MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-30 14:56:23+00:00
Enough batteries to last with no nuclear, coal, or natural gas on a still winter night? There are not enough grid scale batteries yet. There’s ~8 hours of daylight at the 45th parallel in December.

I don’t feel like doing napkin math on Saturday morning, but you’d need an obscene amount of batteries, the US uses 500+ GWh per day.

Ideally battery storage density will keep advancing to the point where we can use grid scale backup batteries for long durations but we are not there yet.
by jay-barronville | 2025-08-30 14:57:49+00:00
> You aren’t specifying your point of comparison. A nightmare relative to what? You might be saying a nightmare relative to what we have now. Are you?

Very fair point.

And no, it’s less about the status quo and more about AI being the default. There are just too many reasons why this proposal, on its face, seems problematic to me. The following are some questions to highlight just a few of them:

- How exactly would “human creators [applying] their own digital signatures to the original pieces they created” work for creators who have already passed away?

- How fair exactly would it be to impose such a requirement when large portions of the world’s creators (especially in underdeveloped areas) would likely not be able to access and use the necessary software?

- How exactly do anonymous and pseudonymous creators survive such a requirement?
by runarberg | 2025-08-30 14:58:02+00:00
The Nokia branding is now owned by HMD Global, who recently announced they would stop selling Nokia smartphones.

I carry a Nokia smartphone as my main phone (G400) and I personally love it. It is really a no-nonsense kind of phone, they kept the headphone jack (which I use almost every day) it even comes with a charger, and it is one of the more affordable smartphones out there.

I really don’t understand what kind of a business decisions it is to own such a legendary brand with such as a rich and successful history and not use it.
by tomasson | 2025-08-30 14:58:19+00:00
Commutative? Did the real numbers create God?

Certainly Turing and Godel showed that computation is not universal (complete). Looking at one element of number theory in isolation seems unproductive? Arithmetic space is staggeringly complex, but structured, layered. IMHO number theory is like a hall of mirrors without a defined interface with physics. See Yang Mills mass gap.
by hk1337 | 2025-08-30 14:58:54+00:00
Technically, you could swap Eloquent for Doctrine which would solve the database issues but Laravel was built around using Eloquent and vice-versa, there’s very little documentation for using doctrine with laravel or using eloquent with symfony, it’d be easier to just use what grew up together.

Laravel is more akin to rails with its rapid application development but rails does it better.
by SkyeCA | 2025-08-30 14:59:17+00:00
I don’t personally have issues finding it when I want it, but it’s annoying to deal with these days, apps are often degrading and outright depressing, I’m usually very busy with other things, and quite frankly I’m burnt out, but it’s not like I can stop working and recover.

People may call it unhealthy, but these days when I have the time and urge I typically hop on VRC, find someone else, connect some “devices” to the PC, and have some fun with them. It’s not the real thing, but it’s good enough to satisfy me 95% of the time.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-30 15:00:26+00:00
You can get pretty far with just K&R and in isolation if you write algorithmic code. Or with just APUE in isolation.

LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats.

Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
by lazide | 2025-08-30 15:00:40+00:00
Even worse, the Navy knew many of these powder bags were getting increasingly unstable as they were near/over their intended lifespan (many were made in WW2 and had not been treated gently), so what Sandia concluded was a likely accidental overram setting them off was likely a consequence of the Navy’s policies.

Policies that people had objected to at the time, but had been pushed through regardless due to ‘stop being a worry wart’/no one wanting to spend the money.

They still have the accident down as ‘Unknown causes’.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-30 15:00:53+00:00
"Extremely" API-specific is a bit much. One way to do it would be to guard all DLL-implemented functions, and all access to DLL-associated resources, with a reference-counted token, or otherwise use a language-level mechanism (such as Rust's lifetimes) to ensure that all resources are dead by the time of closure. This would take some tedious wrapper-writing, but it's not so complex that it couldn't be done by a source generator or whatever.

Of course, C/C++ applications written in the traditional model with static data everwhere would have difficulty not leaking tokens and holding the DLL open, but it's still far from impossible to write such a safe API.

> That doesn't address the need of some DLLs to malloc() resources in the context of the applications linking to them.

If there is a context boundary and really such a need, then the DLL can keep a list of all such resources, and destroy all those resources once closed. Access to them would similarly have to be protected by a token.
by zahlman | 2025-08-30 15:00:55+00:00
A better explanation of this is on my blog todo list, but:

> Even the most shallow analysis would show this was incredibly stupid and short sighted.

Why? Yes, there's a high probability that this single line of code is ultimately wrong. But having it allows for testing the system (to ensure that getDiscount gets called, that the resulting price is between zero and the undiscounted price, etc.) and it can trivially be replaced when the actual discounting logic becomes known. Nothing can reasonably be called "short sighted" that doesn't actually limit you in the future.

> See also Ward Cunningham trying and failing to solve Sudoku using TDD.

It was Ron Jeffries who was struggling with Sudoku, not Ward Cunningham.

And he didn't struggle because of "doing simple things", but because he didn't actually know how to solve Sudoku, and rather than doing research (or trying a few by hand and reflecting on his own thought process) he expected to gain special insight into the solver by modeling the problem more accurately.

If he had actually known, then he would have just applied the same techniques to modeling the solver, and avoided all the embarrassment.

TDD is orthogonal to "doing the simplest thing", just preached by many of the same people. The problem isn't with writing tests for early iterations of the project that aren't anywhere near fully functional. The problem is that the making the tests pass doesn't actually teach you anything about what the next step of functionality is. You still have to actually think, and Jeffries didn't have a proper basis to ground his thinking.

Norvig's approach to the problem involved some clever hacks that aren't necessarily the best thing from a code maintainability standpoint. But he resisted the temptation to create a prematurely generalized system for solving constraint-propagation problems, trying to create some generic abstract representation of a "constraint" etc. In essence, that code didn't diverge from what the XP gurus preached; it just didn't follow their specific methods ("OO" modeling that's heavily based on creating new classes, TDD etc.).

I independently came to the same conclusions about how to solve the problem, however many years ago. Recently, I was reminded of the story (I think via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953168) and tried writing a solver from scratch as an exercise. My code was certainly not as "clever" as Norvig's, but only a bit longer and IMO much better factored.
by amiga386 | 2025-08-30 15:01:15+00:00
> To make your concert analogy actually fit: A scraper is like a company that sends 1000 robots with tape recorders to your "open to the public" concert.

The scraper is sending ten million robots to your concert. They're packing out every area of space, they're up on the stage, they're in all the vestibules and toilets even though they don't need to go. They've completely crowded out all the humans, who were the ones who actually need to see the concert.

You'd have been fine with a few robots. It used to be the case that companies would send one robot each, and even though they were videotaping, they were discreet about it and didn't get in the humans way.

Now some imbecile is sending millions of robots, instead of just one with a video camera. All the robots wear the scraper's company uniform at first, so to deal with this problem you tell all robots wearing it to go home. Then they all come back dressed identically to the humans in the queue, as they jump ahead of them, to deliberately disguise who they are because they know you'll kick them out. They're not taking no for an answer, and they're going to use their sheer mass and numbers to block out your concert. Nobody seems to know why they do it, and nobody knows who is sending the robots for sure, because robot owners are all denying it's theirs. But somebody is sending them.
by names_are_hard | 2025-08-30 15:01:35+00:00
I looked it up as well, because I had a guess at which famous verse it was but didn't know it by chapter/verse.

The context of the verse, based on the surrounding verses, is that "simplicity with the Lord"[0] means accepting that what happens, or what will happen in the future, is from God and there's no need to try to figure out what will be out make sense of the uncertainty of life.

I think I can relate that to the GP's quote.

[0] translation to English my own, not sure what the language you saw was. Notably, the word used in the original Hebrew[1] can be translated as "simplicity" but also "wholeness" or "completeness". Maybe that works better? Also interestingly, in contemporary Hebrew, it means "naive"...

[1] תמים
by sandreas | 2025-08-30 15:01:53+00:00
I've been an open source developer for a long time now and enabled gh Sponsors around end of 2021. My most popular projects have around 1.3k and 450 stars. I claimed to donate all sponsored money to charity and in 2022/2023 when I was actively developing I earned around €260 in total and donated the full amount.

After my second child was born I did not have any time for developing any software. There were still some sponsors, but most of them canceled their sponsorships pretty quick (which was totally OK).

So I would say it depends on your projects, your luck and your consolistency how much you can earn, but i'm pretty sure your earnings will be nowhere near what you could earn by having a job or being a freelancer.

So if money is your primary motivation, I would pick freelancing/working for a company...
by username332211 | 2025-08-30 15:02:12+00:00
Can you name some examples? Virtually every major revolution or civil war I can think of, would involve intelligent achievers who've made it. In fact, the core of the rebellion would be a class that's often vital for the exercise for political power, but won't be allowed access to that same power.

English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc.

