MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-24 15:50:03+00:00
A lot of people on this thread don’t seem to realize that solar and wind now work fine without government subsidies. The Biden-era subsidies have been about accelerating decarbonization, not about propping up the market.

If you let the market choose, it would choose a lot of wind and solar.

> Despite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies).

So the admin just needs to get out of the alway and let the market solve this problem. Not try to centrally manage the economy like the Soviet Union.

1 - https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
by derbOac | 2025-08-24 15:50:21+00:00
Whatever cost it is, I highly doubt it's cheaper to cancel projects that are well underway without recouping any benefits at all, in some cases over the objections of local customers, without an alternative in place with environmental and financial analysis to support it.

Otherwise you're just burning money without an alternative to meet increasing demand (which is likely why costs are increasing and why the additional supply is being built).
by davnicwil | 2025-08-24 15:50:46+00:00
Definitely true. In modern times we confuse understanding things with just being used to them.

I'm typing this on a smartphone. I don't conciously think of it as my "magic pane of glass" like the cliched Roman might but what's actually going on when I tap this screen is as much a mystery to me as it would be to them, at least beyond a few high-level concepts which it also wouldn't take all that much time to explain.

Every day we ride atop an unfathomable stack of abstractions and shouldn't take as much subconcious credit for this as we do. As a civilisation yes you might say we're smarter, but as individuals definitely not.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 15:51:05+00:00
I think what I was getting at, is the power this homoiconicity gives you when combined with macros, and I'm not sure how template strings would help with either. Say you want to have a function that receives the code passed into it, instead of whatever the code evaluated to return, could I somehow achieve that with AST and/or template strings in Python?

Say I want `what-code(1 + 1)` to receive `1 + 1` as the argument, not `2`, would either of those things let me do that? At a glance, and without diving deeper, the Ast module could make it so `what-code("1 + 1")` would let the function parse the string and get an Ast, which we could do stuff with, but it pretty much ends at that and is non-ideal for many reasons.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-24 15:51:49+00:00
This is inference time scaling where as it tries to generate a sample which through logprobs "looks wrong" it early cutsoff. It has a vLLM implementation which is easy to install and use. You can apply the technique to some 4bit model 7b model on your old laptop tier nvidia GPU easily.

Well, the folks on this website think installing vLLM (pip install vLLM...) is hard and that ollama - a far slower and shittier inference engine - is better. Enormous damage has been done to the hobbyist LLM ecosystem due to folks not knowing what tools work on what platform.

The one exception is for mac peasants where llama.cpp is still probably the best implementation, but if you have nvidia and you're not using sglang or vLLM, you're doing it wrong.

But this is of ENORMOUS use for folks who want to run tiny models at home. Go to bed wake up with a K=512 solution answer to your problem.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-24 15:52:09+00:00
> lot of people on this thread don’t seem to realize that solar and wind now work fine without government subsidies

This isn’t about subsidies. Orsted, for example, is being blocked on national security grounds using environmental regulation [1].

Power producers are in on a fix.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
by charcircuit | 2025-08-24 15:52:38+00:00
Why did summarizing a web page need access to so many browser functions? How does scanning the user's emails without confirmation result in being able to provide a better summary? It seems way to risky to do.

Edit: From the blog post for possible regulations.

>The browser should distinguish between user instructions and website content

>The model should check user-alignment for tasks

These will never work. It's embarrassing that these are even included, considering how models are always instantly jailbroken the moment people get access to them.
by mlyle | 2025-08-24 15:52:41+00:00
I think there's surely a little bit of a middle ground?

Subsidizing and protecting local production has a cost: there are gains from trade and operating less efficiently makes everyone's standard of living goes down.

But you don't need to go 100% into protectionism. You can ensure that you have enough domestic industry to

- better weather changes and disruptions

- have a starting knowledge and capital base to use to ramp up production if you have to.

Just having a few percent of domestic demand for advanced ICs covered by local production is enough to make the worst international shocks much softer. Critical needs can still get filled. So a certain amount of subsidy can make sense.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-24 15:52:50+00:00
It’s basic expense fraud.

If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.

Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.

These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.
Show HN: Turn your photos into pencil art – in just a few prompts
by samuelaidoo45 | 2025-08-24 15:52:50+00:00
I built a small tool that lets you transform any photo into realistic pencil drawings using AI — no Photoshop skills required.

The idea came from seeing how many people love hand-drawn portraits but don’t have the time (or budget) to commission an artist. With this, you can upload a photo, type a simple prompt, and get back a graphite-style pencil sketch in seconds.

