MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-20 23:07:52+00:00
This is only tangentially related, but I have always wondered why chlorophyll absorbs blue and red, but reflects green--green being sunlight's brightest component.

It's almost as if there was some evolutionary pressure towards being very visible in sunlight which is more important than evolving ways to collect as much sun energy as possible. When I guess at this I end up with something along the lines of reflected green being used as a signal to a neighboring plant: "I'm already here, grow in some other direction instead." There is some evidence that plants do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-3040.ep1160...) but it's not clear that the need to do so is so strong that it would overshadow the drive to collect as much energy as possible.

Or perhaps there's something to do with the physics of absorbing light to drive a chemical reaction that makes it better to absorb at red and blue while passing on green (450nm and 680nm are not harmonics--so if this is the case it's more complex than which sorts of standing waves would fit in some chemical gap or other).
by prng2021 | 2025-07-20 23:08:02+00:00
You sound like one of those fan boys that keeps a picture of Elon next to their bed.

He's a con-man that has endangered lives by tacking on the word "beta" to a dangerous "full self driving" system for almost a decade to fool customers. Meanwhile others like Waymo did it the right, safe way. And wait no... now it's labeled "supervised" and "unsupervised" full self driving or some bs like that.

He's a con-man that cheats his customers by manipulating odometers (https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a64555...)

He's a con-man that destroyed Twitter but did some bs financial engineering with his XAI to make X suddenly valued exactly the same as when he bought it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-paid-high-price-114...).

He's the con-man that remotely controlled his autonomous robots (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-10-15/tesla-opti...).

Last but not least, he's the immoral idiot that fanned hate and the political divide in America by supporting Trumps claims of a stolen election. He then manipulated a democratic election by offering million dollar in bribes (or prizes as he called them) to people who voted for Trump. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/10/20/elon-musk-offers-1-milli...
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-20 23:08:08+00:00
> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates the acceptable resolution on the fly.

I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons).

> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image.

At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems.

SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-20 23:08:19+00:00
I remember reading the book "The Powers That Be" by David Halberstam where he talks about how first the radio and later the Television made the US president much more powerful than the Congress. American democracy was much more local and decentralized before radio, and no President could get away by ruling with executive orders. In the age of social media, everyone just self bins into a few national buckets and votes accordingly, even in local elections.
by protocolture | 2025-07-20 23:08:39+00:00
>AI isnt cost effective. The investors are going to want their money back very soon due to outside economic influences... they wont get it back and many of these AI pop ups are going to fold. the rest are going to scale back and jack up prices.

Nothing stopping us from having cake and eating. Open AI could fall over, and we would still have all the publicly available models kicking around.
by morkalork | 2025-07-20 23:10:47+00:00
Question: What if you don't comply but are outside of the UK and have no business operating there making money, filing taxes etc. What is the consequence, criminal charges in absentia and an attempt at extradition?

Also, at $1.50/user, what if users pay for accounts? Perhaps this will be the Band-Aid ripping moment that ushers in sane communities that are no longer under attack by endless bad actors with infinite free accounts?
by szvsw | 2025-07-20 23:11:00+00:00
Sure I was playing a little fast and loose there, but (a) the large surface area of the home (and resulting conductive transfer through the walls + convection transfer via infiltration through gaps) is directly a result of the fact that you need a significantly larger volume for humans to move around in and live in than you do to store food and (b) even if we do look directly at the volume of air, the difference is significant since at the end of the day, since for any given constant deltaT, your energy spent is still linear with mass or volume. And we are talking about roughly 2-3 orders of magnitude difference in air volume between a house and a refrigerator.

Anyways, if you write out all of the heat balance equations, you get a few W/m2 of flux on the inside wall of the home and a few W/m2 of flux on the inside faces of the fridge, assuming a typical wood frame construction in summer time and steady states all around.

So yes, of course multiplying the flux through the home’s wall by the surface area of the home results in a massive heat gain value compared to the heat gain conducted through the surface of the refrigerator, but that’s arguably precisely because of the two different volume requirements.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-20 23:11:33+00:00
It's OK because it lets the screen be bigger.

It's less of adding a notch, more of extending the screen upwards except where the camera is.

It didn't take away from any previous screen real estate.

(It does make something like Bartender even more necessary than before though. It's inexcusable Apple doesn't have a built-in solution for properly handling menu bar icons. But that's still a problem even without the notch.)
by Vespasian | 2025-07-20 23:11:34+00:00
That particular approach is actually pretty sensible if you (as a law maker) want to get any results.

