MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alecco | 2025-08-15 12:43:25+00:00
The Iberian peninsula blackout was caused by poor planning and over-subsidizing solar. When there's a lot of sunlight and not much demand the prices fall drastically so nuclear plants were turned off to stop losing money. The problem is nuclear energy works as a sort of pacemaker for the whole grid. For months there were warnings of wild fluctuations but the Socialist coalition government ignored them. They had appointed a politician with good optics (a rabid "green"/feminist) to manage the grid who just doubled down on policy until the blackout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

And France might be good today but it is playing with disaster with very old nuclear plants.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long...

> Amortize France's 56 existing nuclear reactors as much as possible – which are 37 years old on average currently – is part of EDF's strategy. The highly-indebted company, which is in the process of becoming 100% state-owned again, intends to "make the best use" of its "industrial heritage," Lewandowski also told Le Monde.

IMHO the whole EU should do an overhaul and make a reasonable plan to have a decent and stable grid. Some of the best companies and universities for nuclear power are in Europe! The continent should get rid of the rabid "greens". But sadly they always manage to stay in power, even if they get less than 20%! In left-wing coalitions like Spain and France they mark the agenda. And Germany's new "center-right" government needs the "greens" so they have a lot more power than they should. They talk about a plan and nuclear but there's zero funding. It's very sad.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-15 12:43:26+00:00
> I was also shocked ... glazed over eyes and people not understanding ... apparently it's just normal to sign documents without reading them.

And this is why it's so common.

It seems the only options are (1) just swallow the whole bottle of crazy pills and accept that your insane for caring about contracts, or (2) throw your morals in the trash and exploit the stupid people who don't read contracts.

I've seen this myself in multiple places I've worked. I mention parts of the employment contract that bother me and co-workers look at me weird and say "mine didn't have that". Bro, I guarantee your contract said the same thing, but you didn't read it.

And sometimes I can't really blame people. It's really stressful and aggravating to read an employment contract; a great way to start a existential crisis.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what an employment contract says, because "those with power can screw up your life if they really want to" remains the same no matter what the employment contract says.

A company can always have their legal department hound you to the ends of the Earth, forcing you to spend a few hundred thousand dollars defending yourself, and yeah, you might win in the end, and the company will say "our bad, lol", but you're still out a few hundred thousand dollars.

So in a way, what does it matter if a company can fine you a few thousand dollars. They can do the same by abusing our legal system against any person.
Show HN: Paddler – open-source LLMOps platform for hosting AI in your own infra
by mzagaj | 2025-08-15 12:43:50+00:00
We recently did a major rework of Paddler (pretty much rewrote the llama-server from llama.cpp to make it distributed and scalable). It also supports live model swapping, custom chat templates, and other useful stuff.
by cameron_b | 2025-08-15 12:44:46+00:00
The article's assertion is specifically "open hardware" 3d printing, facing patent challenges [ other parties patenting designs released as "open" to the community ] especially in China, open hardware designers can't get their work manufactured in China ( in this very example, but similarly in any other country where the patents are filed ) or imported/exported because they become Infringing materials of the patents filed by other parties who have copied their designs.

Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.
by hyperman1 | 2025-08-15 12:44:48+00:00
Very vague story comming up: I've seen a group of companies and ngos working on a scientific project. On itself, it was a temporary setup, but it also gave everyone an opportunity behind the scenes to test each others tools and capacity without making things too official. People were talking about building new labs and offices in our town. The local government got involved, mainly to provide some trust and stability guarantees.

Then a politician from the national level found out. She coopted the government communication channel, made herself the central person, and backstabbed everyone. We had some very rough weeks ensuring everyone we were just as surprised as them.

Crucially, the politician did not know about the testing capacity aspect, so there was nothing in the schedule allowing for it, even if it was the most important aspect.

In the end, she got a few glowing press releases, and an estimated 100ish jobs evaporated overnight and went to another country. I've learned a lot of politics in that episode and hate all of them.
by teddyh | 2025-08-15 12:44:56+00:00
I grant you that it’s not clear-cut, but nowhere in the book (that I can find) is Gollum described as being pale, or even lightly colored (except his eyes). Instead, Gollum is frequently, as I showed, described as being “black” in color. He is also being misidentified as an Orc, which are similarily described.
Ask HN: What are your favorite obscure but brilliant C/C++ libraries?
by Forgret | 2025-08-15 12:45:09+00:00
I’ve been exploring C and C++ libraries lately and realized there are so many hidden gems out there that rarely get mentioned.

What are your favorite lesser-known libraries — ones that you think more people should know about? They could be tiny, single-header utilities, niche domain tools, or just something that made you go “wow” when you found it.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-15 12:45:19+00:00
> […] By all definitions of an animal, nothing a human does is immoral.