Only the Russian revolution would involve people who were nobodies before it, but they took charge after the disaffected elites that came to power in February spend most of 1917 undermining each other.
by zaphar | 2025-08-30 15:02:43+00:00
This is the "I don't care what fails nor do I wish to handle them" option. Which for some use cases may be fine. It does mean that you don't know what kinds of failures are happening nor what the proper response to them is, though. Like it or not errors are part of your domain and properly modeling them as best you can is a part of the job. Catching at the top level still means some percentage of you users are experiencing a really bad day because you didn't know that error could happen. Error modeling reduces that at the expense of developer time.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-08-30 15:02:55+00:00
Also they hedge a lot, will try doing things one way, have a catch / error handler and then try a completely different way - only one of them can right but it just doesn't care. Have to lean hard to get it to check which paths are actually used and delete the others.

I am convinced this behaviour and the one you described are due to optimising for swe benchmarks that reward 1-shotting fixes without regard to quality. Writing code like this makes complete sense in that context.
by dijit | 2025-08-30 15:03:03+00:00
You're going to have a hard time generalising "European" here, because there's a lot of countries and nothing is set (at all AFAIK) at the EU level.

I lived in the UK and Sweden and both countries had massive private pension systems that you pay into ("optionally"). The state pension is a tiny sliver of that.

In fact, in Sweden I can go look at all my private pension funds in one place; here's a picture of that: https://i.imgur.com/rMw6W44.png

You see the tiny red sliver at the bottom: that's my state pension ("Allmän Pension") which is less than 1,850 USD per month before income taxes. That doesn't even include the inflation that will happen between now and 65 (assuming I will be permitted to retire at 65 which seems unlikely).
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-30 15:03:05+00:00
I've had my involvement with the computer underground.

A web site owner published something he really shouldn't have and got hacked. I wound up being a "person of interest" in the resulting FBI investigation because I was the weirdest person in the chat room for the site. I think it drove them crazy I was using Tor so they got somebody to try to entrap me into sharing CP but (1) I'm not interested and (2) know better than that.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-30 15:03:25+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by solid state AC, peltier cooling? That will never be used for air conditioning, the theoretical max COP is 1 (1w of heat removed for 1w of input power) and a decent heat pump will have a COP of 4 (4w of heat removed for each 1w of input power). Most peltier coolers have a COP of .1, which makes a heat pump 40 times more efficient.

It is impossible to make a solid state peltier cooler that is even 25% as efficient as a vapor-compression cycle heat pump at removing heat, therefore it will never gain traction in applications where a heat pump can be used.

Over the lifetime of an air conditioner, the cost of the energy used to run the equipment will be larger than the cost of the equipment itself, so efficiency is important if you want to reduce your total cost of ownership. SEER ratings eventually have diminishing returns per dollar spent, but finding the most efficient unit per dollar is time well spent.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-30 15:04:11+00:00
Of course there would be differences between the populations. There would probably be genetically-linked psychological differences, too! But would B-islanders be more cooperative, because they needed to band together to survive? Would they be more competitive, because those who hoarded resources for themselves reproduced better? Would A-islanders be better at analytical philosophy, because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals was sexually selected for? Would that have no impact, because analytical philosophy skill has no significant genetic correlate, or would they actually be worse at analytical philosophy because ability to publish in analytical philosophy journals is a poor proxy metric? Or would A-islanders decide that analytical philosophy nerds are undesirable mates, and select against such an ability? Would cultural factors on island B result in a better, safer society where a decade's worth of preserved food is kept at all times, and nobody has to venture out into storms, while the A-islanders become their own predators and destroy each others' food supplies until they suffer entirely-avoidable famines?

Would all these various effects cancel each other out, leaving no phenotypical variation except skin colour (due to the selective effects of melanoma and vitamin D deficiency), and no significant psychological differences except those caused by unselected genetic drift, which are utterly erased by the first generation of interbreeding? There is no way to tell, from the information you have provided. Your thought experiment reveals your (and my) own biases, nothing more. Thought experiments only work in mathematics and physics, not (except in extremely simple situations) evolutionary biology.
by the_other | 2025-08-30 15:05:06+00:00
In the late 00s a few friends sent me “connect with me on Facebook” messages. I thought “this looks suspicious, I don’t want to, but it seems all my friends are communicsting here now…”. So I joined, and in 10years everything I worried could happen with FB did, and much much worse.

So, I’ll trust my gut more on this one.
by 9rx | 2025-08-30 15:05:27+00:00
> I worry about missing important interactions.

If you are concerned that the ORM won't behave as it claims to, you can write tests targeted at it directly. You can then run the same tests against your mock implementation to show that it conforms to the same contract.

But an ORM of any decent quality will already be well tested and shouldn't do unexpected things, so perhaps the worry is for not?
by archagon | 2025-08-30 15:05:48+00:00
An AI helmed by a deranged megalomaniac who keeps publicly tweaking it to conform to his fucked-up worldview is a fundamentally damaged product, no matter how many millions get poured into it or how shiny the splash page is. I feel like this should be stating the obvious, and any “hacker” from the old school would agree.

