MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 16:26:07+00:00
> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc.

You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.

The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...

In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
by YesBox | 2025-08-24 16:26:28+00:00
Unfortunately this isn’t true. Elaborating my point above, they only multiply the attention if the tens-hundreds of thousands of storefront views happen in a day or two. If you get a ten million views evenly spread out through the year, they won’t promote. (Speaking for games not for purchase yet)

I’m speaking from experience and it’s explained somewhere on howtomarketagame.com
by sdwr | 2025-08-24 16:26:54+00:00
I think the "true signifier" of consciousness is fractal reactions. Being able to grip onto an input, and have it affect you for a short, or medium, or long time, at a subconscious or overt level.

Basically, if you poke it, does it react in a complex way

I think that's what Douglas Hofstedder was getting at with "Strange Loop"
by Ccecil | 2025-08-24 16:26:55+00:00
One thing I didn't see covered is to never have your "real phone" and your "burner phone" on you (or in the same location) at the same time while powered.

Easy enough to say "Gee...these 2 phones are always together or nearby when activated" or "this phone shuts off right before this one powers up".

Although, I suspect there are a few other ways to determine identity easier. Such as tracking the device identifier and then looking up nearby public facing cameras.
by apparent | 2025-08-24 16:27:35+00:00
Not sure how to reconcile these statements about baths/showers:

> do not expose to hot water (hot tubs, hot showers etc).

> You can wash hands with it on, be in the rain, dunk it in water, have a bath/shower, but I wouldn’t recommend exposing it to hot water (ie hot tubs) or submerge it for long periods of time.

I guess this means you can have a bath/shower, but just not a "hot" one?

It's also interesting that you're not supposed to submerge for long periods. I remember swimming with my Pebble before with no problem. Are these watches less water resistant, perhaps due to the new speaker?
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 16:27:45+00:00
> To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?

Right! It's a real chicken and egg scenario. It would seem to me that without this infrastructure, it would be very hard to retrain and build new industries. It would really benefit the people of these regions to vote for people who, as a matter of policy, would bring training and infrastructure to them. Unfortunately, the people who most benefit from such policies vote against them [1], so the resources available are insufficient. So the conversation is about poverty reduction through social programs to support people working in a dying industry, rather than growing new industries. The solution, might be to vote for people proposing such resources, which I know is a radical idea, but it's at least something new to try.

https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/the-future-of-america...
by KritVutGu | 2025-08-24 16:28:03+00:00
> Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the code you've written / are tasked with reviewing and that this is perfectly fine and doesn't reflect poorly on you at all, in fact it reflects humility and a collaborative spirit.

Such behaviors can only be normalized in a classroom / ramp-up / mentorship-like setting. Which is very valid, BUT:

- Your reviewers are always overloaded, so they need some official mandate / approval to mentor newcomers. This is super important, and should be done everywhere.

- Even with the above in place: because you're being mentored with great attention to detail, you owe it to your reviewer not to drown them in AI slop. You must honor them by writing every single line that you ask them to spend their attention on yourself. Ultimately, their educative efforts are invested IN YOU, not (only) in the code that may finally be merged. I absolutely refuse to review or otherwise correct AI slop, while at the same time I'm 100% committed to transfer whatever knowledge I may have to another human.

Fuck AI.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-24 16:28:17+00:00
I don’t think oyster worked on overground when TfL took over, other than the special sections where there was co-acceptance (harrow-queens park, Richmond branch). Of course in those days most regular users had a travelcard.

Oyster, and later contactless, makes things far easier to travel. I’ve just been on a u-bahn and bus trip in Nuremberg, had to download an app to buy a ticket, no idea whether I got the right one or not.
by fluoridation | 2025-08-24 16:28:42+00:00
That's actually a good analogy. Bad speakers aren't just slow good speakers. If you try to mix through a tinny phone speaker you'll have no idea what the track will sound like even through halfway acceptable speakers, because you can't hear half of the spectrum properly. Reference monitors are used to have a standard to aim for that will sound good on all but the shittiest sound systems.

Likewise, if you're developing an application where performance is important, setting a hardware target and doing performance testing on that hardware (even if it's different from the machines the developers are using) demonstrably produces good results. For one, it eliminates the "it runs well on my machine" line.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-24 16:29:48+00:00
"Our bridges don't collapse" is a selling point for an engineering firm, on something that their products don't do.

We need to stop calling ourselves engineers when we act like garage tinkerers.

Or, we need to actually regulate software that can have devastating failure modes such as "emptying your bank account" so that companies selling software to the public (directly or indirectly) cannot externalize the costs of their software architecture decisions.

