MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refulgentis | 2025-07-10 15:38:06+00:00
No offense, but I do find the interlocution here somewhat hard-headed.

In a sentence, color science is a science.

The words you are using have technical meanings.

When we say "Oklab isn't a perceptually accurate color system", we are not saying "it is bad" - we are saying "it is a singular matmul that is meant to imitate a perceptually accurate color system" -- and that really matters, really -- Google doesn't launch Material 3 dynamic color if we just went in on that.

The goal was singular matmul. Not perceptual accuracy.

Let me give you another tell something is really off that you'll understand intuitively.

People love quoting back the Oklab blog post, you'll also see in a sibling comment something about gradients and CAM16-UCS.

The author took two colors across the color wheel, blue and yellow, then claimed that because the CAM16-UCS gradient has gray in it, Oklab is better.

That's an absolutely insane claim.

Blue and yellow are across the color wheel from each other.

Therefore, a linear gradient between the two has to pass through the center of the color wheel.

Therefore a gradient, i.e. a lerp, will have gray in it -- if it didn't, that would be really weird and indicate some sort of fundamental issue with the color modeling.

So of course, Oklab doesn't have gray in the blue-yellow gradient, and this is written up as a good quality.

If they knew what they were talking about at the time, they wouldn't have been doing gradients in CAM16-UCS, and not done a lerp, but used the standard CSS gradient technique of "rotating" to the new point.

Because that's how you avoid gray.

Not making up a new color space, writing it up with a ton of misinfo, then leaving it up without clarification so otherwise-smart people end up completely confused for years, repeating either the blog post or "nothings perfect" ad naseum as an excuse to never engage with anything past it. They walk away with the mistaken understanding a singular matmul somehow magically blew up 50 years of color science.

I just hope this era passes within my lifetime. HSL was a tragedy. This will be worse, if it leaves the ability to do actual color science some sort of fringe slow thing in people's heads.
by wrp | 2025-07-10 15:38:17+00:00
It's funny how controversial this subject has been. From reading the more recent books on lightning physics, I'm convinced of the reality of it. From that perspective, I'm amused by the entry on ball lightning in the Encyclopedic Dictionary Of Physics (Thewlis, 1962). I don' have it here, but I recall he says something like, "Reports of ball lightning have generally come from unreliable characters, so we can assume it doesn't really exist."
by mindslight | 2025-07-10 15:38:19+00:00
My experience has not been that the systemd device names are "actively worse". The biggest problem I've had is changing around VMs where subtle shifts in PCIe IDs (specifically subdevices) end up changing changing names. Meanwhile, consistent-net.rules seems like a hack, always in the back of your mind as an arbitrary stateful part of the system. Why should I think of my primary network device as eth2 if there is no reason for it to be eth2 other than merely being the order on the first install?

But if you prefer consistent-net.rules, then more power to you. I'm guessing most of your frustrations could have been addressed by systemd having some shame about changing functionality out from under users, and providing an up-front option to switch between the different methods.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-10 15:38:56+00:00
For prototyping UI it's actually amazing.

"Add a sidebar to the side that tracks where we are in the document".

"Move all elements in area A into a split screen view with those elements at the left hand side and the remaining elements in the right hand side"

The above sort of thing can be painful to do manually. Changing a layout which can have 100's of elements and moving everything across to the new layout structure. Often you can waste a day tweaking it in various ways. LLMs are actually pretty amazing at it since it's a job where you "put old things from one context into a new context" and that's basically what they do. As in AI has saved me some of the biggest pain points and allowed me to focus on the meatier aspects of the code (which it's not so good at).
by sneilan1 | 2025-07-10 15:39:12+00:00
Not to sound like a crazy person, but, does taking energy from tidal waves mean taking energy from the momentum of the earth itself? I read a long time ago somewhere that if we extract enough tidal energy, the earth's rotation could slow down somehow. Obviously as a layperson on this matter I'm not that well-informed but just curious of the possibilities if anyone knows.
by conradev | 2025-07-10 15:39:20+00:00
If by "we" you mean California, then "we" are going to pass the following milestones with solar + batteries fairly soon:

- Solar and storage is cheaper than building a new natural gas peaker plant in most locales (current majority of generation)

- Dispatching battery plants becomes cheaper than turning on existing peaker plants. Fuel is free, dispatch is instant, they can add inertia.

