MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dinfinity | 2025-07-22 14:18:10+00:00
The mid-day peak of solar can be almost entirely mitigated by adding bifacial vertical east-west mounted solar panels.

It works really well: The vertical mounting means the panels stay cooler and are thus more efficient. The east-west mounting also does that, but additionally shifts the peaks of production to close to sundown and sunrise. The only real downside is that you are using (somewhat) more panel surface. And of course you're still not generating more electricity after sundown or on cloudy days, so it is not a panacea.

Sources:

- https://undecidedmf.com/298-vertical-bifacial-solar-panels/

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-68018-1
by somenameforme | 2025-07-22 14:18:19+00:00
There is obviously no accountability for social media algorithms, anywhere. Facebook/Instagram/YouTube are conspicuously algorithmically downranking (and on occasion overtly censoring) pro-Palestinian content, but the political establishment in Western bloc nations don't care, because they don't want unbiased algorithms - they want algorithms that are biased to push their issues of the day.

And Elon is being followed by some 220 million+ people. That's a not insubstantial chunk of the entire human race, let alone the subset of X users. It's unsurprising that his comments would end up highly promoted by most of any algorithm that significantly weights account popularity, which all do - excepting perhaps TikTok.

To get a warrant you need to present strong probable cause to a judge - not liking what is being promoted would not suffice.
by timschmidt | 2025-07-22 14:18:23+00:00
> Starship involves thinking about sea states, taking a ferry ride on each side, and more.

Passengers could eject a few km above ground and parachute to their destination like Yuri Gagarin did on Vostok 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1#Reentry_and_landing

:) /s
by griblack | 2025-07-22 14:19:03+00:00
Just a simple example: compare an atomic bomb with the type of bomb from the Industrial Revolution. Today the scale and speed of change is unparalleled in history. Control of minds by implanting chips is not anymore something impossible but a possibility in a near future. The more tools we have the more power to design tools for control and destruction as never could be imagined before. No, the Industrial Revolution was just a big change but what comes next, if we don't control it, is the last change.
by ferguess_k | 2025-07-22 14:19:18+00:00
Yeah, but how long did that happen? AI could happen a lot faster, likely measured in years.

There are other differences that I can list, e.g. back then, ordinary people could still (relatively easily, comparing to nowadays) start a revolution because there is no significant tech gap between what a state could get and what citizens could get, so anything bad would be corrected in a violent way if it had to be. But with the advancement of technology, I doubt that would ever happen again -- unless we have a WW3 that set back every country by 100 years.

So basically, my argument is, we are facing something that could happen imminently, but we couldn't tell whether it is good for ordinary people or not (I believe many are NOT optimistic), and there is no way to dial back -- shouldn't we stop to think through?
by taeric | 2025-07-22 14:19:22+00:00
Amusingly (to me, at least), I took a stab a long time ago to show how a visitor could get you most of this. As I state in the post, I make no claim that this is as convenient or powerful. It does do what you basically describe, though. https://taeric.github.io/sum-types.html

Note instead of my worse Optional class, what you are describing is a Shape class where there is a different function for each supported shape. If you add a new shape, everywhere that made a shape visitor would have to be updated do deal with the new shape. (A sibling post described this.)

Amusingly, I recall coworkers that did not want to use the "acceptVisitor" method and would force cast to call over to the methods directly. Caught me incredibly off guard.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-22 14:19:31+00:00
> even if they have advertised their product as production ready, shouldn't the developer have some kind of backup plan?

I mean, realistically, yes, because come on, everybody knows this sort of thing doesn't actually work.

However, this isn't really an excuse for the vendor. If you buy, say, a gas central heating boiler, and install as directed, and it explodes, burning down your house, then the manufacturer does not get to turn around and say "oh, well, you know, you should have known that we have no idea what we're doing; why didn't you build your house entirely out of asbestos?"
by sybercecurity | 2025-07-22 14:19:45+00:00
> "...he incumbent vendor uses restrictive licensing practices that make it prohibitively expensive for the government to fire them and switch to a different vendor."

That's only one part of lock-in. The more expensive part is the cost of migration. This includes replacing other tools or code, and retraining people to use the new vendor's products. It's often thought of as cheaper to just stick with the vendors you (and staff) know than embarking on a migration project with a unknown cost.

This could be dismissed as a sunk cost fallacy, but that thinking is common.
by za_mike157 | 2025-07-22 14:19:47+00:00
Hey! Founder of Cerebrium here.

