MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by masklinn | 2025-08-30 08:40:38+00:00
Now you're just empirically lying, by equating the behaviour of solar and wind with that of hydro.

That table also doesn't say what you apparently think it does: it lists Luxembourg as 89% renewable, which is true, but does not include that Luxembourg only covers about 28% of the electricity it uses, and imports the rest.

Thus Luxembourg's production being 89% renewable is worthless information as to the viability and reliability of wind and solar for baseload: Luxembourg relies on its neighbours for reliable electricity supply.
by m11a | 2025-08-30 08:42:09+00:00
Think you need a healthy mix?

eg: if you want distributed systems, esp Java-style, https://www.martinfowler.com is a pretty handy reference. (similar for other areas of SWE).

It’s nice to have a single resource that documents a bunch of non-obvious but still-generally-accepted engineering practices relevant to a domain. It’s of course an opinion, but is reasonably uncontroversial. Or at least, you won’t go too wrong while you develop your own taste in said domain.
by michaelt | 2025-08-30 08:42:41+00:00
> Could anybody explain how this isn't easily circumvented by using a competitor's model?

If the problem is "kids are using AI to cheat on their schoolwork and it's bad PR / politicians want us to do something" then competitors' models aren't your problem.

On the other hand, if the problem is "social media is flooded with undetectable, super-realistic bots pushing zany, divisive political opinions, we need to save the free world from our own creation" then yes, your competitors' models very much are part of the problem too.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-30 08:44:22+00:00
It seems like you are looking at this from a binary stance.

Willing to waste 10x as much resources and money because 99% is not 100% even though we still need to decarbonize shipping, aviation, agriculture and industry. Laser focused on one sector ignoring all else.

That sounds like a juvenile position coming from an ideologist rather than someone vying for the quickest possible decarbonization of our entire society.

I’m not sure why you latched on to hydrogen? Maybe because that is the one you could hope to ”debunk”?

We of course also have biofuels, the ethanol blend in for US gasoline is enough to run the entire grid without help for 16 days.

Just repurpose that, while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize, as we switch our transportation fleet to BEVs.

This does not have to be solved today, it is a problem for the 2030s so let’s not jump ahead of ourselves when Poland still runs 70% on fossil fuels.

What you are saying is that we should force the market to build nuclear power despite the insane cost through subsidies. Vogtle running at 60% is still a completely insane 30 cents per kWh excluding transmission costs.

Please do explain what is scary with grid forming inverters? In the latest Chinese auctions the lots with grid forming inverters added ~$20/kWh to the storage price.

And then you circle back to the completely binary world. You do know that Sweden has a huge oil power plant running a few hours per year in a capacity reserve? It just never gets called in due to not being needed.

With your logic nothing is worth doing until that power plant is entirely phased out even though it runs for a fraction of a percent per year?
by pas | 2025-08-30 08:45:01+00:00
People got used to using a highway that was free. They started doing business moving freight there, or taking jobs and commuting on that nice fast convenient road, and ... now suddenly there's a gate.

Note, the work gets done anyway. The highway is still there. (And marginal cost of more people using it is ... low.)

That said, it's a matter of definition. Usually rent-seeking refers to manipulating public rules, public spending, etc. Here that seems close to impossible. (Broadcom exploit their vendor lock-in business position as much as they want, it's a purely private arrangement, no one is and no one was forced to start using Broadcom's shit.)

...

That said 2.0, rent in "rent-seeking" refers to a part of income (based on Adam Smith's division of income into profit, wage, and economic rent). Where economic rent is payment gained that's not justified by natural costs and market forces. (Of course, good luck coming up with a reliable model for this.) ...

However, here it seems we do know how to come up with the right numbers for profit and rent. Profit was what they were earning before and now ... any extra income is rent that they get by putting the gate down on the free lanes. (And, of course, as people will migrate away we'll see this rent decrease, likely substantially.)
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:45:30+00:00
Some websites will detect a Burp proxy and act accordingly. If you did your initial page load with any kind of integration like that, that's why the WAF may have blocked your request. I don't know exactly how they do it (my guess is fingerprinting the TLS handshake and TCP packet patterns), but I have seen several services do a great job at blocking any kind of analyzing proxy.
by imiric | 2025-08-30 08:46:04+00:00
> So if your code is ascertained to work at the high level, you also know that it must be working at the lower level too.

No, that is not guaranteed.

Integration and E2E tests can only cover certain code paths, because they depend on the input and output from other systems (frontend, databases, etc.). This I/O might be crafted in ways that never trigger a failure scenario or expose a bug within the lower-level components. This doesn't mean that the issue doesn't exist—it just means that you're not seeing it.

