MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-05 14:11:20+00:00
> We have long been told that renewables are cheaper in every way that matters, so let's see the economics of that play out.

Renewables are cheaper now than they used to be. Why? The same reason anything is cheaper the longer you make it: technological improvement, economies of scale, production efficiency, increased # customers, reduced capex, amortized r&d, etc.

"the economics of that" aren't black and white. Just because something is expensive today doesn't mean it will be expensive tomorrow. But if something cheaper exists today, and nobody invests in the expensive thing (because "the market" doesn't see immediate cash gains in it), then the expensive thing never has the opportunity to become cheap.

> The renewable industry in the US was wrought with companies seizing as many renewable credits and subsidies as they can, while providing as little as possible to show for them.

The "show" is long-term. That's the whole point of all green energy: it's expensive at the beginning, and then becomes increasingly cheaper over time, to the point you start saving money, and then you keep saving money. But to ever get to that point, you have to invest big at the start. That's what the subsidies are for!

China has a massive and cheap labor force and decades of manufacturing expertise. That makes their products/services cheap and advanced. Unless we literally take over Mexico, we don't have the labor. And unless we start investing now, we'll never have the expertise. Without subsidies, we will never get on renewables, and we will always pay more for energy. Since the whole future of the world is dependent on energy, it might be a good idea for us to invest in it!
by konsalexee | 2025-07-05 14:12:09+00:00
Long story short, I didn't want to make that analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.

They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to optimize for.

PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in this direction.

Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other use cases.

There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed database industry forward.
by Galanwe | 2025-07-05 14:12:51+00:00
My experience, from 20 years as well, aligns with widespread abuses. Pretty much the whole financial sector is sponsored by the CIR, none of which contribute anything beyond the bullshit reports mentioned above. I myself wrote countless reports like that, most of them vastly autogenerated to look pompous.

I don't remember having to defend anything to get the CIR, it's more of a judgment call on whether you feel confident to defend it if you get an audit, and these are very rare. We've had such audit in the past, and it made everyone rewrite each submitted report in a hurry to make them look more serious. No sanction were applied.

At this point, my opinion is that the CIR has very little to do with actual research, but rather it's a discretionary tax subsidy for sectors in which France wants to be competitive.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-05 14:13:14+00:00
Cancelling development programs for quite advanced programs like the E-7A and F/A-XX at the last mile just makes me think, maybe these guys really are playing for the other team. Not just with regards to Ukraine, but just broadly trying to sabotage the US and broader allied interests.

E-7A in particular seems like such a crucial system. We're going to be stuck using prehistoric mechanically steered radar (E-2D Hawkeye)? Until some hypothetical space based system can magically do the entire job? Defense today is about being able to out see the opponent, and the "leaders" are plunging us backwards into the dark in this fight.

Maybe we didn't actually buy the F/A-XX, but man, development costs were expected to be $75m remaining. We should have at least brought the design to buildable state! We probably should have build 3-8. To learn, to find out the merit and limits.

But we definitely need an airborne eyes & ears, and without E-7A, well, the war fighters that Pete so vociferously pumps up are going to be shooting in the dark.
by RugnirViking | 2025-07-05 14:13:24+00:00
It's very very good at sounding like it understands stuff. Almost as good as actually understanding stuff in some fields, sure. But it's definitely not the same.

It will confidently analyze and describe a chess position using advanced sounding book techniques, but its all fundamentally flawed, often missing things that are extremely obvious (like, an undefended queen free to take) while trying to sound like its a seasoned expert - that is if it doesn't completely hallucinate moves that are not allowed by the rules of the game.

This is how it works in other fields I am able to analyse. It's very good at sounding like it knows what its doing, speaking at the level of a masters level student or higher, but its actual appraisal of problems is often wrong in a way very different to how humans make mistakes. Another great example is getting it to solve cryptic crosswords from back in the day. It often knows the answer already in its training set, but it hasn't seen anyone write out the reasoning for the answer, so if you ask it to explain, it makes nonsensical leaps (claiming birch rhymes with tyre level nonsense)
by disruptiveink | 2025-07-05 14:14:06+00:00
I don't understand why they keep trying this over and over. It can't possibly be a moral crusade as it keeps happening with different players, but I don't understand the purpose.

We now live in a world where the opposite routinely happens: a crime happens, you give the police access to Apple or Google's Find Device / Find My data, they throw it in the trash. Law enforcement has more data to find and procecute criminals than they have time. People get scammed out of money by the thousands every day, over the phone, an insanely easy system to tap and trace. No one gets arrested.