> So why are we immoral then?

On what do you base the idea that morality exists? (If you reject the supernatural.) If there is nothing more but the natural world, then what does it matter how the molecules that make it up are arrange (or act)? Why should one arrangement of molecules be determined to be better or good(er) than another?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
by numpad0 | 2025-08-15 12:45:43+00:00
Koreans don't seem entirely fine to me, but besides, Japanese pronunciation is actually more aggressively simplified than the other two CJK languages during Edo era that numbers of homophone is out of control.

There are as many as 50 homophones for koushou due to this, for example[1]. Communication by phonetic transcripts alone just isn't going to work.

1: https://togetter.com/li/2380657?page=2
by haswell | 2025-08-15 12:45:57+00:00
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to frame this as a situation no different than “paying market rate”.

Whether you like this or not, the practice of hiring employees specifically to work on the same thing elsewhere or to drain a company of its talent - is called poaching.

It’s often legal, but can be controversial especially when it’s a behemoth raiding smaller shops.

You seem to be offended by the word itself, but it’s just a useful descriptor to differentiate between different types of hiring scenarios.

I’ve been poached before, and it worked out great for me.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-15 12:47:01+00:00
Better question: Why use Adolf Hitler and homicide as examples at all? You don't need gross or emotional misalignment to get the point across.

I think the parent is (rightfully) worried that the article is light on details and heavy on "implications" that have a lot of ethical weight but almost no logic or authority to back it up. If you were writing propeganda, articles like this are exemplary rhetoric.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-08-15 12:47:25+00:00
I remember Silverlight being advertised as a cross-platform solution (in small print: works on all supported Microsoft(R) Windows™ platforms!). To this day there are things written for Electron which are „cross-platform” in the sense that Windows and macOS are supported, but none of Linux or *BSD.

Thus I have some warm fuzzies when something new is cross-platform, but not on Windows. (But hey I heard WSL supports Wayland?) Even more warm fuzzies if Windows users come to whine about availability. Happy to have lived to see this turning of tables come.

I’m not a good person, I guess.
by taylodl | 2025-08-15 12:47:44+00:00
Okay. I've been developing software for 40 years now. Frameworks became a thing a little over 30 years ago. Industry productivity soared - so much so that that was our last big productivity boost in the industry.

There are a myriad of other benefits from using frameworks, so many in fact that to me it's a red flag when someone advocates against them.

With regards to AI, like I said in my original comment it's a tool, not a panacea. Experienced software tradesmen are learning how to effectively wield AI - hint: it's not for writing all your code. I'm kind of excited because we could be on the verge of another great productivity boost like we experienced 30 years ago when we adopted frameworks.
by decimalenough | 2025-08-15 12:47:50+00:00
The UK does not need more cities. In fact, like most of the industrialized world, their second-tier and third-tier cities are suffering since the entire economy and population are both getting inexorably pulled into London. This includes the planned cities ("new towns") that tried and largely failed to do exactly what you suggest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
by mettamage | 2025-08-15 12:47:52+00:00
> About happiness in life, that only happens when the needs of the body and the needs of the soul are satisfied. Only then we can talk about happiness and piece of mind. Virtually no amount of Buddhist intention can overcome a hungry body and an empty soul.

Could you elaborate on empty soul? It's easy to think what is meant by empty body (no food, water or oxygen). But one could, for example, believe that any amount of Buddhist intention is fulfilling for the soul?

But you presume that's not the case. Maybe you mean something different with soul than I do. So I'm curious on how you'd elaborate on it.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-15 12:47:53+00:00
The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions. Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
by jeswin | 2025-08-15 12:48:01+00:00
> Spent two hours trying to get an llm to implement a filescan skip a specific directory

There's a large variance in outcomes depending on the prompt, and the process. I've gotten it to do things which are harder than a filescan with a skipped directory - without too much trouble.

Add:

> Llms are really good at template tasks, writing tests, boilerplate etc.

If I have to stretch the definition of boilerplate to what's at the edge of a modern LLM's comprehension, I would say that 50% of software is some sort of boilerplate.
by solarkraft | 2025-08-15 12:48:06+00:00
Seems like they could’ve avoided a lot of the failure with a normal sponsorship.

What they attempted here seems akin to a “mega-sponsorship” with more baggage than they were prepares for.

I don’t think taking over/contributing to an OSS project is a bad marketing move at all, but typically you’d contribute the company’s resources and expertise to make it worth it.

Hiring the project lead is definitely a good step, but the timing feels off. Something that would feel more natural to me:

Sponsorship -> Hire the guy -> Transfer branding

All with some time in between.

