efficiency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38097663

/? CO2 (in my hnlog)

- Butter! "Butter made from CO2 could pave the way for food without farming" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40918803
by mkagenius | 2025-07-26 19:34:21+00:00
Just checked Marissa Mayer's X account, can someone explain why is her account not getting enough views/reach - https://x.com/marissamayer

She apparently has 1.4M followers with barely 20 likes. This was even worse a few months back.

Are those followers bought / dormant? Or is twitter suppressing it?
by brudgers | 2025-07-26 19:34:41+00:00
If you are have an objective squint, a lot of vacation homes have wheels. Per Google AI just prior to pasting:

As of 2024, there are an estimated 11.2 million RV-owning households in the U.S., according to Emergency Assistance Plus.

That's more than double the 4.8 million mentioned in the article...and theoretically some households could own more than two. But modulo RV's are also used for work travel particularly when it comes to construction.

Like anything relating to housing and real-estate, it's complicated.
by trueismywork | 2025-07-26 19:34:45+00:00
You need to think it in a different manner. When you have AGPL code, then it benefits mankind more than corporations. There's a Harvard report on value of open source to society based on how much money corporations put in.

Today linux is working nicely on desktops (even though it's not the year of linux) and is heavily dominated by corporations. The parts where linux doesn't do well are exactly parts without corporate support.

Software is becoming complex enough that it's not possible for a single company to just even maintain a compiler let alone an office suite. Its perfect ground for either one company having monopoly or an free software (not open source) being a base for masses.
by 0xffany | 2025-07-26 19:35:24+00:00
I wholeheartedly disagree.

Technology should not be fixing such a societal or legislative issue. In the example you're providing, why should the user trust the LLM, but not the credit agreement? Why shouldn't the LLM point the user to a different credit agreement, just as exploitative? The company operating the LLM may have such an incentive, and it could be very lucrative.

Illiteracy in the case you are proposing can only increase, for the benefit of some.

(The argument that people can use open source models can't possibly be applied, considering you're speaking about, as you called them, the other 90%, or even the functionally illiterate.)

The last paragraph is concerning to say the least.
by blastonico | 2025-07-26 19:35:57+00:00
How does he know that the response isn't just hallucinations?

I'm telling it because I work there and I don't recognize any of those processes.

In fact I found one script named keepAliveJupyterSvc.sh in a public repo: https://github.com/shivamkm07/code-interpreter/blob/load-tes...
by tlogan | 2025-07-26 19:36:15+00:00
The very big issue in San Francisco is the severe lack of affordable housing. When renovations become significantly more expensive, those costs inevitably get passed on to renters: making the crisis even worse.

If regulations like these are necessary, they should be applied in areas without a housing affordability crisis. But somehow, it’s always the high-cost cities that get hit with even more burdens.
by DrewADesign | 2025-07-26 19:36:42+00:00
It’s great, but it’s not Apollo-level anything. Most games are far more interactively and visually complex. Apples to oranges with UX and interaction problems to solve, but certainly not depth and complexity. I’ve certainly experienced bugs in Reddit’s interface before — there seems to be this idea that they have to be so risk averse that they can’t do anything significant— I’ll bet you a pizza that their official app which implements all the features that people really want to use is made with JS/HTML on the back end anyway.
by righthand | 2025-07-26 19:36:58+00:00
Depends on what you mean by retired. In the traditional sense you’re correct, retired people don’t have income. In the legal sense retirement just means the person is of age to collect benefits. But there is also the question of type of income.

If a retired person owns property and sells it, that is income subject to capital gains tax.

If a person is retired but still owns the business or is even still a board member, they’re still working in a sense and gaining shares.

There are plenty of “retired” people who are “working” and have income.
by khuey | 2025-07-26 19:38:18+00:00
This is interesting, but one axis it's missing is that in some places the "vacation homes" aren't actually habitable year round. Quite a few cabins in Maine are neither insulated nor heated for the winters, are only accessible via roads that aren't maintained during the winter, etc. I'm not familiar with the area but I would guess that Minnesota's Lake Country and other similar places have the same thing going on.
by goku12 | 2025-07-26 19:38:29+00:00
> I can see the argument on both sides but ...