Simply prohibiting disclaimer of liability in commercial software licenses might be enough.
by ericmay | 2025-08-24 16:30:07+00:00
Curious what others think about this but… if we are giving taxpayer grants to Intel in exchange for “national security” which is a fair argument in my view, why not get something in exchange for those grants or just not give the grants at all? I see merit in giving grants, I also see merit in requiring an equity stake as well.

For the communists isn’t this exactly what you want? State ownership of the means of production? Shouldn’t you be cheering Trump on for nationalizing corporations and/or industries or at least heading in that direction? Or is the primary criticism he isn’t nationalizing industries fast enough?
by charleslmunger | 2025-08-24 16:30:31+00:00
The default is FULL

https://sqlite.org/compile.html#default_synchronous

>SQLITE_DEFAULT_SYNCHRONOUS=<0-3> This macro determines the default value of the PRAGMA synchronous setting. If not overridden at compile-time, the default setting is 2 (FULL).

>SQLITE_DEFAULT_WAL_SYNCHRONOUS=<0-3> This macro determines the default value of the PRAGMA synchronous setting for database files that open in WAL mode. If not overridden at compile-time, this value is the same as SQLITE_DEFAULT_SYNCHRONOUS.

Many wrappers for sqlite take this advice and change the default, but the default is FULL.
by t0bia_s | 2025-08-24 16:31:44+00:00
Industrially manufactured bar soaps became available in the late 18th century, as advertising campaigns in Europe and America promoted popular awareness of the relationship between cleanliness and health.

Also, bacteria was "discovered" by Ignaz Semmelweis, in mid 19th century. Barely anyone believes his theory.

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had thrice the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
by jfengel | 2025-08-24 16:32:08+00:00
My opinion is that we should open voting further. If voting works at all, it's only because you don't do any selection on the voter base, and hope some kind of "wisdom of crowds" kicks in.

As far as I'm concerned everyone who lives here should vote. Felons, infants, people in jail, anyone who can pull a lever or an unambiguous gesture. I'd even include fetuses if they could. If the law affects you then you should have a say.

This is undoubtedly a stupid idea. But the current system is clearly broken and I'd be willing to at least try taking the principle seriously.
by hollerith | 2025-08-24 16:32:19+00:00
>So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.

I heard that before the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan support in Congress for phasing out the use coal in the US, so it seems quite possible that that bipartisan support will reassemble itself after Trump is gone (because the next President is unlikely to be as populist and as uncaring about climate change as Trump).
by jorgen123 | 2025-08-24 16:32:40+00:00
And remember that you all are part of the market. In my area you can choose what power generation your electricity comes from. Most customers do not bother, unfortunately (less than 10% of Marin Clean Energy customers).

I know, not real-time. Renewable energy credit trading, and such. But you become the demand for clean generation if you choose to do so. It is easy. If you are in Marin, Contra Costa, Napa, or Solano go to https://mcecleanenergy.org/opt-up/

Similar CCA's are all over California and probably beyond.
by Jensson | 2025-08-24 16:33:07+00:00
> Nvidia has seen it coming

That doesn't matter, the question is if Nvidia investors has seen it coming or if they still overpay for the "sell shovels in a goldrush" meme. When people think you can't go wrong investing in a company then you know the company is almost surely overvalued because many have invested in it without thinking about the price.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-08-24 16:33:18+00:00
Consumers have a right to know what the source is of the content they are ingesting into their minds, and specifically if that content originated in another actual human mind or if it's the slop generated by a synthetic text extruder.

It's really a pretty straightforward proposition to understand, and disclosure is absolutely the key so that consumers, if they choose as I do to boycott such output, can make informed decisions.
by wrs | 2025-08-24 16:35:22+00:00
I’ve done a few ports like this with Claude Code (but not with a while loop) and it did work amazingly well. The original codebase had a good test suite, so I had it port the test suite first, and gave it some code style guidance up front. Then the agent did remarkably well at doing a straight port from one imperative language to another. Then there’s some purely human work to get it really done — 80-90% done sounds about right.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-24 16:35:25+00:00
There's a lot of "it kind of worked" in here.

If we actually want stuff that works, we need to come up with a new process. If we get "almost" good code from a single invocation, you just going to get a lot of almost good code from a loop. What we likely need is a Cucumberesque format with example tables for requirements that we can distill an AI to use. It will build the tests and then build the code to to pass the tests.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-24 16:35:30+00:00
It's why I called it Ralph. Because it's just not all there, but for some strange reason it gets 80% of there pretty well. With the right observational skills, you can tune it into 81, then 82, then 83, then 84. But there's always gaps, always holes. It's a lovable approach, a character, just like Ralph Wiggum.
by VincentEvans | 2025-08-24 16:36:02+00:00
There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup.

Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years.

But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no longer be constrained by sandboxes of Excel or Access - they will ship multi-cloud edge-deployed kubernetes micro-services wired with Kafka, and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.
by acdha | 2025-08-24 16:36:22+00:00
You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.

Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-08-24 16:36:24+00:00
A non-suspension fork is ok for 95% of people and likely cheaper than a matching frame, less material and a simpler shape.

Also - my suspension fork is 20 years old, has never had maintenance and is working fine. What do you do to yours? :)

(Or maybe my fork is NOT fine and I just don’t know it…)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-24 16:36:39+00:00
> After finishing the port, most of the agents settled for writing extra tests or continuously updating agent/TODO.md to clarify how "done" they were. In one instance, the agent actually used pkill to terminate itself after realizing it was stuck in an infinite loop.

Ok, now that is funny! On so many levels.

Now, for the project itself, a few thoughts:

- this was tried before, about 1.5 years ago there was a project setup to spam github with lots of "paper implementations", but it was based on gpt3.5 or 4 or something, and almost nothing worked. Their results are much better.

- surprised it worked as well as it did with simple prompts. "Probably we're overcomplicating stuff". Yeah, probably.

- weird copyright / IP questions all around. This will be a minefield.

- Lots of SaaS products are screwed. Not from this, but from this + 10 engineers in every midsized company. NIH is now justified.
by Jensson | 2025-08-24 16:37:05+00:00
Yeah, these essentially circumvent just about any anti botting/cheating measure we have, even capable of tricking humans in short context.

Like, they used to go ask questions to botters in games to see if they could answer, and bots used to be unable to respond to most questions in a reasonable manner. But today you can't do that, an LLM easily respond to most kind of trick question, well aside from stuff like "how many r are there in strawberry", you need such things to be able to recognize that you are talking to a bot.
by Tsiklon | 2025-08-24 16:37:09+00:00
Generally PCI-E lanes and memory bandwidth tend to be the big difference between mobile and proper desktop workstation processors.

Core count used to be a big difference but the ARM Procs in the Apple machines certainly meet the lower end workstation parts now. to exceed it you're spending big big money to get high core counts in the x86 space.

Proper desktop processors have lots and lots of PCI-E Lanes. The current cream of the crop Threadripper Pro 9000 series have 128 PCI-E 5.0 Lanes. A frankly enormous amount of fast connectivity.

M2 Ultra, the current closest workstation processor in Apple's lineup (at least in a comparable form factor in the Mac Pro) has 32 lanes of PCI-E 4.0 connectivity that's enhanced by being slotted into a PCI-E Switch fabric on their Mac Pro. (this I suspect is actually why there hasn't been a rework of the Mac Pro to use M3 Ultra - that they'll ditch the switch fabric for direct wiring on their next one)

Memory bandwidth is a closer thing to call here - using the Threadripper pro 9000 series as an example we have 8 channels of 6400MT/s DDR5 ECC. According to kingston the bus width of DDR5 is 64b so that'll get us ((6400 * 64)/8) = 51,200MB/s per channel; or 409.6 GB/s when all 8 channels are loaded.

On the M4 Max the reported bandwidth is 546 GB/s - but i'm not so certain how this is calculated as the maths doesn't quite stack up from the information i have (8533 MT/s, bus width of 64b, seems to point towards 68,264MB/s per channel. the reported speed doesn't neatly slot into those numbers).

In short the memory bandwidth bonus workstation processors traditionally have is met by the M4 Max, but PCI-E Extensibility is not.

In the mac world though that's usually not a problem as you're not able to load up a Mac Pro with a bunch of RTX Pro 6000s and have it be usable in MacOS. You can however load your machine with some high bandwidth NICs or HBAs i suppose (but i've not seen what's available for this platform)
by losvedir | 2025-08-24 16:37:16+00:00
It frustrates me that neither party is about energy abundance. The Democrats have clamped down on coal, fracking, nuclear for various largely climate reasons. And now the republicans want to reverse it and restrict renewables mostly in a "turnabout is fair play" kind of way. I wish the current administration had just cut regulations and enabled more fracking or whatever and left it at that.

Taking the environmental hit for lower energy costs is understandable at least, even if those who are more financially stable would prefer not to. But whatever this is makes no sense and is just puerile revenge.
by corinroyal | 2025-08-24 16:37:32+00:00
Wait, you created April, one of the most amazing hosted languages on Lisp just to learn Lisp? Wow! And here I am toiling over a simple CRUD library management app trying to figure out CLOS and it's not even going well.

April is a revelation and I'm putting it in my framework. APL reminds me of Leibniz's alphabet of concepts for his calculus ratiocinator. So gorgeous and efficient. I'm getting the keyboard.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-24 16:37:45+00:00
[dupe]

Some earlier discussions:

Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548

Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187

Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715
by jfengel | 2025-08-24 16:38:16+00:00
As far as I can tell, those who heard what they wanted in his campaign promises are reasonably satisfied that they are getting it. There's some loss of approval as reality precludes some options, but that happens to everyone.

Nor do I think the "apolitical" will become any less so. I see no reason why the midterms should give radically different results.

Now, it just so happens that historically things swing a bit back at midterms, and given how close things are that's enough to sway the entire power structure. It's an unfortunate reality of voting: a one-vote margin is no different from unanimity.

Even so I do not expect the overall tone to change any time soon. Those proportions seem fairly durable.
by ghuntley | 2025-08-24 16:38:35+00:00
> - weird copyright / IP questions all around. This will be a minefield.

Yeah, we're in weird territory because you can drive an LLM as a Bitcoin mixer over intellectual property. That's the entire point/meaning behind https://ghuntley.com/z80.

You can take something that exists, distill it back to specs, and then you've got your own IP. Throw away the tainted IP, and then just run Ralph over a loop. You are able to clone things (not 100%, but it's better than hiring humans).
by AceyMan | 2025-08-24 16:38:51+00:00
>>Go to the back door (most salesmen go to the front door, a manoeuvre always resented by maid and mistress alike).

To most of us Yankees, this makes no sense. Many of not most of our single-family homes are built in areas that don't implement an alleyway, so the back door is really only for the residents to get to the back yard or carport, etc.

If a salesman knocked on the back door it's likely they'd have the police called on them / or worse.
Show HN: AsyncFlow – stop guessing p95 latency, simulate your system before prod
by gb00 | 2025-08-24 16:39:02+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been working on *AsyncFlow*, an open-source simulator for async/distributed backends built on top of SimPy.

The idea is simple: instead of pushing code straight to prod and hoping p95/p99 latency and throughput hold, you can model your topology, generate workloads, and run scenarios offline.

Define topology: for example client → load balancer → servers → edges in YAML or Python Generate stochastic traffic (Poisson arrivals, exponential service times) Run the simulation and collect metrics

Metrics out of the box: - Latency distribution (p50, p95, p99, min/max) - Throughput (per server and system-wide) - Queue lengths / ready queues - RAM in use

The idea is not to replace production monitoring, but to give engineers a “what-if” playground before deployment: • What if latency on a link spikes for 30s? • What if I add/remove a server behind the LB? • How does p99 shift if service times degrade?

It’s still early-stage, but I’d love feedback on whether this approach makes sense for pre-production capacity planning and what scenarios would be most useful to support.

Repo in the first comment!
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-24 16:39:11+00:00
I (journalists), P (sports), L (internal company moves), F (students)

I know a few people with two visas - an I visa for work and a B1 for tourism

75% of non immigrant visas are normal tourist/business visa you need to go to a trade show in vegas or go to Disneyland.

The H category was under 10% of non immigrant visas.
by karmakaze | 2025-08-24 16:39:14+00:00
The article discusses many of my fave topics, but not as clearly as I'd like. It should be more clear in distinguishing ethics and morality which is used interchangeably by layfolk but shouldn't here.

The other thing it doesn't connect is how we currently use AI. What we use are statistical models not axiomatic proofs. We can extract axiomatic proofs from them, but that's an extra unexplained step which is needed to make the rest of the article relevant.

The conclusion is also the same as before we had AI, we'll still have to make moral judgements where ethical evaluations are inconclusive or unreliable. Pretty much the same as any safe use of AI not specific to this area.

Ironically it could have been been beneficial to use an AI to proof the article for strength of its argument and logical gaps.
by Ccecil | 2025-08-24 16:40:25+00:00
I second the Youtube channel suggestion. Very entertaining and informative. Lots of trash talking and banter to keep things interesting. The SF tours are especially great. Explanations of why things should/should not be planted in areas really opened my eyes to how bad the urban designs can be.

Sidenote: I like that he tattooed his finger with measurement lines so he can use his fingers in the pictures as reference for size.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 16:40:28+00:00
> Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;

This is so funny to me, because if you listen to anti-solar people, they'll tell you it's a bad idea because it doesn't generate anything at night. Given what you say, even if batteries weren't a thing, it would seem like solar would be an ideal component of any power grid, even if it didn't produce any energy for the nighttime whatsoever.