MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-18 20:24:34+00:00
Battery tech is for general use. The median and mean usage of a car in the US is 40 miles per day. A 300 mile battery gets you a week's worth of driving between charges (~7.5 days). That's comparable to a median ICE car that gets 300 miles on a tank, with the subtle distinction of needing a 30-45 minute fast charge versus a 5-10 minute refill. But that's still a once a week "problem" with useful mitigations such as it is dangerous and illegal in most states (just poorly enforced in many as well) to leave a car unattended while refueling with gas, but electricity is far safer and multitasking is easier and more convenient while fast charging. (That fact that most fast chargers aren't interesting destinations with enough things walkably nearby is a different problem to solve, that the market should be rather good at solving eventually.)

But that's all still treating EV charging in the old world ICE model which everyone is familiar. When people are talking about wanting more chargers everywhere a car may be parked, like offices or transit stations and other parking structures, that isn't a need, that's a market opportunity unavailable to ICE. You can't put a gas pump in every parking space, but you sure can put an ordinary electric outlet. We can distribute the charging "problem" of a car far more easily than the current centralizing forces of gas logistics. It's an amenity that anyone who owns a parking lot or garage can offer to encourage walkability to nearby businesses and/or homes. It's a possible revenue source for other parking lots or garages that love low margin business models like electricity metering and/or think they have a captive enough audience to charge whatever margins they like, to make the bottom line grow.

We don't need those things to happen. We've driven gas engines for enough decades without that. We want those things to happen. We expect market forces to eventually deliver those things, as soon as the market better figures out what EV charging disrupts in parking lot planning and operations/maintenance. You can't expect your gas car to have more gas when you come back to it in a parking lot, but an EV can have a slightly higher charge almost anywhere it is parked for a while and that's a game changer that will slowly spread as the market finds the fun (and profit or marketing opportunity) in it.
by oezi | 2025-08-18 20:24:42+00:00
Well, even if they are so bad they still started to dominate EV car sales in Europe because Elon dropped the ball.

I inherited an ID3 and while I can say the software and entertainment system in general isn't great I think it is a solid car. If you look at how the cars improved by variant and versions over the last 4 years then it is quite remarkable. Cheap plastic gone, charging DC now at 185 kw, you have GTX versions with more HP than anybody would need.

Going EV is life-or-death for all car manufacturers. Who with the exception of Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and VW is doing a good job of the old manufacturers?
by rspencer | 2025-08-18 20:24:43+00:00
I had a similar thought a few years ago with an Advent of Code problem for which my solution in python might have been

max(map(sum, input_list.split(None)))

To decipher this the eye has to jump to the middle of the line, move rightwards, then to the left to see the "map" then move right again to see what we are mapping and then all the way to the beginning to find the "max".

The author would probably suggest rust's syntax* of

values.iter().split(None).map(Iterator::sum).max().unwrap_or(0)

but I was learning q at the time so came up with the much clearer /s, right to left

max((0^+)\)l

*: Though neither python nor rust have such a nice `.split(None)` built in.
by coredog64 | 2025-08-18 20:24:47+00:00
It's less about Bezos and more about the principal/agent problem. There are entire groups within Amazon that exist to justify promotion scope for the manager. Then there are entire groups that are supporting revenue-generating operations but have been reduced to KTLO because there's not scope for promotion.

Promotion-driven development is an issue across MAGMA, but IMO Amazon has it the worst because of the twin drivers of extreme stack-ranking and the focus on equity appreciation in compensation.

Being behind on AI has resulted in a field day for empire builders. Amazon needs to get their overall house in order first before trying to be a leader in AI.
by lawik | 2025-08-18 20:25:02+00:00
I think Intel wants to stay alive so they are looking for a lifeline and the current administration wants to bring chip production into the US.

Intel's death would be very embarassing to that whole effort. So Intel has incentives (survival) and the administration has incentives (jobs in the US). The method is "whatever can be claimed as a win".

No US party seems particularly capable or keen to hold an ideological line but especially not the GOP from what I've seen. Not saying other countries have particularly impressive parties either. I'm less than thrilled with ours over here.
by speedgoose | 2025-08-18 20:25:04+00:00
Phones don’t have active cooling, or just proper cooling. Heavy usage and charging will heat up the battery a lot. A warm battery at a high state of charge will deteriorate fast.

Also, they aren’t designed to last very long. One manufacturer could reduce the max voltage in the BMS (battery management system), or reduce the charging speed at high states of charges, to significantly increase the lifetime of the battery but they somehow don’t. Though you start to see some phone limiting their charge.
by grafmax | 2025-08-18 20:25:12+00:00
Effects of upzoning are mixed:

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/Zoning%20C...

Median rent as a portion of median income driving homelessness:

https://wp-tid.zillowstatic.com/3/Homelessness_InflectionPoi...

Just a couple examples. The causal picture is more complex than upzoning. It is one factor among many.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-18 20:25:14+00:00
ecto's sql dsl basicly fixes this. here's one I just wrote in my codebase

from(l in Blinq.Reservations.OrderCycleLinks) |> join(:left, [l], r in Blinq.Reservations.Reservation, on: l.reservation_id == r.id) |> select([l, r], %{ order_cycle_id: l.order_cycle_id, customer_id: r.customer_id }) |> where([l, r], l.order_cycle_id in ^order_cycle_ids and r.assignment_type == :TABLE) |> Repo.all()
by mnw21cam | 2025-08-18 20:25:49+00:00
Admittedly, the whole stupidity of the article aside, they do make a valid point with their "triggering processes" bit. GET should not perform side-effects. That's what POST is for.

Also, for your blog, have you considered password-protecting it? As in, http passwords, which are still (surprisingly) a thing. You can even have a password-free landing page handing the password out to every human that visits, with an onward link to the password-protected site. That should stop the bots but keep letting the humans in.
by jdsully | 2025-08-18 20:25:55+00:00
The worst thing is they deny access to Bedrock by default. I had to wait two weeks to get access because there support took multiple days to respond. More than enough time for me to port my entire app to GCP out of frustration. GCP has sensible default quotas so you can at least try it without a two week wait. Plus access to Gemini.
by lolive | 2025-08-18 20:26:03+00:00
You are probably right, I am not representative of the vast majority of people who consume products, whereas I collect [what I consider to be, for me] GREAT stuff.

But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].

And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.
by nirava | 2025-08-18 20:26:03+00:00
+1 to this. The AI stuff should be a different tool that I can pipe stuff into:

`doxx document.docs | doxxAI`

Even without any of the bad vibes around AI, it is just much more aesthetic and wonderful if the core doxx util was a single purpose command.

Also, it is open source so if it's sufficiently useful, someone will spin off a AI stripped down version anyways, and that'll probably gain more users/goodwill in the kind of CLI SSH dev niche market this tool is trying to fit in.
by jfengel | 2025-08-18 20:26:23+00:00
Conspiracy theories and crackpot theories overlap a lot. A lot of crackpot theories include a conspiracy component: not only is my crackpot theory true, but also there is a conspiracy to suppress it.

The conspiracy theory element is a heuristic for evaluating the crackpot theory: setting aside the particulars of the theory, does it also require an utterly enormous, vastly powerful group to keep that secret (but not quite powerful enough to keep you from having discovered the truth)?

That's a heuristic, not a proof. But it does give you a hint about which notions are worth your time to investigate further.
by rhet0rica | 2025-08-18 20:27:00+00:00
I have two related stories.

Googlebot has been playing a multiple-choice flash card game on my site for months—the page picks a random question and gives you five options to choose from. Each URL contains all of the state of the last click: the option you chose, the correct answer, and the five buttons. Naturally, Google wants to crawl all the buttons, meaning the search tree has a branch factor of five and search space of about 5000^7 possible pages. Adding a robots.txt entry failed to fix this—now the page checks the user agent and tells Googlebot specifically to fuck off with a 403. Weeks later, I'm still seeing occasional hits. Worst of all it's pretty heavy-duty—the flash cards are for learning words, and the page generator sometimes sprinkles in items that look similar to the correct answer (i.e., they have a low edit distance.)

On the other hand there was a... thing crawling a search page on a separate site, but doing so in the most ass-brained way possible. Different IP addresses, all with fake user agents from real clients fetching search results for a database retrieval form with default options. (You really expect me to believe that someone on Symbian is fetching only page 6000 of all blog posts for the lowest user ID in the database?) The worst part about this one is that the URLs frequently had mangled query strings, like someone had tried to use substring functions to swap out the page number and gotten it wrong 30 times, resulting in Markov-like gibberish. The only way to get this foul customer to go away was to automatically ban any IP that used the search form incorrectly. So far I have banned 111,153 unique addresses.

robots.txt wasn't adequate to stop this madness, but I can't say I miss Ahrefs or DotBot trying to gather valuable SEO information about my constructed languages.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-08-18 20:27:44+00:00
> I've regularly wondered how much of the slow battery degradation in these car battery packs is "cheating".