I recently saw a screenshot from one of these apps (so I can't guarantee its authenticity. But it's not an inconceivable scenario). Someone posted a man in there with his photo. The elephant in the room is that the man is dead! His ex-wife (with whom he had children) is enraged by this and is demanding to have it removed. Instead of addressing her concern, one of them decides to report her!

Now this may be an anecdotal argument. But when it pertains individual rights and human dignity, even a single violation is sufficient to question the ethics and legality of such endeavors. An important fact here is that nobody has absolute rights. Any rights are valid only as long as they don't infringe on someone else's rights. So, smearing, maligning and vilifying someone cannot be justified in the name of 'women's safety'.

This is one of those cases where you can't find a balance between both sides. One side is objectively wrong. Ruining the lives of any number of innocent men must not be an acceptable compromise for ensuring women's safety. There must be ways to achieve that without causing such widespread collateral damage. Their argument to the contrary is not just lazy, it reeks of hubris and contempt.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-07-26 19:39:24+00:00
It is already here, it is called Bitcoin (with Lightning possibly). And this is not fantasy, the exact same story happened to Pornhub in 2018 - in which they got banned from Visa/MC and purged 60% of their content. They are banned to this day, and now accept Bitcoin/Crypto Payments as well as SEPA transfers in the EU.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-26 19:40:56+00:00
I don't think we can really trust in all those years of stated preferences, now that the revealed ones are so different. They folks who often say "States' rights" have always been the most willing to violate them if it gets them what they want.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should have new fears of a National ID feature. Republicans in administrator-roles recently started corrupting federal databases, fraudulently marking living people as dead [0] in order to kill their accounts, while firing the people who pointed out it was flagrantly illegal.

It doesn't require any imagination for the same bad administrators to illegally disable National ID logins because you posted something that hurt the cult-leader's feelings. The feature cannot be made safe if the framework is still open to crooks.

[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-and-doge-claim-power-to-fals...
by PopAlongKid | 2025-07-26 19:41:04+00:00
This explains very little. State income tax is based on your state of residence, not where you have a vacation home, in which by definition you do not live most of the year. Further, it makes no sense to refer to "the state with no income tax", as there are many of those.

Granted, there are some working-age people who buy a vacation home with the thought of moving into it permanently a decade or two into the future, but those plans entail a lot of uncertainty (health, closeness to family) and of course once they move, it is no longer a vacation home.
by jpc0 | 2025-07-26 19:41:05+00:00
Very likely something along those lines.

Effectively standardise passing operations off to a coprocessor. C++ is moving into that direction with stdexec and the linear algebra library and SIMD.

I don’t see why Rust wouldn’t also do that.

Effectively why must I write a GPU kernel to have an algorithm execute on the GPU, we’re talking about memory wrangling and linear algebra almost all of the time when dealing with GPU in any way whatsoever. I don’t see why we need a different interface and API layer for that.

OpenGL et al abstract some of the linear algebra away from you which is nice until you need to give a damn about the assumptions they made that are no longer valid. I would rather that code be in a library in the language of your choice that you can inspect and understand than hidden somewhere in a driver behind 3 layers of abstraction.
by drdaeman | 2025-07-26 19:41:32+00:00
Human intellectual/cognitive capabilities are unprecedented, though.

I'm not sure if we'll live to see it, but I'd be pretty surprised if some fine day humanity won't evolve enough to abandon the primate bodies and decouple humanity from its biology. That is, I believe we'll eventually give birth to thinking machines, and hopefully they'll keep the humanity going even if other branches would possibly fail to the environmental changes.

Unless, of course, we won't make ourselves extinct first.
by hx8 | 2025-07-26 19:42:05+00:00
1. Blocking coinbase would be anti-compeitive behavior which are totally different laws.

2. Valve is not publicly traded so we cannot do a detailed comparison, but all indications show Playstation is a larger gaming platform than Steam. Steam is not "the largest game platform on the planet".

3. Yeah I agree that strong legal regulations for the payment processing industry would be good. I think a public electronic payment processing system would be better, and wide adoption of a crypto-currency based solution would be the best. My trust in governments and central banks to handle monetary policy is very low. My trust in private for-profit companies to handle payment processing is even lower. It's one thing to do well over a few decades, and another thing to do well over a several centuries and real economies operate on a very long timescale.

4. It's disappointing that we treat NSFW as such a taboo.