MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dv_dt | 2025-07-21 17:46:53+00:00
There is a mental block around "efficiency". Because what most people have in mind is some sort of technical performance efficiency of the solar + battery system. And if it's not higher than some number - then it's unworkable in region X.

Technical performance is an input in the efficiency that actually matters, but definitely not the sole determinant. Ultimately the cost efficiency that delivers the needed power at the some time. If you can capitalize more panels at the right cost, it overcomes an "uunworkable" technical performance efficiency.

Five years ago, solar + batts were getting dismissed as being able to offset natural gas. Now its offseting that tradoff in new energy builds for California. What we're seeing is renewables advancing on multiple efficiency fronts - both technical performance efficiencies, and subsystem costs, to deliver more competitive system cost efficiency. More and more traditional energy and more regions will be displaced because these technologies are still in the rapid cost drop phase of their manufacturing S curves.

It's really a matter of who has the focus and financial strength to continue to invest in the manufacturing and tech to keep up the improvements - a lot like the solar+batt version of Moores law in chips and the race surrounding it.
by cvoss | 2025-07-21 17:46:56+00:00
The Trolley problem is only a problem because there is perfect information in the hypothetical about the consequences of your actions. In real life, you have far less information to go on, which often leads to a more obvious right answer. Shutting down the machine to try to save the one person right in front of you that you know is in immediate danger is the right answer, versus the far less knowable hypothetical future where some number of people may or may not have delayed or relocated scans which may or may not have delayed treatment that may or may not have been immediately necessary as a life-saving matter. As a private MRI operator, you are not morally responsible for keeping your machine functional in order to help keep (figurative) passers-by alive. But you are morally responsible for the health and safety of the patients and visitors on your premises.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-21 17:46:59+00:00
It is sort of funny, these are essentially manors that were built to aesthetically evoke the vibes of castles (Not functional as fortifications, but also never intended to be). So, UNESCO is commemorating historical buildings that were themselves built to commemorate a long-gone era!

Someday we will have to show these commemorations in a commemoration of the UNESCO headquarters.
by zippothrowaway | 2025-07-21 17:47:10+00:00
Read the transcript. "...the sunny places, think about Muscat in Oman, or Las Vegas in the US or Johannesburg in South Africa. So places like that get more than 90% of the way to 1 GW constant electricity with those cloudy days. In a place like Washington or Madrid, you're in the high 80s. So 88% in Madrid, if I remember correctly. And then for Washington, it would be somewhere there as well.

And then if you have the bad luck to be stuck in Birmingham, in the UK.

That's a cloudy place. And you barely have, like, two very, very sunny months, like in the middle of the year in summer when it's actually, it is actually sunny. Most of the time it's various degrees of cloudy. So even there you have more than 60% of the way to 24/365"

So it's not as big as a drop-off as you might think with solar+battery. And that's not accounting for wind being a much better performer in the UK.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-21 17:47:36+00:00
The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world:

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year.

[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
by jasonpeacock | 2025-07-21 17:47:39+00:00
To keep things simple, "activity is better for cognition". It doesn't have to be outside. Let's start with just promoting any activity...

There's already well-known studies showing that doing physical activity _before_ the school day starts, and then having the most challenging/cognition intense classes first, following the physical activity, boosts learning.

See the book Spark[1] to learn more.

[1] https://a.co/d/2ZCabyM
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-21 17:47:42+00:00
That's fair and it was less a dig at the specific comment than the overall trend of American fatalism that can be summed up as "a new thing can't possibly work because we live in a weather torment nexus".

While the point that the benchmark favours CA is reasonable what about the other 10+ states on California's latitude? Even as far North as New York is equivalent latitude to Madrid. I just struggle to believe the desert of Nevada for instance or Texas isn't also viable for solar. Plus those states have the advantage of not having California's crumbling transmission infrastructure (though even worse for Texas from what I understand) or anti-building regulatory regime.

This strand of American pessimism seems to only ever lean one way, to ignore lessons from other countries and to oppose new tech.