Furthermore, the fact that, by their nature, integration and E2E tests are often more expensive to setup and run, there will be fewer of them, which means they will not have full coverage of the underlying components. Another issue is that often these tests, particularly E2E and acceptance tests, are written only with a happy path in mind, and ignore the myriad of input that might trigger a failure in the real world.

Another problem with your argument is that it ignores that tests have different audiences. E2E and acceptance tests are written for the end user; integration tests are written for system integrators and operators; and unit tests are written for users of the API, which includes the author and other programmers. If you disregard one set of tests, you are disregarding that audience.

To a programmer and maintainer of the software, E2E and acceptance tests have little value. They might not use the software at all. What they do care about is that the function, method, object, module, or package, does what says on the tin; that it returns the correct output when given a specific input; that it's performant, efficient, well documented, and so on. These users matter because they are the ones who will maintain the software in the long run.

So thinking that unit tests are useless because they're a chore to maintain is a very shortsighted mentality. Instead, it's more beneficial to see them as guardrails that make your future work easier, by giving you the confidence that you're not inadvertently breaking an API contract whenever you make a change, even when all higher-level tests remain green across the board.
by ccccffff0000 | 2025-08-30 08:46:25+00:00
You talk about "semantic tree memory" but what does the system use as a storage? Just the text that is passed into and generated by the LLM? Doesn't that strategy risk context window overflows soon, and also content loss due to the LLM's imperfect recall? Did you think about integrating an external storage layer via tool calls?
Show HN: Datacmd – Terminal-native dashboards from CSV/API in one command
by vinserello | 2025-08-30 08:46:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Datacmd to eliminate bloated dashboards and browser UIs. It turns any CSV, JSON, API feed into live, terminal-native dashboards with one command. Fast. Minimal. Developer-centric. AND IT'S OPEN SOURCE https://github.com/VincenzoManto/datacmd

What it does:

* Generates dynamic dashboards in the terminal: tables, gauges, pie charts, line charts, radars, text boxes * Layout auto-generated or configurable via YAML * Supports CSV, JSON, REST APIs, live system metrics (CPU, memory, disk)

Why this matters:

* No GUI. Instant visuals where developers live * Zero setup. Download binary or use "go run", and dashboards appear * Great for sysadmins, devs, ops, data hackers working in terminal-first workflows

What I learned building it: Automating a clean layout via algorithm beats manual dashboard design for fast insights. Generating widgets in terminal forces clarity - no fluff, just signal.

Looking for feedback on:

* Performance with massive datasets (>100k rows) * UX: readability, layout transitions, color themes * Widget ideas: real-time alerts, sparkline ring charts, CLI-friendly drill-downs

Live on GitHub. Let me know if you want a downloadable binary or CI build link. Open to contributions, bug reports, wild dashboard ideas.
by MikeyLi | 2025-08-30 08:46:54+00:00
Every time I travel (or even go to a fancy restaurant at home), I stare at menus like they’re cryptic puzzles. No pictures, lots of foodie jargon I don’t get… and I usually just guess and hope for the best .

So for the past year, I’ve been hacking away at my first big project: FoodieLens

It’s a web app where you just snap a photo of the menu, and it will:

Show you real images of the dishes

Translate foreign menus

Generate AI images if the original dish photos are hard to find

Link each dish to a quick Google search for context

Save menus for later

I wanted it to be super simple: no credit card needed, just free credits to start.

Would love feedback from you all — especially:

Does this solve a real pain point you’ve had?

What’s the #1 feature you’d want added before you’d actually use it?
by m11a | 2025-08-30 08:47:06+00:00
For Rust, there are a few blogs that lean more on fundamentals and language design (like https://without.boats/blog, https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps).

For misc Rust engineering, like the OP, I agree it’s quite scattered. I personally like to save good ones in my Feedbin as I encounter them
by procaryote | 2025-08-30 08:47:19+00:00
There are lots of profit motivated big companies that cause much less collateral damage. Facebook ranges from individualised harm like showing kids makeup ads when they delete a selfie, to macro scale harm like election interference

You could take a job designing landmines and you'd have a real hard time causing as much actual harm, as there just aren't enough wars going on to reach the same scale
by smolder | 2025-08-30 08:47:36+00:00
I'm on board with not censoring the army of agenda driven liars on 4chan but I just want people to know that they do make up lies and shift public opinion on the payroll of despotic oligarchs. There is no political truth to be had on any "chan" because there is a group or groups working hard to spread lies and set every visitor off course.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 08:49:39+00:00
Bots are probing for access from various servers, eventually falling back to executing requests from residential IP addresses: https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...

Cloudflare is dealing with a couple million faked requests every day just from Perplexity users, and Perplexity is far from the worst player in the field.

The problem would be quite easy to solve with basic rate limiting if it weren't for the attempts to bypass access controls.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-08-30 08:50:19+00:00
You could completely ignore that incident and find 10 other reasons not to support this company or the man behind it. Calling a cave diver that rescued multiple children a pedophile should be reason enough for you. Here he is saying Jews are against whites. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitic-comments-...