If by "we" you mean the rest of the world, China is manufacturing and installing the most renewable energy of any country in the world by far – and it's not enough to meet their demand. That's why they're also deploying more coal and nuclear than anyone else, too! They're probably building more electric vehicles than any other country, too, which is huge for their air quality.
by nick238 | 2025-07-10 15:39:30+00:00
Maybe these are the windmills that drive the whales crazy? To paraphrase wind-watch.org (sounds non-partisan)

> The obvious concern that most people might guess will be dangerous and damaging to [swimming] wildlife are the spinning blades themselves. While large white spinning [turbine] blades rotating [below] the horizon or in an advertisement seem bucolic, restive, and like the perfect green energy source, the fact is that the tips of the blades can be spinning at up to 200 miles per hour. Those speeding blades can act like a giant blender for large [fish] such as [tuna] and [whales] which fly around the commercial [water] turbines and chop those [fish] up. Biologists have found that even small species of American [fish] regularly get killed from the spinning turbines of commercial [water] turbines.

/s
by wredcoll | 2025-07-10 15:39:41+00:00
> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.

I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.

Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.

Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.

Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
by mdaniel | 2025-07-10 15:39:55+00:00
I can think of 2 pragmatic reasons:

1. If one wished to use .xpi/.crx (akin to F-Droid's install pathway) then the user would have to teach the browser to trust the signature of them. F-Droid doesn't suffer from this because each .apk is self-trusting, meaning it is signed, and that signature conveys lineage (v1.0 is owned by the same publisher as v1.1, so safe to upgrade), but the operating system doesn't have to be informed about any chain of custody for the .apk cert

2. I am not aware of any self-hosting extension registry, even from Mozilla, and extra lol for Chromium. If such a thing existed, the browser would have to allow the user to add "trusted extension registries" (along with their trusted CA chain). It would actually be snazzy if they went the Helm/Homebrew route and just leveraged OCI distribution (aka docker registry) for that, since it would open up almost unlimited self-hosting options, including publishing right from GitHub Actions to ghcr.io
by pjc50 | 2025-07-10 15:40:17+00:00
People aren't terribly keen on what happens when nuclear plants inevitably wear down, break or pollute either.

Mind you the market has tended to give up on tidal power too. The sea is a harsh environment, working there is expensive, and solar cost reductions have simply run over most of the competition. Scotland has seen quite a few innovative ocean energy companies launch a pilot, run it for a few years, then go bankrupt.
by perihelions | 2025-07-10 15:40:28+00:00
Duplicate of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510731 ("Linda Yaccarino is leaving X"—1 day ago, 974 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517055 ("Grok 4 Launch [video]"—11 hours ago, 374 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ("Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts"—1 day ago, 140 comments)
by spiderice | 2025-07-10 15:40:31+00:00
You're ignoring the fact that Cursor does all sorts of context management (actually, reduction) and prompt engineering to try and get good results for cheaper. The fact that you're saying the only 3 explanations are

1. Musk didn't test Cursor

2. Yesmen

3. Lying

Shows much more about your biases than anything related to Grok 4 usage
by Aachen | 2025-07-10 15:40:36+00:00
First time I hear someone describe nausea from dark mode. Quickly looked astigmatism up on Wikipedia - isn't that something glasses fully correct? I think I've got this as well, but not sure, I've just always had glasses and take whatever they measure to be the best possible lens

(Of course I critically evaluate the measurement, like one time I actually couldn't read faraway text with what they were proposing whereas I could with my old glasses. But I don't know the exact values or terms for the different defects, I think my eyes have at least three different issues including something about rotation as astigmatism apparently means)

