MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-07-21 11:56:04+00:00
I would never use them to write a proposal from scratch (as in "write a grant proposal to submit to call X on topic Y"), but they can very effectively turn informally-written lists of bullet points with (human-generated) ideas into well-structured sections of flawless, effective text describing the ideas in detail. As well as iterate on the text (make this section longer, shorter, add idea X, emphasize aspect Y more, etc.), suggest risks and contingency plans, make a Gantt chart, etc.

All this represents the overwhelming majority of the work (in terms of hours) in writing a grant proposal.
by anovikov | 2025-07-21 11:56:40+00:00
That's certainly not the case. Fossil fuel consumption in the US has been flat for 50+ years, and falling on per capita basis, which didn't stop the economy from growing. It's even more pronounced for the world as a whole. From 1974 till today, output per joule of fossil fuels consumed increased 1.9x worldwide and 3.2x in USA.
by nottorp | 2025-07-21 11:56:41+00:00
Well gaming has been around for a while and some of those gamers are now paying their kids' electricity bills.

However, that's not what makes me care about energy efficiency. It's the fucking cooling noise.

I was probably around 25 when I realized that 30 fps is good enough and if i stick a passive huge ass radiator on a GPU that can do just that I'll be able to hear the game's soundtrack even on very low volume and without using headphones...
by FergusArgyll | 2025-07-21 11:56:48+00:00
"One should not eat until his stomach is full. Rather, [he should stop when] he has eaten to close to three quarter's of full satisfaction. One should drink only a small amount of water during the meal, and mix that with wine. When the food begins to be digested in his intestines, he may drink what is necessary. However, he should not drink much water, even when the food has been digested."

Maimonedes Human Dispositions 4 (Trans. by Eliyahu Touger)
by mekster | 2025-07-21 11:56:58+00:00
How do you mean can’t be sure if it recovers? It’s not hoping for inconsistent states to be recovered by the db but they’re supposed to be in good state with file system snapshotting.

https://serverfault.com/a/806305

https://zrepl.github.io/v0.2.1/configuration/snapshotting.ht...
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-21 11:57:03+00:00
Why do banks refuse to clear transactions over a weekend? There's lots of problems with current payment infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that crypto would solve them.

For the thing in the OP though, some kind of crypto rail for these kinds of transactions probably would make a difference. The trouble is that Visa/MC don't just impose these restrictions for moral reasons, it's mostly because of higher charge-back rates and fraud.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-21 11:57:23+00:00
I'm not sure about that. The few examples of high framerate movies I saw, it made the fact that they are on a set and that they're acting very obvious. It felt like watching a theater play. The micromovements, now visible, gave it all away.

Obviously you can make 60+ FPS cinematography work well, games do it all the time. But whether that's practical in live action, I'm not sure. I certainly haven't seen an example that didn't make me cringe yet. Even in non-cinema settings, such as on YouTube, the presentation style usually needs adjusting a bit.

Speaking of, I do wish that all the cinematography-focused content creators on YouTube stopped using 24 and 30 FPS out of vanity though at least... Though it would help if YouTube rolled out support for HFR (120+ fps) as well, so that those who include 24p movie snippets don't need to compromise.
by QuesnayJr | 2025-07-21 11:57:57+00:00
Seeing the culture of StackOverflow, I would choose to be dead in the ground rather than ask a question there, even a question that can't be easily answered elsewhere. Volunteer-run sites need a mix of enthusiasts who do the real work of the site and janitors who keep things from being too chaotic, but enthusiasm dims while the desire to impose order never does, so eventually the janitors take over.

MathOverflow has a much better culture, so I ask (and answer) questions there. I'm not quite sure why it's worked out better there, though I suppose it's something to do with the population.
by sam_goody | 2025-07-21 11:59:11+00:00
Yes, but only after this post in science and on HN. As has been mentioned above, one of the links it offers is this very post.

So, AI will look online and synthesize the latest relevant blog posts. In Gemini's case, it will use trends to figure out what you are probably asking. And since this post caught traction, suddenly the long tail of related links are gaining traction as well.

But had Derek asked the question before writing the article, his links would not have matched. And his point that it isn't the AI that figured out that something has changed, remains relevant.