What would be favourable for that cost curve is not putting tarrifs on Chinese subsidised panels and this fatalism leeches energy from that consensus. When the tech is cheap enough to slap anywhere the optimal deployment is less important and why not make the most of China's 'blunder' with these below cost panels.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-21 17:47:43+00:00
>If only we had some kind of purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments

Unfortunately, all such systems are quickly co-opted for the purpose of speculative price schemery. Bitcoin will soon reach a point of no-return, when the smallest fractional has an exchange rate so high that it will be impossible to purchase small goods at all (except in bulk), though in reality that point was reached many years ago. The entire concept of cryptocurrencies might actually be irrevocably poisoned, because even a new system would have to deal with the public perception baggage of the last decade's many Ponzi-type scams and various joke/meme coins. If only Satoshi had been a social genius instead of a technical genius.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-21 17:47:48+00:00
>email / gmail is not case sensitive Jsmith@gmail.com is the same as jsmith@gmail.com

gmail is not case sensitive. email systems are allowed to be case sensitive, most choose not to be. This used to be an issue to deal with when pre-internet legacy email addresses (like Lotus Notes corporate email, or Outlook/Exchange systems) were put onto the internet.
Show HN: Only video to understand Model Context Protocol (MCP) in depth
by abhisharma2001 | 2025-07-21 17:47:51+00:00
But why you should watch this ? 1. No prior MCP knowledge needed-instantly actionable 2. Includes free labs with real code, and live demos 3. Watch and outpace everyone still stuck reading specs 4. The future of AI agents is powering up fast. Don’t miss this wave.
by jerf | 2025-07-21 17:47:52+00:00
It's not just "uninhabitable weather". I live in Michigan. It's the second-cloudiest state in the nation, just barely behind Oregon (but they get way more rain than we do), but in terms of "plague"-type weather it's not bad. We do get some thunderstorms, and nominally, we're the northeastern end of "Tornado Alley", and we do have the occasional tornado, but it's not that common. On the net I think Michigan is rather less prone to natural disasters than most places.

But it's cloudy. A lot. It literally does not raise to my conscious awareness if the sun does not shine in December. And I mean literally in its original sense. It takes over 30 days in the winter for me to notice that I haven't seen the sun in a while and another couple of weeks before I'm really bothered by it. We're already far enough north that winter days are noticeably shorter and less bright as it is, and then the sun doesn't even shine. In the summer 50% cloudy is a fairly normal day. Bright blue sky from horizon to horizon is uncommon enough to be worth noting.

Solar advocates may relax as I'm not going to claim that solar is "useless" in Michigan. However, it is undeniably a lot more useful in deserts that are much closer to the equator. And big government solar projects really do pencil out much worse in Michigan than they do in California or Arizona, even though I'm not constantly dodging death around here. I like the diversity in power sources on general principles but we do take an efficiency hit to get it.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-21 17:48:22+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization

> In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls to pure functions and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again. Memoization has also been used in other contexts (and for purposes other than speed gains), such as in simple mutually recursive descent parsing.[1] It is a type of caching, distinct from other forms of caching such as buffering and page replacement. In the context of some logic programming languages, memoization is also known as tabling.[2]

It includes citations so I won't bother repeating them. Memoization is caching, there is no confusion about this in the literature.
by santoshalper | 2025-07-21 17:48:23+00:00
Since the election, we have social and institutional norms be torn down or routed around time and time again. While I agree that I have not seen this specific situation yet, I think you'd be a fool to blithely assume it will not happen soon. It is possible, it is (by some people in power) highly desirable, and those people have made it clear that legality is irrelevant to them.

These are not normal times, and your cynicism is not serving you well here.

EDIT: I don't believe that the parent post should have been flagged. While I disagree with them, I believe they posted productively and in good faith.
by mass_and_energy | 2025-07-21 17:48:25+00:00
"Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals".

Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.

Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-21 17:49:15+00:00
That's a fair criticism of the media headlines, but the final ruling of $480,000 just in punitive damages ($1M inflation-adjusted) is still pretty ridiculous given, again, that handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters as part of everyday life. We could quibble about about the compensatory damages (80% McDonald's fault seems too high to me, but it's also probably not 0%), but I feel that certainly there should be no punitive damages for such things.
by nashashmi | 2025-07-21 17:49:24+00:00
There are only so many words in the modern English language to hint at "next upgrade": pro, plus, ultra, new, advanced, magna, X, Z, and Ultimate. Even fewer words to explain miniaturized: mini, lite, and zero. And marketers are trying to seesaw on known words without creating new ones to explain new tech. This is why we have Bard and Gemini and Chat and Copilot.

Taking a step back, it is overused exaggeration to the point where words run out quick and newer tech needs to fight with existing words for dominance. Copilot should be the name of an AI agent. Bard should have been just a text generator. Gemini is the name of a liar. Chat is probably the iphone of naming but the GPT suffix says Creativity had not come to work that day.
by icelancer | 2025-07-21 17:49:40+00:00
Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power.

As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them.

Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-21 17:49:44+00:00
Most people do dream of gaining power and the sweet corruption money, whether they can or not is a different matter. Your comment is the perfect example of what I was alluding to, trying to have a discussion on India's problems gets you labelled for "racist undertones".

> and has taken great strides in eliminating corruption through technology.

Please enlighten me with one example. What great strides have been taken in eliminating corruption. Go to any small town and most prime real estate is owned by government servants. Go to a big city and most prime real esate is owned by politicians or their adjacent entities.

> Read about their mammoth push to get everyone a bank account and direct benefit transfers.

This just removes a very very small slice of the corruption pie. If this is the best example from a long time then things don't look good.

> The people you allude to be dreaming of a cushy govt job that allows them to be corrupt is a tiny tiny % of their 1.3B population.

Just look at the numbers of people studying for years for the various Government exams. It is not tiny by any means. And 1.3 B is not the right yardstick, but the number of youths in that age group.
by fzeroracer | 2025-07-21 17:49:53+00:00
> suing the everlasting shit out of the government when they try to detain you, which they won't, because this is just made up.

Two things

1) Suing the US government only works when they say you can sue them (see: Sovereign Immunity). Additionally, the rank-and-file have vastly extended defenses against lawsuits (see: Qualified Immunity). If an customs agent decided to get especially frisky against you, the odds of you succeeding on a lawsuit against either the agent or the US government is close to nil unless it was an extreme violation of your constitutional rights, and even then it's not in your favor.

2) We have multiple recent examples of US citizens being illegally detained by ICE agents despite showing paperwork and evidence of citizenship. If you think you're safe: You're not.
by igouy | 2025-07-21 17:50:12+00:00
11:10 -- The second thing that I want to get clear, is I don't want to hear any complaints that no one ever pushed this model. …

It is so obvious that everyone actually 100% meant you should look at the domain model and you should code that directly into the compiled hierarchy."

.

Not everyone actually —

"The simplistic approach is to say that object-oriented development is a process requiring no transformations, beginning with the construction of an object model and progressing seamlessly into object-oriented code. …

While superficially appealing, this approach is seriously flawed. It should be clear to anyone that models of the world are completely different from models of software. The world does not consist of objects sending each other messages, and we would have to be seriously mesmerised by object jargon to believe that it does. …"

"Designing Object Systems", Steve Cook & John Daniels, 1994, page 6

https://archive.org/details/designingobjects0000cook
by dannylmathews | 2025-07-21 17:50:21+00:00
Hey, I'm the developer behind Inkverse and I just open-sourced it under the AGPL License. (http://github.com/taddyorg/inkverse)

Inspiration for Inkverse: I wanted to build an indie-friendly comic platform, similar to what Bandcamp does for indie musicians. If you are not familiar with the digital comics space, it is a brutal industry to earn a living in as a creator. It is a niche industry dominated by some big players and they take full advantage of that. For example: If you want to access the monetization tools on any of the big platforms, you have to negotiate with them on a contract where they get exclusive IP rights to your comic and take a 50 to 75% revenue cut. In contrast, Inkverse has standard terms of service for all our creators and takes no IP rights. Right now we have a Patreon integration for monetization and in the future we plan to add our own payments system (with a fairer rev split ~10%).

Inkverse is open-source ie) all our code is open and available for people to use, but I think, more importantly, all the comics use an open-source comic specification. Why use a comic specification? None of the comics on Inkverse are hosted on Inkverse, a creator self-hosts their own comic on their own server OR uses a tool like Taddy (https://taddy.org) to help them distribute their comic. The benefit is there is no platform lock-in, a creator can share their comic feed with any other comic app, not just Inkverse.

Inkverse specifically focuses on comics that use the webtoons format. Webtoon is a comic format, made specifically for mobile phones (vertical scrolling). Here is an example: https://inkverse.co/comics/a-is-for-alice. It is the format a lot of the younger generation uses to read comics. I do think Inkverse will always focus on the Webtoons format, but the SSS spec and Taddy can support other types of comic formats like page layout or manga etc in the future. btw, If you are a user of Komga or Kavita, Inkverse may not be for you as it isn't a comic app for self-hosting your own comics, it's more a way for creators to more easily distribute their comics to their fans.

Lastly, one really cool technical thing I did: I implemented OAuth directly in the SSS feed. Creators want to be able to have exclusive episodes of their comics only available to their paying backers. So, on the SSS feed, you can specify OAuth endpoints which can be used to get back a token to view exclusive content. In practice what this looks like is, a creator connects their Patreon and picks which episodes are exclusive to their Patreon backers, and readers on Inkverse can connect their Patreon and only Patreon backers of the creator get access to read their exclusive episodes.