- Runpod is one of the cheapest but it comes at the price of reliability (critical for businesses) - We have more performant cold start performance with something special launching soon here - Iterating on your application using CPUs/GPUs in the cloud takes just 2–10 seconds, compared to several minutes with Runpod due to Docker push/pull. - Allow you to deploy in multiple regions globally for lower latency and data residency compliance - We provide a lot of software abstractions (fire and forget jobs, websockets, batching, etc) where as Runpod just deploys your docker image. - SOC 2 and GDPR compliant

With that all being said - we are working on optimisations to bring down pricing
by yomismoaqui | 2025-07-22 14:20:37+00:00
What happened here was to be expected if you have used agentic coding.

Last weeks I have also been testing AI coding agents, in my case Claude Code because it seems like it is the state of the art (also tried Gemini Cli and Amp).

Some conclusions about this:

- The agentic part really makes it better than Copilot & others. You have to see it iterating and fixing errors using feedback from tests, lint, LSP... it gives the ilusion of a human working.

- It's like a savant human, with an encyclopedic knowledge and hability to spit code faster than me. But like a human it benefits from having, tests, a good architecture (no 20k line code file, pls).

- Before it changes code you have to make it create a plan of what he is going to do. In Claude Code this is simple, is a mode you switch to with Shift-tab. In this mode instead of generating code it just spits a plan in Markdown, you read it suggest changes and when it look ok you tell it to start implementing it.

- You have to try it seriously to see where it can benefit your workflow. Give it 5 minutes (https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes).

As an agent it shines on things where it can get a nice feedback and iterate to a solution. One dumb example I found cool was when trying to update a Flutter app that I hadn't touched in a year.

And if you use Flutter you know what did happen, Flutter had to upgrade but before it required updating Android SDK, then Android Gradle Plugin, and another thing, and some other thing to infinite... It's a thing I hate because I have done too many times.

So I tried by hand and after 40 mins of suffering I thought about opening Gemini Cli and tell it to update the project. Then it began executing one command and then reading the error and execute another one to fix the error, then another error that pointed to a page in the Android docs, so it opened that page, read it and fixed that problem, then the next and another one...

So in 2 minutes I had my Flutter project updated and working. I don't know if this is human level intelligence and I don't care, for me it's a sharp tool that can do things like this 10x faster than me.

You can have you AGI hype, I'm happy for the future when I will have a tool like this to help me work.
by yungporko | 2025-07-22 14:20:43+00:00
i've never considered testing out any of the new version control systems i see from time to time for the simple reason that i already know git, everybody else already knows git, git already completely handles everything i could conceivably want it to do (and a bunch more stuff that i will never touch), and perhaps biggest of all, i can't tell my manager that i want our whole team to migrate our code into (new thing) which everybody will have to learn for no reason.

serious question as somebody who has never even looked into what jujutsu offers - unless you're a solo dev with some free time, what exactly is the selling point here?

edit: i didnt realise that its just a layer on top of git so that basically answers my question, fair
by baq | 2025-07-22 14:21:21+00:00
> as long as they don’t have conflicts. If they do, you’re in for a rough time. I struggle to see how a vcs could help with that, even if I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

A vcs can allow you to commit conflicts and then commit their resolutions whenever necessary. This has been pioneered by darcs (IIRC) and jj also allows that.
by Geezus_42 | 2025-07-22 14:21:34+00:00
I'm eagerly awaiting Zen to enable tab groups/folders. I've been watching feat:9355, but its gotten bogged down in a debate about the whether tab folders in the tab bar should be the same as bookmarks, ala Arc. I personally did not like that Arc considered tabs and bookmarks to be the same because it made management and syncing a pita. Having to use a third script to export your bookmarks is not a good look.
by sebstefan | 2025-07-22 14:21:59+00:00
> - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.

I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it

>- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.

I haven't had that either

My bane is trying to make microphones/cameras work in video calls on teams/slack/etc. When you open up the console they use chrome-only javascript all over. They give no shit supporting firefox.
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on the impact of AI on programming careers?
by HisoMorow | 2025-07-22 14:22:28+00:00
I m sure you have heard this question many times already so excuse me if this post feels spammy, but the evolution of AI makes me worry on how it will impact my career. I m a junior level developer (not entry level though) that has been working on a company that creates systems for banks. A coworker of mine attended a presentation done by the company that focused on a project that would normally be done by a group of 5 people over a span of 6 months, but was done by a single person on merely 6 days through a no-coding / vibe coding platform.

This made me worry more than ever for the threat of becoming obsolete on my career due to the evolution of AI. What do you all think here? Is a programming career in legit threat under AI, more than other careers at least? And how long term you estimate the actual threat to be in this case? Lastly, how do you think it would be a good idea for a programmer to move like in order to conform to the new standards, aside ofc from using AI to help with work whenever it makes sense to do so?
by timlod | 2025-07-22 14:22:29+00:00
I've used it before for realtime-uses (not production though where you'd need 100% guarantees for no drop-outs), latency has not been an issue. I think you essentially get the latency of the plugins you're using since this is a JUCE wrapper.

