MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cduzz | 2025-08-25 13:41:41+00:00
I don't think you ever get enough of a temperature difference just by having a passive black pipe in the sun, to do any useful work besides potentially keeping someone warm in the winter. You could do useful work if you concentrate the energy from the sun somehow, like with mirrors.

Heat pumps do magic by changing the pressure at which a working fluid changes phase, so you can boil the fluid over here, have it absorb an enormous amount of energy then compress it back to a fluid elsewhere and push that heat back out -- this works pretty well because you're just moving the heat and only pushing the temperature on the "hot" side up a relatively small amount. I don't think, for instance, you could make an oven with heat pumps.

To do useful work you need a _substantial_ energy gradient -- it's hard to live in the sun even though its got lots of free energy floating around. The sun is very useful to the earth because the energy it provides is so much more energetic than the ambient environment.

Edited to add:

There are discussions of using exotic working fluids like compressed CO2 -- that'd allow you to manage the phase change maybe to a region where you could concentrate the energy in the fluid then expand it elsewhere at "room temperature" temperatures -- but I think things like compressed (to a _fluid_) CO2 are really hard to work with.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-25 13:42:16+00:00
It's done a bunch, all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy. Most commonly people use them either for batch pre-heating of hot water or for full heating. I looked in to getting something like that for the hydronic heat in my house because currently it's propane-fueled and the deliveries are quite expensive in the winter.
by parpfish | 2025-08-25 13:42:23+00:00
I visited a pumped storage facility a while back that stored electricity by pumping water uphill to store it and then draining it past a turbine to reclaim it. Ever since I’ve been intrigued by using gravity instead of batteries.

For home use, it seems like you could rig up some heavy stones on pulleys to do the same thing could be fun because you’d get to physically see your batteries filling up. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that an array of ten 10-ton concrete blocks lifted 10m in the air could power a house for a day (ignoring generator inefficiencies)
Show HN: WebhookHub – Instantly inspect and replay webhooks
by its_default | 2025-08-25 13:42:24+00:00
Hi HN,

I built WebhookHub because I kept running into the same pain whenever testing integrations: webhooks are hard to debug. They arrive at odd times, you need to expose a local server, or set up ngrok, and there’s no easy way to replay them.

WebhookHub gives you an instant endpoint - no config or code needed. You can:

Create a webhook URL with one click

Inspect headers and payloads in a clean UI

Replay requests to your local or staging server

Share endpoints (public links) with your team

I know there are other tools in this space, but my focus is speed and simplicity - a tool you can use in 10 seconds without installing anything.

I’d love for you to try it and tell me what you think. Here’s the link again: https://webhook-hub.up.railway.app/
by troupo | 2025-08-25 13:42:40+00:00
> fact checking

You forgot that just to set up an alternative app store you need this:

--- start quote ---

Provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit in the amount of €1,000,000 from a financial institution that’s at least A-rated or equivalent by S&P, Fitch, or Moody’s, and maintain that standby letter of credit as long as your alternative app marketplace is in operation

--- end quote ---

> 0.5€ Core Technology fee per install

per install

So if your app is suddenly popular, you have to pay through the nose.

> This includes app reviews, manual updates, and fraud protection.

Why is Apple involved in app review on alternative app stores?

Why is Apple doing manual updates?

Considering the amount of scam apps on App Store, Apple isn't doing fraud protection in their own store.

> This tier is mandatory for any app that promotes external payment options.

Why? What does Apple have to do with external payment options?
by Panzer04 | 2025-08-25 13:42:42+00:00
The problem with Intel splitting is precisely that the fab is worth nothing.

No one will give Intel real money for the advanced fabs, as they are worthless right now. I suspect that's probably the main thing holding Intel back from doing that - they can't get a decent price on the fabs, and just spinning them out directly would probably lead to a fairly immediate failure without Intel's CPU design division funding development without immediate expectation of returns.

