MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by discordance | 2025-08-19 03:43:34+00:00
I'm curious how you see this potentially increasing the cost of energy? Why can't we do both large systems and small distributed systems?

I see the following benefits:

1. Stabilises the grid

2. Smooths peak demands. Check the Price and Demand graph here: https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

3. Increases supply -> energy prices decrease?

4. Accelerated move away from coal generation and towards renewables.

5. Job creation (solar and storage installation)

Drawbacks:

1. Renters, lower income houses and apartment dwellers don't have access the subsidies

2. Exposure to dodgy installers and systems just like we saw with the Australia solar scheme.
by petronio | 2025-08-19 03:43:35+00:00
> Brazil is essentially the world's soy farm and we import like 70% of our fertilizer.

You might want to check the sources from which we import those fertilizers, largest of which are Russia and China. While some do come from more US aligned sources, including the US itself, most of the names on that list have no problems ignoring US sanctions if it comes to that.

> They're going to sacrifice everything to protect these judges and display their non-existent "sovereignty", like a defiant child trying to stand up to its parent.

Our sovereignty is very much real and existent :)

> Brazil is pretty much done for if this continues.

Nope, we'll be fine.
by strix_varius | 2025-08-19 03:45:06+00:00
I'm curious about the goal here... if you wanted to learn how to turn gameplay ideas into playable video games, then the most effective way would be picking up either an ultralight engine like Defold or an ultra-tutorialized engine like Unity.

If you wanted to learn JavaScript by building games, then you should definitely not use Kaplay or Phaser, etc, since they're so far removed from JavaScript you wouldn't learn anything (other than how to build things in their particular environments). Web standard JS is more than capable of building simple games with no abstractions separating you from what you're trying to learn.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-19 03:45:31+00:00
Yeah I know... I know that it's not a good fit for HN. I post this here because this is the only place I feel safe discussing this.

I do hope I'm not being too much of a pain on dang's butt... My account is already rate limited to about 5 posts every two hours or so and I think that's absolutely fair. I emailed him once about it, he explained his reasons and I accepted them and the limitation. I hope HN's downraking of political threads neutralize any disruption these discussions could possibly cause.

I know I'm going to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic by saying this but please keep in mind that there's at least a possibility that the flaggings and downvotes are politically motivated.

People have created sockpuppet accounts here and called me out by name because of the views I express.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forabolsonaro

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35900285
by chowells | 2025-08-19 03:47:30+00:00
Autocomplete-oriented programming optimizes for writing code. I don't think that's a good route to go down. Autocomplete is good for spewing out a large volume of code, but is that what we want to encourage?

I'd much rather optimize for understanding code. Give me the freedom to order such that the most important ideas are up front, whatever the important details are. I'd much rather spend 3x the time writing code of it means I spend half the time understanding it every time I return to it in the future.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-19 03:48:04+00:00
All of those things are solved by eating legumes as well. I would rather eat protein rich vegetarian food over lab grown meat. I still eat meat but maybe only once a week, I really enjoy discovering what other cultures have created for meat free meals. Hell, hundreds of millions of Indians are vegetarians, and I would much rather cook and eat Indian food over eating some abomination of nature which only exists due to human’s destructive diet tendencies and lack of discipline. I also refuse to eat beyond meat either as those meat substitute products are very processed and far from their natural state.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-19 03:49:46+00:00
>In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1.

That's exactly how we do it in New York as well.

What's more, before I'm given that paper ballot, I need to provide my name and address, then provide a signature which is compared to the signature on file with the Board of Elections. If the signature doesn't match, I don't get to vote.
by tgbugs | 2025-08-19 03:50:12+00:00
This would seem to be a direct corollary to the red queen hypothesis applied in the context corporations instead of species. That is, in a competitive environment you have to keep spending R&D dollars to stay in the same relative market position because everyone else around is spending as well. However the paper talks about productivity of the individual firm and aggregate productivity (presumably across the whole economy). Therefore I think that the red queen may not be whole story, because firms should still be getting more efficient (more productive) even if they can't capture that value due to competition, the production possibilities frontier should be growing because we need less capital to accomplish the same tasks, leaving more for other things. However it seems that this is not the case? So what the paper seems to mean by "increased rates of obsolescence" is that there is so much churn within organizations that they can't actually get something implemented in a way that actually allows them to capitalize on the potential increased productivity? That sounds like a complexity wall, but I feel like I'm feel like I'm missing something.
by didibus | 2025-08-19 03:50:38+00:00
It's quite different, the way you model things, it's entirely different. Even though both are able to deliver highly concurrent computation.