Instead you have chosen to actively support him, harming us, out of spite due to a situation you've willingly blinded yourself to. Seriously? You're citing the ADL? That's like asking the NAACP whether Kanye really said "I love Hitler." Who gives a fuck, I have ears.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 08:50:48+00:00
Yes - I meant 'impossible to difficult' to define to all people, at all times. Agree it's easy for me to define how that looks. It doesn't mean that the same is true to you. That's why I went from a very general, to very specific.

I'm saying we ended up in situation where people are lying when they say "I don't trust Google", b/c they have Gmail, use Google services - so their trust can't be zero. It's more than zero. Obviously it's a trade-off, people are pragmatic they do their cost-benefit analysis, and act accordingly. They just lie when they talk about the subject. I think it'd be better for all, if the public discussion moved from "I trust Google zero" (which is obviously untrue), to "There is cost-benefit to this, and I personally chose xyz".
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 08:51:15+00:00
A good portion emigrated because it was either that or the gallows. Another portion - possibly those that you referred to with the 'by choice' bit was imported as so much cattle to be used and abused. Slavery powered a lot of engines in those days and even if those European ancestors washed their hands of it in Europe at the time their descendants had no problem at all setting it up in what would become the USA as well as they folks 'back home' profiting immensely from it. Here in NL they are still to a large extent in denial about it. And that spirit is also still alive and well in the USA.
by thomasmg | 2025-08-30 08:51:58+00:00
Wind turbines can, and are, turned off (by turning, feathering the blades, and braking). There are two main cases: high wind / storm, and too much electricity in the grid. Photovoltaics can also be turned off.

The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators, eg. nuclear and coal, because they can't easily (cheaply) ramp down or shut off. Sometimes it is cheaper to let prices go negative than to use emergency mechanisms (that do exist).

Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in. Specially, a negative price does not mean the grid is melting.
by progbits | 2025-08-30 08:51:59+00:00
I have mixed feelings. "Educating the masses" is important, at least to a certain baseline, otherwise we get failing democracies due to manipulation of uneducated voters.

But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
by nils-m-holm | 2025-08-30 08:52:06+00:00
Thank you for your kind description of my work!

Turning the Buddhist (or other) teachings into deeds is not too hard once you have understood who you are, and, maybe more importantly, who you are not. Figuring /that/ out can be tough and require a lot of practice.

What people perceive as modest is really an acceptance or even appreciation of what is. My apartment has not been renovated in decades, I repair what needs repair and otherwise leave things to themselves. I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and my hardware is already old when I buy it. This is the course of things. Things age and change and at some point disappear. Why prefer the new over the old? Why the old over the new? It is just that things and beings get old on their own, and it is much more joyful to witness this than trying to resist it.
by hemabe | 2025-08-30 08:52:16+00:00
I noticed this phenomenon several years ago and came to the following conclusions: Romania is strongly multi-ethnic. Germans from Saxony and Swabia immigrated to Transylvania 800 years ago. A thousand years ago, people from northern India immigrated, whom we now know as Gypsies and who make up 8-10% of the population. In the south, the country was besieged by the Ottomans/Turks for 400 years. The cognitive differences between these ethnic groups are enormous.

Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT to find the winners of the Math Olympiads, their schools, and their places of birth. Most of the Olympiad winners attended elite schools in Bucharest, with few math participants coming from the south of the country and no participants who could be classified as Gypsies. But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.

In 2023, for example, a computer science Olympiad participant from Orăștie (Hunedoara County) won a silver medal. Orăștie is located in Transylvania and historically had a Saxon community. Brașov (Kronstadt) also recently produced medal winners: in 2025, a student from the Meșotă College in Brașov won silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) also appears on the list – a student from the Bălcescu Lyceum there won silver at the Linguistics Olympiad in 2024. Timișoara (Temeswar)—also a western city with German history—was represented by a student (Carmen Sylva College) with an Honorable Mention in linguistics. These examples support the thesis that educational centers in the former Habsburg regions produce above-average talent.

Is there any further information about the ethnic origin of the Science Olympiad participants? I would be grateful for any information (even if it does not confirm the thesis).
by globular-toast | 2025-08-30 08:52:20+00:00
Not in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-30 08:52:46+00:00
Walmart would not have laid off that many people this recently unless there were ominous signs that economy-dependent things were getting worse recently than they had predicted according to their bottom line. And they should know.

This is a skilled individual probably working in a location with lower pay scales than the hot tech centers or he would have been making more. Maybe even was in Bentonville, AR or remote to there which could mean relocation may need to be considered.
by perlgeek | 2025-08-30 08:53:16+00:00
> Use nuclear magic to make the hot side, cool with ambient temperature.