They way it feels less like a hostile takeover, which users have been trained to quickly jump ship when happening.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-15 12:48:43+00:00
> If you were to work for yourself and publish your research, people might do bad things with it anyway.

There's a whole world of difference between someone using your work in a way that you find objectionable and volunteering to accept a paycheck doing work for a company that you know will be using the work they're paying for in a way that you find objectionable.

This is why I have to assume that anybody working for a company is fine with what that company does.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-15 12:48:57+00:00
So, with all the detailed breakdowns about the failures of platform services in this htread, and the (well justified) applause for pirating, do any of you feel like sharing your favorite/most ample pirate content services for shows and movies.

I'll start: Piratebay. Oldie but still good for most of the limited tv show and movie watching I do. I get the feeling there's a lot more out there though.
by yagizdegirmenci | 2025-08-15 12:48:59+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm in the mobile gaming industry for last ~5 years, I'm not a Unity dev, my work is on Unity is mostly Business Intelligence (AdTech-Marketing Tech) like client side-ML, analytics, live-ops, segmentation etc.

I wasn't expecting to see UnityMCP in the article, so I'm kinda surprised.

When MCP's started popping up, MCP for Unity was the first thing I searched for, I've used it, when it became unmaintained (maybe for a 1-2 months?) I forked it, made a few nice updates, even as a someone that used the project I didn't realized the transition of the repository!

I know hundreds of game devs, so let me share my perspective.

- Your target audience is not HN people, I'm pretty sure %80 of them doesn't even know what MCP is. - I use Cursor, %99 of game devs are using Rider, MCP tooling and integrations around it not mature enough to gain their attention yet.

- Game devs and their leads are (mostly) dinosaurs that looks skeptical using AI at work, like when I was in Rovio, you weren't allowed to use tools like, Claude, Cursor, OpenAI etc.

- I'm not surprised acquisition of an OSS project didn't get coverage on media.

Would I use it as someone who only knows the basics of Unity Editor?

- Maybe.

Do I think someone who works as a Game dev and knows Unity really well and would use it?

- Probably not. (Note: at the office right now, asked a few game dev's and they were like, naaah)

- - - - -

Your product looks cool, having something that directly works inside Unity is really neat but I don't think it would be the moat.

I think there is so much potential, if you can build a really good agent, think like Manus for Unity, that works directly in Unity and making the MCP related optional because it would be nice to have, Unity Editor part is the easiest part for them.

Ask this, would it be useful for a game developer working in a company like Scopely, Zynga, Dream Games etc?
Show HN: I built a free keyword research tool with AI suggestions
by thisismehrab | 2025-08-15 12:49:14+00:00
I built a keyword research tool to help find low-difficulty keywords without paying $100+ a month for tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.

It uses data from one of the big-name SEO platforms, so the metrics (search volume, difficulty, CPC) are accurate. You can:

1. Enter your own keywords to get metrics

2. Use the AI feature to generate new keyword ideas from a seed topic

It’s part of the SaaS I’m developing, but I wanted to make it free before launching our full product to get some real feedback.

love to hear your thoughts on the tool’s accuracy, ease of use, and any features you think would make it better.
by jart | 2025-08-15 12:49:53+00:00
Steve Wozniak is doing a great job funding other people's retirements. Half of all revenue collected by US federal govt in 2024 (totaling $2565 billion) was given to retirees. Mostly middle class and government retirees. That's $1500b for social security, $865b for medicare, $128b for retired feds, and $72b for retired military.
by crinkly | 2025-08-15 12:49:56+00:00
I think you're overcomplicating it. Having actually worked for UK gov directly with politicians, they are mostly either trying not to look bad but way out of their depth in stuff and being propped up by civil service.

In that circumstance they'd stay out of it and blame it on the citizens while trying to get favour with Vance some other way.

Spend a few months in Azerbaijan if you want to experience a police state. I have :)
by floppyd | 2025-08-15 12:50:00+00:00
This is a very weird sounding pretense. Why does it matter if Africa in particular is bigger on the map compared to other countries and continents? How does area matter in general? It's not like we can infer anything useful from area comparisons. Also the map that is proposed (with the kinda-oval shape) is a map that I've seen a lot in school right next to now more common Mercator, and I'm from now here close to Africa.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-15 12:50:00+00:00
> native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes.

Don't try to teach children to read this way, though: it's a high-level technique that comes with practice and familiarity, with near-instant fallback to lower-level techniques as appropriate, or the resort of dyslexics who cannot read any other way. Teaching children to use the approaches used by struggling readers will tend to produce more struggling readers than necessary.
by ajd555 | 2025-08-15 12:50:02+00:00
Great read, I didn't know about the Swiss approach to infrastructure projects, but I like it. In a sense, it's how successful networks are built: slowly, but steadily. I'm reminded of the Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen, where he states that starting at a smaller scale, you'll get a small network with more engagement that you can sustainably grow over time, whereas large companies that roll out a networked project in a big bang (Google+, anyone?) can dramatically fail. Very insightful and I look forward to applying this in NYC logistics!
by JCM9 | 2025-08-15 12:50:13+00:00
The unit economics of these models and APIs are really ugly. Those saying they are not losing money on inference likely are only doing so when making up funky non-GAAP accounting thinking. It’s the old “we’re making money when you ignore all the places we’re spending money” argument.

When you factor in the R&D costs required to make these models and the very limited lifespan of a model (and thus extremely high capital investment depreciation rate) the numbers are pretty nasty.
by nisegami | 2025-08-15 12:50:27+00:00
Much like democracy being ill-suited to combat climate change, capitalism seems ill-suited to deal with a long-horizon problem like this. It doesn't matter if you will be unable to find workers in a decade or two when your KPI is headcount reduction and it's evaluated quarterly, or when your bonus as an executive depends on the stock price over a given year.

One of the only arguments that hit for me against AI art was exactly this one. How will we get skilled human artists to handle the 20% of use cases AI art may not be suitable for when they never had the chance to hone their skills by working on the 80%?
by lazide | 2025-08-15 12:50:40+00:00
Was the 10GB video file never released anywhere and is stored in a now bit rotted old HD in your basement?

Reasonable puzzles can be worked out (albeit maybe with a lot of work) with information provided by the puzzle or available somewhere in the environment.

Unreasonable puzzles (like some old Sierra games cough) are impossible without secret inside knowledge by the puzzle maker and/or brute force. And sometimes not even with brute force.

The hash/video example might just be an Easter egg hunt requiring looking across a wide set of videos (somewhat reasonable but boring), or completely unreasonable depending on circumstances.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-15 12:50:44+00:00
That form of migration is happening all over the world right now.

Virginia opossums, traditionally associated with the deep south, are now routinely spotted around Toronto, and are moving even further north. Armadillos, though still shy of the Canadian border, have crossed the Ohio River. American alligators, long stopped around Cape Hatteras, are now spotted in the tidal creeks of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. [1] Lobsters are moving north to the Canadian Maritimes from New England, and the blue crabs of Chesapeake Bay are filling the niches they're leaving behind.

It's much the same way in Europe. The European praying mantis used to be a hot-climate central Italian and Balkan insect. Now it's routinely spotted in Germany, has been found as far north as Latvia, and I found one in the usually-chilly Slovenian mountains just the other day!

Wherever you are on the map, look at the climate and ecosystem a few hundred miles south. That's likely where things are heading for you; it's a safe bet that the species that thrive there are the ones that are going to be best adapted to where you live in the second half of the 21st century.

[1] - https://defenders.org/blog/2023/12/why-we-almost-said-see-yo...
by dev0001 | 2025-08-15 12:51:24+00:00
> the hate towards people who actually made the web happen (Smaug, Anne, Emilo, etc…)

The vast majority of comments on https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 are polite and respectful.

Also, "Smaug, Anne, Emilo" did not "make the web happen." They have influenced how the web has developed, in particular favouring functionality and uses that are dependent on Javascript, and neglecting to ensure parity of opportunity for other approaches to flourish.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-15 12:51:31+00:00
That's a matter of perspective. Sure, the keyboard could know the labels printed on it and send the proper key, and you could see it as "change my labels, change my keyboard's understanding of the labels and send the right thing".

Or, you could see it as "the keyboard is an input device with about a hundred possible actors, that have something printed on them to help the user distinguish". An input device's function —even if it is a keyboard— is being an input device, not necessarily inputting letters or keys. If I want to map the key labeled "U" to bring up the second last terminal window, that's valid. Not being able to input "U" now is my problem to solve. And a programmable keyboard, as programmable as it might be, can never cover the undefined set of things users around the world would want to make some keys do. So you'd have to split it in two remapping operations. But why? It's added complexity and confusion.

In your specific case, my position (which, yes, because it's not how things work in USB/BT/…, is somewhat meaningless) is that there should be a function where the keyboard reports both the labels on its keys as well as the physical layout. (And then keypresses relative/in reference to that.)

And the thing that kinda drives my position home is an annoyance a lot of German (QWERTZ) and French (AZERTY) people know: Game inputs quite commonly use WASD layouts, and those get warbled quite a bit. As they would (even worse) on your reprogrammed Colemak layout.

P.S.: your "ergonomics" and "use a very different layout" points seem to have misunderstood my position/argument. I'm saying remapping keys / different layouts should be a general OS/software function, not something the keyboard does in its microcontroller. I'm entirely on board with "fancy" layouts.