How it works:

Pick a clear photo (face, pet, or object).

Enter a prompt like: “Create a realistic pencil sketch of this in traditional graphite style.”

The AI generates a pencil drawing with shading and detail that looks hand-drawn.

You can experiment with different styles (softer shading, cross-hatching, high-contrast, etc.) to get unique results.

Try it here: https://pencil-me-ai-guide.vercel.app
by pas | 2025-08-24 15:53:02+00:00
thanks! very interesting!

ah, and now I understand what the hell people mean when they put dots on coordinate! (but they are obviously wrong they should use the flying point from Catalan :)

... hm, so this issue is easily more than 20 years old. and since then there's no solution (or the German libraries consider the problem "solved" and ... no one else is making proposals to the WG about this nowadays)?

also, technically - since there are already more than 150K allocated code points - adding a different combining mark seems the correct way to do, right?

or it's now universally accepted that people who want to type ambigüité need to remember to type U+034F before the ü? (... or, of course it's up to their editor/typesetter software to offer this distinction)

regarding the Han unification, is there some kind of effort to "fix" that? (adding language-start language-end markers perhaps? or virtual code points for languages to avoid the need for searching strings for the being-end markers?)
by jraph | 2025-08-24 15:53:39+00:00
Early stuff was designed in a network of trusty organizations (universities, labs...). Security wasn't much a concern but it was reasonable given the setting in which it was designed.

This AI stuff? No excuse, it should have been designed with security and privacy in mind given the setting in which it's born. The conditions changed. The threat model is not the same. And this is well known.

Security is hard, so there's some excuse, but it is reasonable to expect basic levels.
by master_crab | 2025-08-24 15:53:44+00:00
This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but most (really all) employees are in it for money. So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning. That’s why you implement rules.

If you start trying to tease apart the motivations people have even if they are following those rules, you are going to end up more paranoid than Stalin.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 15:54:05+00:00
Isn't the opening paragraph perfectly fine as it is? It was the first thing I read and I feel like I understand exactly what it is:

> Seed is an interactive software environment. With it you can create and use computer programs in many ways. It is based on the Common Lisp language and runs inside the Web browser, allowing you to build software on a local or remote computer system, and it can present programs and their output using a wide variety of display modes.

An environment for creating programs, that you can use locally or remotely, and it can show programs and data in various ways.
by zahlman | 2025-08-24 15:54:12+00:00
To save a click:

> The unusual name and the missile's original color — a bright pink tip where the warhead is housed — were an internal company joke on the unheralded role of women in the male-dominated world of weapons and war.

> “Our first missiles were pink; they passed all the tests pink, but then we had to change color because of military camouflage requirements. But the woman in charge of production is still there. Women's touch in missiles,” Terekh said.

> The Flamingo could pose some real problems for macho Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

> "I would say there is some sort of big dick energy moment. You don’t need a scary name for a missile that can fly 3,000 kilometers," Terekh said of the missile's claimed range. "The main goal is for a missile to be effective.”

This is not Politico's original headline, BTW.
by stevenbedrick | 2025-08-24 15:54:54+00:00
Two points. First, the danger is very real, as the specific administrative mechanism for those final determinations involves political appointees outside of the regular scientific or program review processes, so who knows what they will or won’t understand or what sort of priorities they’ll be working off of.

Second, the programs you’re referring to (“diversity” meaning only people with the right skin color etc.) used a very clear and well-defined model of “under-represented minority” that (in addition to members of this or that minority racial or ethnic group) included women, people from rural zip codes, people who were the first in their families to go to college, people who grew up on free/reduced lunch, and a bunch of other categories that have long been known to be under-represented in science. This definition has been around for decades and there’s been a ton of research about the importance and efficacy of these kinds of programs, some of which are training programs to try and diversify the incoming pipeline of scientists, and some of which were additional funding pools to try and address the very, very, very well-documented gap in early career funding awarded to URM scientists. Characterizing it as just being about skin color is simply inaccurate.

Some of the other “DEI” research that has been terminated consists of projects looking at health issues that are specific to certain populations; the NIH has officially said that health disparities research is still allowed but we are all scratching our heads trying to figure out how to write grants for it that don’t run afoul of the current “rules” which are frankly nonsensical and very “vibe” based so it’s hard to know what will and what won’t be allowed. Almost like they don’t want us to bother trying…
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-24 15:54:56+00:00
I'm not sure I'd see things the same way. Lot of work went into it; even if the final was LLMed. The result is quite readable.

