MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChuckMcM | 2025-07-31 20:58:16+00:00
Looks basically like the TRIGA reactor design (without the water shielding). Seems to have similar challenges with rapid load changes. At one time I thought NASA was looking at something like this tied together with a battery pack that would allow for rapid changes in dynamic load without a lot of stress on powering up/down the reactor. And now I can't find it. Sigh.

If you're a billionaire building your bunker this would be the ultimate off-grid power source :-).
by nvch | 2025-07-31 20:58:26+00:00
We are constantly learning (updating the network) in addition to inference. Quite possibly that our brains allocate more resources to learning than to inference.

Perhaps AI companies don’t know how to run continuous learning on their models:

* it’s unrealistic to do it for one big model because it will instantly start shifting in an unknown direction

* they can’t make millions of clones of their model, run them separately and set them free like it happens with humans
by acidburnNSA | 2025-07-31 20:58:36+00:00
This is a passionate team working on a very hard problem. They have guts and skills. I've always loved microreactors for fringe remote power where people are willing to pay 20x more than normal diesel generator prices. Like Antarctica, remote bases, the moon etc.

Trying to make microreactors cheap is super hard. We've obviously tried it many times, the most relevant being the truck-mounted military microreactor ML-1 (the only closed-cycle direct gas turbine reactor ever operated) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1.

Shielding is hard. Even a small reactor this size needs like 8 ft. of high density concrete on all sides, or equivalent, plus 4-6" of a heavy metal like tungsten to take down the gammas. You can't just put it underground because the neutrons activate the dirt. Driving it off afterwards is borderline impossible because you generally have to put the spent fuel in robust canisters that can handle collisions, rollovers, and RPG attacks.

But the hardest part is fuel cost. This reactor uses medium-enriched ('HALEU') fuel, which is super expensive, and then it packages it into TRISO form, which is about 100x more expensive to fabricate than regular UO₂ fuel. On the plus side, it's super robust and can minimize the need for other safety systems. Those prices could both go down, conceivably, but the fab process is pretty intricate, and it's hard to bring down enrichment costs. In my analysis, the fuel cost alone nearly makes this kind of reactor uncompetitive with a diesel generator in almost all applications. So even if the reactor is free (because you build it on an assembly line?), you're still out of luck.

Then there's thermal strain. When you're a small reactor you have big gradients. This bends things. Neutrons make it worse. Then you have a tiny box with electronics in it getting absolutely hammered by neutron dose. That does bad things too.

I hope they can find a way to bring fuel costs way down. I really like the people at this company, and I really like nuclear power and want to see it used in many new applications. I just don't quite see the path yet.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-31 20:58:42+00:00
Not to slip too far into analogy, but that argument feels a bit like a horse-drawn carriage operator saying he can't wait to pick up all of the stranded car operators when their mechanical contraptions break down on the side of the road. But what happened instead was the creation of a brand new job: the mechanic.

I don't have a crystal ball and I can't predict the actual future. But I can see the list of potential futures and I can assign likelihoods to them. And among the potential futures is one where the need for humans to fix the problems created by poor AI coding agents dwindles as the industry completely reshapes itself.
by boogieknite | 2025-07-31 20:59:47+00:00
my neighbor is a coffee roaster and started with production in his garage

when i visited he showed me the setup and i had a bunch of questions to unpack the production situation. he told me id been more interested than anyone who had visited which surprised me because hes very popular with many local lifelong friends frequently parking in the cul-de-sac

its an engineers nature to want to take things apart
by lawlessone | 2025-07-31 21:00:08+00:00
you are :D

yikes from their FAQ:

"The plan is for the small amount of spent fuel (the volume of the spent fuel in one reactor is equivalent in size to just two Walmart gas grill propane tanks) that comes out of our reactors at the end of their duty cycle to only be temporarily stored on-site until a federal repository or interim storage solution becomes available. "

They don't even have plan while the exist now.
by Pocomon | 2025-07-31 21:00:12+00:00
The misinformation, and subsequent hate whipped up online in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings has raised fresh questions over the regulation of social media. Last week Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said social media platforms had “put rocket boosters” under some of the misinformation spreading online, saying those firms “need to take some responsibility for this”.

The justice system has already meted out severe punishments for those convicted of stirring up far-right violence. On Friday Tyler Kay was handed a 38 month sentence for inflammatory posts on X, and Jordan Parlour was given 20 months in jail for inciting racial hatred with Facebook posts.

