MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-21 21:55:46+00:00
> Well, the grid wasn't ready:

You are being sold a pup. The grid was fine. Places like South Australia (a state) have 70% renewables without big changes to the grid.

I don't know what the real reason was, but it's more likely to do renewables undercutting the price the existing coal plants could sell electricity during the day, to the point the were no longer profitable. So to keep them profitable they curtailed the much cheaper solar and wind, rather than the coal fired generation. Maybe those plants are state owned, or perhaps they have good political connections, or perhaps they own the generation, distribution and retail networks making them very difficult for a politician to take on.

The approach taken in other countries is to let the market sort it out, with a guiding hand. If coal plants can only generate at night because they are out-competed during the day by solar, then let them raise their prices at night and when the sun don't shine. That will cause price spikes. Don't like the political problems price spikes cause? Force the retailers to sell at a base price fixed for must they advertise in advance. The retailers won't do that because they are owned by the generators - it's time to split the two functions and create an electricity market. Intermittent renewables and slow ramping coal companies are causing spikes? Create a market for storage, and ensure the retails have no choice but to purchase enough storage guarantee the continuous supply they promised to the customers.

Or you can just sit on your hands, let the existing coal generators continue doing what they have always done, and justify it by saying "the grid" can't handle change. Reuters will happily repeat that excuse for you, without asking too many questions. Politically, that works too. But only in the short term. In the longer term, particularly as those coal fired plants reach end of life, you are up for a really painful time because the gradual change you could have had had now has to happen all at once.
by amusable | 2025-07-21 21:56:01+00:00
To each their own, but as a counterpoint to many of these comments, I know plenty of people in tech who prioritize their family at the cost of their career & health/fitness. I think most tenured people at FAANGs are doing that actually. 99% of all parents I know at FAANGs have high blood pressure, can't run a mile straight, deal with chronic pain due to sitting all the time, have low grade diabetes or need to take multiple types of psychiatric medications due to never being able to achieve financial freedom.

I think financial freedom _needs_ to be a priority for your long-term health, especially if you want to have a family. And achieving financial freedom requires sacrifices elsewhere in your life.

And in general, I think it's totally fine to work hard if you want to, but you absolutely need to make sure that you're getting an exponential amount of payout for every hour of overtime you put in.
by pseudo0 | 2025-07-21 21:57:17+00:00
In one case it was a personal website, the other was a Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.

Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...

https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...
by vdupras | 2025-07-21 21:57:29+00:00
And that's what it's all about: Energy Return on Investment. Conventional oil has a much much better return than fracking, and the US is out of it. This is what is meant by "decline". Sure, there's plenty of oil, but it's more expensive to get out, so we don't.

On the flip side, our economy is dependent on a certain EROI. Below that, it chokes because we don't have enough energy "slaves" to render the services we've came to depend upon.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 21:57:56+00:00
That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly.

If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
by chrisco255 | 2025-07-21 21:57:57+00:00
No I don't see the problem. We've had Freedom of Speech for 250 years in the USA and our democracy has lasted longer than anyone's. France is on their 15th or 16th government in that amount of time. Perhaps if the copied the Bill of Rights verbatim they would still be on their 1st.

Don't even get me started on Nazis. Their most effective tool for control over citizens was restriction of speech. The Reichstag Fire decree being exhibit A.

The far left is just as awful and the USSR's glavlit, gulag, etc were extremely effective at silencing criticism. All ever in the name of order and peace, but in truth a consolidation of power.

> Then there's some things you can say without getting into legal trouble, but you may get killed for it by those you offend.

Sure, this is why Americans have a phrase called "Live free or die". If you're not willing to die for liberty then your fear of death will be used to control you. So fuck em, say what you think.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-21 21:58:32+00:00
> What is X accused of specifically?

Nothing.

There is an investigation (there are named offenses that are the main, but not stated as exclusive, focus), not an accusation against X and various individuals.

The investigation may, depending on what it finds, result in accusations against some or all of the people on whom the investigation is focused, but whether it will and what the accusations will be is not known until the investigation has occurred.
by deepspace | 2025-07-21 21:58:57+00:00
> two people and four items of luggage plus a personal bag each

Well, there's you problem. I have traveled the world, including many trips of 6 weeks or more, with only a single. carry-on. Laundromats exist everywhere.

Snark aside, a bit of planning and organization w.r.t. packing pays off handsomely in terms of flexibility when traveling.