Ultimately it depends on how much work you do and how efficient an audio thread you built. pedalboard is not a library which does audio playback itself, it just effects buffers you give it. I used python-sounddevice, which are bindings for PortAudio - if you don't use much CPU you can comfortably run plugins in realtime.

Obviously you're still beholden to the GIL in Python (until further notice) so if worse comes to worst you might experience the unlucky dropout.
by arbesman | 2025-07-22 14:22:29+00:00
Glad you enjoyed the intro! In terms of the meat, there’s only so much that can be provided in an introduction, but I did step through the chapters at the end, explaining a bit of what is to come (though obviously not the meat itself: that’s found in the chapters themselves!).

But in terms of code itself, I do my best to convey how programming (and the world of code) feels. Admittedly, this is hard to do, but I talk about everything from different programming languages and what they are all about (and their vibes) to the unexpected power of global variables.

There is also a ton of computing history to be found in the book, which I think is vital for understanding the tech world (and building whatever comes next). We often see a certain amount of historical ignorance in tech, and that feels like a recipe for missing context, or unnecessary reinvention, or just plain not understanding the path dependence of this world. So I really try to explore that a lot.
by kylebenzle | 2025-07-22 14:22:57+00:00
100%, CIA has long controlled that narrative in this country though its subsidiaries. Just a few BIG examples:

1. USAID – Frequently used by the CIA for covert operations and as cover for agents abroad. (Washington Post [1])

2. Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) – CIA-founded and funded anti-communist intellectual network during the Cold War. [2]

3. Air America – CIA-owned airline used heavily during the Vietnam War and Laos operations. PBS [3]

4. Blockstream - CIA backed "non-profitable" company that controls the Bitcoin GitHub repository and guides development founded by useful idiots like Gregory Maxwell, "Blue Hair Matt," and a handful of other internet trolls with no real software credentials.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/usaid...

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1263191.The_Cultural_Col...

3. https://www.miamiherald.com/
by iamkonstantin | 2025-07-22 14:23:42+00:00
I'm not sure making a list that's been done time and time again here would make a difference. But if you're truly interested, here are my top 3:

- Firefox comes packed with all kinds of telemetry and analytics turned on.

- No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one.

- Widgets! I love Vivaldi's Dashboard for when one needs more than just a homepage.
by gruez | 2025-07-22 14:23:53+00:00
>with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].

Is that an unreasonable assumption? As much as people like to come up with excuses like "I had open wifi!" or "I was running a TOR node", judges don't seem inclined to believe them, probably for the same reason they don't seem inclined to believe excuses like "somebody took my car on a joyride and then returned it!" for parking tickets. Remember, both non-commercial copyright infringement lawsuits and parking tickets are tried in civil court, which means the standard is "preponderance of evidence", not "beyond reasonable doubt".
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-22 14:24:03+00:00
When I said "in the context of Silicon Valley", I meant the geographical region not "what are the bad things tech has done".

Most SV politicos that drive living conditions in the valley don't take PAC money and aren't affected by Billionaires. There's a housing shortage and a cost of living crisis anyway (example: no matter how much you pay gig economy workers, they are not going to afford a home in the valley).

The issues you mentioned are because of Citizens United - a federal issue w/ consequences all over the country (not just SV).
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-22 14:24:19+00:00
>> I think there's a large market for it and it should be a one weekend job.

You're essentially asking for a heavily customized phone OS, this is not like adding a bootstrap theme - and you're willing to pay FIVE DOLLARS?

>> But talking to developers for ideas is a dead end.

Maybe for product ideas but perhaps you should find one to critique your "weekend project" idea
by throwanem | 2025-07-22 14:24:32+00:00
I've seen approaches like this involving "memory" by various means, with its contents compactly injected into context per-prompt, rather than trying to maintain an entire context longterm. One recent example that made the HN frontpage, with the "memory" feature based iirc on a SQLite database which the model may or may not be allowed to update directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43681287
by sebstefan | 2025-07-22 14:24:36+00:00
> In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.

Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't care to check if their shit works on firefox.
by roenxi | 2025-07-22 14:24:39+00:00
If you bring in a bunch of immigrants it'll still have recognised centres to the distributions. That is literally how the US population was built. That is the thing about distributions, they form. It isn't possible to live in a place with other people and not start forming cultural links.

There isn't a question here that different people have different cultures and migration changes culture. Indeed, if we assume that migrants migrate to places with cultures that promote success then change the culture that'd suggest that migrants cause mean-reversion for the worse. But on the other hand that mean reversion happens anyway, cultures change anyway and migrants tend to be a bit smarter and more motivated than the locals so it is hard to really be certain.