A process in Elixir has an id, state, and is sent messages to its address. The message are queued inside the process, and handled one at a time.

One process can spawn another, and so on.

It's more like white collar workers sending emails to each other.

In core.async, a Process is anonymous, it doesn't have an id and doesn't have an address. You cannot send messages to it.

Instead a process is more like a worker on an assembly line with conveyor belts.

What matters are the conveyor belts and what's on them. Where things go from one belt to the next and what happens to the things as they flow through. You can have multiple workers working a belt and if something jams dependent belts stop. The belts are called Channels.
by glenstein | 2025-08-19 03:50:56+00:00
> So waving away Beyond/Impossible as safe

As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing in important areas.

My understanding of the studies on UPF health outcomes is that their data is drawn overwhelmingly from traditional categories like junk food and processed starch and sugar. Which is all the more reason to avoid the equivocation between the two categories, lest someone get the mistaken impression that the Twinkie data is about the burgers.
by g48ywsJk6w48 | 2025-08-19 03:50:57+00:00
Thank you for sharing such a great product. Last week after getting fed up with a lot of slow commercial products and wrote my own similar app that works locally in the loop and can record everything I say at the push of a button, transcribe it and put this into the app itself. And for me it was really important to create a second mode so I could speak everything I want in my mother tongue and that gets translated into English automatically. Of course, it all works with formatting, with the placement of commas, quote, etc. It is hard to believe that this hasn't been done in a native dictation app on macOS yet.
by echelon | 2025-08-19 03:53:13+00:00
Open source has been turned against us and used to build hyperscalers that effectively control modern computing.

Pure open source is also not a sustainable business model. You have to be open core or non-commercial, otherwise anyone and everyone can steal your lunch.

You're asking for the right to compete when they've given you every other single right there is. That's just not nice.
by conartist6 | 2025-08-19 03:53:30+00:00
Hazel has embedding gaps but they are language and editor specific.

BABLR takes Hazel's idea and takes it about 18 steps further, potentially making embedding gaps a feature of every editor and programming language.

As long as solutions don't have a way to scale economically they'll be academic, but BABLR makes this not academic anymore.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-19 03:53:30+00:00
They are bringing neatly one new coal power plant online per day. To the extent they’re building any renewable energy capacity, it’s nuclear power, and some PV farms with their excess solar panel production that can’t be sold internationally. The Chinese are smart: they want reliable, cheap energy, and know what it takes to get it.

Renewable energy in the form of wind and solar are direct subsidies for the oil and gas industry. Wind and solar are intermittent and you have to build a proportional amount of natural gas power plants to maintain a stable grid. Every new PV farm creates demand for another natural gas power plant.

The IRA subsidies for renewables were extremely lucrative. That’s why you see renewable energy projects in Texas. Government money spends just as good as profits from oil and gas.

“Renewable” energy exists where the subsidies are, and in some rare niche cases like geothermal power in Iceland. Many of these wind farms won’t produce more energy than it took to create them.
by colechristensen | 2025-08-19 03:53:40+00:00
In general I do not find eating animals or animal products offputting. I am an animal, I eat animals. The disconnect from nature caused by your entire diet being boxed and shrinkwrapped gives a person strange perspectives on biological reality.

Vegitables are grown IN THE DIRT THEY ARE BY DEFINITION DIRTY, FIGS CONTAIN DIGESTED WASPS, nearly every agricultural product contains at least a little bit of BUGS, FRUIT IS THE REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS OF A FLOWER.

Sigh.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-19 03:53:42+00:00
> increased circulating catabolic hormones

AKA stress hormones. I wonder why they're stressed?

> nothing to do with starvation.

I assure you, if you have one of these conditions, piling starvation on top absolutely hurts your chances of survival.

> in usa iirc,in usa 20k people died in 2022 or so from malnutrition. were they also in blockaded zone ?

Population-wise, that's the equivalent of 170 in Gaza, and the US numbers are largely elderly people; Gaza is 50% minors.

Starvation is the openly stated goal of the Israeli government. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250416-israel-says-n...

> "Israel's policy is clear: no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population," [Defense Minister] Katz said in a statement.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-08-19 03:54:20+00:00
Then why are the only lab grown meat products ground / reconstituted ? I'm only going off a interview with a startup CEO that pivoted to lab grown egg white because of the aforementioned challenge. You can keep sterile petri dishes, but if you try to reach even a chicken nugget sized piece of solid muscle, you aren't going to keep it free of contaminants.
by nicbou | 2025-08-19 03:54:23+00:00
I call it “move slow and fix things”.

Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining.

This has been my business for almost a decade. I love when I find other people with similar focus. My latest find is shottr.cc.
by necovek | 2025-08-19 03:55:34+00:00
As GP said, you can take this both ways.

I can define the return format of my query in the SELECT statement, then adapt the data structure in the FROM block using subselects, aliases etc — all to give me the shape desired for the query.

If you've ever done complex querying with SQL, you'd know that you'd go back and forth on all parts of the query to get it right unless you knew the relations by heart, regardless of the order (sometimes you'll have to rework the FROM because you changed the SELECT is the point).
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-08-19 03:55:50+00:00
> This will get our banks banned from the international banking system, isolating our country. The economic damage this will cause simply cannot be calculated.

What about Trump’s actions makes anyone think that Brazil will escape this fate if only it suborns its democracy to Trump’s whims?

Of the BRICS nation, the only one that isn’t being targeted by Trump is Russia. We don’t need to get into why that is.

India is being targeted purportedly for importing Russian oil which is obviously nonsensical considering Russia keeps escaping additional sanctions and other areas, such as China which imports more Russian oil and the EU which imports far more gas, don’t face sanctions for this reason.

China has been facing a whole set of sanctions for the past 6 months and other restrictions.

South Africa faced an escalation based on nonsensical claims of white genocide (South Africa has a massive crime problem…there’s no evidence it’s targeted towards white people and if anything the opposite seems true considering black South Africans are suffering more from crime than white SA)

And these are just BRICS. We haven’t even gotten to the Penguins yet.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-19 03:56:12+00:00
> LLMs offer the single biggest advance in interoperability I've ever seen.

> ... we need to build APIs with just enough documentation (and/or one or two illustrative examples) that an LLM can help spit out the glue code needed to hook them together.

If a developer relies on client code generated by an LLM to use an API, how would they know if what was generated is a proper use of said API? Also, what about when lesser used API functionality should be used instead of more often used ones for a given use-case?

If the answer is "unit/integration tests certify the production code", then how would those be made if the developer is reliant upon LLM for code generation? By having an LLM generate the test suite?

And if the answer is "developers need to write tests themselves to verify the LLM generated code", then that implies the developer understands what correct and incorrect API usage is beforehand.

Which begs the question; why bother using an LLM to "spit out the glue code" other than as a way to save some keystrokes which have to be understood anyway?
by nis0s | 2025-08-19 03:57:06+00:00
I can’t comment on the comic because I can’t read it well on my phone. But I am of the view that consciousness can be achieved through silicon-process computation if there are emergent properties which can convert discrete feature processing into perceptual experience. Therefore, I don’t think AI can ever achieve consciousness in a disembodied form (brain in a vat hypothesis), as I don’t think that’s how higher-level consciousness works.

Okay, I read the comic on my computer. If agents in the simulated universe possess higher-level consciousness, then they're no different from us. Maybe the timescale of their perceptual experience is different from ours. We need to be careful, though, about fooling ourselves into thinking there is a conscious being where there might just be a faithful imitation. How do you tell the difference? I think this is a useful concept, even though I think it has its flaws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
by paffdragon | 2025-08-19 03:57:09+00:00
When I read the title I remembered how people in the 90s at my place built their lawn mowers. It was a new thing. My father welded the frame from scrap metal with the motor from a washing machine and some tiny wheels from an old baby stroller lol. It was kind of open source, many people copied or he helped build one. Haha, served us surprisingly well for a time :)
by inkyoto | 2025-08-19 03:57:46+00:00
Very much relevant. The definition of the ledger database includes immutability of datasets as a hard constraint[0][1]. The mere fact that the git commit history can be altered automatically disqualifies git from being an acceptable alternative to the ledger database in highly regulated environments.

If strict compliance is not a hard requirement (open source project are the prime example), git can be used to prove provenance, provided you trust the signer’s public key or allowed signers file.

[0] https://www.techtarget.com/searchCIO/definition/ledger-datab...

[1] https://www.moderntreasury.com/learn/ledger-database
by tmeasday | 2025-08-19 03:59:20+00:00
Wow, something weird is going on in your house. I literally never change my light bulbs, I was just thinking about this the other day when I was looking at my extra bulbs and considering where to store them. It occurred to me it's been literally years since I changed a bulb, whereas in the old days it used to be a regular occurrence.