OT, I really enjoy his posts. As AI takes over, will we even read blog posts [enough for authors like him to keep writing], or just get the AI cliff notes - until there is no one writing novel stuff?
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 11:59:24+00:00
I know, I live in such an European country, but I still know (and use) "." as the decimal point. Most people I know here do, too, and they are not in IT. I think it often depends on context, too, and I would like to think people just know.

I just checked, my bank uses "." as the decimal point, too, instead of the official ",".
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 12:01:06+00:00
Same with e.g. the Souls games, whose bosses are often designed to be visually and audibly overwhelming when you first encounter them. But after a while, when you get better, come back to a fight later, or watch someone else playing, you'll see it very differently from playing yourself, to the point where a lot of things just feel painfully slow and/or clearly telegraphed.

Doesn't make it much easier though as the window for when you should hit that dodge button is still narrow.
by mousethatroared | 2025-07-21 12:01:41+00:00
What is exergy? The one time a mechanical engineering colleagues tried to explain it to me, he reached the wrong conclusion on the problem we were working on.

I haven't seen it in any physics thermodynamics book, and only mech eng. seem to know what it is, and then only in the US.

Faires (undergrad MIT Thermo book from the 50s) makes no mention of it as far as I can tell.
by clbrmbr | 2025-07-21 12:02:33+00:00
From: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

> the support for submodules is incomplete

This has been a stumbling block for me. In C firmware, there’s no package management so submodules tend to be how we bring in libraries.

My experience has been that worktrees simply do not work with submodules.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-21 12:02:41+00:00
> Maybe those people are right, though? I think the discussion starts from a place that assumes other people are wrong.

I think this is the right approach. We know that io_uring has a somewhat significant history of critical security issues. It's not enough just to point out that "these 3 critical CVEs were fixed in the last 12 months, it's secure now!"

Reputation and trust has to be built over a long period of time.
by magicalhippo | 2025-07-21 12:02:52+00:00
Animations are, or at least were, often animated on twos[1], leading to 12 frames per second.

This was used to good effect in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse where they mixed animating on ones (24 fps) and twos[2], making one character appear more skilled than the other for example.

[1]: https://businessofanimation.com/why-animation-studios-are-an...

[2]: https://youtu.be/jEXUG_vN540?t=150
by siddboots | 2025-07-21 12:03:17+00:00
This perspective is the inspiration for much of lattice theory. When you consider implication as an ordering, then "x and y" becomes max(x, y), "x or y" becomes min(x, y). True becomes the top term, False becomes the bottom. One of the neat implications is that much of what we think of as being propositions in boolean algebra also work in the wider setting of Heyting algebras i.e., any lattice that also has implication.
by mritchie712 | 2025-07-21 12:04:15+00:00
We just open-sourced our Meltano (Singer) target[0] for Ducklake (from DuckDB). This gives you access to 500+ connectors (e.g. Hubspot, Stripe, Postgres, etc.):

* Type conversion is automatic (timestamps stay timestamps).

* Append or merge: choose at runtime.

* Storage is portable (S3, GCS, or local).

* Works with Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or DuckDB catalogs.

* Timestamp and categorical partitions are built in.

We're already running it in production here at Definite and open to feature requests / PRs.

0 - https://github.com/definite-app/target-ducklake
by Roark66 | 2025-07-21 12:05:02+00:00
>Nah. With everything behind anti-bot crap now, control has been handed over to companies like CloudFlare.

It's impossible for the "anti bot crap" to work. And why would we want it anyway? Why does a website owner care if I'm clicking on his link or is it my bot searching for me on my behalf.

We're very close to having our own personal bots deal with the shit part of the experience for us.

For example take this query "I need to paint a bare steel railing using RAL 7016 color, buy me some paint and brushes". The bot already knows my price preferences and my location because it's my bot. Likewise my shipping preferences. So he just asks "How big is the railing?" and you answer "Tiny, 6m long and 4cm wide", the bot asks "any special instructions?" and you say "yes, no hammerite, I want the brushes to be cleaned with water, I also want a paint I can use when it might be raining soon".

And the bot goes and finds you exactly what you need. It shows you the product page and asks, should I buy a small 250ml can of this?" you say yes, and the transaction is made.

Contrast this with the usual user story today. Type "water resistant, straight on rust paint" in Google. You get inundated with products unavailable in your local market. You find something that might be what you need, but it's not in stock or the only seller has 2 week lead time. Eventually you find it after wasting 2h of your life.