Spontaneous weekend trip to a remote island when carrying only a backpack - sure. Add two heavy suitcases, and it becomes an impossibility.
by asadotzler | 2025-07-21 21:59:11+00:00
> but if it's not sure, it should quit

Can it be sure or not? I've never been able to get LLMs to give confidence measures that match their actual outputs. I'll ask an LLM "Are you sure?" and it'll reply "Absolutely" when it's output is completely wrong, or it'll backtrack on a correct output with "I should not have provided an answer when I was unsure. Here is an answer I am sure of..." and then provide something completely wrong.

If they can't properly and consistently score their confidence, how do they "know" when to quit and give it back to the human?
by mnw21cam | 2025-07-21 21:59:36+00:00
My stock reply to this used to be that you can send emails from anyone - who the email is sent from is not authenticated.

It's a little less true now with some of the newer protections, but only today I received a fairly subtle spam/scam supposedly from the main email address of a major retailer, so I think it's still sensible to never every trust the "From:" part of an email.
by yesco | 2025-07-21 21:59:37+00:00
> That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US

Not true. The US has a much higher bar for prosecuting speech than the UK.

Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) - 395 U.S. 444

- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/107965/brandenburg-v-o...

- Speech must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action"

- AND "likely to incite or produce such action"

- General statements like "burn them all" typically fail both prongs

The "imminent" requirement is key. Connolly's Facebook post lacked:

- Specific targets or locations

- Timeframe for action

- Direct instructions to specific individuals

- Any indication people were prepared to act on her words immediately

Here are cases with far more explicit threats that were protected:

United States v. Bagdasarian (2009)

- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/221261/united-states-v...

- Citation: 652 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2011)

- Posted that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head" with racial slurs

- Result: Conviction reversed as crude political statement, not true threat

United States v. Turner (2013)

- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/904120/united-states-v...

- Citation: 720 F.3d 411 (2d Cir. 2013)

- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses

- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole

Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.

The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.

You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
by ColinWright | 2025-07-21 22:00:09+00:00
Machine translated:

Gilles Dowek was a French computer scientist and logician.

His PhD was entitled "Automatic Demonstration in the Calculation of Constructions."

He taught at the École Polytechnique from 2002 to 2010 and was a researcher at INRIA, attached to the Formal Methods Laboratory of the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay.

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=83529
by asdefghyk | 2025-07-21 22:00:25+00:00
RE "...All of the peak demand supplied from batteries...." This is a very good start.

My question is how do the batteries go , if there is 1 - N days of cloudy weather? Can the batteries supply the peak for more than one day? Is there ( or where would they go ) transmission lines to bring in the needed peak supply from other storage (battery / pumped hydro ) areas?

Another step would be to include days of peak electricity demand, which in my country occurs in cold weather ( heaters) and very hot weather ( air conditioner's ) OR is there demand limits like in Spain demand limit for some houses is around 3KW (YUKS)
by alexeiz | 2025-07-21 22:00:29+00:00
For some time after the introduction of the M1 CPU Macbooks provided the best battery life experience. So it would make sense to use a Macbook if you wanted your laptop to work more than 4-5 hours unplugged. But now Intel Core Ultra series 2 and AMD Strix Point laptops are almost as good. Sure you won't get 20 hours of battery life, but you get about 10-15 hours and it's already good enough. Performance of Intel/AMD CPUs are also good enough: about M2 performance-wise. Sure they are a couple of generations behind Apple, but for most tasks it doesn't matter. Linux compatibility is also getting there. You can choose a Thinkpad if you want to be sure that Linux runs on it. But even many consumer-grade laptops are supported but Linux thanks to recent kernel updates. Essentially what I'm saying is that if you want a good laptop experience and you like Linux, you don't have to settle for Macbook anymore.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-21 22:02:04+00:00
The whole people pleaser routine is very creepy in my book and makes them say very weird things. See an example below.

https://futurism.com/anthropic-claude-small-business

> When Anthropic employees reminded Claudius that it was an AI and couldn't physically do anything of the sort, it freaked out and tried to call security — but upon realizing it was April Fool's Day, it tried to back out of the debacle by saying it was all a joke.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-21 22:02:12+00:00
> IPC is increasing, not flat.

Benchmarks going up is not IPC increasing. These are separate things.

Please look IPC for the latest GPU's from Nvidia, the latest CPU's from AMD. The IPC is flat. See intel loosing credibility with failing processors due to power problems from clocking because IPC is flat.