Now the Online Safety Act is facing scrutiny, with London mayor Sadiq Khan saying it is “not fit for purpose”. Are the laws tough enough? We’ll take a look, after the headlines.
by sangwulee | 2025-07-31 21:00:27+00:00
Quick napkin math assuming bfloat16 format : 1B * 16 bits = 16B bits = 2GB. Since it's a 12B parameter model, you get around ~24GB. Downcasting to bfloat16 from float32 comes with pretty minimal performance degradation, so we uploaded the weights in bfloat16 format.
by caycep | 2025-07-31 21:01:11+00:00
It's beyond what is the watch. Rolex is good, but omega speedy starts (started before inflation/tariffs?) at $5k. And is certified for Space(tm)! Some good smaller brands (nomos) at around $2k.

Watch market above that starts getting weird. You have some special models, technically equivalent w/ cosmetic bling hitting $80-100k
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-31 21:02:02+00:00
>Respectfully disagreed. The sales people for veblen goods work extremely hard because competition is intense even within that space. The Bugatti salesman is competing with Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini, etc.

Respectfully disagree. Which oil-rich Sheikh did you see who only has one supercar in their garage and not all of those you listed? These people aren't stock brokers or tech bros who need to work and save money for for years in order to be able to finally afford one dream car, but they own a multi generational empire that makes them enough money to afford all those cars.

>If none of them move on the deal then you're holding an absolutely immense albatross.

Comparing real estate to exotic cars is apples to buffalos. Most exotics are already sold before they leave the factory floor.
by projektfu | 2025-07-31 21:02:06+00:00
This is the basis of "The E-Myth". A book I didn't read a long time ago because the title made me think it was about Scientology, but a consultant encouraged me to read it and I did. Essentially, the book is about this:

Person A likes to bake and has creative recipes that people like. Person B likes to develop companies and knows a baker who can make a recipe. Person A struggles to keep a bakery open and could really live to never see another pie in their life. Person B creates Cinnabon.
by Peteragain | 2025-07-31 21:02:15+00:00
Looks aspirational to me. 1Mw electricity at 30-100% efficiency (100??) and 1.9 Mw heat via air in the volume of a shipping container? That's moving a lot of air. And I'd want fail safe, passive control "rods" (what happens if the helium leaks out and the heat isn't being removed) before I'd sleep easy with one in my back yard.
by wwweston | 2025-07-31 21:02:21+00:00
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.

Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.

There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
by morning-coffee | 2025-07-31 21:02:34+00:00
Yeah. I learned programming in high school in the mid-80's and was hooked. I liked electronics too, and got a BSEE. But took a summer job writing code and never looked back... still coding now, professionally.

My analogy is that the 80's and 90's were like the "Golden years" of software jobs... maybe like being in the aircraft industry was in the 30's. Lot's of learning and discovery and fun to be had. Working in software now is probably like I imagine being an aeronautical engineer at Boeing now... you'd better be prepared for being satisfied working on some small part of a much larger and complex system and moving at a glacial pace (compared to the Golden years).

(And yeah, the workplace now is flooded with people who seem to be here because they heard it paid well.)
by bshzzle | 2025-07-31 21:02:44+00:00
Running Sourcebot with a self-hosted LLM is something we plan to support and have documented in the golden path very soon, so stay tuned.

We are using the Vercel AI SDK which supports Ollama via a community provider, but doesn't V5 yet (which Sourcebot is on): https://v5.ai-sdk.dev/providers/community-providers/ollama
by giancarlostoro | 2025-07-31 21:02:45+00:00
This is what drove me from Ubuntu to Arch (specifically I'm on EndeavourOS) I had a piece of software that needed me to install a version of the C standard library that was not available on Ubuntu in any way without messing with the core OS. So I said, screw it, let me finally try Arch, but let me find the least intrusive installer based Distro. I have not looked back since.
by veqq | 2025-07-31 21:03:07+00:00
This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....

> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.

> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.

> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
AI: The Creativity Killer – Are We Trading Genius for Convenience?
by jethronethro | 2025-07-31 21:04:46+00:00
Oh great, another day, another "AI breakthrough" that's supposed to make our lives easier. But let's be real here, folks. Are we actually making progress, or are we just getting lazier and dumber?

Back in the day, if you wanted to create something, you had to put in the work. You had to learn, practice, and fail—over and over again. And you know what? That was good for us. It built character, fostered creativity, and made us think. But now? Now we've got AI that can churn out a passable blog post, a mediocre painting, or a forgettable piece of music in seconds.

What's happening to our brains? We're outsourcing our creativity to machines that don't understand art, emotion, or the human experience. They just regurgitate patterns they've seen before. And we're eating it up because it's easy and cheap.

