MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by superdisk | 2025-08-25 16:03:20+00:00
Kind of funny that this warrants a news article. I've been living in South Africa for the last couple years and this is basically just normal. The municipality just doesn't pay the water bill, so we don't have water half the time. What everyone does is install a giant tank and pump at their house so they can shower when the water is out. How quickly you get used to it...
by Sharlin | 2025-08-25 16:03:34+00:00
In general people don't really think of color in terms of the spectral progression (or the hue wheel), and I don't think that most people intuitively expect a gradient between two colors to pass through another "unrelated" primary or secondary color. The point is somewhat moot though, given that such gradients (like yellow to blue or red to green) are very unnatural anyway.
by ang_cire | 2025-08-25 16:03:58+00:00
> They should do risk assessments to see if their users are at risk of getting harmed, like physical sites and events.

The problem is when one group wants to impose their definition of harm on everyone else, saying that everyone else shouldn't be allowed to be 'harmed' even if they don't consider it as such. In the UK this is not unique to the OSA discussion(see the UK's anti-trans turn), and but it is very relevant.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-25 16:04:17+00:00
> Others are wondering whether to scrap plans to build on their property, leaving home for showers and limiting their toilet flushes.

> The pump failed in June, before the system’s planned overhaul. Townspeople were asked to use the “bare minimum” of water — flush the toilets, but don’t water the lawn.

It blows my mind they are using flushing toilets in the desert. Composting toilets are not some new-fangled technology, and require zero water. You live in a desert! Come on!

> “These men were brought in because I had put them on a water restriction schedule,” Pacheco said in an interview. “They are upset they can’t water their lawns while people can’t have water to actually live.”

Watering lawns? In the desert? How is this not illegal? This feels like the entire climate change "controversy" in a nutshell: people so brazenly into the abuse of their own resources that they will fight to continue wasting them until they no longer exist.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-25 16:04:19+00:00
I’m talking about a deal with TSMC to safeguard their production.

Although, between the EU, Japan and Korea there might be enough of an incentive for China to think twice even without the US involved.

There are two countries in the EU that operate nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. More with conventional subs. Shutting down the sea lanes in that area would be relatively easy for any number of European countries.

One thing that Ukraine (if Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t already) has proven is that it is much harder to win a war for a major power than the posturing would have you believe.
by mwpmaybe | 2025-08-25 16:04:28+00:00
> I bought a geforce RTX 3080 at launch and boy was I surprised at the power draw and heat/noise it pumps out. I wonder why anybody bothers with the 90 series at all.

More VRAM, and NVLink (on some models). You can easily run them at lower power limits. I've run CUDA workloads with my dual 3090s set as low as 170W to hit that sweet spot on the efficiency curve. You can actually go all the way down to 100W!
by fanf2 | 2025-08-25 16:04:35+00:00
> It comes from the 1940's originally

Really?! That’s amazingly early. There were barely even subroutine libraries at that time. I’d love to see an example of "Application Programming Interface" from that time.

(I don’t remember seeing the term until Microsoft started using it when talking about Windows in the 1990s; before then it was things like library functions or supervisor calls - but I didn’t have much experience at that point so I was probably missing some of the more collar-and-tie programmer lingo.)
by theknarf | 2025-08-25 16:05:13+00:00
Suggestion, replace this:

<item> <title>Last Blog Post</title> <description> I am Jack's XML Parser. I consume unclosed tags I kill jack. </description> <link>https://xsltblogdemo.vgr.land/content/posts/20250707.xml</link> <guid isPermaLink="false">post-20250707</guid> <pubDate>Mon, 7 Jul 2025 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <author>vgr.xsltbf@example.com (vgr)</author> </item>

With this:

<post title="Last Blog Post" description="I am Jack's XML Parser. I consume unclosed tags I kill jack." link="https://xsltblogdemo.vgr.land/content/posts/20250707.xml" isPermaLink="false" guid="post-20250707" pubDate="Mon, 7 Jul 2025 13:00:00 +0000" author="vgr.xsltbf@example.com (vgr)"> Content of the post.... </post>
by lazide | 2025-08-25 16:05:22+00:00
It’s messed up anywhere there are periods of sufficiency and insufficiency, no matter what the rules are.

Either ‘first user wins’, like here, or ‘all users get allotment’ - in which case you can be screwed by someone building a new subdivision, or ‘gov’t entity allocates’ in which case corruption/payoffs become the norm, etc, etc.

At least it’s better than ‘shoot anyone using your well without permission’ like used to be the middle eastern standard eh?
by jjangkke | 2025-08-25 16:05:30+00:00
this works in principle. heating dirt to store energy is cheap, the material costs almost nothing and the physics are solid. if the output needed is heat then it can beat batteries by a mile on cost.

the problem is scale. the dirt is free but heaters, piping, controls, permits, and contractors are not. balance of system costs creep up fast and thats where most cheap energy ideas collapse.

the market fit is narrow too. industrial heat or maybe district heating could work. coal plant conversion sounds good in headlines but takes forever to line up politics and utilities. daily cycling wont compete with batteries, only long slow seasonal storage makes sense.

execution decides if this survives. if they can keep real projects near the claimed cost then it has a shot, otherwise it stays as a cool demo.
by YalebB | 2025-08-25 16:05:45+00:00
I recently released v2 of Showcase, the new feature is collaboration!

The goal of this app is to let you store websites, social media posts and online content together in one place, rather than bookmarking content across 10 different apps.

The coolest features are:

- Store together YouTube videos, blog posts, articles, Tweets, Tiktoks, pictures, text etc.

- Collaboration! Add other users to collaborate in a collection with you. Create shared information hubs or plan trips together

- iOS/Android + web app

- Use the Share Extension and save content quickly to never lose any info again

Clarifier: Showcase is more of a permanent storage for your online forms of content, so you can keep information always accessible, rather than needing to scroll through your bookmarks on different apps to find something. Free to use btw!

I'd love to hear any feedback or answer any questions.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-25 16:06:30+00:00
The testing app shows you your video stream in real time, it's relatively tightly zoomed and cropped to your face. This is what leads me to believe that they rely heavily on eye tracking (and sound, they require that your mic be capturing too) to look for suspicious behavior. I'm not sure, because it's never happened to me, but I believe the proctor has the ability to interrupt your test and request that you show them the room.

The requirement is that you remain in place and keep your face on camera for the duration of the test, but depending on the test there's an "unscheduled break" functionality that will let you take an unsupervised break, at the cost of locking you out of all of the questions you have already seen on the test so far.

Pearson OnVUE: https://www.pearsonvue.com/us/en/test-takers/onvue-online-pr...

Microsoft-specific documentation of the online testing process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications...
by hansvm | 2025-08-25 16:06:32+00:00
That's not the issue. Take pure blue wavelengths as an example. They also activate your green cones a little. Increasing the frequency activates the blue cones less and the green cones much less, yielding a higher ratio of blue to green activation, and a new color (violet) that you can't represent with mixed color output exactly aligning with mode receptor wavelengths.
by filoleg | 2025-08-25 16:07:01+00:00
I mean, sure, I never disputed that (because I have zero idea how difficult it is to buy a knife in the UK, and I’ve never even said anything about knives).

My question was about the stricter limits on purchasing alcohol or lottery tickets in the US (which were brought up in the comment I originally replied to), because that was the first time I heard about that. I was curious what those alluded-to limits were, and I still have zero idea.
by charleslmunger | 2025-08-25 16:07:10+00:00
>If you switch to WAL mode, the default behavior is that transactions are durable across application crashes (or SIGKILL or similar) but are not necessarily durable across OS crashes or power failures. Transactions are atomic across OS crashes and power failures. But if you commit a transaction in WAL mode and take a power loss shortly thereafter, the transaction might be rolled back after power is restored.

How is this behavior reconciled with the documentation cited in my comment above? Are the docs just out of date?
by eduction | 2025-08-25 16:07:10+00:00
100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.

So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.
by jerlam | 2025-08-25 16:07:37+00:00
> poorest county

> multistory homes with sweeping decks facing Blanca Peak

> The water crisis has forced older residents to contemplate selling their dream homes, where they had planned to retire

The article's framing seems to waver between "how dare you do this to the poor and starving" and "how dare you do this to the older, richer retirees". I'm sure there are people of all kinds affected by the water issue but it's not as simple as the clickbaity title suggests.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-25 16:07:57+00:00
About 1 in 15 of the pdfs I view in Preview have some sort of "corrupt jpeg" artifacting on the first page. (These are scans of old books, magazines, typically.) There will be a diagonal staircase of green blocks, each what I assume is the DCT 8x8 size going all the way down the page, along with what looks like a missing color channel. The same pdf if opened with Firefox will look fine (so pdfjs gets it right). This has gone on for years, something to do with MacOS's own rendering of pdfs (so trivially switching to another app is unlikely to fix it). I have no idea what this is, I can't even think of a good description with which to google the problem...
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-25 16:08:05+00:00
Just to expand on the “behavior” bit, there’s a truckload of little things that native AppKit apps get you that nothing else will, not even other “native” toolkits like Qt. Things like Option-clicking a disclosure triangle in a nested list expanding/collapsing all children recursively, which one comes to use frequently and misses when absent. Foreign toolkits have spotty coverage of that kind of thing if they implement any at all.

As much as visually fitting in is important, behavior is perhaps bigger. Anybody who’s working on the Mac port of a cross platform toolkit would do well to replicate those little bits.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-08-25 16:08:22+00:00
Reply suggestion:

Thank you for sharing something so personal. I’m truly sorry for your loss — I can’t imagine the depth of that grief.

OS Yamato is not meant to impose forgetting, but rather to invite reflection. Some memories deserve to last forever — and Yamato allows users to mark items they wish to keep. That said, I understand completely that not everyone wants to revisit things often, and that doesn’t make them less precious.

Your perspective is a meaningful reminder that digital systems should be gentle and flexible. I’ll carry that with me as the project evolves. Thank you again.
by dinfinity | 2025-08-25 16:08:25+00:00
It's not terrible, but I definitely wouldn't call it 'huge'. The learned motions are very oldschool in that the performed actions aren't particularly smooth coordinated movements along different degrees of freedom.

The Google robot applying a timing belt presented earlier this year looks much more natural, imho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAFiuEP7iE (albeit still pretty robotic)
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-08-25 16:08:37+00:00
I'm sure it made sense at the time. It was essentially homesteading. Just like you could grab a chuck of untamed land and fence it, plow it, build on it, and then you owned it. Water worked the same way.

Of course this ignored the people who were already living there, but they had the wrong skin color and religion.
by bArray | 2025-08-25 16:10:05+00:00
> One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country.

This is exactly what I'm arguing against. The UK only has two real sources of renewable energy, solar and wind. The articles I linked showed that there were periods where we could barely get the energy we needed - and that included the imports from the EU. There is no real answer currently to storing that energy.

The UK historically had a strategic decentralised reserve of gas which were decommissioned (although articles do not show it). A prior government foolishly turned us into a "on-demand economy" for energy, and we had zero buffer to global prices. Fuels such as gas, diesel, petrol, coal, etc, can be stored for long periods and are very energy dense.

> Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.

Solar panels have a lifetime, the entire fleet will need to be rotated within 10-20 years, but they are currently being purchased directly with tax payer money. The UK has not yet demonstrated that it can incorporate all of these costs at a similar or lower rate. These panels are not manufactured locally, and we are reliant on external countries to produce them. Wind turbines are a similar story.
by wildzzz | 2025-08-25 16:10:06+00:00
I took one semester on astrophysics. The unit they use and the number rounding involved is so different compared to other fields. First, they use centimeters and grams. Why? Because that's what was used before SI units came to be. Why? Because it's a tradition. With this system, you get very large exponents when using scientific notation. The funny thing is that the coefficient of any number isn't terribly important. As long as you were within a factor of 10, that was close enough. Compare that to other engineering fields, if I design a portable device that I say will draw max 2W but actually draws 8W, that's probably going to be a problem. Another funny thing is that the cgs unit system uses ergs instead of joules. 1 erg is the equivalent to a mosquito taking flight yet we use this for calculating the energy of a star???

In the abstract, they use the unit erg s^-1 Hz^-1. In other RF fields, we would use dBm/Hz which is a measure of power spectral density. 10^29 erg s^-1 Hz^-1 is equivalent to 260dBm/Hz.
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-08-25 16:10:58+00:00
A bit unrelated, but I have the same soldering helper as in the post. It's called Omnifixo (I found out about it from a YouTube video (Norm from Tested)). I was initially skeptical, but it's made soldering a whole lot easier - highly recommended.

I've done some mouse PCB mods myself (swapping dead switches mainly). My biggest annoyance is resoldering through-hole components - unfortunately aftermarket PCBs for mice are quite rare, and my favorite mouse isn't all that popular in the "mouse community".
by mwpmaybe | 2025-08-25 16:11:03+00:00
> Raspberry 5 is a dud

cf. the Pi 4: 2–3X CPU performance, full 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports, a PCIe Gen2 x1 connector, dual 4-lane MIPI connectors, support for A2-class SD cards, an integrated RTC...

A dud?? What's the issue? The price?
by tialaramex | 2025-08-25 16:11:15+00:00
> Wat? Where did you get that?

The talk you're so excited about actually shows this asymptote. In reality a GC doesn't actually want zero garbage because we're trading away RAM to get better performance. So they don't go there, but it ought to have pulled you up short when you thought you could apply this understanding to an entirely unrelated paradigm.

Hence the V2 comparison. So long as you're thinking about those solid fuel toy rockets the V2 makes no sense, such a thing can't possibly work. But of course the V2 wasn't a solid fuel rocket at all and it works just fine. Rust isn't a garbage collected language and it works just fine.

GC is very good for not caring about who owns anything. This can lead to amusing design goofs (e.g. the for-each bug in C# until C# 5) but it also frees programmers who might otherwise spend all their time worrying about ownership to do something useful which is great. However it really isn't the panacea you seem to have imagined though at least it is more widely applicable than arenas.

> it's worth thinking about the fact that the minimal amount of RAM per core on most machines these days is high.

Like I said, this means you are less likely to value the non-GC approach when you're small. You can put twice as much RAM in the server for $50 so you do that, you do not hire a Rust programmer to make the software fit.

But at scale the other side matters - not the minimum but the maximum, and so whereas doubling from 16GB RAM to 32GB RAM was very cheap, doubling from 16 servers to 32 servers because they're full means paying twice as much, both as capital expenditure and in many cases operationally.

> I say it's evidence

I didn't see any evidence. Where is the evidence? All I saw was the usual perfect market stuff where you claim that if it worked then they'd have already completed it by some unspecified prior time, in contrast to the fact I mentioned that they've hired people to do it. I think facts are evidence and the perfect market fallacy is just a fallacy.
by joshmlewis | 2025-08-25 16:11:19+00:00
One of the biggest nuggets people need to take away from this:

> At one point we tried “improving” the prompt with Claude’s help. It ballooned to 1,500 words. The agent immediately got slower and dumber. We went back to 103 words and it was back on track.

Keep your prompts / agent instructions short. Focus on the wide view, not specifics.
by 15155 | 2025-08-25 16:11:20+00:00
> That's not something you or anyone else could predict.

You're right: nobody can possibly predict how a nation with no blue water navy, and zero relevant (naval or otherwise) combat experience (ever) might fare against the most expensive, trained, veteran naval combat force in the world - backed by the world's two largest and most expensive, trained, veteran air forces (USAF, USN).

> This would immediately cause a death toll in the millions and a nuclear response would follow.

This presumes that the United States would ever allow a blockade to happen to begin with. The US Navy goes where it wants.
by mh- | 2025-08-25 16:11:35+00:00
Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.)

Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.
Show HN: prompttest – pytest for LLMs
by decodingchris | 2025-08-25 16:12:21+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with LLMs lately and kept running into the same problem:

Every time I tweaked a prompt, I had to rerun a bunch of test cases manually and eyeball the results.

It felt like writing code without unit tests.

Existing tools I found were either:

- Full frameworks where you write evaluators in Python.

- Big platforms expanding into monitoring/security.

I wanted something simpler: a fast CLI that just tests prompts.

So I built prompttest, a pytest-like workflow for LLMs:

- You define a prompt in a .txt file with `{variables}`.

- You write test cases in .yml, with plain-English criteria.

- You run prompttest to see clear pass/fail results in your terminal.

The core idea is that your "assertion" is just English.

Example:

> The response must be polite and address the user by name.

Then a model grades the output for you.

This gives a safety net — you can refactor prompts and instantly see regressions.

The project is still early.

It runs on OpenRouter, so you can test against many models (including free ones) with one API key.

Would love feedback, ideas, or use-cases you’d want supported.

GitHub: https://github.com/decodingchris/prompttest
by jazzyjackson | 2025-08-25 16:12:23+00:00
If the AI isn't given access to its own power breakers it will never be a problem to turn off an AI. The question is, why is the 'alignment' of the model what all the safety research is going into, and not, how do we make sure the power breakers are not accessible over the internet by bad actors, whether they be human OR ai ?

The parent is not "reducing" the issue to cybersecurity - they are saying that actual security is being ignored to focus on sci fi scare tactics so they can get in front of congress and say "we need to do this before the chinese get to it, regulating our industry is putting americans' in harms way"
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-25 16:12:32+00:00
That's fine, but were you terrified? Scared and having a panic attack and clutching your purse? Were you worried you ended up in "Silent Hill" like the author of this sensationalized piece?

I'm guessing like any unbiased person you just noticed this is a deep tunnel and that's interesting on its own and can be written about and expressed non-sensationally and without Matrix-like filters on photos.

Imagine instead of exoticizing and orientalizing this, we had an article about its unique architecture style, who the architects were, why it is so deep, quotes from the people there, a comprehensive history, information about the surrounding town and region, etc. Its bothersome to me that we're regerssing back to the world of grifters and sensationalists. I feel like the popularity of Atlas Obscura-style stuff is a sad reflection of the times we're in. We collectively decided facts, respect, diversity, respecting other cultures, challenge, and merit are put on the backburner for sensationalism, ego pleasing, rent-seeking, mindlessness, intellectual dishonesty, and engaging in popular stereotypes.
by nine_k | 2025-08-25 16:12:53+00:00
I think it's impossible to do an incremental update in an arbitrary case. Imagine an m-view based on a query that selects top 100 largest purchases during last 30 days on an e-commerce site. Or, worse, a query that selects the largest subtree of followers on a social network site.

Only certain kinds of conditions, such as a rolling window over a timestamp field, seem amenable to efficient incremental updates. What am I missing?