MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmd | 2025-08-24 14:50:23+00:00
On the other hand, it has no understanding of time. I have thousands of photos of me from the 1970s up through today, and Apple Photos is remarkably good at identifying me in all of them. And yet when my daughter was born it started identifying her, as a baby, as me. You'd think you could build a model to grasp the idea that a photo of a baby taken in 2015 is probably not of me.
by glenstein | 2025-08-24 14:50:31+00:00
I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.

See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 14:51:07+00:00
> it feels like it would good, readable code into a tangled mess pretty fast

It definitively can, no doubt about it. But used sparingly and only when there is no other way, it can help you remove enormous amount of boilerplate and other things, in a relatively simple, fast and safe way. In my codebases, it does lead to a lot less code, even when most projects just have 2 or 3 macros at most.

Just as one basic example that comes to mind just because I had to do it today: imagine you have a testing suite. When some assertion fails, you'd like to display what value was expected, what value it actually got, and what the exact code was. In JavaScript, I think the most you'd be able to get without involving 3rd party compilers, reading source code from disk or whatnot, would be some functions name (`myfn.toString()`), while in Clojure your macro could capture the entire source code within it, and print it, trivially.

Basically, if you want a function that can take the arguments without evaluating them before executing it, you can do so with macros but without macros you cannot do that. Personally, being able to do so leads to me finding simpler solutions, and expressing them in better ways, compared to if I didn't have them available.
by nadermx | 2025-08-24 14:52:24+00:00
>I don't get it, is your claim that the rightsholders can sue in German courts and get an injunction if they want sites blocked, or that site blocks shouldn't be needed at all because suing people (but not blocking the sites) is an adequate remedy for infringement?

Yet your own response seems to imply you do get it?

>What if the domain registrar or hosting provider is in another country? If some Chinese company is infringing on some German company's IP, is your response to tell them to sue them in China, rather than have the goods be blocked at the border?

Correct. As the infrigment is happening in China, not in Germany. Just because you don't like the way a law works, doesn't mean you can suddenly claim your rights are being violated some where else.

>Unless there's some context that's missing from the article, the sites being blocked seems like they're straightforwardly committing copyright infringement. It's not like youtube-dl is being taken down or whatever. "movie streaming sites are fine because there's a tiny chance that it's used by someone who already owns the movie" seems like a flimsy excuse to allow such sites to continue operating.

Yes because a tiny chance of innocence should be completely ignored according to your logic, and given that copyright infringement carries criminal penalties and prison. I hope it's not you who ends up in that situation.
by lexicality | 2025-08-24 14:52:48+00:00
Well, no, the thing that should never cross your mind is prioritising the company over yourself or other human beings.

The entire reason the company is employing you is to have you do things that are good for it. If you want them to keep employing you (and also to give you more money) then you should be looking out for things that are good for the company, doing them and then making sure that management knows that it was you that did it.
by hackernudes | 2025-08-24 14:52:58+00:00
My understanding is this is for excess PV capacity. But I think they should address this! Their plan is to heat deep inside a big pile of dirt using resistive heating elements and then pump the heat out in pipes. Maybe it's hard or expensive to add solar heating into the system? But why couldn't they pump it in? Maybe they don't have extra space because the dirt mound is covered in PV panels.
by fathermarz | 2025-08-24 14:53:39+00:00
When creating a backup, it attempts to condense sectors through some non-standard proprietary algorithm that shifts addressing and tries to roll it up. It wouldn’t be an issue if when restored it reversed this process, but it does not and leaves holes, gaps, or new sectors altogether in the reconstruction. Because of the spaghetti nature of this, the user can only use their software unless they want to reverse engineer the patented algo.
by geocar | 2025-08-24 14:53:40+00:00
> can't write efficient code. Software bloat has already gotten worse by at least an order of magnitude in the past decade.

Efficiency is a good product goal: Benchmarks and targets for improvement are easy to establish and measure, they make users happy, thinking about how to make things faster is a good way to encourage people to read the code that's there, instead of just on new features (aka code that's not there yet)

However they don't sell very good: Your next customer is probably not going to be impressed your latest version is 20% faster than the last version they also didn't buy. This means that unless you have enough happy customers, you are going to have a hard time convincing yourself that I'm right, and you're going to continue to look for backhanded ways of making things better.

But reading code, and re-reading code is the only way you can really get it in your brain; it's the only way you can see better solutions than the compiler, and it's the only way you remember you have this useful library function you could reuse instead of writing more and more code; It's the only guaranteed way to stop software bloat, and giving your team the task of "making it better" is a great way to make sure they read it.

When you know what's there, your next feature will be smaller too. You might even get bonus features by making the change in the right place, instead of as close to the user as possible.