But here's the thing: creativity isn't about taking the easy way out. It's about struggle, about pushing boundaries, about making something uniquely yours. When we rely on AI to do the heavy lifting, we're not just cheating ourselves—we're cheating the world out of genuine innovation.

And don't even get me started on the ethical implications. Who owns AI-generated content? What does it mean for artists and writers trying to make a living? We're so busy marveling at what AI can do that we're not stopping to think about what it should do.

So, I urge you, fellow hackers and creators, don't let AI be the death of your creativity. Use it as a tool, sure, but don't let it become a crutch. The world needs your unique voice, not an algorithm's best guess. Let's not forget what it means to be human—to create, to innovate, to inspire.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-31 21:04:48+00:00
> The US and Germany used a Swiss company to sabotage encryption for years

CryptoAG and the CIA's decision to release the history document of that operation is such an interesting story. In particular, it had this effect of getting people to distrust Swiss companies, for better or for worse. It makes it sound plausible, if however unlikely, that a company such as Proton is actually a front for US cyber warfare. (I don't think it is but it might be; it seems like that may have been the point.)
by acidburnNSA | 2025-07-31 21:05:29+00:00
It's a lot different from a TRIGA. It doesn't have hydrogen in the fuel and it uses high temperature/high pressure helium gas as the coolant (vs. water in a TRIGA).

We did run a nuclear reactor in space once that did use TRIGA fuel. It was called SNAP-10A. More recently, the Kilopower test ran a reactor on land but intended for space with a U-Mo metallic fuel.
by ggm | 2025-07-31 21:05:32+00:00
A flame chart of energy consumption to customer from well-head typically shows an astronomical amount consumed at head in the gas train. It can be a significant sub of the total available energy consumed at the head and in pipeline and shipping, to produce the output which can be sold.

Unfortunately much of it can't be sold or shipped off site and if it isn't used, will be fugitive gas emissions or flared.

Replacing the diesel and other fuels used on-site is good. But it's only part of the story. Running the train would certainly burn a lot of gas, so replacing that would be good.

(-not a fan of SMR for a variety of reasons, mostly political)
by dmhall23 | 2025-07-31 21:05:35+00:00
For conventional loans in particular, pricing is pretty straightforward, and just depends on the different buckets you fall into. Pricing is mostly driven by credit score range, down payment amount, loan amount, property type, and number of units. You can see Fannie Mae's loan level price adjustments here (pdf): https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/9391/display

So our rates are accurate assuming the base info you shared is correct. When we have a completed application, if it turns out that your credit score that you shared is meaningfully different, or that the property is a condo and not a single family home, then the pricing may be different from what we shared.
by apothegm | 2025-07-31 21:05:51+00:00
Ask. Not about them. Ask as you would ask if you were interested in using AI the same way. “What are our company standards and expectations around the use of AI for X?” “What editing are we expected to do?”

That should give you a better sense of what sort of reception an intervention should get, or whether anyone besides you perceives this as problematic in the first place.
by johann8384 | 2025-07-31 21:05:52+00:00
This lines up with my experience, sometimes it is as simple as "Your way is fine, but we did it this other way over here, and over here, should we make it consistent, even if it is consistent but not as good" or as you pointed out, looking for footguns. I also like the supervillian model of "Show this to an average 5 year old and see what obvious flaw they point out".
by greycol | 2025-07-31 21:06:22+00:00
You can't actually configure the wan connection fully without internet connectivity (at least last i checked).

This meant for instance if your WAN required VLAN like New Zealand you couldn't actually set it up without another router. Their fix is to add 1 more option to the WAN configuration options rather than the full suite of WAN configuration options you get once it's talked home.

The partial fix does make it clear that the philosophy of "you must talk to the mothership" is a guiding one that ubiquiti sticks to.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-31 21:06:56+00:00
I think the usual counterargument to the strong form is, "So you're saying that not even an AI with a computer the size of Jupiter (or whatever) could run circles around the best humans? Nonsense!" Sometimes with some justification along the lines of, "Evolution doesn't select for as much intelligence as possible, so the sky's the limit relative to humans!" And as to inherently hard problems, "A smart AI will just simplify its environment until it's manageable!"

But these don't really address the near-term question of "What if growth in AI capabilities continues, but becomes greatly sub-exponential in terms of resources spent?", which would put a huge damper on all the "AI takeoff" scenarios. Many strong believers seem to think "a constant rate of relative growth" is so intuitive as to be unquestionable.
by pcrh | 2025-07-31 21:07:29+00:00
This paints a depressing picture, which also has some support in empirical evidence.