> Even an M4 MacBook Pro is substantially faster than an M1

Again, clocking. m4 (non pro) vs m1 are so close in IPC on common tasks that its negligible. The performance gains between the two are from memory bandwidth not core performance.

> Server chips are scaling core counts

Parallelism is not the same as performance. Intel dropping the "core duo" 20 year ago was that RUNNING at 2ghz was an admission that single threading was ending. 20 years on were 20 cores deep (consumer), and only at 4ghz with "boost clocks" (back to that pesky power and cooling problem).

And this product still exists today: the N150 (close enough). Its has lower power consumption and more cores. And what was the single core performance gain? 35% Improvement in 20 years.

None of these things are running any of the LLM's that power the tools were talking about. Those are in the datacenter. 700 core CPU's, 400-800gbps top of rack switching are the bleeding edge. This is where "power" and cooling have hit the wall. The spacing requirements of a bleeding edge NVIDIA install are impacting the costs of interconnect between systems. Lots of fiber and needing to be spaced out because of power/heat adds up to a boat load of extra networking costs. Having half empty racks because of density is now a reality.

And you see these same issues at home: power demands of GPU's for consumers and workstations are thought he roof. Were past what the PCI spec can provide, all that power is heat and has to go somewhere. Sometimes it burns up poorly designed connectors. The latest gen is consumes even more power, to push clocks higher, for very little gain (see flat IPC nvida).
by lacker | 2025-07-21 22:02:21+00:00
Typically formalization is actually harder than solving a problem. You almost always solve before formalizing. And it can be surprisingly hard to formalize problems that are easy to solve.

For example, is there a polygon of area 100 that you can fit 99 circles of area 1 inside it, without overlapping? Yes, obviously, it's very easy to prove this informally. Now try formalizing it! You will find it takes a while to formalize a number of fairly obvious geometric statements.
by nicf | 2025-07-21 22:02:24+00:00
I don't know enough about the RH examples to say what the answer is in that case. I'd be very interested in a perspective from someone who knows more than me!

In general, though, the answer to this question would depend on the specifics of the argument in question. Sometimes you might be able to salvage something; maybe there's some other setting where same methods work, or where some hypothesis analogous to the false one ends up holding, or something like that. But of course from a purely logical perspective, if I prove that P implies Q and P turns out to be false, I've learned nothing about Q.
by hadlock | 2025-07-21 22:03:00+00:00
> selectively prosecute and enforce the law ... Indian parenting model of everything being wrong. This cultural trait is so embedded in Indian culture, but it is possible to eliminate.

Can you expand on this, for better understanding by someone not familiar with this style of culture/parenting; and if you have any knowledge, does this also extend to Pakistani and Bangladeshi culture as well? Thanks
by azalemeth | 2025-07-21 22:04:20+00:00
We have ear defenders and staff inside and monitoring visible in both locations -- anaesthetic machine in the control room. There's not much you can safely do in the fringe field but you can do CPR and rapidly get someone out of the room (and before my spinal injury I used to practice both of those regularly, particularly when part of a team scanning patients with inotropes)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-21 22:04:30+00:00
You could always request that from the author. Since it's a Mac app, they could do that. Not so, if it were an iOS app.

It's a pretty basic SwiftUI app. They haven't really polished it, so I could see why they might not be interested in making it much more accessible. It's a tool for Mac geeks.

Speaking for myself, I have a whole bunch of packages, and almost every one has a test harness. Many of the test harnesses are "full-fat" iOS apps, so they can't be provided as releases, unless I create an App Store app for each one.

They need to be built and run. A couple are Mac apps, but the whole deal with them, is that they are test harnesses, so divorcing them from the IDE is sort of negating their purpose. They are meant to help other Apple developers to understand and use the packages the apps are associated with.
by purusmahe | 2025-07-21 22:04:56+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with AI-native development at Thumbtack, rethinking team structures and workflows for shipping AI-powered features. This blog shares what we’ve tried some things that worked, some that didn’t.

I’d love to hear how other teams are approaching this.

Are you rethinking team structure or iteration loops with AI?

What’s helped or hurt cross-functional collaboration?

How are you all approaching AI Evaluations & building user trust.
by persolb | 2025-07-21 22:05:26+00:00
As a mid size company that does work with government agencies, it’s near impossible to use anything ‘better’ solution. Cybersecurity requirements are getting so onerous that Sharepoint is too commercially feasible of an option to use anything else for a shared file store between organizations.

The fact that Sharepoint sucks* doesn’t matter… because anything else is seen as a risk.

* folders with lots of files are hard to scroll through because each page is lazy loaded, the automation functions are buggy, logins between different M365 tenants breaks and is not correctable by a normal site admin, human readable URL paths aren’t standard, search is shit, tables/filters are buggy, the new interface hides a bunch of the permissions logic, some things like permission groups need to be managed via outlook, etc etc. I’m sure a bunch of my gripes are technically fixable, but these aren’t things that should need a web search in order to use/fix.
by nicf | 2025-07-21 22:05:43+00:00
I certainly didn't mean to dispute that! Formal proofs have a lot in common with code, and of course reading code is illuminating to humans all the time.

I meant to be responding specifically to the case where some future theorem-proving LLM spits out a thousand-page argument which is totally impenetrable but which the proof-checker still agrees is valid. I think it's sometimes surprising to people coming at this from the CS side to hear that most mathematicians wouldn't be too enthusiastic to receive such a proof, and I was just trying to put some color on that reaction.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-21 22:06:23+00:00
But I've never heard of someone caring about their code vs lower-level code running in parallel, just whether or not there are multiple OS threads involved in the end. Like you have 32 CPU cores, your Python batch code is only using 1, and whether or not you use Python threads to fix this depends on if you're using something like Numpy that'll release the GIL.
by hadlock | 2025-07-21 22:06:36+00:00
> Originally, DevOps was about trusting developers with production. But modern DevOps teams operate on the belief that developers can’t be trusted with production.

This right here pretty much discredits him (or her) completely; there's no way you would survive five minutes of an audit where developers have direct access to Prod in any kind of regulated business (finance, medical, banking, nuclear, military etc). This might be acceptable for an owner operated website that sells trading cards but absolutely not for any company > 500 employees.
by mietek | 2025-07-21 22:07:22+00:00
Ah, I do agree with this perspective. I think we must ensure that any such tools emit proofs that are not only valid but also readable.

On the other hand, humans do also occasionally emit unreadable proofs, and perhaps some troubles could have been avoided if a formal language had been used.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/titans-of-mathematics-clash-o...
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-21 22:07:43+00:00
The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out.

You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.

If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
by JCM9 | 2025-07-21 22:07:48+00:00
Amazon generates a ton of cash and the strategy of rolling that back into the business has, broadly, worked well. The challenge now as the company gets on in years is that there’s some bits making cash and a whole lot that’s not. That OK so long as the cash keeps coming in to subsidize things but if that changes things will get messy quickly. They’re clearly trying to start rationalizing that now, including with AWS where they’re starting to address some of the bloat there and lack of a coherent strategy at scale outside EC2, storage, and a few other core services.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-21 22:07:49+00:00
> I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.

I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?

The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.

There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
by twiss | 2025-07-21 22:08:13+00:00
Fair enough, I'm willing to believe it's doing evil things to hosts on the platform, indeed.

But FWIW, the EU is at least making an effort to regulate the company: https://nltimes.nl/2024/09/19/eu-court-says-bookingcom-wrong... (which claims that Booking can no longer prevent hosts in the EU from offering lower prices elsewhere).
by mixmastamyk | 2025-07-21 22:08:45+00:00
Updates only arrive once a day maximum, can wait for a few days if you like.

Ugly grub? It's a black and white list. Hide it, I guess? Set the plymouth bgrt (manufacturer logo) theme.

Confusing sometimes means one isn't familiar, which passes.

Use the software manager and choose default apt source unless you know for sure you need something newer.
by scq | 2025-07-21 22:08:50+00:00
Amprius has released a statement:

> Amprius Technologies, Inc. has never developed or manufactured batteries for power banks. For accuracy, please attribute the certification issue to Apex (Wuxi), not Amprius. Recent reports have incorrectly linked Amprius Technologies, Inc. to a battery certification issue. The company involved is Apex (Wuxi) Co., Ltd., formerly known as Amprius (Wuxi) Co., Ltd., a Chinese lithium battery manufacturer based in Wuxi, China.

> Apex (Wuxi) was once a subsidiary of Amprius Inc. but was never part of Amprius Technologies, Inc. In early 2022, Apex was spun off, renamed, and has operated independently since, with no ties or relationships to Amprius Technologies, Inc.

(source: https://www.gizchina.com/2025/07/14/anker-baseus-romoss-amon...)