Management should be able to buy into that if you explain it to them, and if they can't, maybe you should look elsewhere...

> a much slower machine

Giving everyone laptops is also one of those things: They're slow even when they're expensive, and so developers are going to have to work hard to make things fast enough there, which means it'll probably be fine when they put it on the production servers.

I like having a big desktop[1] so my workstation can have lots of versions of my application running, which makes it a lot easier to determine which of my next ideas actually makes things better.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44501119

Using the best/fastest tools I can is what makes me faster, but my production hardware (i.e. the tin that runs my business) is low-spec because that's cheaper, and higher-spec doesn't have a measurable impact on revenue. But I measure this, and I make sure I'm always moving forward.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-24 14:53:55+00:00
What you point to is an odd reversal for sure. Trump is actually doing many of the things he campaigned on while most candidates lie during the campaign. Trump now lies about seemingly obvious or unimportant things now in office, where many presidents either wouldn't waste a lie on something unimportant or wouldn't bother acknowledging the topic at all.

They all still lie though. Whether a particular lie can be considered an exaggeration boils down to how strict a line one draws around what a lie is. To me, if a president speaks only a partial truth or a misrepresentation if information they very much have access to, its a lie.
by whodidntante | 2025-08-24 14:54:21+00:00
Germany was trying to get Mexico to join them for wwi, with enticement of getting back the land they lost 70 years prior. That loss was immense for Mexico in land, pride, and economics

Mexico was dealing with its own internal issues (revolution) which made it difficult for them

A slight turn of events and the us would have a huge southern front I deal with, and a base of support for disaffected native Americans and African Americans.

Russia also dropped out of Wwi due to its intern revolution

It is easy to look back and see manifest destiny as a given. There were a lot of contingencies
by Razengan | 2025-08-24 14:54:24+00:00
Does anyone know how to get support from Anthropic? I purchased the Claude.ai Pro sub to try it out and disabled auto-renewal, then tried to remove my payment method from my account, just in case.

You can't.

So I tried to reach support. There's no email, no phone number, just a THIRD-PARTY AI chatbot.

Well guess what, the Send Message button in the text field is disabled.

This is infuriating and puts me off the whole product and maybe I'll just file a chargeback.
by whatever1 | 2025-08-24 14:54:35+00:00
It is fine for the NIH to cut completely the research grants if the government that was elected by the people decides that the country has other priorities.

What is not fine is having a censorship committee, that has obviously no idea about the field, to be deciding based on their vibes whether a proposal should be funded.

I find it insane that in 2025, in the USA, Medical researchers have to scrub their science manuscripts for potentially offending keywords.
by raffraffraff | 2025-08-24 14:55:18+00:00
It took me two weeks of farting about with Rectangle, alttab, hammerspoon and karabiner to make MacOS not give me face cancer every time I had to use it.

I still kinda hate it because I can't get keyboard shortcuts to just fucking work. On the work MacBook I use the mouse more than I'd like because I can't reliably do stuff that I have done fluidly on windows and Linux for decades, mostly around keyboard cursor control, selection, jumping in blocks of words and paragraphs, sane use of home / end, page up/down etc. Just when I think I have it cracked, I try to select the next two words, or from cursor to end of line, and it's like "no sir, in this fucking app it does something completely different, good luck finding out why it how to fix it"

I agree about the hardware though. Since the early 2010s MacBook Pro has been the best hardware. Before the M series I had a MBP13 2015, and in fact, it's still the "kitchen laptop", running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
by loeg | 2025-08-24 14:55:28+00:00
We've observed FDP to make a surprisingly big difference in drive internal WA. If you can meaningfully tag different lifetime/stream data from your workloads, and you can expect hardware that supports it, it's very helpful. We some something like WAF reduction from ~1.60 to ~1.04 (on a synthetic but vaguely plausible workload).
Ask HN: What's your Supabase stack look like?
by alwaysunday | 2025-08-24 14:55:51+00:00
Curious what folks here are pairing with Supabase these days.

We’ve been building Dreambase.ai on Supabase for the past few months, and have a pretty light stack to avoid bloating with too many tools:

- Supabase for database, auth, and storage

- Next.js + Tailwind for the app frontend

– Vercel for build/deploy

– Polar + Stripe for payments

– Posthog for event tracking

– Dreambase for product analytics (our own tool)

- Resend for email

What's in yours? Anything you consider essential?
by mamcx | 2025-08-24 14:57:19+00:00
This has 2 key things:

* "well designed": What was the objectives and ideas...

* "codebases": How well that was implemented

They are a lot of lofty claims saying how this or that is "fast, secure, etc" but don't end like that in the actual implementation.

But most of the time, that could be seen in the "design claims" already! Good design is not just full of adjectives and nice sounding goals, but the concrete considerations, what was the trade-offs, false-starts, and reasons behind the decisions.