However, democracy is not as feeble as this analysis would suggest. After all, we can see that major shifts in political support for policy positions are possible, and these do require public support (democracy) to occur.

For example, in the US the civil rights movements of the 1960's and 1970's. Or more recently the Brexit referendum in the UK or populist anti-immigrant positions that have arisen in recent years and acquired major political support. Whether you agree with these or not, they are politically impactful, and democratically supported.

Issues surrounding civil liberties have often attracted strong political and popular support. So the question here is how such support can be generated for privacy, which itself a right under numerous legal regimens including the US constitution and the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
by crysin | 2025-07-31 21:07:47+00:00
I think you're making up a narrative in your head to support your bias against Disney here.

TASM 1 was definitely well received when it was released. It was tarnished by the slop that was TASM 2, which lead to Sony being able to come to a licensing agreement with Marvel Studios, to use Spider-Man in the MCU. I think it's an extreme stretch to think Disney had any nefarious doings in the public opinion of those movies, Sony did that to themselves and has proven time-and-time again they cannot make a good quality movie with their Spider-Man IPs.

The Rise of Skywalker is at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was universally acknowledged to be terrible, even by the "critics". Disney definitely was also not able to silence or drown-out the absolute outrage by the cast and fans of the treatment of Luke in The Last Jedi.

Why would Marvel / Disney spend any effort sabotaging the DCEU when Warner Bros. was good at doing it all themselves? If Marvel was worried about DC stealing their audience, they would have focused more on movies like The Batman, not some c-grade antihero most people have no idea about? The Rock fostered a lot of the ill-will towards that movie himself.

I say all this but I also think it's accurate still to say reviews are trustworthy but I don't think they ever have been. I don't think this is some new phenomenon, just people are more aware of the corruption embedded in the system.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-31 21:07:53+00:00
It's a nice victory story for the YIMBYs hoping to win over the upper-/middle class trying to retain the narrative that the market will provide "affordable" housing (not what this even demonstrates, but anyway), but this isn't going to get people off the street. We need a public housing sector to appropriately meet everyone's needs. Otherwise this is just a game of justifying "who deserves housing", a discussion over which I'll never agree with the market.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-31 21:08:17+00:00
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.

I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.

I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
by cyberax | 2025-07-31 21:08:42+00:00
> Diesel generators are "great" because diesel doesn't evaporate.

LOL, no. I see, you have never worked with large diesels meant for backup.

If you just leave diesel fuel alone, then over time (6-9 months) the residual water separates at the bottom of the tank. And then various microbial life springs into action, happily living off all of that free energy. While there's some dissolved oxygen, it will happily use it to oxidize the fuel. But even without oxygen, the bugs will try to live off energy produced by polymerization of unsaturated hydrocarbons.

Polymerization == gunk that clogs up your fuel filters.

So you have to periodically clean up diesel fuel by removing water and filtering the gunk out. It's called "fuel polishing". Large diesels will have fixed systems, for smaller diesels, sometimes mobile systems are used like these: https://fueltecsystems.com/equipment/pneumatic-systems-2/
by drewcoo | 2025-07-31 21:09:04+00:00
> Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification

Bureaucracy does not cause things to get worse. It's not a bad rash that the system displays when it's about to get worse or the puss discharged when it's irritated.

Bureaucracy is a response to a system that works well. It adds rules and hierarchies and red tape to maintain the system state as it is. It's organizational glue.

Bureaucracy is only a problem when trying to change a system.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-31 21:09:11+00:00
It's not a black swan. The issue is that using Pypy means accepting some potential compatibility hassle, and in return you get a reasonable speedup in your Python code, from glacial to tolerable. But nobody who has accepted glacial speed really needs tolerable speed.

It's like... imagine you ride a bike to most places. But now you want to visit Australia. "No problem, here take this racing bike! It's only a little less comfortable!".

So really it's only of interest to people who have foolishly built their entire business on Python and don't have a choice. The only one I know of is Dropbox. I bet they use Pypy.
by ThatPlayer | 2025-07-31 21:09:52+00:00
I think he means self-hosted on your own hardware, rather than requiring their Unifi Protect appliances. You used to be able to with their old Unifi Video .

Unofficially (and therefore not supported), you can just take their binaries and run it on your own hardware. But since they only support their own hardware and it's arm64 hardware, you only get arm64 binaries: https://github.com/dciancu/unifi-protect-unvr-docker-arm64

With them adding generic onvif camera support, I might try it again because the other options aren't amazing either.
by drivers99 | 2025-07-31 21:09:55+00:00
Just to add to that, it does link to

https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 )

which is different than yesterday's link to https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )