MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-23 05:29:35+00:00
There are two ways to make AI cheaper: make energy cheaper or make AI hardware and algorithms more efficient and use less energy that way. Google is investing in doing both. And that's a good thing.

I actually see growth in energy demand because of AI or other reasons as a positive thing. It's putting pressure on the world to deliver more energy cheaply. And it seems the most popular and straightforward way is through renewables + batteries. The more clean and cheap capacity like that is added, the more marginalized traditional more expensive solutions get.

The framing on this topic can be a bit political. I prefer to look at this through the lens of economics. The simple economic reality is that coal and gas plant construction has been bottle necked for years on a lot of things to the point where only very little of it gets planned and realized. And what little comes online has pretty poor economics. The cost and growth curves for renewables+battery paint a pretty optimistic picture here with traditional generation plateauing for a while (we'll still build more coal/gas plants, not a lot, and they'll be underutilized) and then dropping rapidly second half of the century as cost and availability of alternatives improves and completely steam roll anything that can't keep up. Fossil fuel based generation could be all but gone by the 2060s.

There are lots of issues with regulations, planning, approval, etc for fossil fuel based generation. There are issues with supply chains for things like turbines. Long term access to cooling water (e.g. rivers) is becoming problematic because of climate change. And there are issues with investors voting with their feet and being reluctant to make long term commitments in what could end up being very poor long term investments. A lot of this also impacts nuclear, which while clean remains expensive and hard to deliver. The net result of all this is that investments in new energy capacity are heavily biased towards battery + renewables. It's the only thing that works on short notice. And it's also the cheapest way to add new capacity. Current growth is already 80-90% renewable. It's not even close at this point. We're talking tens/hundreds of GW added annually.

Of course AI is so hungry for energy that there is a temporary increase in usage for coal/gas. That's existing underutilized plants temporarily getting utilized a bit more mainly because they are there and utilizing them a bit more is relatively easy and quick to realize. It's not actually cheaper and future cost reductions will likely come in the form of replacing that capacity with cheaper power generation as soon as that can be delivered.
by camillomiller | 2025-08-23 05:29:47+00:00
I’ve been covering tech for 20 years. No, it wasn’t always like that. There was a sincere mutual respect between the companies and the media industry that I don’t see anymore. Both sides have their fault, but you know it’s not media that huperscaled and created gazillionaires by the score. Also, software is way more bendable to the emperors’ whims, and Google has become particularly hypocritical in the way it publicly represent itself.
by motorest | 2025-08-23 05:30:00+00:00
> People are complaining they gamed the number: that's an improvement!

Is it, though?

There's a post in this discussion claiming that Google rolled out AI summaries on all of their search queries. This means they greatly increased the number of queries by triggering queries at each Google search. These are unsolicited queries that users do not send by themselves or want.

Then the post claims each of these unsolicited queries are executed using small models that are cheaper to run.

The post asserts these unsolicited queries represent half of the queries.

Google's claims are that now the median cost of their queries is lower. The post asserts around half of Google's AI queries are not requested by users and instead forced upon them with searches.

To me, what this spells is the exact opposite of a improvement. It's waste that is not requested by anyone and adds no value. It's just waste.

Consequently, if Google pulled the plug on these queries then the would reduce their total query count by around 50%. How much energy and carbon emissions would that save? Well, if you pick up that value and flip it over to show how much is being wasted, that's your "improvement".
by ecocentrik | 2025-08-23 05:30:49+00:00
No, that was sarcasm that employed a slippery slope argument. I was not seriously suggesting that the federal government will buy Facebook. I was suggesting that we should avoid a pattern of behavior (slippery slope) that might lead to the socialization of other companies. Giving Intel a grant to keep it from failing is very different from demanding 10% in exchange for funds to keep it from failing.
by logicchains | 2025-08-23 05:31:01+00:00
>What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.

That's not science, that's a demonstrably false assumption that everyone thinks smartphone usage is bad for kids.

In my experience with kids and smartphones, kids of the young generation (gen Z) are way better informed (and less brainwashed) than kids of their parents' generation were, whose only access to information about the world when growing up was through the captured, centralised legacy media.
by jajko | 2025-08-23 05:31:26+00:00
Most of us don't have work phones, that's stuff from early 2000s at best. Lugging around another brick just for work, no thank you.

That being said, answering anything work related outside of work, unless they are your truly close friends is lame and considered a character weakness, to be abused. And don't expect any extra bonus points for that.

Having a good private (aka actual) life you are willing to defend ain't a sign of weakness, in contrary.
by efficax | 2025-08-23 05:31:27+00:00
i do know how hard it is, that doesn’t change anything. nobody is forced to use something like zed and if you think it’s important enough to stress about the product decisions they make, the open source license gives you freedom to decide what to do about it. anyway you don’t even have to maintain it. you can take gpl software you like today, build it for linux and with a docker container you’ll be able run that same binary for the foreseeable future. then you can choose to extend it or not
by pm90 | 2025-08-23 05:31:39+00:00
The bigger issue that nobody seems to have addressed is how a single developer could have a machine that only he had access to that could run this code with admin privileges over their ActiveDirectory. Eaton should immediately explain what kinds of safeguards it has instituted to prevent this from happening again. If I were the CEO I would be thanking this person to have revealed this kind of access control vulnerability.
by ForOldHack | 2025-08-23 05:33:20+00:00
The only two things I can l'd think of, is driving and article 25 of the constitution. The latter which has been clearly violated to a large extent. There ought to be a licence to be able to run for office, just a multiple choice question. Are you an 1) Idiot? 2) Fascist? 3) Ted Cruz? 4) pedophilic zoophile? And turn just disqualify them.
by musicale | 2025-08-23 05:33:53+00:00
> On the flip side, all the original hardware is now ancient and at least somewhat broken (or going that way), and it's a pain to keep it running as an ongoing prospect

Fortunately there are FPGA implementations, though you might want a non-USB gamepad and keyboard, and a CRT (or maybe a 120Hz or better HDMI display?) to get closest to the original performance.

https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
by Inufu | 2025-08-23 05:34:35+00:00
It means you can for example no longer do things like get multiple disjoint references into the same buffer for parallel reads/writes of independent chunks.

Or well you can, using unsafe, Arc and Mutex - but at that point the safety guarantees aren’t much better than what I get in well designed C++.

Don’t get me wrong, I still much prefer Rust, but I wish async and references worked together better.

Source: I recently wrote a high-throughput RPC library in Rust (saturating > 100 Gbit NICs)
by quantified | 2025-08-23 05:36:27+00:00
In situations you chose, or in situations you were forced into? Are you clearly somewhere in the autistic spectrum?

Primary and secondary school, church, family, these are ready-made, we're ushered into. Thinking broke religion for me.

But cognitive biases and hangups (socially transmitted mental illness) are part of the environment. Took me a lot to break out of the ones I could see. People who lack an ability to see the perspective of another person (common for Asperger's) can revel in arbitrary rule systems and privileges. Can. Not destiny, but not beneficial for the total society.
by cornholio | 2025-08-23 05:36:34+00:00
That's the point, spreadsheets get users to solve issues algorithmically without forcing them to learn programming, but allowing them to understand and control the solution.

Full stack vibe tools solve some 1st order approximation of the problem, but then leave the user clueless to how adapt and evolve the solution without learning programing - and in fact are harder to maintain and debug even for those who do know programming. Re-applying the same tool is widely understood as a guaranteed disaster in the long run, current vibe tools can't really maintain their own creations.
by spankalee | 2025-08-23 05:36:34+00:00
I'm sorry, this a dumb comment that has no basis in reality.

HTML Imports was part of the initial set of the web components specs, there's no "cabal" or whatever that got its hands on it, and it didn't rely on JavaScript, not in the way you're probably referring to.

It was only opposed because it was separate from the JS module system, not because it relied on JS.

It's replacement: The HTML Modules proposal has general support from all vendors, just no one has put together a complete proposal yet.
by kubectl_h | 2025-08-23 05:36:39+00:00
That's fair and I've certainly experienced this where I live, which is north of Buffalo in latitude. Also frost heaves are no joke in non-city/non-highway roads and present another obstacle to FSD. I guess my point, if I had one, is I would hope FSD would be programmed to be as conservative as possible in adversarial winter conditions and not overreact to such conditions and that alone is enough to increase safety because humans, for various reasons, are not conservative enough. Hard to imagine for sure.
by pmontra | 2025-08-23 05:38:46+00:00
Samsung DEX had a Linux desktop package in 2018. It was a lxd container based on Ubuntu 16.04. They developed it in collaboration with Canonical. Unfortunately they deprecated it shortly after, maybe already in 2018. The next Android update would remove it.

