MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DannyBee | 2025-08-24 15:40:20+00:00
I have built two of these for dogs. It's really not hard,w hether you go completely from scratch or use something premade.

If you want something mostly premade,go get an autoslide. If you want to do it completely from scratch:

1. RFID/bluetooth proximity is much easier to work with than camera + rpi + AI. For the usecase you are talking about, AI is not just overkill, but will make it actively harder to achieve your goal

2. Locking is pretty easy depending on motor mechanism - either a cheap relay'd magnetic lock, or simply a motor that can't be backdriven easily.

Motor wise, you can either use the rack and pinion style that autoslide does, or a simple linear motor if you don't want to deal with gear tracks.

Overall, i went the autoslide route and had it all set up and working in an hour or two.
by patmorgan23 | 2025-08-24 15:41:10+00:00
Solar/wind + battery storage can come online a lot faster and cheaper than nuclear.

We should probably increase the construction of nuclear, but it's extremely expensive and takes 5+ years to bring a plant online, even with regulatory fast tracking. Committing to a batch of plants with the same design would help reduce cost, and maybe decrease the avg time to operations, but it would still take a decade for all the plants to come online.
by stevenbedrick | 2025-08-24 15:41:55+00:00
Totally agreed, but I will just add, to your first point, it’s fine for priorities to change, but we do also have well-established statutes that define how changes in administrative rules are supposed to be implemented (eg the Administrative Procedures Act), and at least some of the lawsuits about grant termination have argued that those rules have been being ignored or outright turned inside-out. The district court judge’s written decision in the APHA v NIH case was quite detailed in his explanation of the many, many, many ways that the APA was grossly violated. So yes, priorities are allowed to change, but we have a system in place to manage that; otherwise we are, as Justice Jackson put it this week, playing Calvinball which IMHO is no way to run a country. At a micro level, it’s really painful to spend months writing a grant, more months waiting for it to come up for review, and then at the last second have it get administratively bounced because of new “rules” that didn’t exist when the grant was written or submitted (as happened to me earlier this year).

You are of course correct that it’s utterly bananas that in 225 we are wasting our time trying to guess which words shouldn’t be used in grant applications, and that our colleagues at the CDC and NIH are having to do the same for their papers.
by coffee_am | 2025-08-24 15:42:10+00:00
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...

But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?

On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
by humanrebar | 2025-08-24 15:42:11+00:00
Are you saying the mentality is offensive? Or is there a business justification I am missing?

Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 15:42:28+00:00
> were forced to work on a much slower machine

I feel like that's the wrong approach. Like saying a music producer to always work with horrible (think car or phone) speakers. True, you'll get a better mix and master if you test it on speakers you expect others to hear it through, but no one sane recommends you to default to use those for day-to-day work.

Same goes for programming, I'd lose my mind if everything was dog-slow, and I was forced to experience this just because someone thinks I'll make things faster for them if I'm forced to have a slower computer. Instead I'd just stop using my computer if the frustration ended up larger than the benefits and joy I get.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-24 15:42:32+00:00
> the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA

Wyoming here. Coal country. Everyone thinks this is dumb. Including the folks in Campbell county, our top-producing coal region that has been trying to build a wind farm [1].

Trump’s social media fans in Florida and Texas like this because it feels like owning the libs. (To the extent there may be pecuniary interest, it would be in power producers. Like housing, stopping new power raises prices and profits incumbents.)

Also, that Reddit thread is about coking coal. Not the thermal coal power plants burn. It’s about American steel production shutting down in the face of our trade war. Not this new economic miracle these idiots have spun up.

[1] https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/...
by pron | 2025-08-24 15:42:58+00:00
We also got Java and Python (and VB for a while), which means there is no intrinsic, irrational bias against those approaches. A romantic view of those languages tends to ignore their serious shortcomings at the time they were presented. It's like claiming the market was irrational when it preferred VHS to Betamax despite the latter's better quality, while neglecting to mention it had a worse recording time, which mattered more to more people. When compating two things, it's not enough to mention the areas where X is better than Y; you also need to consider those where X is worse.
by glimmung | 2025-08-24 15:43:22+00:00
This is hilarious - I have yet to get to the article, because (on a fresh Ubuntu Mate LTS install with the stock Firefox) I am redirected to: -

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-generic-ua.html

...which complains about an "HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this.", and I'm left thinking that the person behind this site does not care about client-side problems...
by AlbertoGP | 2025-08-24 15:43:31+00:00
I tried it out to see if I would want to use this instead of miniz which I am using at the moment, but the example seems to be missing some includes.

I filed an issue with the details: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/stb-zip/issues/1

Edit to add: I see now that you also did the Uprintf submission from a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44960664) which had some baffling bugs, and then you mentioned that you were using AI for some of it. That might explain the missing parts here too.
by cubefox | 2025-08-24 15:43:38+00:00
I don't quite understand this. The friction on ordinary desktop PC gaming is also fairly high. I can't imagine playing on Quest 2 or 3 is significantly more complicated. Also, if you are playing a large RPG (like Asgards Wrath 2), a few minutes of setup won't make much of a difference in playing time. I agree it's a different issue for more casual games.

I think the more relevant difference is that there are vastly more (and therefore: better) PC games than VR games.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-24 15:43:54+00:00
> What you want to aim for is a RAM/CPU usage that matches the RAM/CPU ratio on the machine, as that's what you pay for.

This totally ignores the role of memory bandwidth, which is often the key bottleneck on multicore workloads. It turns out that using more RAM costs you more CPU, too, because the CPU time is being wasted waiting for DRAM transfers. Manual memory management (augmented with optional reference counting and "borrowed" references - not the pervasive refcounting of Swift, which performs less well than modern tracing GC) still wins unless you're dealing with the messy kind of workload where your reference graphs are totally unpredictable and spaghetti-like. That's the kind of problem that GC was really meant for. It's no coincidence that tracing GC was originally developed in combination with LISP, the language of graph-intensive GOFAI.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-24 15:43:55+00:00
> CPI energy prices

What does this mean?

> solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices

Why would the government intervening to ban supply make things better?

This policy is a hand-out to power producers. It constricts supply. It’s Trump copying San Francisco and Los Angeles housing policymakers, except for energy.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-24 15:44:08+00:00
> In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives.

It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
by ModernMech | 2025-08-24 15:44:13+00:00
This message seems to come from a timeline where the people cutting the renewable projects care about electoral outcomes.

But in this timeline, they tried to violently overturn the 2020 election, and they are currently trying to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering states they control as much as possible.

This isn't about earning the political support of people in coal country who vote GOP. If they ever face negative electoral outcomes in the future, their plan is to overturn the election using either force or legal chicanery.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-24 15:44:19+00:00
If you want to lower costs, why would you prevent the easiest to deploy form of supply? Why would you prevent the market from meeting the demand?

This isn’t about subsidies, it’s about standing in the way of the free market.

And why do you think cost relates to a form of supply? It seems more likely that demand is also much higher (data centers, more air conditioning, etc).
by netsharc | 2025-08-24 15:44:39+00:00
Gee, I really haven't considered your approach.. considering extensions can really be trojan horses for malware, that's a good idea..

It's interesting how old phone OSes like BlackBerry had a great security model (fine-grained permissions) but when the unicorns showed up they just said "Trust us, it'll be fine..", and some of these companies provide browsers too..
by jmull | 2025-08-24 15:45:20+00:00
> Most people do not spend thousands of hours building something "not knowing what they're building."

They sure do in my experience.

> On the contrary, in my experience it's much more important to "play" with a concept and see it working...

I agree with all that. That's the point: figure out what you're trying to do before building it. Of course you will not know everything up-front, and of course you would try things out to learn and progress, and, for anything that it's tiny, of course it makes sense to do this iteratively, working from the most pressing/important/risky points earlier.

Or, at least, it seems obvious to me.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-08-24 15:45:24+00:00
Your comment reflects energy policy from somewhere around like 1975?

How can I tell someone on hackernews knows absolutely nothing about power generation economics? They say we have to go all in on nuclear. And that's assuming that the poster isn't being completely disingenuous.

Nuclear is expensive, and there are no technologies that will reduce the price in the near term. Solar wind and battery storage is still on a economies of scale price reduction curve that no other form of electricity generation can match.

Not coal, not natural gas, and certainly not nuclear.

If you start building nuclear plants which best case come online in 10 to 12 years, with nuclear technology that already is not economical, by the time they come online that is another 10 or 12 years of battery, solar panel, and wind technology improvement and further economies of scale.

Wind and solar have the ability to be organically grown and expanded. Solar can be placed practically anywhere there's a roof.

Now do I think we should be researching nuclear, researching lftrs, and perhaps funding nuclear power plants to perform peaking in the grid? Sure.

Do I think we should be shutting down existing nuclear power plants not particularly. I'd rather use those than natural gas and coal fired plants for grid balancing.

Right now rooftop solar or residential solar is probably about the price of nuclear. In 10 years it will probably be half the price of nuclear.

Anyway, the overall good news with this typically unhinged Trump announcement is it the economic reality is on the side of alternative energy proponents.

Of course the government can screw things up, boy howdy. Do we know that now. But then Americans will just learn the brutal truth that other economies are going to drop the price of their electricity, which is one of the basic drivers of economic growth and competition.

And the US will be left behind.

Because it's not like we're entering a multipolar highly competitive world right? oh.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-24 15:45:35+00:00
You could ask dozens and maybe hundreds of entry level questions about the study that the study answers in its text.

How many of those questions do you feel is adequate to pre-respond to any time you link a study? Especially when assuming incompetence on the person asking the question thus you can't possibly know the questions they are most likely to ask (since they're incompetent)?

And if I'm incompetent, why would anyone trust my summary and pre-responses to the study?

None of this makes sense. And we're getting awfully close of just pasting/linking the study so the person with the questions can just read the dang thing.
by diggan | 2025-08-24 15:45:49+00:00
> There is not 2 different kinds of code

In Python in relation to ast, it does seem so yeah.

If you add two numbers in Python code, it looks like `1 + 1`, but if you use the module from `Lib/ast.py` linked above, how would it look like? I think it would be something like `Expression(body=BinOp(left=Name(id='x',ctx=Load()),op=Add(),right=Name(id='y', ctx=Load())))` which at a glance, certainly looks different than `1 + 1` in my eyes :)

In lisps, `(+ 1 1)` is just `(+ 1 1)` regardless if it's source code or AST, they're just the same thing.
by oezi | 2025-08-24 15:46:58+00:00
I would argue that buying Russian gas was primarily market driven and politics didn't stop it from happening. It was cheaper than American or Qatari gas why should European nations not have bought it?

It the same way that the US got hooked on cheap Chinese imports.

Also renewables make too much sense right now. That's why a lot of dollars are allocated towards them even though subsidies are mostly gone.
by oceanhaiyang | 2025-08-24 15:47:28+00:00
Why is the entire blog aligned to the left on mobile? Even the background is to the left.

Though this article mostly discusses exact time, I find this idea very interesting in relation to my dissertation. Minor distraction probably causes me to waste a few minutes to tens of minutes to get focused again. Having a child and a partner that need help when I’m working from home has trained me to be able to power write in 1-2 hours what others do in a day. A bigger distraction like an issue causing stress might distract me for half of my work day. It’s not that I don’t want to continue but it’s hard to get back onto task just as one was.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-24 15:47:35+00:00
The cost picture already makes sense for onshore wind, which is why if you have a suitable site people do that. If you own a hilltop farm in the UK a bank loan for a wind turbine is a no-brainer for the loan officer - because it's not correlated to farm gate prices unlike other loans you might want e.g. for equipment or buildings so that's a desirable loan to have.
by mlyle | 2025-08-24 15:47:35+00:00
The only things that matters for this consideration are:

A. How bad is the consequence of not having them?

B. How long does it take to tool up domestic production if there's a supply disruption?

C. How long can you tolerate the shortage of them?

D. How easy is it for a disruption or disaster to disrupt international supply?

The answers to A and D are fairly different, but both are "bad enough" to trigger this kind of thinking. The ratio of B to C are probably similar between food and critical integrated circuits.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-24 15:47:37+00:00
You have the right picture of what’s going on. Roughly:

* The only true interface with an LLM is tokens. (No separation between control and data channels.)

* The model api layer injects instructions on tool calling and a list of available tools into the base prompt, with documentation on what those tools do.

* Tool calling is delineated by special tokens. When a model wants to call a tool, it adds a special block to the response that contains the magic token(s) along with the name of the tool and any params. The api layer then extracts this and forms a structured json response in some tool_calls parameter or whatever that is sent in the api response to the user. The result of the tool coming back from the user through the tool calling api is then encoded with special tokens and injected.

* Presumably, the api layer prevents the user from injecting such tokens themselves.

* SotA Models are good at tool calls because they have been heavily fine-tuned on them, with all sorts of tasks that involve tool calls, like bash invocations. The fine-tuning is both to get them good at tool calls in general, and also probably involves specific tool calls that the model provider wants them to be good at, such as the Claude Sonnet model getting fine-tuned on the specific tools Claude Code uses.

Sometimes it amazes me that this all works so well, but it does. You are right to put your finger on the fine-tuning, as it’s critical for making tool calling work well. Tool calling works without fine-tuning, but it’s going to be more hit-or-miss.
by amai | 2025-08-24 15:47:39+00:00
Anyone ever bought shoes or clothes or tires in the EU? The sizes are absolutely not metric and a complete mess! Not to start about traffic rules, sizes of streets, traffic signs etc. Nothing is regulated, nothing is standardized. But the worst missing regulations which are keeping the continent back are missing standards for train traffic in the EU: E.g. there are about 10 different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_electrificatio... in the EU. In addition their are thousands of incompatible regulations regarding train signals. The EU could have high speed trains from Lissabon to Helsinki. But I guess the US will introduce metric units before the EU will solve their train traffic mess.
by groby_b | 2025-08-24 15:47:44+00:00
This would make sense if it were a single issue. (And then, limited sense - even quite red places like Texas invest in solar because they need it. Coal is a regional issue, not a national one)

If you see it in light of all the other actions taken across the spectrum, you land at best at "desperate dice roll to re-tool the US into a manufacturing power from the 80s", and at worst at "deliberate dismantling of a first-rate world power into a second tier paradise for oligarchs".
by danenania | 2025-08-24 15:48:22+00:00
It can definitely be difficult and frustrating to try to use LLMs in a large codebase—no disagreement there. You have to be very selective about the tasks you give them and how they are framed. And yeah, you often need to throw away what they produced when they go in the wrong direction.

None of that means they’re getting worse though. They’re getting better; they’re just not as good as you want them to be.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-24 15:48:22+00:00
That would be a compelling counter if and only if languages like Java actually beat other languages in throughput. In practice that doesn’t seem to be the case and the reasons for that seem to be:

* languages like c++ and Rust simply don’t allocate as much as Java, instead using value types. Even C# is better here with value types being better integrated.

* languages like c++ and Rust do not force atomic reference counting. Rust even offers non atomic ref counting in the standard library. You also only need to atomic increment / decrement when ownership is being transferred to a thread - that isn’t quite as common depending on the structure of your code. Even swift doesn’t do too badly here because of the combination of compiler being able to prove the permission of eliding the need for reference counting altogether and offering escape hatches of data types that don’t need it.

* c++, Rust, and Swift can access lower level capabilities (eg SIMD and atomics) that let them get significantly higher throughput.

* Java’s memory model implies and requires the JVM to insert atomic accesses all over the place you wouldn’t expect (eg reading an integer field of a class is an atomic read and writing it is an atomic write). This is going to absolutely swamp any advantage of the GC. Additionally, a lot of Java code declares methods synchronized which requires taking a “global” lock on the object which is expensive and pessimistic for performance as compared with the fine-grained access other languages offer.

* there’s lots of research into ways of offering atomic reference counts more cheaply (called biased RC) which can safely avoid needing to do an atomic operation in places completely transparently and safely provided the conditions are met .

I’ve yet to see a Java program that actually gets higher throughput than Rust so the theoretical performance advantage you claim doesn’t appear to manifest in practice.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-24 15:48:33+00:00
>4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;

Where, in the USA, can an electricity seller increase the price without government approval? Hell, your [2] link is about an entity of the federal government, there are no shareholders.
by yuanchuangAI | 2025-08-24 15:49:45+00:00
We tested 50+ AI tools in the past few months and ranked the top 10 that actually make a difference in productivity and creativity.

Key picks: - *ChatGPT* (#1) – still the best all-around assistant. - *Canva* (#2) – AI design for non-designers. - *Gemini* (#3) – great for Google Workspace users. - *DeepSeek* – surprisingly strong for research. - *Adobe Firefly* – pro-level visual creation.

We also compared pricing, best use cases, and added a table to help people pick the right tool.

Full writeup here: [https://www.toolsverse.tools/blog/top-10-ai-tools-august-202...]

Curious: What AI tools have you found indispensable in 2025?