The authors seem to be Chinese, and may not be that confident in their English. I suspect that we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of stuff, as time goes on.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-24 15:55:39+00:00
Yes, and I wonder how many "5 year" project estimates, even for well understood engineering endeavors, end up being accurate to within 50% (obviously overruns are more common then the opposite)?

I took his "50% 5-year" estimate as essentially a project estimate for something semi-concrete they are working towards. That sort of timeline and confidence level doesn't seem to allow for a whole lot of unknowns and open-ended research problems to be solved, but OTOH who knows if he is giving his true opinion, or where those numbers came from.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-24 15:56:46+00:00
> This might come as a bit of a surprise to you

> So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning.

I’m not “surprised” nor “astonished” nor do you need to be “concerned” for me. That’s unnecessarily condescending.

I’m simply explaining how these generous policies come to and end through abuse.

You are making a point in favor of these policies: Many will see an opportunity for abuse and take it, so employers become more strict.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-24 15:57:15+00:00
That’s like claiming that Amazon is a bad investment because they weren’t reliably profitable until 2015 and only had their first profitable year in 2003. The part you’d be missing is that they were reinvesting all their profits into the revenue growth machine. These past few years is actually the switchover point for Uber when growth seems to have leveled off more.

It’ll take them 7 years to make it back and keep generating for even longer. Whether or not self driving cars kills Uber will depend on how well or poorly they’ve diversified their business model.

But headwinds and risks are true of any business. You’re missing the larger point I’m making that investors and business people frequently do loss leading as a tactic to kill off competitors and once the competitors are gone they can milk the market. Whether or not it’s an effective strategy doesn’t matter - can companies are not coming back no matter what happens to Uber. Similarly, local industries that China kills won’t come back no matter what happens with China.

Also as a final nit - the data I’ve looked up suggests they only lost 16B since founding. This halves the payback time to a few years and then every year after that is many billions in profit.
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-24 15:58:16+00:00
When I used the word illusion, I meant the illusion of a self, at least a singular cohesive one as you are pointing out. It is an illusion with both utility and costs. Most animals don't seem to have meta cognitive processes that would give rise to such an illusion, and the ones that do are all social. Some of them have remarkably few synapses. Corvids for instance, we are rapidly approaching models the size of their brains and our models have no need for anything but linguistic processing, the visual and tactile processing burdens are quite large. An LLM is not like the models Corvids use, but given the flexibility to change it's own weights permanently, plasticity could have it adapt to unintended purposes, like someone with brain damage learning to use a different section of their brain to perform a task it wasn't structured for (though less efficiently).
by d4mi3n | 2025-08-24 15:58:16+00:00
This is disingenuous but soft-fraud is not a term I’d use for it. Fraud is a legal term. You either commit fraud or you do not. There is no “maybe” fraud—you comply with a policy or law or you don’t.

As you mentioned, setting policy that isn’t abused is hard. But abuse isn’t fraud—it’s abuse—and abuse is its own rabbit hole that covers a lot of these maladaptive behaviors you are describing.
by oceanhaiyang | 2025-08-24 15:58:16+00:00
I read they either dump it into a local river while monitoring it or back to water treatment plant. Some datacenters have started reusing water but for some reason using it more than once is not appealing. Definitely the biggest problem is it’s not always a closed system and dumping it into a river potentially damages the river and makes the area lose their water. A percentage of the water is also lost via evaporation.

Source: https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/
by xmichael909 | 2025-08-24 15:58:18+00:00
Our company just put this out, full MoQ support for MediaMTX with 200-300ms latency - demo at https://moq.wink.co/moq-player.html

GitHub: https://github.com/winkmichael/mediamtx-moq

We implemented both WebTransport (for browsers) and native QUIC (for server-to-server) after discovering browsers block raw QUIC. Works today in Chrome/Edge, integrates with existing RTMP/RTSP streams in MediaMTX.
by scared_together | 2025-08-24 15:59:13+00:00
I thought that incognito mode in Chrome[0] and private mode in Firefox[1] already disables extensions by default.

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769?hl...

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-brow...
by masklinn | 2025-08-24 15:59:18+00:00
Belgium legislated the phase out of nuclear in 2003 due 2025, opting to neither replace nor postpone closure of nor refurbish its at the time 7 reactors as their lifetimes ran out.

Then it had to postpone the closure of at least two reactors following the second invasion of Ukraine, and this year officially dropped the phaseout and opened the door for new builds (unlikely as they are).
by Bender | 2025-08-24 15:59:22+00:00
I would have to get former coworkers to dig through Jira. I would not bother. These are all proprietary applications supported by dead or dying companies. Most of the original developers are retired or no longer with us. The apps get picked up by acquiring companies rinse and repeat when they chapter 11.

More useful is finding newer, supported and open source applications that can replace their functionality but that's a whole other topic around prioritization and people paralyzed by fear of change due to the amounts of money flowing through their unsupported applications.
by lazide | 2025-08-24 15:59:36+00:00
Notably, the California Central Valley is mostly as productive as it is because of fossil aquifers that are starting to reach nearly completely depleted states. The California Aquaduct would still allow some of it, but not nearly to the extent it has. Much of the remaining fossil water is having quality issues (excessive arsenic, salt, etc.).

Arizona is not that far off [https://www.kjzz.org/2023-12-11/content-1865370-groundwater-...].

There is a very real chance both locations will end up ‘reverting to the mean’ in the next 100 years due to lack of sustainable water supplies, which I uh expect to cause significant cultural and political dysfunction, as river driven water supplies are highly variable and don’t have the stabilizing effect that underground aquifers have.

I’m less familiar with Arizona, but in California a big issue with the fossil aquifers is that when drawn down too much, they collapse, and will never be able to be rehydrated. At least not with currently known technology. ~ 28 feet of subsidence so far. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsiden...].

Modern Day Mesopotamia (at least Iraq) has similar issues - [https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/november/iraq-drought-slashes-s...]. The most stable areas politically (Kurdistan, Baghdad) is also the only area with reliably reachable not-super-deep aquifers (Figure 27 ish), and also not problems with overly saline low quality sub-surface water (see figure 37ish) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338393628_Groundwat...].

The north and northeast is the only part of Iraq with subsurface water suitable for normal domestic use without being treated.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-24 15:59:37+00:00
To back up your point, here is the plummeting price of renewable energy [1].

The real reason for all this is because people get extremely rich off of fossil fuels and people don't relaly get rich off of renewables. Resource extraction (mining, drilling for oil and gas, etc) is a wealth concentrator.

Oh and it's worth adding that the recent bill reduced royalty payments paid by oil companies [2].

The whole thing is simply yet another form of wealth transfer from ordinary citizens to the mega-wealthy.

[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-plummeting-cost-of-rene...

[2]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/21/trump-administratio...
by groby_b | 2025-08-24 16:00:15+00:00
I did not know this indeed. But, of course, that means signing up and spreading your medical info even further. (Plus, in some cases, more money)

For folks who are also looking, the search term "adhd meds call around service" seems to work. I'd list URLs, but I haven't used any and don't want to endorse.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-24 16:00:26+00:00
They're also in geographically low population areas so counting them and the people employeed in their towns they have a significant sway on some states and the Senate skews things towards low population states through it's inequitable representation AND the outsized power Senate rules give individual Senators.

Plus it's made a few people EXTREMELY rich so they've made their opinions and interests everyone elses problem too.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-24 16:01:28+00:00
That's not ESP-IDF, that's the Arduino wrapper around ESP-IDF.

Setting the baud rate does actually do something (just follow the baudRate parameter here: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/master/cores...), it just doesn't affect the output speed of the USB serial output.

If you specify non-default pins for the serial output (i.e. you're opening a second serial connection to talk to another piece of hardware) the begin() method does influence the data rate.

Also, there are dev boards out there that do actually use a TTL converter and USB-to-serial converter to access the standard serial port, though they're not very common as far as I can tell, so I wouldn't just assume the baud rate setting does nothing on the standard pins either.
by pron | 2025-08-24 16:02:17+00:00
> It turns out that using more RAM costs you more CPU

Yes, memory bandwidth adds another layer of complication, but it doesn't matter so much once your live set is much larger than your L3 cache. I.e. a 200MB live set and a 100GB live set are likely to require the same bandwidth. Add to that the fact that tracing GCs' compaction can also help (with prefetching) and the situation isn't so clear.

> That's the kind of problem that GC was really meant for.

Given the huge strides in tracing GCs over the past ten and even five years, and their incredible performance today, I don't think it matters what those of 40+ years ago were meant for, but I agree there are still some workloads - not anything that isn't spaghetti-like, but specifically arenas - that are more efficient than tracing GCs (young-gen works a little like an arena but not quite), which is why GCs are now turning their attention to that kind of workload, too. The point remains that it's very useful to have a memory management approach that can turn the RAM you've already paid for to reduce CPU consumption.

Indeed, we're not seeing any kind of abandonment of tracing GC at a rate that is even close to suggesting some significant economic value in abandoning them (outside of very RAM-constrained hardware, at least).