If you use ambient temperature for cooling, you are severely limited in your total power output. Like, we're talking about less than a megawatt output (depending on how big the ambient heat dispensers are) compared to the ~1GW of a regular old nuclear plant.

You might say: that's fine, let's just build many small ones. But you still need to track your radioactive material, make sure it's not stolen etc., which is a lot of overhead per installation.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-08-30 08:53:46+00:00
The fact that its not very useful for the forms of writing most people participate in nowadays--short form responses that are heavily contextual. Even longer form writing is often labored over--people use LLMs for outdated types of communication, like long-winded emails or school papers.

Idk, working in the AI space, I've started to write very succinctly and straight to the point, maybe as a counterweight to the often overly flattering, verbose forms of prose that the LLMs employ. I pay close attention to every word and try to never write more than is necessary.
by integralid | 2025-08-30 08:54:24+00:00
> So if your code is ascertained to work at the high level, you also know that it must be working at the lower level too

In the ideal world maybe. But It's very hard to test edge cases of a sorting algorithm with integration test. In general my experience is that algorithms and some complex but pure functions are worth writing unit tests for. CRUD app boilerplate is not.
by pnt12 | 2025-08-30 08:54:35+00:00
I don't think it's ironic: maybe it's not intuitive / not easy to do!

But there's utility in talking about it. If you teach people that good engineers prepare for Google scale, they will lean towards that. If you teach that unnecessary complexity is painful and slows you down, they will lean towards that.

Maybe we need a Rosetta stone of different simple and complex ways to do common engineering stuff!
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-30 08:54:48+00:00
They are undoubtedly cutting into profits. When I Google now, I wait for the AI summary (come to think of it, the fact that it takes 3-5 seconds to appear might not be organic...) and then click the references, rather than clicking through to search results. They're probably losing a LOT of reason for people to fight for SEO now. Why bother, Google users will just read the summary instead.

I suspect that they're hoping to "win" the AI war, get a monopoly, and then enshittify the whole thing. Good luck with that.
by barnacl437 | 2025-08-30 08:55:21+00:00
woah, another country blocking discord again? (well, mine don't, just surprised)

quick resort: you can use quad9 or nextdns if they are just using the classic dpi blocking thing. if these just doesnt work, then there is psiphon. its an anti surveillance kit iirc. other comments might include more options. i just want to list the ones that i've tried and used.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-30 08:58:40+00:00
Ok. I’m talking about the concerted effort to kill trains and public transit by the auto/oil industry.

LA was beautiful in the 20s. Could have been a world class metropolis instead of a sprawling hellscape of seven lane interstates where it takes 1.5hr to travel 15 miles, choked by pollution.

Go watch Roger Rabbit again. Pay attention to the villain instead of the foxy redhead.
by afro88 | 2025-08-30 09:00:56+00:00
> I think this works in simple domains

You're not wrong. So many engineers operating in simple domains, on MVPs that don't have scale yet, on internal tools even. They introduce so much complexity thinking they're making smart moves.

Product people can be similar, in their own way. Spending lots of time making onboarding perfect when the feature could do less, cater for 95% of use cases, and need no onboarding at all.
by nils-m-holm | 2025-08-30 09:01:02+00:00
There are always the sample chapters, and the code from the book is in the public domain. :)

The book is basically a modern and more complete version of the "Small C Handbook" of the 1980's. I goes through all the stages of compilation, including simple optimizations, but keeps complexity to a minimum. So if you just want to learn about compiler writing and see what a complete C compiler look like under the hood, without investing too much into theory, then this is probably one of very few books that will deliver.

Edit: and then Warren Toomey has written "A Compiler Writing Journey" based on PCC, which may shed a bit more light on the book: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/acwj
by MrJohz | 2025-08-30 09:01:45+00:00
Yeah, that's similar to how I'd look for the correct place to put my tests. But at that point, a unit test is just the innermost layer of tests, which doesn't feel like a useful distinction. In your example, I might have a set of tests checking how the rules are parsed and interpreted (say), and then a set of tests one level up checking that the validation engine was a whole works, and then another set of tests a level up testing a module that uses the validation engine. The tests for the validation engine won't retest parsing, and the tests for the module using the validation engine won't test validation per se, but there's multiple layers there where each layer contains unit tests focusing on that layer's code specifically.
by 9dev | 2025-08-30 09:01:46+00:00
True, although I’d argue that the relative normalness is probably also a necessity due to TNG being a very long-running show, where you cannot devise bespoke design for every episode in an economical way.

Yet, I still find the textured blinky walls very immersion-breaking, for their artificial appearance. It’s nit-picking for sure; TNG did an amazing job at creating an interesting universe.

I’d just wish for some actually bold yet believable vision of the future.