If one was a gambling man (with a good helping of pride), you keep the fabs with Intel (where the CPU design division is printing money) and subsidise the fabs and hope they finally stick the landing and start making half-decent chips again.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-25 13:42:54+00:00
Imagine an agent being a roommate. They see that toilet paper is running out, they go to the supermarket, they buy more, they charge you money. All without you saying a word. Sure, it might not be your favorite brand, or the price might not be optimal, but realistically, the convenience of not having to think about buying toilet paper is definitely worth the price of having your roommate choose the details. After all, it's unlikely they'll make a catastrophically bad decision.

This idea has been tried before and it failed not because the core concept is bad (it isn't), but because implementation details were wrong, and now we have better tools to execute it.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-25 13:43:00+00:00
> is what style guides that go into the minutiae of comma placement try do do

Eh. There might be a tacit presumption here that correctness isn't real, or that style cannot be better or worse. I would reject this notion. After all, what if something is uniquely crap?

The basic, most general purpose of writing is to communicate. Various kinds of writing have varying particular purposes. The style must be appropriate to the end in question so that it can serve the purpose of the text with respect to the particular audience.

Now, we may have disagreements about what constitutes good style for a particular purpose and for a particular audience. This will be a source of variation. And naturally, there can be stylistic differences between two pieces of writing that do not impact the clarity and success with which a piece of writing does its job.

People will have varying tastes when it comes to style, and part of that will be determined by what they're used to, what they expect, a desire for novelty, a desire for clarity and adequacy, affirmation of their own intuitions, and so on. We shouldn't obfuscate and sweep the causes of varying tastes under the rug of obfuscation, however.

In the case of AI-generated text, the uncanny, je ne said quoi character that makes it irritating to read seems to be that it has the quality of something produced by a zombie. The grammatical structure is obviously there, but at a pragmatic level, it lacks a certain cohesion, procession, and relevance that reads like something someone on amphetamines or The View might say. It's all surface.
by Agentus | 2025-08-25 13:43:52+00:00
to further this point. a lot about writing is style. editors sometimes smother the style in the name of grammar, conventions, or correctness, inoffensiveness. sometimes the incorrectness is the entire point, and the editor erases the incorrectness not realizing it was intentional.

ive heard of many professions complain about their version of “editors” from comedians, to video producers, and radio jockies.
by vintermann | 2025-08-25 13:45:09+00:00
"Our" side in that particular context obviously means NATO, the US, the five eyes countries, the west etc. Take your pick.

And yes, I think you have a side, and I think these groups' foreign policies are 1. Very far from being simply "evidence based" and 2. Not in any meaningful sense under democratic control.

Have you ever wondered why so many people actually turn up to vote for Putin in Russia, even though they don't really influence anything by doing so?

I think they have simply decided that it's easier to want what they can have. Learn to like the taste of the only course that's on the menu.

And I also think that attitude is very common in the western world.
by dmix | 2025-08-25 13:46:09+00:00
> And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup

Those AI skin enhancement filters are always terrible. Especially on men. Crazy they'd try it automatically. This isn't like the vocal boosting audio EQing they do without asking.

Google must have some questionable product management teams these days if they are pushing out this stuff without configuration. Probably trying to A/B it for interal data to justify it before facing the usual anti-AI backlash crowd when going public.
by aurecchia | 2025-08-25 13:46:18+00:00
Are you implementing an auth server or integrating with one?

Regardless, the last time I dug into this topic I ended up feeling the same. The web is littered with articles that scratch the surface and only cover the basics. They often leave out the details, which IME ended up making things more difficult to understand. What was the most helpful, as you said, was to follow the RFCs and the OIDC spec directly.

What might also be useful, if you are implementing an auth server, is to look at existing implementations. Duende IdentityServer (https://github.com/DuendeSoftware/products/tree/main/identit...) is the most widely-used one in the .NET space.
22Gb of data analyzed in 2 minutes with an AI agent.
by edonderguti | 2025-08-25 13:46:37+00:00
I made an ai agent that analyzes 22Gb data and visualizes them in two minutes. With this agent you can train ai models, build ETL pipelines and handle real time data. I am wondering what is your opinion for somethng like this. What kind of example would be interesting to try?
by kragen | 2025-08-25 13:47:01+00:00
It's probably worth adding the context that Wildberger's agenda is to ground mathematics in integers and rational numbers, eliminating those pesky irrationals Euclid introduced, because reasoning about them invariably involves infinities or universal quantifiers, which everyone agrees are tricky and error-prone, even if they don't agree with Wildberger's radical variety of finitism. So he was delighted to find a kindred spirit millennia ago in the Plimpton 322 scribe and, presumably, the entire Babylonian mathematical tradition.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Proportions:_Rational_T...
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-25 13:47:13+00:00
> We could have had other competitors, but nobody wanted them

People didn't even get a choice. Google bullied Windows Phone out of the market.

People won't switch to a platform without apps. Microsoft tried to fix that, made an HTML5 youtube app. Google threw a fit and blocked it, twice. MS even followed what Google told them to do, and still blocked the app.

Google saw great hardware, and an OS that was gaining media attention (Windows phone at the time had a lot of positive reviews, and the Nokia Lumnia phones were great, and better cameras than any Android at the time) and used their market power to kill it.
by Ecco | 2025-08-25 13:47:41+00:00
I'm a huge fan of vintage Apple devices, and just got my hands on an iBook G3. It didn't come with a power adapter, but it has what really looks like a docking connector on the back. However I surprisingly haven't been able to find anything online about that connector.

Does anyone here have any info about that docking connector? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
by ccvannorman | 2025-08-25 13:47:51+00:00
I absolutely love this question.

Postulate: You cannot define a largest physically describable number.

My assumption is that due to the very nature of Kolmogorov complexity (and other Godel related / halting problem related / self referential descriptions), this is not an answerable or sensible question.

It falls under the same language-enabled recursion problems as:

- The least number that cannot be described in less than twenty syllables. - The least number that cannot be uniquely described by an expression of first-order set theory that contains no more than a googol (10^100) symbols.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-08-25 13:48:22+00:00
Recovery exists in a separate partition protected by SIP; it's set up this way to so that 99.99% of scenarios require a local, physical attack. "recoveryOS" is also bound to the specific APFS volume of the device. There's more to it than that, but you can be reasonably sure that recoveryOS isn't lying to you.

Sure, you can make an argument someone gave you a special device with a fake OS... but anyone willing to do that has much more simple ways to fuck with you.
by Panzer04 | 2025-08-25 13:48:43+00:00
100$/kwh on a battery that does 1000 cycles is 10c/kwh, 5000 cycles ("Claimed" lifepo4 these days), that's 2c per kwh. These aren't that unreasonable, albeit one would need to account for cost of capital and so on increasing these effective numbers.

Batteries are already economical in most grids where they can arbitrage daily prices of 0-10c during the day to 10-30c during the night, with the occasional outlier event contributing dollars per kwh.

They will never load-shift across seasons, agreed, but for daily loadshifting they are already economical, and being 90%+ efficient (and very simple/easy to deploy and scale) is part of why they're popular. It opens up power shifting opportunities that aren't just daytime solar too.
by lynndotpy | 2025-08-25 13:48:54+00:00
When Amazon came out with the "dash" button and then the "Alexa" speakers, I figured they must have expected they'd get some unintended purchases, and that they'd make more profit from those than they'd lose in the people going through the refund process. (That, or they'd learn whether it was profitable, and eat it as an R&D cost if it turned out to be unprofitable.)

I think this might be similar. In short, it's not consumers who want robots to buy for them, it's producers who want robots to buy from them using consumers dollars.

I think more money comes from offering this value to every online storefront, so long as they pay a fee. "People will accidentally buy your coffee with our cool new robot. Research says only 1% of people will file a return, while 6% of new customers will turn into recurring customers. And we only ask for a 3% cut."
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-25 13:50:00+00:00
They rehired the team.

Basically, when Tesla's stock started to dip, he went on a cost-cutting rampage. The head of Superchargers made a proposal to grow, and Elon got angry and fired the whole team.

It's one of those moments where, if Elon got angry, and then waited to cool off before doing anything rash, it would have been forgivable.
by niemandhier | 2025-08-25 13:50:02+00:00
I always assumed that it was more a case of behavior selection:

Yes, people did drink water frequently, but those societies and groups that regularly consumed fermented drinks like wine or beer, had on average a lower chance of consuming polluted water.

As a result behavior that favored drinking slightly alcoholic drinks became more widespread by selection.

This doesn’t require that people actually knew their water sources were polluted.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-25 13:50:26+00:00
There's a flag you can set electronically, to make the card read only, but if the OS isn't set up to support running from a read-only filesystem, setting the card to read only will make the OS crash. If the OS is set up for a read-only filesystem, it won't try to write to it, regardless of the flag.

Setting up Linux to run from a read only filesystem only takes a handful of commands, but having a tool to automate it would be nice.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-08-25 13:50:29+00:00
> Even if you dropped all packets from that client you would need to still process the packets to figure out what client they belong to before dropping the packets?

In modern Linux you can write BPF-XDP programs to drop traffic at the lowest level in the driver before any computation is spent on them at all. Nearly the first thing the driver does after getting new packets in the rx ring buffer is run your program on them.
by jpc0 | 2025-08-25 13:50:34+00:00
I would argue that AI is exactly how you should handlr these edge cases, but likely a fine tuned model.

There would be hints that a photo is from the 60s vs 15s, a human would be able to tell in many cases even without other context.

That is exactly the use case AI is meant to excel at, something that is arguably hard to do algorithmically but is possible for an ML model
by nirui | 2025-08-25 13:50:34+00:00
> A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent. I'm seriously thinking that the CCP encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall to the rest of the world.

A simple check against the IP address 170.106.176.0, 150.109.96.0, 129.226.160.0, 49.51.166.0 and 43.135.0.0 showed that these IP addresses is allocated to Tencent Cloud, a Google Cloud-like rental service.

I'm using their product personally, it's really cheap, a little more than $12~$20 a year for a VPS, and it's from one of the top Internet company.

Sure, it can't really completely rule out the possibility that Tencent is behind all of this, but I don't really think the communist needs to attack your website through Tencent, it's just simply not logical.

More likely it's just some company rented some server on Tencent crawling the Internet. The rest is probably just your xenophobia fueled paranoia.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-25 13:51:28+00:00
Sure, but my entire post was about safety issues having my son walk in some parking lots. And getting my wife to put on the equivalent of a 60-liter backpack to go to the store is absurd.

I get that you don't want to make accommodations for people but you might want to think about what leads you all to get so bent out of shape on this one. At the end of the day your argument boils down to "your spouse just needs to work harder so I'm not inconvenienced by the cart she hung off the curb next to the space I wanted." Society is full of people with differing abilities in differing mental spaces and not everyone owns equipment like that and is willing to spend 10 minutes getting it out and setting it up in a busy parking lot while also wrangling their willful, very curious child.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-25 13:52:17+00:00
If there weren’t other players in the game that might be true. As it is, though, the EU is rapidly rearming, and has proven itself to be far more principled and stable in the Ukraine conflict.

I wouldn’t trust a deal done with the USA to be worth anything right now. I would trust a deal done with Europe, Korea or Japan. All of whom would love to have TSMC build a fab in their respective territories.
by zdragnar | 2025-08-25 13:53:09+00:00
It's been done, but not without controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

At home, it's suitable in warm climates but is more challenging in snowy / very cold regions. Generally speaking, converting to electricity then using an electric water heater is more efficient because there's much less insulating, heat loss, and piping that can leak and cause water damage.
by fcpguru | 2025-08-25 13:53:19+00:00
some nice OKLCH resources:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cone-color-picker-identifier/i...

https://sindresorhus.com/system-color-picker

https://evilmartians.com/opensource/oklch-color-picker

https://oklch.eerolehtinen.fi/

https://github.com/eero-lehtinen/oklch-color-picker
by walterbell | 2025-08-25 13:54:15+00:00
https://www.thefai.org/posts/dean-ball-to-join-fai-as-senior...

> The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) today announces the addition of Dean Ball as Senior Fellow. He will focus on artificial intelligence policy, as well as developing novel governance models for emerging technologies. Ball joins FAI after having served as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
by alansammarone | 2025-08-25 13:54:22+00:00
This is mostly true. It fails to mention "is the user a kid" is unverifiable without imposing identify verification, which implies that all speech (which is already monitored) is now self-censored, effectively turning the state in a surveillance state. You don't need to be throwing people in jail for that, having a credible means of identifying anyone online is enough.
by kragen | 2025-08-25 13:54:24+00:00
Yeah, I learned an enormous amount from it when I encountered it (in hard copy of course) in 01996, and some of what I learned is now no longer relevant.

There are some people building new Lisp machines: https://opencores.org/projects/igor https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr https://interlisp.org/ http://pt.withington.org/publications/LispM.html http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html https://github.com/dseagrav/ld http://www.aviduratas.de/lisp/lispmfpga/ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/36_qKNErHAg https://frank-buss.de/lispcpu/

Also, Morello includes some Lisp-machine-like features. In my view knowing about the history of hardware architectures is far more important for designing new ones than for reproducing old ones.
by ericmay | 2025-08-25 13:54:46+00:00
I don't think that's the key feature of Communism but it sure sounds nice. The way you know that's not the key feature or perhaps philosophical underpinning is because if that were true you could just start your own Communist firm, collective, "facility that generates profits" today under democracy and free markets.

I hear you on the potential for state nationalization of companies to turn into fascism, though. It's often hard to tell the difference between some of these authoritarian regimes (fascism, dictatorship, communism) because they tend to take similar actions from time to time albeit with different goals.
by jerf | 2025-08-25 13:54:59+00:00
I have definitely found utility in modeling certain words and phrases as having a value for marketers (and by extension, politicians) that acts much like a natural resource that they can "use up". It's a tragedy of the commons situation in which every participant is motivated to use it up as quickly as possible to their advantage because there is no reason for any given participant not to.

Further based on the way some of these things get used I'm pretty certain this modelling is consciously used by some higher-end marketing firms (and politicians), though by its nature it tends to also be copied by other people not in on the original plan simply by them copying what works, which depletes the value of the word or phrase even more quickly, and the fact that this will happen is part of the tragedy of the commons.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before AIs become part of this push and we'll witness some sort of coordinated campaign where all our AIs simultaneously wake up one day and push us all with the same phrasing to do some particular thing at the behest of marketers or politicians because it works.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-08-25 13:55:05+00:00
An AA battery contains approximately the same as 1 ton raised 1m. (About 3Wh)

A Tesla Powerwall contains about 13.5kwH (about 4,000 times as much)

So you can either raise 100 tons 10m above your house, or you can have 1/13 of a Tesla Powerwall.
by wickedsight | 2025-08-25 13:55:15+00:00
There are some videos on Youtube discussing the hypotheticals of this. They're never really very positive about the feasibility. Neither on a small scale nor on a country-wide scale.

If you'd want to store 1kWh at 10m height, assuming no loss at all from heat, friction, etc, you'd need about 4 of those blocks block weighing 10 tons (according to ChatGPT). So you'd need a lot of those blocks to power a house for a day, unless you're very efficient.