Otherwise everyone from small sites to Facebook would just shop around jurisdictions and formally operate their websites from wherever fits them best.

And if a service is used by citizens of your country it makes sense to scale requirements by the impact it is having on them.

This particular law may not be great overall but I've got no issues with this method. As a site provider outside the UK it's trivially easy to avoid liability (by blocking people)
by mindslight | 2025-07-20 23:12:03+00:00
> People are quick to jump to free market reasoning because it's quick, easy, and requires little to no thought or nuance

... to defend something that is broken, because it assuages their belief in the just world fallacy. I would say that we could actually use more freer market dynamics for many aspects of healthcare. But they need to be appropriately applied to areas where there are specific problems that can actually be fixed with things like more transparency, patient choice, etc - AND NOT in ways that merely justify the existence of problems or even exacerbate them!
by pseudo0 | 2025-07-20 23:12:19+00:00
Realistically they can't, unless the service owner lives in a country with an extradition treaty with the UK, and that country has an equivalent law in place. But most service operators don't want to deal with that stress, so they will just IP block the UK and Brits who know how to use a VPN will just keep using the service.

I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a topic in trade negotiations with the US in the future though, since this is a trade barrier that imposes significant regulatory cost on US companies for content that is legal in the US. Eg. the proscribed categories of illegal content include knives and firearms, hate, etc.
by palata | 2025-07-20 23:13:18+00:00
Are you saying that the local merchant tests it and that's why they sell it at 250x the price?

I said 10$, but it depends on the length. So 60cm is maybe 10$, 70cm is 12$, 80cm is 13.50. So you would say that testing the 70cm variant of the zipper is worth 2$ more than testing the paint on the 60cm variant?

My point is that at this price, if I don't get the zipper on Temu, I don't get it at all. I won't pay 10$ for a zipper of this quality.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-20 23:14:19+00:00
Yep. They rode T-Mobile Sidekick (Danger, Inc.) into the ground while putting on more bandaids, but it was a constant 9-alarm fire that didn't Microsoft didn't want to invest in seriously. It was a shit show I barely avoided when I was a semi-freelance consultant when I made the mistake of associating with Taos Mountain (oh look, IBM bought them).
by tptacek | 2025-07-20 23:16:34+00:00
Medicare should fund drastically more residency slots. But that aside, I think Medicare is a pretty slick compromise between what's challenging about state-funded health care and private market health care: at the lifetime inflection point where people's medical costs drastically increase, publicly-funded single-payer kicks in; before that, people with (actuarially) far lower costs get the benefits of private market care. A thriving private market is created that provides benefits even to the publicly-funded care.

Obviously, the system has an enormous problem: it costs too much, because medical providers operate cartels that jack prices up.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-07-20 23:17:09+00:00
Tried it out and it crashed so bad I had to force reset my M3 air.

It has functionality for showing active music. I was clicking around to try and disable this functionality. In doing so it launched Apple Music (software which I never use). MacOS asked for my permission to allow QuakeNotch to control music. I could not click on anything and had a permanent rainbow wheel. The force quit menu did not show QuakeNotch so I needed to hold the power button. That's an instant uninstall for me.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-20 23:18:04+00:00
ugh, reading the paper, their methodology is kinda crap. They basically just guess what the thermal resistances in their system are, and use air temperature measurements to figure out the heat flow. This is not how to measure heat flow accurately. It might be OK as a comparison with whatever TEC they tested with, maybe, but it's not at all something I would trust to compare to another test setup. If their box is more insulative than they think it is, their results are gonna look better than reality. This can be validated at least approximately by just putting a heater in the box that's dissipating a known amount of heat and looking at the temperature rise, but it seems they didn't even do this. And in general the regime where you've got small temperature differences is where your systematic error in a system like this can become huge and distort the results by multiples.

(This is an area which is really hard and details matter. Heat is basically impossible to measure directly, and the indirect measurements are fraught with peril. Getting it wrong was a large part of why people thought they had demonstrated cold fusion)
Show HN: PaletAI – App to create, play, and share AI‑generated games
by tedwatson123 | 2025-07-20 23:18:12+00:00
Hi HN!

My cofounder and I just launched PaletAI, a mobile app for playing and creating AI-generated games.

What PaletAI does: 1. Create – Describe the game you want to make, AI makes it, no coding. 2. Share – Hit publish and it appears on our TikTok-style home feed. 3. Play - Swipe through thousands of games, save the ones you like.

Basically it’s a platform for “vibe‑coded” mobile games.

What problems we’re solving: - Creators: No‑code tools still leave you with “now what?” (hosting, marketing). With PaletAI, you just hit “Publish” - Players: Finding quick casual games today means store searches, downloads, sign‑ups, storage (lots of friction). With our app you just swipe

Please try it and let us know what you think! App Store (iOS/US-only for now): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/paletai/id6745572623

Thanks! Ted
by bGl2YW5j | 2025-07-20 23:19:30+00:00
I use Jetbrains AI assistant for its great integration with the editor and the codebase, and have been experimenting with Claude Code too. Jetbrains Assistant still has better editor integration for things like reviewing generated diffs and generating code based on currently selected code.

My augmented workflow is to “chat” with GPT because it’s free and powerful, to refine my ideas and surface things I hadn’t thought about. Then I start writing code to get in to the flow of things. I’ve found if I use the LLM straight away, I disengage, become lazy and lose context and understanding over the code. In these situations, I’ve had to redo the code more often than not. Lack of understanding is one part of why, but more importantly, disengaged prompting leads to vague and incorrect outcomes.

When I’m very clear in my head about my goal, I create a prompt either directly from my cursor, or if the changes are larger, I ask the LLM to not apply the changes but instead show them to me. I do both these things within the IDE in the chat window. I review the code and sometimes I’m happy applying it as is, other times I copy and paste it and tweak it manually.

I’ve got barebones rules set up; I haven’t felt the need to go overboard. Jetbrains Assistant does a good job of passing relevant context to the model.

I keep my prompts top-down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)) and explicit. Sometimes I’m much more detailed than others, and I’ve found that extra detail isn’t always necessary for a good result.
by intothemild | 2025-07-20 23:19:58+00:00
As a parent I really like googles family controls, all of it. Except ONE thing.. I cannot block or limit YouTube Shorts.

Whenever my daughter watches regular YouTube there's a good chance she might watch something creative or educational or something that ends up with her suddenly making something out of paper, or drawing or anything physical. Learning about something amazing and getting excited.

YouTube Shorts is just AI slop, and horrible content I wish never existed.
by AJ007 | 2025-07-20 23:20:17+00:00
I have no idea why we need to require site operators to verify users ages? Just force the mobile phone companies do it. It would be pretty trivial for apple, with a front facing camera, face detection, and then just read everything on the screen. If something bad or offensive is shown, the phone is disabled and a notification is sent to the parents and the police.

The western internet as we knew it is dead. Privacy is dead, we already live in a post-Snowden panopticon. With multiple always-on microphones in every public room and often in private rooms too. HD cameras are everywhere. If you live in any major city, hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, which might contain you, is being uploaded for public view and AI training daily.

There have been other open source deathblow laws passed in the EU like the Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive which have been repeatedly dismissed by other commenters on hn. Earlier stuff like the GDPR was dismissed too as only affecting big companies. The arguments in support of these laws have basically been you are small so you don't need to follow them. That seems like lot of disrespect for the EU's legal system but maybe it's well deserved.

It's only a matter of time until ID verification will be mandated even to make a post like this one on sites like hn. Western companies assisted authoritarian prison states in monitoring, censoring and controlling their citizens, when they should have been doing the exact opposite. Now it's really hard to argue that it isn't possible here.
by throw234234234 | 2025-07-20 23:21:11+00:00
Not sure the analogy is the same. A driverless car if it does something wrong can cause death - the cost of failure is very high. If my code doesn't come out right, as other posts here have said, I can just "re-roll the slot machine" until it does come out as acceptable - the cost is extremely low. Most of the "reasoning" models just increase the probability that the "re-run" will more likely be to preference of most people with RL to make it viable - tools like new agents know how to run tools, etc to give more data for the probability to be viable within a good timeframe and not run into an endless loop most of the time. Software until it is running after all is just text on a page.

Sure I have to be sure what I'm committing and running is good, especially in critical domains. The cheap cost of iteration before actual commit IMO is the one reason why LLM's are disruptive in software and other "generative" domains in the digital world. Conversely real-time requirements, software that needs to be relied on (e.g. a life support system?), things that post opinions in my name online etc will probably, even if written by a LLM, will need someone accountable and verifying the output.

Again as per many other posts "I want to be wrong" given I'm a senior in my career and would find it hard to change now given age. I don't like how our career is concentrating to the big AI labs/companies rather than our own intelligence/creativity. But rationally its hard to see how software continues to be the same career going forward and if I don't adapt I might die. I will most likely going forward, similar to what I do with my current team, just define and verify.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-07-20 23:21:12+00:00
Dude... in the 70ies to 80ies I grew up where they gave a shit about supersonic flights, sometimes even low level. By the military, because COLT WAR!