I guess what I'm asking is why you don't have glasses. Are they too expensive in your area, or the defect only very minor so it doesn't impede safety when driving even on highways? (Then I'm surprised you get nauseous though, since I don't when I read anything without glasses, regardless of dark or light mode.) Or if you do have glasses, is this still an issue while wearing them? If so, any idea why?
by GratiaTerra | 2025-07-10 15:40:38+00:00
I agree, personal energy abundance is disruptive: * Utility decentralization, economic liberation from near zero marginal cost of energy after initial investment. * Geo political: reduced dependence on hydrocarbon fuels, energy sovereignty * Transportation: every home is becomes a 'gas station' to recharge EVs, or for the EVs to charge the house in case of low house batteries (as opposed to ICE generator) * Climate: no hydrocarbons burned => no pollution * Technological civilization: abundant clean energy creates a feedback loop of innovation in energy production, storage, AI and networking * new business models from energy as a service
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-10 15:40:46+00:00
In Flix all effects are tracked by the type and effect system. Hence programmers can know when a function is pure or impure. Moreover, pure functions can be implemented internally using mutation and imperative programming. For example, in Flix, one can express a sort function that is guaranteed to be pure when seen from the outside, but internally uses a quick sort (which sorts in place on an array). The type and effect system ensures that such mutable memory does not escape its lexical scope, hence such a sort function remains observationally pure as seen from the outside.

(I am one of the developers of Flix)
by consumer451 | 2025-07-10 15:41:19+00:00
A use case I just realized will likely become popular is to “clean room design” a copy of a tv show episode or movie.

1. Turn each shot from the source material into a prompt

2. Edit the shot prompts, reorder the sequence of shots, to suite your narrative

3. Generate “new” tv show/movie

This largely solves the problem that you still need to understand storytelling, cinematography, and editing to make something compelling.
by mhurron | 2025-07-10 15:41:26+00:00
I think that's actually going to be more of an age thing as well. The converter wasn't just the remote, but the little box, separate from the TV, needed to convert signals for an older TV.

Basically, the 'cable box' or the 'satalite box.'

But ya, 45 years old, grew up in Toronto and Southern Alberta and it was a converter, until it wasn't.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-07-10 15:42:31+00:00
Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.

What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels

https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
by DrBazza | 2025-07-10 15:43:14+00:00
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.

Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.

The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.

Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.

And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.

Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.
by mgdev | 2025-07-10 15:43:14+00:00
Profitable operations, doubling previous adjusted EBITDA. [0]

While not a yet an ROI-positive takeover, on an incredible valuation growth trajectory from the post-acquisition low. Likely to be positive the minute xAI meaningfully monetizes Grok. [1]

Gains strategic access to global training data, and real-time human sentiment. [2]

Incredible built-in distribution for new AI-powered products. [3]

Literally tipped the scales in an election, a role typically reserved for traditional media companies. [4]

Yes, a total failure of a business. /s

[0]:https://x.com/Austen/status/1887363437518270757

[1]:https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/the-xai-x-merger-is-a-good...

[2]:https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-xai-will-u...

[3]:https://digiday.com/marketing/with-600-million-users-xs-lind...

[4]:https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/07/x-formerly-twitter-becomes...
by mapt | 2025-07-10 15:43:21+00:00
JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.

> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]

Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.

https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...

Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.
by jfengel | 2025-07-10 15:43:30+00:00
Thank you for that.

My father just died of Parkinson's. (Or at least, with it, but it was causing more and more serious issues.) I've probably got a decade before I would show any symptoms at all.

Meantime, I've been doing my best to be generically active and healthy -- I still run marathons, eat reasonably well, moderate alcohol, no smoking, etc. (Dad didn't smoke, either -- though there are rumors that nicotine might actually help.)

So this test would probably become commercially available right about the time I'd start taking it.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-10 15:43:30+00:00
Arguably FP really is about eliminating side effects.

The research has sprung out of lambda calculus where a computation is defined in terms of functions (remember: Functional programming).

Side effects can only be realized by exposing them in the runtime / std-lib etc. How one does that is a value judgement, but if a term is not idempotent, then you arguably does not have a functional programming language anymore.
by chasing | 2025-07-10 15:43:36+00:00
Afloat in what sense? Usage is down. At least for me, the vast majority of my social and professional network has moved to other platforms. And every time a public figure (journalist, politician) does post it feels like they're immediately swarmed by right-wing propaganda idiots/bots. Feels like a complete mess.

But, yes, I guess it still exists. So props?
by NotAnOtter | 2025-07-10 15:43:41+00:00
I used to throw loads of parties. At somepoint I realized..

1. It's expensive. I never once got a reasonable contribution from my friends. I knew this at the time, but eventually I was over it. Paying $100-250 per event just to deal with all the work and drama that comes with it.. not worth.

2. It's a lot of work. Hours of prep, hours of hosting, hours of clean up after. At the end of the day ~12 hours of effort for ~4 hours of fun is not a good ROI.

3. It frequently was an excuse to get drunk or high. Which is fun, whatever. But as I grew more health conscious, this was less and less appealing. I can drink on my own if I want.

4. There are better alternatives. I don't have to do any of the above options if I just jump on Discord for a while. Or join a rec league sport. Or spend it with my family.
by theozero | 2025-07-10 15:43:46+00:00
We say "made for sharing" because .env.schema replaces .env.example which always drifts from reality - and often requires insecurely sharing secrets manually.

Even if not setting values within your files, you can rely entirely on env vars in the platform where the code runs and still benefit from validation provided by varlock.

Right now we give 1Password as an example, but you can use any provider that has a CLI. We are also working on a plugin system that should make it easier to integrate with any provider.

As for redaction - that note is about how we redact your secrets from _our_ CLI output. However we also provide tools to redact within your application. Right now this works only in JavaScript, by patching global console methods. We will also hook into stdout for varlock run, similar to what the 1Password cli does.

The leak detection is much more interesting - especially in hybrid client/server frameworks, where you can easily shoot yourself in the foot.

By removing plaintext secrets from env files, we totally remove the risk of them leaking via AI code assistants, which I guarantee is happening millions of times a day right now. Also the schema itself and autogenerated types give AI much more context about your env.
by mdaniel | 2025-07-10 15:44:00+00:00
I ran an extension that automatically submitted pages to the Internet Archive as I browsed them, but managing the allowlist/denylist turned into a major hassle, so I eventually just installed the extension into a "public browsing" profile, but as is often the case it turned into "I don't feel like switching to that profile" and it fell by the wayside

But, in the same vein as your comment, I have long wished for Common Crawl to really lean into their mission, and not just publish monthly snaps of whatever their bots can see but do what you said and accept .har or .warc files from anyone and serve the ... hourly? ... .warc via Bittorrent
by b112 | 2025-07-10 15:44:20+00:00
Yes, the whole motion matters. I've seen lots of historical documentaries with footage, and I've never seen a nazi salute with that motion.

You have to really work at it, to think Elon made such a salute, but others have not. It's ridiculous and absurd.

When I see and hear mad lunacy amd character assassination such as this, I immediately think "well everything else said about Elon must be made up too"

You speak of "good faith", do you know what this means?

It means that best intentions should be presumed, not worst, when examining the acts of others.

Have you done this?
by timschmidt | 2025-07-10 15:45:11+00:00
I don't think I'm the one being presumptuous or demanding. I've actually tried to help you make a stronger argument. Shooting a hundred or even a thousand queries to 3 or 4 LLMs and shoving the results through established sentiment analysis algorithms is something ChatGPT can one-shot in just about any language. You demand people agree with your opinion and refuse to spend 20 minutes supporting it with facts. Not my problem, I tried to help. You may not see it that way. That's fine.
by naikrovek | 2025-07-10 15:45:12+00:00
how do banks do it now? you know the answer, at a high level. it's the same way we prevent unauthorized access when the blockchain isn't involved, and it's how we prevented unauthorized access before the blockchain existed.

it's how banks prevent someone from withdrawing money from your account without your permission, everywhere across the entire globe at once, all the time.

it's the same reason that I, a normal user, can't delete people from active directory at work, or change their passwords to mess with them.

you've dealt with this kind of permission system your entire computer-using life. you know how it works. you know what it is. being distributed doesn't matter at all.
by noman-land | 2025-07-10 15:45:17+00:00
I was taken to the Body Worlds[0] exhibit when it was going around and it was extremely fascinating and disturbing. At the time I knew nothing about it, but when I was looking at the exhibits I noticed that many of people displayed looked Chinese. There were even children in the exhibits. Trying to imagine how those bodies ended up there for us to look at was a very discomforting thought and I didn't enjoy thinking about that at all. Very unusual experience.

[0] https://bodyworlds.com/
by bionhoward | 2025-07-10 15:46:26+00:00
What makes you say Google is explicit about the fact they have humans and AIs reading everything? It’s got a confusing multi-layer hierarchy of different privacy policies which hide what’s happening to folks’ conversations behind vague language. They promote it as being free but don’t even link to the privacy policies when they launch stuff, effectively trying to bait noobs into pasting in confidential information