You can see some examples reading about the design of Erlang, early pascal, most RDBMS, etc.

So, you first mid/long term goal is to learn to distinguish what good design actual look like.

then, in relation with codebases then to be kinda easier: It actually follow the design?

A good example is the 'std' library of Rust. It has a lot of lofty claims about security and such things that could sound alarms, but then you dive in the code of it and see is there A LOT of care about it, and a lot of docs comments discussing this stuff and then the code match.

P.D: The "std" or equivalent of the lang is one of the most important codebases you need to learn and study, and the MAJOR way to judge how truly good is it.
by ksec | 2025-08-24 14:57:58+00:00
This. I just did a comparison between my MacBook Pro Early 2015 to MacBook Air M4 Early 2025.

*Intel Core i5-5287U*: - *Single-Core Maximum Wattage*: ~7-12W - *Process Node*: 14nm - *GB6 Single Core *: ~950

- *Apple M4*: - *Single-Core Maximum Wattage*: ~4-6W - *Process Node*: 3nm - *GB6 Single Core *: ~3600

Intel 14nm = TSMC 10nm > 7nm > 5nm > 3nm

In 10 years, we got ~3.5x Single Core performance at ~50% Wattage. i.e 7x Performance per Watt with 3 Node Generation improvements.

In terms of Multi Core we got 20x Performance per Watt.

I guess that is not too bad depending on how you look at it. Had we compared it to x86 Intel or AMD it would have been worst. I hope M5 have something new.
by techpineapple | 2025-08-24 14:58:31+00:00
A theory that I have is that AI Chatbots are so impressive - the core ability to have a sophisticated conversation with an entity about any topic - that people are bad at understanding its limitations. If prior to LLMs, Siri was like 10,000 points of ability and LLMs may be like a million points of ability, because it’s such a big leap, it’s impossible for humans to intuitively understand if AGI requires 10 million points of ability or 10 trillion.
by hkpack | 2025-08-24 14:58:32+00:00
As a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit.

Where did you heard it?

It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.

This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
by nkrisc | 2025-08-24 15:00:29+00:00
> people are being whisked through a network of tunnels, deep below the bustling city

Also compared to London or many metro systems, Chicago’s is not deep underground at all. As a Chicagoan I was very surprised the first time I saw some of the escalators in London or Washington.

In some parts Chicago’s is almost literally just basement level with nearby buildings.
by fcdradio | 2025-08-24 15:00:56+00:00
Yep, and the thing is that after the dot-com crash we’ve seen another shift where the web has totally transformed society and brought huge value to both everyday people and companies.

The value of it wasn’t ColdFusion or Flash, it was the novel ways that people used the foundational tech.

So yeah, the AI bubble may burst and one model or another (or a company like OpenAI) may fail, but I don’t think we have even scratched the surface on the novel things this tech can do.
by Bender | 2025-08-24 15:01:32+00:00
HorseCookieRoadApples. If someone tampers with my servers I will instantly know and they will shortly thereafter be my mRNA volunteer test subjects.

Do all servers have debug back doors? Of course they do. Every piece of hardware has some form of JTAG debugging that can bypass all aspects of security and magic math no matter what proprietary fancy name that Stan the car sales man pushes. To access those debugging features they have to physically access my servers and that is not going to happen.
by striking | 2025-08-24 15:01:59+00:00
When you need a lot of lead (enough to build plumbing for a neighborhood), you probably want to source it locally. When "1 part TEL to 1300 parts gasoline by weight is sufficient to suppress detonation",[1] you can source the lead from just about anywhere and ship it with the fuel.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead
Gemini in Gmail Is Pretty Well Useless
by airbreather | 2025-08-24 15:02:07+00:00
So I need to collate some expenditure records for maybe 12 odd years going back, for these purposes mostly it will be in my gmails.

So I click the Gemini star in Gmail and ask it to make a list of all invoices found in my gmails, and it tells me this:

"I understand you would like to go through all your emails from the past 10 years to find invoices and create a Google Sheet with the biller, date, and amount.

However, I am unable to access every single email in your account and automatically create a Google Sheet with the requested information.

I can help you search for emails based on specific keywords or criteria, but I cannot perform a comprehensive analysis of all your emails and extract the data in the way you described."

So what use is it then?

I would have thought something like this is exactly the point, especially given the Gmail search feature is so woeful.
by andai | 2025-08-24 15:02:09+00:00
On that note, is non-reasoning ("minimal") GPT-5 worse at following instructions?

I'll tell it don't use numbers or bullet points and it just ignores that. Unless I scold it, then it complies.

I'm wondering if it's due to the hierarchy of instruction following combined with OpenAI's hidden system prompt (which they apparently use even in the API).