Sometimes one could read about broken windows indeed, but that depended more on how low they flew (While being supersonic).

Concorde @M2 somewhere between 12 to 16km altitude wouldn't do that.
by jackvalentine | 2025-07-20 23:21:13+00:00
I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.

Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.
by dethron | 2025-07-20 23:21:37+00:00
Take a look on the documentation I've added to explain better the topic: https://github.com/elSilveira/genesis-protocol/blob/master/e...

I've added an example too: https://github.com/elSilveira/genesis-protocol/blob/master/e...

I've pushed other examples to the repository, fell free to check on: https://github.com/elSilveira/genesis-protocol/tree/master/e...

Let me know if this clarified your question.
by mousethatroared | 2025-07-20 23:21:40+00:00
"that is, it produces 35 W of cooling per 1 kW consumed."

No, they don't. First, without defining a delta T, efficiency is meaningless (unless its a Carnot cycle).

Second, the efficiency is (depending on op. point) higher than 100%. See [1]. You can pump 20 W of thermal power with 2 A @ 4 V = 8 W

20 W of cooling for 8 W of work, or an efficiency of > 200%. This is common to all refrigeration cycles, and frankly for a puny 10C, it sucks.

[1] https://www.datasheethub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/data...
by willseth | 2025-07-20 23:21:42+00:00
That’s simply not true. Certainly it can be hard to wrap your head around architecting complex logic in XSLT 1.0, but it's not unlike how you have to change your thinking for functional programming generally. More ergonomic imperative logic and several other features in XSLT 2.0 made it a much more developer friendly language.
Show HN: Auto-greyscale specific apps after time limit reached
by aygeaye | 2025-07-20 23:22:01+00:00
I've always found Android's Digital Wellbeing controls too blunt. It's all-or-nothing (on purpose?): disable an entire app or greyscale the whole system. This is useless for apps like Reddit or Instagram where I still need to check DMs but want to kill the scrolling trap.

Found an open-source app, DetoxDroid, that solves this. You can set time limits per-app, and it will then greyscale (or disable) only that specific app. It's exactly the granularity I was looking for.

Not my project (I did make a PR today though), but thought others here might find it useful, and think it deserves some more attention!

GitHub: https://github.com/flxapps/DetoxDroid

Amazingly, it works without root, only requires the extra 'WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS' permission (for greyscale) and you can audit it, fork it and build your own version if you're security conscious.
by altairprime | 2025-07-20 23:22:05+00:00
Cryptocoins are primarily a solution to avoiding taxation of wealth and arrest by government authorities for illegal purchases/transfers; otherwise Visa/MC would simply have lobbied for regulations that electronic payments must be operated as purpose-neutral platforms, which would significantly increase their revenue (and shielded them against the puritans demanding they prohibit porn) while neutralizing a potential competitor’s value to electronic payments. The stored-value bubble hinges on this as well; if cryptocoins weren’t effective for evading taxation and arrest, then generating and spending them would have compelled tax payments out of one’s currency reserves and arrests for black market purchases and cross-border transfers.

That they provide what resembles a neutral payment platform is a side effect of those goals, and that neutrality hinges on regulated banks being willing to provide accounts to those excluded by Visa/MC in order to convert cryptocoins to legal tender. Banks are largely just as unwilling as payment processors, for the same regulatory and political reasons as payment processors, which is why this is ultimately a problem of neutrality regulation rather than of crypto.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-20 23:22:45+00:00
They made both the problem of power consumption and removing waste heat infinitely worse. Instead, I used liquid cooling with a copper block on one side and a heater core from an RV on the other. It was so efficient, it didn't even need a fan so long as the radiator fins remained somewhat vertical. I recall it used a pink additive to distilled water. That was bank in the day when you had to make double sure the very large PVC tubing was kink free, clamped properly, and oh the joys of removing air from the system.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-20 23:23:22+00:00
Oh?

My parents, both PhD's. AFIAK first car (they had lived where they didn't have as much need of one) was in their 40s. First house in their 50s. We bought our first house (bigger and better than anything my parents ever owned) when I was still in my 20s. (She's older but did not come with any assets beyond her education.)
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-07-20 23:23:47+00:00
A friend of mine scoffed that I would buy a remote controlled 12v relay for $4 from temu. He said I was risking burning my truck to the ground to save $30. He sent me a link to the Amazon one he bought. So I sent him a link to the exact same one, on Temu, for $5.