Alas, I’m sure the mods have manually disabled flags for this press release.
by ijk | 2025-08-30 15:05:50+00:00
I think the main difference is that sandboxing and simplifying the LLM's access to tools and data tends to be core functionality, whereas for XR it is more about performance and developer experience.

I'm going to put a lot of work in anyway to keep the LLM from accidentally overwriting the code running it or messing with customer data incorrectly or not being overwhelmed with implementation details; having a standard for this makes it much easier and lets me rely on other people's model training.

If it's merely that I have to train a dev on an XR SDK, I can pay them a salary or encourage schools to teach it. AI needs an team for an R&D project and compute time, which can get a lot more expensive at the high end.
by sigseg1v | 2025-08-30 15:06:03+00:00
What size of codebases are we talking here? I've had a lot of issues trying to do pretty much anything across a 1.7 million LOC codebase and generally found it faster to use traditional IDE functionalities.

I've had much more success with things under 20k LOC but that isn't the stuff that I really need any assistance with.
by bitexploder | 2025-08-30 15:06:14+00:00
If you look at how the most advanced commercial models are deployed they already have much of this, including isolation. This post is essentially sketching much of what I know already exists. Not in the literal OS sense, but in terms of all of the features suggested. It still isn’t enough. Agents need powerful access to things you care about to do their job. Granting them just enough permissions on the things you care about is much harder than containing the LLM, and that is already difficult. The right model for LLM security is an untrusted userspace, not an entire “OS”.
by rbren | 2025-08-30 15:06:47+00:00
If you're interested in running agents (specifically for software dev) inside a sandbox, OpenHands [1] runs in Docker by default, and can run on Kubernetes or on a raw VM. It gets access to the standard tools (e.g. file ops, bash) as well as a web browser and a Jupyter notebook.

[1] https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands
by petre | 2025-08-30 15:06:50+00:00
It's a bit more nuanced.

The teachers will just move to cities with more schools. Qualified workforce too. Rural areas are already depopulated.

Yes, the trip by car to Brasov is quite daunting on a Friday evening or Saturday morning. But infrastructure is getting better thanks to the EU. The politicians learned that motorways with EU and government funds is a great way to get them voted and they created a current account deficit.

Brasov is nice. What's not that nice about it, is brown bears roaming freely at night on the streets. Trivia: was also named after Stalin during stalinism. It also had a Hollywood like sign post cut in the treeline on the main hill with the dictator's name.
by mastermage | 2025-08-30 15:06:51+00:00
sometimes you do some wack magic in just one line of code, sometimes thats necessary for performance or because what you are trying todo is inherently wack magic. Example the fast inverse square from quake. Insane magic and if you just document does inverse square approximately people would freak out. So sometimes when wack magic is used explain the wack magic (as concise as reasonable)
by rozab | 2025-08-30 15:06:56+00:00
Relevant excerpt:

>The FBI and CISA raised the alarm two months after The Wall Street Journal reported that hackers linked to the Chinese government have broken into systems that enable U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct electronic surveillance operations under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

>"These are for legitimate wiretaps that have been authorized by the courts," Hong says. But in hackers' hands, he says, the tools could potentially be used "to surveil communications and metadata for lots of people. And it seems like the [hackers'] focus is primarily Washington, D.C."
by eksrow | 2025-08-30 15:07:28+00:00
It feels like I'm getting more jaded everyday because the moment I started reading this article I was convinced it was written by an AI.

From a hosting perspective which the article talks about I would worry more about just keeping the AI agent functional/alive in a whatever environment a big challenge, using AI a great but stability in any basically use-case has been rough for me personally.

From a developer perspective I've been using devcontainers with rootless docker via wsl and while I'm sure there's some malware that can bypass that (where this VM approach would be a lot stronger) I feel a lot safer this way than running things on the host OS. Furthermore you get the same benefits like reproducibility and separation of concerns and whenever the AI screws something up in your environment you can simply rebuild the container.
by dijit | 2025-08-30 15:07:37+00:00
Sweden has the most booming tech sector in Europe so far, and the games industry around Stockholm and Malmö rival Paris.

Not sure where you got that they're lazy, some of the most hardworking and skilled people I've met are here.

They also understand that a mind that does not let go does not grow, like a bodybuilder overtraining: rest is an important part of growth. Do you mean that?
by DonaldFisk | 2025-08-30 15:07:56+00:00
> Just look at North Korea for example ... on average their literacy is terrible.

Where do you get that information from? According to the CIA, it's 100% (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/f...). North Korea Info (https://www.northkoreainfo.com/why-does-north-korea-have-a-h...) gives a slightly lower estimate of 97%-99%.