Tell me this AI use is not an improvement of the Web.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 12:05:31+00:00
Hungary. Would have you ever guessed? :P

If you turn on localization on your PC, it will use "," instead of "." (in MS Word, definitely) for decimal points though, but as I was saying, in practice (and in real life), "." seems to be the common standard still for the decimal point, it seems, even though officially it is not.

> Hungary uses a comma (",") as the decimal separator, not a period ("."). In Hungarian, a comma is used to separate the fractional part of a number from the whole part, while a period or space is used to group digits in thousands. For example, "one and a half" would be written as 1,5 in Hungarian.

Real life would beg to differ, however. My bank uses "." instead of ",", and I have had the same experience elsewhere, too. In IT, it has always been ".", too.
by m000 | 2025-07-21 12:05:54+00:00
This is Reaganomics [1], but for speakers. There's just a handful of audiophiles that would be replacing their speakers every year, so there would be hardly any "downflow" of quality second-hand speakers.

And repairability just means that the industry can move people from manufacturing to service and support.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-21 12:06:04+00:00
But understandable, as The Matrix is generally speaking better known than John Woo films. I mean you named the director instead of one of his films, which implies the director is better known than his films.

The Matrix also did an interesting take on freeze frame animation with the 360 degree simultaneous camera capture thing. They'd use CGI for that nowadays. Actually they used a lot more CGI in fight scenes in the sequels already. Which I think is a shame.
by johnecheck | 2025-07-21 12:06:28+00:00
What constitutes illegal algorithm manipulation? What obligations to impartiality do digital space providers like Musk/X have?

Not sure what laws exist but it seems tricky to design a coherent legal standard around what sorts of algorithms are allowed. I'd rather just be able to choose between open-source algorithms, that way we can just not use the one that pushes {Billionaire}'s latest post to the top.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-21 12:07:08+00:00
While the article keeps mashing the "AI" fear button - how would the situation be different if "AI" was replaced with old-fashioned outsourcing - to LowBidCo Legal-ish Services Inc.*, which was paying wanna-be human lawyers in Elbonia 10 cents per page, to churn out legal-sounding stuff on typewriters?

Either way, half-assed lawyers would be giving gullible/overworked judges a bunch of legal fantasies to sign off on.

A pretty damned obvious fix would be to prema-ban the responsible lawyers from the practice of law. Maybe with some "affected cases are re-opened, and ..." rules, to discourage the use of expendable idiot lawyers in higher-stakes cases?

But doing that would violate unwritten rules #1 of America's legal/"justice" system - protecting their own.

*Yes, a pretend name
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-21 12:08:18+00:00
Android Studio had the exact WYSIWYG experience other toolkits used to have, it was just hidden behind an <AbsoluteLayout> because designing mobile applications the way desktop applications used to be designed is an awful idea.

Drop an AbsoluteLayout into a design and you can drag, drop, and resize buttons to your hearts' content. You'd have the same problem with VB6 where your buttons would fall off the screen if someone ran your application at a lower resolution than you designed it for, but that was never a problem for the desktop designer.

For the same reason dumping buttons on an arbitrary coordinate and resizing by eye is no longer acceptable on desktop, that same ease of design died out in Android for any serious application developer. It stuck around a while longer on desktop, unfortunately, but modern frameworks pretty much all use declarative layouts these days.
by zug_zug | 2025-07-21 12:08:58+00:00
I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it unproductive).
by remram | 2025-07-21 12:09:26+00:00
It would be fun to go the other way, make a giant canvas that you draw on based on the sender's IPv6 address.

Obviously it would be a really really big canvas but you could strip some leading or trailing bits.

(If we give 8x8 pixels per /64 and considering that only 2000/3 is used, that's 2^67 pixels)
by MarkPNeyer | 2025-07-21 12:10:17+00:00
> Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.

The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.
by player1234 | 2025-07-21 12:12:24+00:00
Technology has been stagnant for over 50 years, so it is easy to believe if you live in reality.

But sure if you exclusively look at the one field that has been advancing until about now I can see how one would end up where you are.

But this is exactly right, we are incrementally moving into the lamest cyberpunk future one can imagine, and we have been for some time.
Show HN: AI Technical Discovery for Non-Tech Founders
by jurijtokarski | 2025-07-21 12:12:30+00:00
Built this after watching too many founders struggle with technical planning. It's an AI assistant that creates development roadmaps in minutes instead of weeks of consulting.