Who is actually repeatedly pushing for things like these within the EU? For what purpose? What crimes went unprocecuted because of the unability to perform mass surveillance like this? It seems that all the time, when law enforcement actually cares about, it's trivial for them to get evidence? So why does this keep popping up every year?
by konsalexee | 2025-07-05 14:14:18+00:00
It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series.

My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be nice
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-05 14:14:20+00:00
Funny to see this on HN today. Yesterday I used gemini-cli to create a LLM-based text adventure game running locally with Ollama: you provide a text file with a short background scenario, then play.

In the late 1970s, I wrote an open source Apple II text adventure game mostly using a huge piece paper with locations represented as a graph of bubbles with text descriptions and possible action keys. Manually writing Apple Basic code was easy but time consuming. So much work, but fun! What I built in ten minutes yesterday is also a lot of fun; I thought about open sourcing it, but it is so easy recreate with AI coding tools I figured why bother.
by mystified5016 | 2025-07-05 14:14:44+00:00
Yes, absolutely.

It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.

It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-05 14:15:05+00:00
I'd suggest that Mr. Estes find a different mine to work at if he insists on continuing to work in mining. He could also pivot to other industry, safety is a big deal in most industry. I'm sure they would consider him at many locations for similar positions.

I'm not opposed to having programs to help these people, not at all. I'm from Norway where we have free healthcare, education, social security nets etc. I'm all for that stuff, it benefits all of us.

All I'm saying is if new opportunities don't fall into your lap you need to find them yourself.
by losvedir | 2025-07-05 14:15:24+00:00
You... hang out with coyotes in the park? I live near a park with coyotes and all of us are wary of them. The people who walk their dogs frequently carry sticks. As a parent of a 1 yr old and 4 yr old who likes to let them have some degree of age appropriate freedom running around in the park, I can't help but think of the coyotes. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem like they might be dangerous around people, particularly children.

Maybe it's HN's demographics speaking, but everyone here is talking about their pets, but what about children? Do coyotes not attack kids?
by computerphage | 2025-07-05 14:15:27+00:00
> This is purely an observation: You only jump ship in the middle of a conquest if either all ships are arriving at the same time (unlikely) or neither is arriving at all. This means that no AI lab is close to AGI. Their stated AGI timelines are “at the latest, in a few years,” but their revealed timelines are “it’ll happen at some indefinite time in the future.”

This makes no sense to me at all. Is it a war metaphor? A race? Why is there no reason to jump ship? Doesn't it make sense to try to get on the fastest ship? Doesn't it make sense to diversify your stock portfolio if you have doubts?
by timr | 2025-07-05 14:15:37+00:00
The proper comparison is not a human, it’s a computer. Or even a human with a computer.

But my point wasn’t to judge LLMs on their (in)ability to do math - I was only responding to the parent comment’s assertion that they’ve gotten better in this area.

It’s worth noting that all of the major models still randomly decide to ignore schemas and tool calls, so even that is not a guarantee.
by lottin | 2025-07-05 14:15:43+00:00
Like bitcoin, gold is too a "bubble asset", but unlike bitcoin, gold is a physical object with use value and limited availability.

The thing about gold is that its price appears to to be negatively correlated with the economic cycle. Because of this some people argue that it makes sense to include it in a portfolio of stocks and bonds, so that the volatility of the portfolio is reduced, although personally I would advise against it.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-05 14:16:40+00:00
I think the real question is whether we can do it today.

e.g. When NYC expanded its subway system for the first time in 50 years in 2017, it cost $2.5 billion per mile. 8-12x more expensive than similar projects in foreign cities.

There might be too much regulation and too much cost and too many meetings and too many contractors and too much political conflict to do many of the feats we did in the 19th and 20th century.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-07-05 14:17:36+00:00
> At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention.

With KYC and other regulations ramping up, how true is this in practice?

I guess you can get some of that benefit with a wallet only you control. But most folks can barely handle using a custodial wallet.

Transactions are also public by default, for better and worse.
by sbelskie | 2025-07-05 14:17:36+00:00
If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of high literary quality.

Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously lots of sci-fi elements in them.
by actuallyalys | 2025-07-05 14:18:07+00:00
I feel like it takes a human a month to write a novel or start up a company only of you’re talking about a very constrained version of the task. Like people write novels in a month — that’s the whole premise of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo — but they aren’t finished products, they’re first drafts.