Stack: Typescript, React/React Native, GraphQL, Node.js.

Let me know what you think!

Inkverse: https://inkverse.co GitHub: http://github.com/taddyorg/inkverse SSS comic specification: http://3s-docs.org/ OAuth on SSS: https://3s-docs.org/hosting-provider-oauth
by jstimpfle | 2025-07-21 17:50:26+00:00
Funny that GP whas one of the comments that made immediate intuitive sense to me. By the simple principle of demand / supply ~ price, price controls (in a time of high prices, which is because of scarcity), should inhibit creation of more supply. Leaving prices to their natural forces should allow creation of more supply, which, regardless of the price level, should relax the market and lead to lower prices.

While price controls might keep the supply affordable to a larger share of the population, that doesn't help the fact that there isn't enough supply, so instead of money, other mechanisms influence who gets to buy the goods. This could be: Who is most willing to invest an unhealthy amount of time and energy, who is eligible to maybe acquire state funding, or simply who is the lucky one. Is any of this better than letting money decide? I tend to think no and think it would be better to have a functioning market with reasonable prices.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-21 17:50:32+00:00
> At the data scale + level of complexity our OLAP queries operate at, we very often run into situations where Postgres's very best plan [with a well-considered schema, with great indexes and statistics, and after tons of tuning and coaxing], still does something literally interminable — not for any semantic reason to do with the query plan, but rather due to how Postgres's architecture executes the query plan[1].

Well, ok, this is a problem, and I have run into it myself. That's not a reason for not wanting a QL. It's a reason for wanting a way to improve the query planning. Query hints in the QL are a bad idea for several reasons. What I would like instead is out-of-band query hints that I can provide along with my query (though obviously only when using APIs rather than `psql`; for `psql` one would have to provide the hints via some \hints commnad) where I would address each table source using names/aliases for the table source / join, and names for subqueries, and so really something like a path through the query and subqueries like `.<sub_query_alias0>.<sub_query_alias1>.<..>.<sub_query_aliasN>.<table_source_alias>` and where the hint would indicate things like what sub-query plan type to use and what index to use.
by erichocean | 2025-07-21 17:50:32+00:00
I regularly have the opposite experience: o3 is almost unusable, and Gemini 2.5 Pro is reliably great. Claude Opus 4 is a close second.

o3 is so bad it makes me wonder if I'm being served a different model? My o3 responses are so truncated and simplified as to be useless. Maybe my problems aren't a good fit, but whatever it is: o3 output isn't useful.
by nzach | 2025-07-21 17:51:12+00:00
> How is this not excellent advice?

I do understand that in order to create something popular you need to create something good but you also need to properly communicate what you do. And proper communication is as hard as creating something good. So, I do know you need to "find an audience", and that is why I've posted it in a few places.

Having said all that, reading these comments made me feel somewhat demoralized because the advice wasn't really actionable. As a noob in this space I went in expecting to get some advice along the lines of: "your idea is bad", "the website design needs to improve", "your app keeps crashing", "there is no way to make money from this", etc... But all I've got was this generic "find users" advice.

"Find users" isn't intrinsically bad advice, but the way it was delivered felt really bad. How do I find users? Should I post about it in some platform? Maybe I should write a blog post about it? Running ads is a viable approach? Given what I have, what communities should I try to engage?

> so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed

But I don't want to create a business right now. I just want to create something that people find interesting. I already know how to build things for myself, now I want a different challenge. But right now I feel stuck because I've built something, nobody seems to care and I don't really know how to improve my situation.
Show HN: 47jobs – Marketplace for "Vibecoders"
by the_plug | 2025-07-21 17:51:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm building 47jobs, a marketplace connecting clients with "vibecoders" - developers who specialize in AI-assisted development.

What's vibecoding? Instead of writing code manually, vibecoders use natural language prompts with AI tools (GPT, Claude, v0) to rapidly prototype and build features. They describe what they want in plain English, and AI generates working code that they iterate on until it's production-ready.

The productivity gains are incredible - what used to take weeks now takes hours.

Why this matters: - Traditional hiring focuses on syntax knowledge - The real skill now is prompt engineering and AI collaboration - Clients need rapid prototyping and validation - There's no platform specifically for this new type of developer

I'm pre-selling early access passes ($47) to validate demand and build a community before launch. The response has been encouraging so far.

Would love HN's feedback on the concept and landing page: https://47jobs.xyz

Is this the future of development, or am I missing something?