What it does:

- Takes your business idea in plain English

- Asks focused questions about requirements

- Generates complete MVP roadmap with timeline and budget

- Recommends tech stack and identifies risks
by hn92726819 | 2025-07-21 12:12:38+00:00
I've seen this sentiment a lot here. "Once shell is >n lines, port to python". My experience has been different. Maybe half of the scripts I write are better off in python while the other half are exponentially longer in python than bash.

For example, anything to do with json can be done in 1 line of readable jq, while it could be 1, 5, or 20 lines in python depending on the problem.

I'd just like to put that out there because half of the time, the >n metric does not work for me at all. My shell scripts range from ~5-150 lines while python are 100+
by card_zero | 2025-07-21 12:12:39+00:00
Yes, but my point is, trying to silence the speech of others is part of free speech, and you and your sources have said so. So criticizing the absolutist for not being a consistent absolutist, when you don't even believe in any simple consistent rule, is petty.

There probably is a very general consistent rule to your/your source's idea of free speech, like "everybody's liberties should be curtailed only where they endanger the liberties of others". But implementing this leaves enormous scope for arbitrary and creative judgments. We can assume that your opponents, being wrong, have less internally consistent ideas, but even so the presence of exceptions in itself is nothing to be critical about if your own conception of free speech is nuanced. They may be following some logic too.
by torginus | 2025-07-21 12:12:43+00:00
I kinda get what you're coming from - back in college i had a lab where we had to make a NES-style game console from scratch on an FPGA - including peripherals and video output - which used VGA, that's how I got to familiarize myself with the technology. It was super simple, you just output the correct voltages to the RGB pins and sent the proper HSYNC and VSYNC signals, and that was it, worked like a charm as long as you didn't mess up too bad, the monitor figured out the rest.

Recently I dusted off this project and bought myself a new FPGA board, with a HDMI output. Getting that thing to work was a nightmare. Not only did I have to configure the HDMI transciever, I had to build proper EDID support, and get I2C to cooperate, and get the timing of the signals exactly right. And even then, out of the 5 screens I could get my hands on, only 2 worked, one of which would inexplicably go to sleep despite displaying video on the screen.

Getting HDMI working was more painful and took about 10x as long as the rest of the original project did, and even then, it was a partial success.
by vikramkr | 2025-07-21 12:13:18+00:00
There's also a chance that the primary photosynthesiizers on each happened to be purple for a while (purple earth) and the ancestors of plants absorbed red/blue and ignored green because they were getting leftovers. Also, even now, iirc the limiting step in oxygenic photosynthesis is by far rubisco's incorporation of CO2, so there's no immediately obvious fitness function that would be optimized by just increasing the efficiency of light harvesting.
by AbstractPlay | 2025-07-21 12:13:29+00:00
On your website, you seem to claim in bold letters that you've talked to Graham Priest about your work:

> A Conversation with Graham Priest About Abstraction Logic

but admit afterward that you talked to Claude prompted to sound like Graham Priest:

> A conversation about abstraction logic with Claude representing Graham Priest.

You also wrote an update stating:

> Update: The real Graham Priest says that it doesn't really sound like his voice. So enjoy with caution .

Don't you find it unethical to claim that you had "a conversation with Graham Priest about Abstraction Logic"? You didn't have a conversation with Priest. You had an interaction with Claude in Priest clothing. It doesn't even sound like Priest agrees with what you prompted Claude to say. Do you think it's permissible to let LLMs speak on behalf of people without their consent? Do you think that what an LLM says when prompted to speak as though it were some person should be accepted as what the person would actually say and believe?

Why should we find it interesting what any LLM has to say about your work, regardless of whose voice you dress it up as?
by junlianglee | 2025-07-21 12:14:03+00:00
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by immibis | 2025-07-21 12:14:19+00:00
My personal external backup is two external drives in RAID1 (RAID0 wtfff?). One already failed, of course the Seagate one. It failed silently, too - a few sectors just do not respond to read commands and this was discovered when in-place encrypting the array. (I normally would avoid Seagate consumer drives if it wasn't for brand diversity. Now I have two WD drives purchased years apart.)

It's a home backup so not exactly relevant to most of what you said - just wanted to underscore the point about storage media sucking. Ideally I'd periodically scrub each drives independently (can probably be done by forcing a degraded array mode, but careful not to mess up the metadata!) against checksums made by backup software. This particular failure mode could also be caught by dd'ing to /dev/null.