Similarly, while I’m sure you could make good progress on starting a business in a month, it seems like that would take longer to genuinely complete from start to finish. Also, it seems like it’s necessarily a task that relies on external factors: Waiting for approval to come from various agencies, hiring employees, waiting for other parties to sign contracts, etc.
by ben_w | 2025-07-05 14:18:49+00:00
> I do agree on the liability angle. This increasingly seems to be the main value a human brings to the table. It's not a new trend, though. See e.g. medicine, architecture, civil engineering - licensed professionals aren't doing the bulk of the work, but they're in the loop and well-compensated for verifying and signing off on the work done by less-paid technicians.

Ironic that this liability issue is one of the big ways that "software engineer" isn't like any other kind of engineer.

My university was saying as much 20 years ago, well before GenAI.
by jMyles | 2025-07-05 14:19:28+00:00
> Is the world really going to come crashing down if people only spend on things they need rather than endlessly cycling through shit they don't?

In broad strokes, this is perhaps the most important question of environmental sustainability which stems from monetary policy.

Second most important is the matter of how much energy is spent on security (eg, in the case of bitcoin, the horrifying amounts of power spent on SHA256 hashing, and in the case of USD, the perhaps even more horrifying energy consumption of the global petrodollar empire).

We spend so much deliberation on this second question that we often ignore the first: what monetary policies will make us chill out on the whole importing-plastic-shit-we-don't-need-from-the-other-side-of-the-earth thing?
by matthewsinclair | 2025-07-05 14:19:44+00:00
> “There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination.”

I think TS Eliot said this exact thing, but more poetically, in “The Hollow Men” (1925):

> “Between the conception and the creation, falls the Shadow”

Which remains one of my all time fave pieces of writing. So much said in so few words.
by dzaima | 2025-07-05 14:19:48+00:00
I think LLVM should be able to handle up to less than 65536-bit vectors? At least I saw some llvm issue noting that that's where some things broke down; so a 32kbit vector would be f64x512. But I meant an exaggeration as far as actually using it goes, f64x64 is hilariously overkill even on AVX-512, and utterly awful on pre-AVX512.
by koverstreet | 2025-07-05 14:20:11+00:00
Fair :) I've been trying to keep this thing (relatively) quiet and low profile until it's completely done, but it's gotten hyped.

Data integrity, core IO paths, all the failure modes, all the crazy repair corner cases - these are the hard parts if you really want to get a filesystem right. These are what we've been taking our time on.

I can't claim 100% success rate w.r.t. data loss, but it's been phenomenally good, with some crazy stories of filesystems we've gotten back that you'd never expect - and then it just becomes the norm.

I love the crazy bug reports that really push the boundaries of our capabilities.

That's an attitude that reiserfs and btrfs never had, and when I am confident that it is 100% rock solid and bulletproof I'll be lifting the experimental label.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-07-05 14:20:12+00:00
If you properly learn the skills, then refreshing your skills takes way less time than learning them the first time. This means you didn't really lose the skill.

>Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job

People that do this need their behavior changed. Testing people on quickly find-able implementations is an absolute circus. Obviously an exception if the job actually involves writing CS algorithms, but most of them do not.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-05 14:20:21+00:00
This, mostly.

Upvotes are certainly better than the deluge of "I [like|agree with|repeat] this" drivel that some online forums seem optimized for. While still giving some indications of which responses are more or less popular on HN. But without (that I've noticed) attracting too many karma-farming or karma-grinding users.

Bigger picture - we can talk up the virtues of HN's karma system, or of Dang & Co., or of Paul & Co....but in the end, 95% of the credit for the quality of information and discussions here belongs to the "critical mass" community of good, regular users.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-07-05 14:21:21+00:00
It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-07-05 14:21:30+00:00
> The idea of sending a header to remember a tech person is a great one, but I think the name should be something neutral, or something that has some relation to the person and not a random fantasy reference.

You made me laugh - this has 'old man shakes fist at cloud' vibes, which is concerning as it seems we are about the same age!

If you wanted to add a header `X-In-Memorium` to any site that you control, go ahead. If anyone adds `X-Clacks-Overhead` to their site, its not going to affect you.

The My Little Pony thing seems, from an outsiders quick look, like it does meaningfully affect other people.
by xena | 2025-07-05 14:21:51+00:00
My website returns a random person in a list for every X-Clacks-Overhead response header: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/877872b4d7db92b602683ecb4e99...

I figured this was one of the best ways to do it. That way I'm letting people that were significant to me live on forever, one random HTTP response header at a time.

$ curl https://xeiaso.net --head | grep clacks x-clacks-overhead: GNU Satoru Iwata
by Retric | 2025-07-05 14:22:16+00:00
In general your point’s fine but…

There’s likely multiple orders of magnitude difference between the numbers that “were reported” as part of a known outbreak vs the number of associated deaths that actually took place. People often get admitted without identification of what specific food caused them issues.

Further there’s reasons to avoid things that don’t result in deaths. “Each year in the United States an estimated 9 million people get sick, 56,000 are hospitalized, and 1,300 die of a foodborne disease caused by known pathogens.”

So their salad avoidance isn’t as extreme a reaction as you’re suggesting.
by pm90 | 2025-07-05 14:22:37+00:00
Its a combination of factors. The end of ZIRP made raising money more expensive and the tax change made hiring Software Engineers more expensive. Small businesses faced existential challenges and cut back, so now there was less demand from them. Then Big Tech realized they needed to layoff to post better numbers to continue boosting their stock (even though they made enough revenue) so started cutting jobs.

With this change one of those factors has been eliminated, so we will see startups/small businesses become a lot more competitive.
by designerarvid | 2025-07-05 14:22:40+00:00
One of the main politicians behind this is Swedish Social Democrat Ylva Johansson[1]; coming from a party with a long history of political surveillance[2]. Unlike East Germany, Sweden has never “dealt” with this past. She thinks this is how it should be.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson?wprov=sfti1#Sur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IB_affair?wprov=sfti1
by memv | 2025-07-05 14:23:50+00:00
Discovering a Dual Output Symbolic Arithmetic System: DW211

I’d like to share a symbolic arithmetic structure I’ve been exploring, called *Delta Wave 0211 (DW211)*. It arises from analyzing operations like `1 + 1`, but treating them not just arithmetically (`2`) — but also *symbolically*, as concatenations (`11`).

From this, a *dual output logic* emerges: - `1 + 1 = 2` (logic) - `1 + 1 = 11` (identity)

This reveals a *recursive delta pattern* between symbolic and numeric outputs, oscillating with deltas like *+11, –2*, which I call the *DW211 Wave*. It behaves structurally like a wave: pulsing between logical operations and symbolic echoes.

I’ve been formalizing this into a computational framework that includes: - Symbolic delta tracking - Dual-state output engines - Recursive number systems with identity memory - Potential applications in symbolic AI, arithmetic identity, and even blockchain logic

An early writeup and examples can be found at: [https://fr3action.com](https://fr3action.com)

I’m curious whether this resonates with anyone exploring symbolic computation, alternative arithmetic grammars, or recursive number systems. Would love feedback, counterexamples, or links to similar work.

Thank you — Michael Varley
by k__ | 2025-07-05 14:23:51+00:00
Tangential related:

I learned in a class on design that you should work with what you already know.

If you don't know about colors, then do it in grey scale, if you don't know about that, do it in black and white.

The best ideas come from working with constraints.

While highly skilled designers/musicians/developers/writers/etc. do this despite being able to work outside of the constraints, a beginner can do it too. Sure, they can't choose the constraints as freely as a pro, but they can make work with what they got and it can lead to interesting results.

This is also a good way to approach new things without embarrassing yourself, as you don't try to impress with skills you don't mastered 100% yet.
by jetbalsa | 2025-07-05 14:24:25+00:00
I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what ever main genre you want out of it.
by skydhash | 2025-07-05 14:24:48+00:00
> why has nobody solved the code editing in a robust way yet.

Mostly because code editing is not the problem. When coding the solution exists out of the coding space. Code only remove ambiguity. It may conflict with earlier interpretations or the current interpretation is flaky, which leads to bugs, aka actual behavior differs from expected behavior (which also exists out of the coding space).

So trying to solve things within the coding space is an incorrect approach since the beginning of computation. And trying to merge natural languages (great for exploring problems) and formal languages (great for specifying instructions) was seen as foolishness by Dijkstra [0].

The reason natural languages are great for problem solving is that we can redefine what things means easily, changing the semantic of terms as our understanding evolves. And when we've settled on a set of semantics and a process, we translate that to formal notation so it stays fixed. An analogy is sketching (where we freely edit lines and just try stuff) and oil painting where every brush stroke is purposeful.

[0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...