Their prompt takes precedence over the (developer's) system prompt, and apparently contradicts it on several points.

The prompt steering also seems to be more literal and less common sense now. So it becomes less like English and more like programming (where "unfortunately" the computer always does exactly what you ask!)
by westurner | 2025-08-24 15:02:17+00:00
"Insect populations flourish in the restored habitats of solar energy facilities" (2024) https://www.anl.gov/article/insect-populations-flourish-in-t...

ScholarlyArticle: "If you build it, will they come? Insect community responses to habitat establishment at solar energy facilities in Minnesota, USA" (2024) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0f72

From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/experts-uncover-incredib... :

> The results speak for themselves. One study found that insect abundance tripled over five years at two Minnesota solar sites. Native bee populations skyrocketed twentyfold. That's some serious pollinator power.

/? solar meadow: https://www.google.com/search?q=solar+meadow
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-24 15:02:58+00:00
AI isn’t smart enough to permit edge-cases like artistic nudity, especially with people who’ll find and abuse any exemption for the edge-case to create something that doesn’t belong. AI is unreliable, so its censors are broad to minimize rare failures or bugs (“unintentional exemptions”) that people will find and abuse.

Despite this, AIs get fooled to this day. There are still jailbreaks for GPT-5 and nudity and piracy on YouTube.

The only way to distinguish “good” from “bad” is competence, which has never existed on a large scale.
by tuckerman | 2025-08-24 15:03:10+00:00
I believe part of engineering isn’t over-engineering for the task at hand as well. If the costs of a “failure” are low/zero then the right thing can be to move quickly expecting some problems.

I think the field could get better at knowing when costs are low (eg sometimes scalability, cheaper to change a database choice than rebuild a bridge) and where the costs are sometimes very high (eg security).
by fifilura | 2025-08-24 15:03:18+00:00
Yes I'll happily extend that to 10x more difficult.

At least compared to building a batched pipeline with SQL. I think you should really think hard whether you really need a streaming pipeline. And even if you find that you do, it may be worthwhile to make a batched pipeline as your first implementation.

I did exactly what you describe in my previous job. In the beginning with reluctance from our architects who wanted to keep banging the dead horse and did not understand the power of SQL "SQL is not real programming, engineers write java" (ok maybe I deserve a straw-man yellow card here, they don't deserve all of that). But I think they understood after a while.

With AWS Athena and Airflow. Good luck, consider me your distant moral support.
by api | 2025-08-24 15:04:15+00:00
Forcing their deployment is how you make them cheap enough to compete in the market without subsidies.

It’s how industrial economies of scale work. The more of something you do the cheaper it is. Bootstrapping an industry is analogous to overcoming the activation energy for a chemical reaction.

The rate of scaling is different for different tech, and it’s actually quite good for renewables. That’s because solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are incrementally deployable and subject to rapid iteration. It looks more like the electronics industry or, in the case of windmills, the car and truck industry, than the conventional power plant industry. Look up the rate at which these technologies have gotten cheaper. For solar annd batteries in particular it’s almost like Moore’s law.

It would never have gotten started without subsidies. Most things are deeply unprofitable at first.

Fossil fuels also require massive subsidies to bootstrap until they could scale. Look into the history of Standard Oil, the railroads, and electrification. The two world wars also helped.

One of the things that deeply challenged the minarchist libertarianism I held when younger was seeing that virtually nothing happens in tech or industry without state bootstrapping. Someone must be prepared to set huge piles of money on fire to start anything.

Once things get going they can be profitable in a free market. Solar is there in markets with high sun exposure. Battery storage is there in markets with a high power cost arbitrage spread. Both are still getting cheaper. Solar may be the cheapest source of power in a decade in most of the world.

Computing and the Internet is the same. The latter was originally called DARPAnet.

BTW the biggest disadvantage of nuclear vs renewables is that it is much more of a slog to scale. It doesn’t get cheaper as quickly due to slow iteration time and capital intensive large projects.
by gruez | 2025-08-24 15:04:45+00:00
>Yet your own response seems to imply you do get it?

So which one is it?

>Correct. As the infrigment is happening in China, not in Germany. Just because you don't like the way a law works, doesn't mean you can suddenly claim your rights are being violated some where else.

Yet, in most countries you can get an injunction (ie. a "block") for infringing goods produced abroad to be seized at the border. It's within the government's remit to regulate what happens within its own borders, even if the infringing product (or website) is outside its borders.

>Yes because a tiny chance of innocence should be completely ignored according to your logic, and given that these carry criminal penalties and prison. I hope it's not you who ends up in that situation.

Where did "criminal penalties and prison" come from? We're talking about sites that are obviously engaging in copyright infringement. I'm not sure how you went from that to "send everyone with an open plex server to the gulag".