Also it's not hard to work out how much electricity you are saving. If you are worried about a couple of bucks, it won't take much usage of a 80W bulb to blow through that.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-19 04:00:51+00:00
> most of the names on that list have no problems ignoring US sanctions if it comes to that

Somehow I doubt it...

Trump has already imposed 50% tariffs, causing major economic losses. NATO has already threatened to impose 100% tariffs on us if we keep buying russian oil. And these are mere tariffs, not actual sanctions.

It's very hard to predict what's going to happen if things keep spiralling out of control.

> Our sovereignty is very much real and existent :)

Sovereignty must be backed up by military and economic power. We have neither. It's complete fantasy.

Do you really think the likes of China and Russia are going to defend us and our interests if push comes to shove?

Look at Ukraine. Gave up nuclear weapons because the USA promised to defend them if push came to shove. How's it going for them?

They'll use us like pawns and then turn us into their own backyard. Not that our relation with the USA is any different but personally I'd rather live in the USA's backyard than in China's backyard.

> Nope, we'll be fine.

Remains to be seen.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-19 04:01:07+00:00
>The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections.

Right. Which is why in all 3500+ elections (and yes, every county has a separate election, with separate ballots, separate rules and separate groups of folks managing the elections. In fact, it's your neighbors who manage and staff the elections in your county) every election day, there are generally representatives from each candidate and party involved in each race, from city council member, animal control officer, coroner, mayor, congressperson, etc., etc., etc. at each polling place and counting center (where different) who are there to make sure their candidate is not shortchanged.

This happens everywhere, ever time and is nothing new. IF there are claimed "irregularities," recounts are performed and lawsuits filed and adjudicated.

But don't believe me. Go ahead and work at the polls. They hire and train folks to work at polling places during the elections. See for yourself. Or is that too much work and you'd rather rely on someone else (you trust them, but not anyone else?) to tell you what goes on at the polls?

Please.
by sandspar | 2025-08-19 04:01:08+00:00
All media technologies seem weird at first. 19th century Europeans fled from the first movies of trains, expecting to be struck by the moving image. Deep jungle tribes believe that photographs steal a piece of your soul. I myself remember spending hours on YTMND 20 years ago. The early internet was Weird and Fresh and exciting. So if GenAI makes established, successful people feel weird and confused, then to me that seems like a good sign.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-19 04:01:25+00:00
Arguably the reason is making a game engine is easier than making a game. Obviously creating all of Unity/Unreal is a ton of work. But, to make a game engoine you have a checklist of features (gameloop, rendering, audio, input, ...) each of which you can break into smaller features. It gives you a free todo list, each item on the list has generally known solution, and makes it feel like you're making lots of progress as you check things off and see systems come up. That progress feels great. And you are making progress but you're making progress making a game engine, not a game.

A game on the other hand is a blank sheet. There is no checklist. It's way harder to make progress on a game.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-19 04:01:48+00:00
Why is anyone talking about voting methods when the President can call up a state and ask them to gerrymander 5 congressional seats? What's the fucking point in caring about the integrity of various voting mechanisms if they can just fix the outcome anyway? You don't need to scam the voting box, just win a majority in the legislature and then prevent the other side from ever winning again. Sidesteps the whole voting ID issue very cleanly.
by doctoboggan | 2025-08-19 04:03:16+00:00
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.

Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/

However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-19 04:03:18+00:00
You're missing the entire point of a free labour market system. If there are 10000 jobs for "position x" and only 8000 citizens who qualify, then companies are forced to compete with each other to attract those workers. Usually by paying higher wages. Or companies are forced to train people to get qualified workers. Can't do either? Then shut down your business and retire in eternal shame for being a worthless failure.

That's the entire idea, that's what a nation is built for. A "shortage" of workers is exactly the desired result in a healthy free market nation.
by nazgul17 | 2025-08-19 04:04:37+00:00
You put my thoughts into words better than I could.

This reminds me of the exploration-exploration trade-off in reinforcement learning: you want to maximise your long term profits but, since your knowledge is incomplete, you must acquire new knowledge, which companies do by trying stuff. Prematurely dismissing GenAI could mean missing out on new efficiencies, which take time to be identified.
by ryukafalz | 2025-08-19 04:04:52+00:00
As ever, I think the answer to "how do we sandbox arbitrary code while still letting it do useful things?", whether human-written or machine-written, is with object capabilities. Run the generated code in a sandbox, but pass in capabilities to useful resources, whether that be remote servers, local directories, or whatever else. Then you know the bounds of what trouble it can get up to from the start.