It worked but Android killed it mercilessly if it used too much memory or the rest of the system needed it.
by HackerNewt-doms | 2025-08-23 05:38:49+00:00
The mail service has several serious shortcomings: 1. Disposable addresses (with the prefix temp in the domain part of the email address) can be generated via the web interface. However, when I receive an email at such a disposable address and reply to it in the web interface, the From field does not show this disposable address used in the previous communication, but instead the standard email address of the mailbox account. This is extremely annoying, because this communication partner is only supposed to know the disposable address. 2. In addition to the limited number of disposable addresses provided by the mailbox service, it is also possible to generate countless email addresses in the form of +extensions to the standard local part of the email address itself. Here again, it is frustrating that these email+addresses cannot be selected as the sender in the mailbox web interface (in Thunderbird you can and in the iOS Mail app it only works after manually adding this extension email as an alias in the account settings of the iOS app).

Moreover, Mailbox.org restricts the creation of email extensions exclusively to the plus sign: with alice@mailbox.org you can generate alice+test@mailbox.org, which inbound will automatically be sorted into the inbox folder alice (case sensitive).

But Mailbox.org does not allow the creation of alice.test@mailbox.org, which would actually be accepted as a registration email address by significantly more online services, because many of them apply standard filter rules for valid email addresses that wrongly consider the plus sign invalid and therefore reject it.
by ack_complete | 2025-08-23 05:39:07+00:00
The dialog editor is a good example of the damage that was done with the VS.NET transition. When they rewrote it to use the WinForms-based UI, they introduced a fundamental bug: the Z-order for picking was reversed so that clicking on a stack of controls selected the one on the bottom. Very annoying for controls like group controls intended to be stacked below other controls. Bug filed, WONTFIX'd, and it's still broken to this day.
by throw83949459 | 2025-08-23 05:39:19+00:00
I am more worried about dogs in school. Many teacher are fine to blame 11 years old for "provoking" dog attack! It is ok to send a kid to hospital, for eating a sandwitch!

Teachers at my school do not believe allergies are real! If there is asthma attack, it is an uncorrelated event! School will stab my kid with epipen, call ambulance and send me hospital bill! Avoiding it is too much work!

Once school brought unrestrained police dogs to school for a demonstration! Those had a record of attacking and torturing suspects!

Being able to call help is a basic human right!
by randomness3249 | 2025-08-23 05:41:06+00:00
Quick tool to:

1. Take snapshots of a workbook, then compare the current content to the snapshot

2. Load other workbooks (ye old report_final_final.xlsx) and compare the changes

3. Revert cells

It's just for simple content - no managing VBA or re-sorted tables. But I find it useful, and hope you will too!
by mquander | 2025-08-23 05:41:54+00:00
You should not assume that "they've chosen one particular tiny model", or "it's a median across all models including the tiny one they use for all search queries" because those are totally made up assumptions that have nothing to do with what they say they measured. They measured the Gemini Apps product that completes text prompts. They also provided a chart showing that the thing they are measuring scores comparably to GPT-4o on LM Arena.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-23 05:42:48+00:00
I think it is just us getting old. I used Linux since high school in the 90's, through all the way to the late 00's. I switched to OS X (long before it was macOS) because that's where all the and coming developer tools were, and I got tired of being sysadmin to my own Linux install as things break.

Now I'm the opposite of you. I WANT to run Linux, and I have both a recent Framework and Lenovo laptop at home that I bought for this purpose. But I have some issue with Nvidia drivers, or just stuck down a rabbit hole trying to configure a GUI the way I want, or whatever, and I give up and go back to macOS where everything is familiar and works out of the box. I'm too old and/or busy to deal with that shit, but it probably reflects my age more than it does macOS vs Linux.
by kvakkefly | 2025-08-23 05:45:03+00:00
Getting errors in console, won't start.

hook.js:608 Failed to parse JSON from match: SyntaxError: Expected ',' or ']' after array element in JSON at position 207 (line 3 column 194) at JSON.parse (<anonymous>) at build-studio-C28lcD4m.js:67:471

Stuck at "Starting project..."

Also, seems like 15-20 people to build this, after just a couple of months. Something is off with the numbers. Also, vibe coding platforms are becoming commodity with other platforms lightyears ahead, approaching zero margins.

Definitely wish you luck, but something feels off with the numbers, timeline, product and the market you chose :)
by neya | 2025-08-23 05:47:57+00:00
> thanks in part to CNN’s initial failure to redact some CCTV text that described the location of the camera

This is the most important bit. That journalist had one fucking job. Technically, their job was handed to them in a platter. Now their incompetence is going to cost someone else's livelihood and possibly, life. What a sad state of affairs.
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-08-23 05:49:40+00:00
If memory serves, it was Visual InterDev that won, actually. The VID IDE was the forerunner to Visual Studio.NET 2002, which was the first unified Visual Studio IDE.

n.b. I worked on the Visual Studio Core team, which maintained devenv.exe, among other things, from 2003-2007'ish.
by devjab | 2025-08-23 05:49:42+00:00
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.

> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.

> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1350.pdf

I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.

I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.

Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.

So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
by joha4270 | 2025-08-23 05:49:46+00:00
You will find that competitive games already attempt's this, but it's impossible to eliminate entirely.

I can move and reveal what's behind a corner a lot faster than a network roundtrip, so either the server needs to give some advance warning or you're going to see enemies pop into existence suddenly.

And computing if somebody is almost visible isn't trivial either. Level geometry can have narrow openings such as holes in a wall. Or what if somebody jumps?

And that's before getting into non visual information. It's not perfect, but you could still add a significant advantage by drawing the exact location of footsteps.

So yeah, (some) games try, but network latency means the client needs some information a wallhack can use, and the alternative: being killed by an enemy that was invisible is at least as frustrating as being killed by a cheater so the visibility estimate has to be generous.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-23 05:50:20+00:00
Apple did this to itself. Reportedly it was Jobs' opinion turned policy that Apple don't do games or pornography.

Exactly this policy and their interference to app developers created a selection pressure and a cutout hole in shape of "only slightly gamelike && technically not pornographic && in high demand", and the category of apps more accurately represented as "strip clubs with casinos with no cash-out" filled the vacuum like a Ghibli film blob monster.

Early iOS games were more game-like. Apps like SNES remakes, flappy birds and music games, were more common, but they all converged down and down into porn territory.

It doesn't happen naturally; not even pornographic game markets, let alone Steam or Itch, aren't as badly infested with gambling as App Store. It only happened artificially by how Apple ran it over the past ~15 years.
by anakaine | 2025-08-23 05:51:32+00:00
Given that teachers are no longer competing for student attention in class, that is one single and quite important positive which doesn't require an academic study and referencing to demonstrate.

I'm not sure what you were hoping to achieve with the request for evidence, but what you're asking is not yet subject to a longitudinal study. The move has certainly been praised by educators, and that should be enough given it's the first or second year year of implementation in many cases, and what they are advocating for isn't a social taboo, nor draconian.
by topspin | 2025-08-23 05:53:45+00:00
> Isn't that pretty bad, Darth Vader style changing of previously agreed on deals ?

There has been some changing of deals on Intel's part as well, with indefinite delays on US fab buildouts the US passed a bill to subsidize. Now the US is taking some equity for its debt.

Far more dramatic Government intervention took place in 2009 when the US bailed out domestic automakers, including equity. Don't recall as much angst about that among the laptop class. Because Obama.
by manmal | 2025-08-23 05:54:25+00:00
One weird trick is to tell the LLM to ask you questions about anything that’s unclear at this point. I tell it eg to ask up to 10 questions. Often I do multiple rounds of these Q&A and I‘m always surprised at the quality of the questions (w/ Opus). Getting better results that way, just because it reduces the degrees of freedom in which the agent can go off in a totally wrong direction.
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-23 05:56:12+00:00
>That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union.

I know this is just frustrated anger, but it does no good. Our union has survived more than one braindead administration before. We fought a war killing hundreds of thousands to save it for god's sake. We dealt with Zachary Tyler and Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland. We'll get past this moron and be stronger for it, just watch.
by esperent | 2025-08-23 05:57:24+00:00
Here's the report. Could you tell me where in it you found a link to 33x reduction (or any large reduction) for any specific non-tiny model? Because all I can find is lots of references to "median Gemini". In fact, I would say they're being extremely careful in this paper not to mention any particular Google models with regards to energy reduction.

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-23 05:57:25+00:00
> Ada uses two stacks allowing a callee to return a stack-allocated arrays to the caller.

You could do this manually by threading a pointer to a separately-allocated stack (could be on the heap or perhaps just a static allocation) as an extra function parameter. It's just a very simple case of arena allocation, with similar advantages and disadvantages. (For example, the caller must ensure that enough space is available on the dynamic-data stack for anything that the callee might want to push onto it.) In general it's just not really worth it, because it turns out that dynamically-sized data that one would not want to simply place on the heap is rare anyway.
by philiplu | 2025-08-23 05:57:28+00:00
No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; the 32-bit and later 64-bit x86 backend was a different codebase from the 16-bit stuff.