It is still a bit of a non-issue that immigrants don't assimilate into something that doesn't really exist in an environment that was changing anyway. I wish more people from my own culture would assimilate into it a bit better and maybe keep to some of the good ideas a little more diligently. Or even just agree on what they were.
by adamcharnock | 2025-07-22 14:24:52+00:00
I think this is more akin to shutting down an AZ, rather than a region, which certainly does happen. Except AZ lettering is randomised per AWS account, so your 'us-east1-a' isn't my 'us-east1-a'. Which means AWS can migrate people away, over time. I believe older accounts which still use the old AZ are given notice that it is closing.

Plus, there was the whole closure of AWS EC2 Classic, replaced with AWS VPC.

This another reason why deploying over multiple AZs has its benefit. Not just for technical failure, but it means you can still move should one region close down.

I suppose an interesting questions is: would I prefer to move a single-AZ deployment such as this in the cloud, or in the real world? And honestly I can see the pros and cons of each.

In the cloud it involves a bunch of engineering time (possibly minimal, likely a lot more given reality). In the real-world it involves a temporary fibre connection to the next DC over, and a gradual or rapid move of hardware with the help of some specialist contractors (for example). But at least the state and implementation quirks move with the compute. I can see it either way, but I can feel myself wanting to believe in the latter. There is something about trucking servers across town that appeals me.
by dale_glass | 2025-07-22 14:25:11+00:00
Oh, static linking can be lots of "fun". I ran into this interesting issue once.

1. We have libshared. It's got logging and other general stuff. libshared has static "Foo foo;" somewhere.

2. We link libshared into libfoo and libbar.

3. libfoo and libbar then go into application.

If you do this statically, what happens is that the Foo constructor gets invoked twice, once from libfoo and once from libbar. And also gets destroyed twice.
by elza_1111 | 2025-07-22 14:25:22+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

TL;DR: I wrote this because I believe the hype around AI agents in observability is getting ahead of reality. After building an MCP server for our observability backend, I'm convinced they are powerful hypothesis generators, but not yet reliable problem solvers.

After reading a few articles claiming MCP would be the "end of observability," I felt the need to write down my own, more skeptical take, based on my experience building one of these systems.

My core argument is that these tools are effective at identifying known failure patterns, but they struggle with novel issues. During a high-stakes incident, the risk of following a confident-sounding LLM hallucination down a rabbit hole is dangerously high. Verifying the AI's suggestions can often be just as much work as finding the root cause yourself.

Ultimately, I see these agents as a co-pilot that can brainstorm, but can't yet be trusted to fly the plane.

Curious to hear from other SREs and developers: how are you really using these tools? Are you finding them reliable for RCA, or are you also spending significant time manually verifying their "confident" suggestions?
by d1sxeyes | 2025-07-22 14:25:32+00:00
> There were numerous public cases where they chased people downloading few mp3s just for themselves

If this is true, I have been unable to find any. Can you please share? In all of the cases I was able to find, the huge fines were based on also uploading.

> If you don't understand how torrents work on technical level I suggest at least some shallow reading

This is a bit patronising, and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. My point is that the only prosecutions I've been able to find are where they were able to prove uploading as well as downloading (and yes, the fact that someone used BitTorrent makes it a slam-dunk, because the protocol makes it impossible to download without also uploading). Are you trying to argue that someone who torrents a copyrighted work doesn't also share it?
by pjmlp | 2025-07-22 14:25:33+00:00
That would be Kotlin, Google's C#, given how history goes.

I has enough ML influence on it, as a simplified Scala, and also can compile to native in various ways.

On the other hand you will notice that the only thing Android team only cared about Go, was the Soong build syste, and parts of the GPU debugger.
by esafak | 2025-07-22 14:26:17+00:00
I finally remembered: PocketD(irectory), by Jeff Rollason.

https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simteln...

I used https://www.neilb.net/doswasmx/ to run it, generating this screenshot of its CLI: https://imgur.com/a/6i91Vyz

And that's just all they could fit on one page.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-22 14:26:17+00:00
"President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from UNESCO – which supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes that are totally out-of-step with the commonsense policies that Americans voted for in November," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said."

I have come to think of UNESCO with regard to their World Heritage sites (I saw in the news that Neuschwanstein was just recently added), but one of my favorite science books when I was growing up I found was compiled by UNESCO, "700 Science Experiments For Everyone" [1]. I loved the way it showed you how to set up a modest "lab" with inexpensive (or found) things. Perhaps they were considering poorer communities/nations.

[1] https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780385052757