Using the word "cheating" has a very negative valence, but it's not exactly a secret that EV batteries are not designed to use their full "raw" capacity. The manufacturer is quite clear that you should avoid charging to more than 80% on a regular basis as it will degrade the battery faster. What matters is not that the batteries are capable of some theoretical "raw" capacity but that the advertised capacity is correct, just like with SSDs. It doesn't strike me as cheating that SSDs have more capacity than what is advertised on the (proverbial) box.
by tick_tock_tick | 2025-08-18 20:28:35+00:00
I mean is that going to be possible or even help them? I think whole can of worms is going to go real bad for the Democrats the states they control are mostly already district-ed fully blue or almost fully blue while the red states have way more possible adjustments.

Add in the fact that everyone has been moving to red states for the last decade the seat re-balancing of the house is really going to favor Republicans.
by ToDougie | 2025-08-18 20:29:06+00:00
Used to play CS1.6 for 30-40 hours a week in a DFW-based server called A Better Place to Play. Every time as_oilrig showed up in the rotation, people would scramble to join me on the CTs. We had so many great strategies, we could win almost every round. (And mind you this was a 32-person pub.) Greatest of times, and only possible because the server had a dedicated community and our clan was meticulous.

Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....
by PyWoody | 2025-08-18 20:29:16+00:00
If you're on Mac, you can use `say`, e.g.,

say "This is a test message" --voice="Bubbles"

EDIT: I'm having way too much fun with this lol

say "This is a test message" --voice="Organ" say "This is a test message" --voice="Good News" say "This is a test message" --voice="Bad News" say "This is a test message" --voice="Jester"
by brosco | 2025-08-18 20:29:20+00:00
There is indeed a lot of crossover, and a lot of neural networks can be written in a state space form. The optimal control problem should be equivalent to training the weights, as you mention.

However, from what I have seen, this isn't really a useful way of reframing the problem. The optimal control problem is at least as hard, if not harder, than the original problem of training the neural network, and the latter has mature and performant software for doing it efficiently. That's not to say there isn't good software for optimal control, but it's a more general problem and therefore off-the-shelf solvers can't leverage the network structure very well.

Some researchers have made interesting theoretical connections like in neural ODEs, but even there the practicality is limited.
by necovek | 2025-08-18 20:29:34+00:00
I've recently had Apple Notes mess up my notes: I can still extract them from the notes.db file with a binary editor to an extent, but it's not a valid sqlite file anymore. I am not even sure what happened (did my laptop run out of battery or something else, I don't know).

I didn't have them synced to the Apple Cloud either as it's a corporate laptop, but I advise against using them for what you want to keep.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-08-18 20:30:07+00:00
I'd say it's more of a mixed bag.

There's some good (microbiome research, cracking down on influencers advertising drugs), some bad (anti-fluoride, autism scare, vaccine scare, EM radiation scare), some I can't evaluate (usefulness of non-animal models, usefulness of AI in cancer research and in diagnostic medicine), and some that depend heavily on implementation (prescription impact on mental health, building a general data platform, changing nutrition labelling).

It's certainly doesn't seem like a dismantling of the agency nor an attempt at corruption.

However, RFK Jr. and the rest of this administration has a lot of baggage, I heavily disagree with the idea that the bad ideas here are just a distraction duck.
by stetrain | 2025-08-18 20:30:25+00:00
I'd love to see cities put efforts into connecting those isolated cultures-de-sac neighborhoods with pedestrian and bike paths.

I can understand the desire to reduce through-traffic which sometimes comes with speeding or aggressive drivers. But walking and cycling to your friends house shouldn't mean going a mile out to the entrance of your neighborhood, down the busy highway, then a mile back in to their house when they were only half a mile away to begin with.
by daviding | 2025-08-18 20:30:39+00:00
I had a mild addiction to this game about 7 or so years ago. Purely casual but lots of hours. I found it sort of a stress relief.

On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-18 20:30:49+00:00
> Cupertino has done the thing it swore it never would: turn its tablet into a full-blown window-wrangling, compromise-abandoning computer.

Contra: I (and my senior mom) would like to have a simple device with a simple interface. If I wanted to use a 'real' computer I would use a real computer.

At the very least there should be a "simple mode" switch where the behaviour can be toggled.
by godelski | 2025-08-18 20:31:04+00:00
I just started getting back into gaming and I'm seeing shit like this all the time. It's amazing that stuff like this is so common while the Quake fast inverse square root algo is so well known.

How is it that these companies spend millions of dollars to develop games and yet modders are making patches in a few hours fixing bugs that never get merged. Not some indie game, but AAA rated games!

I think you're right, it's on both management and the programmers. Management only knows how to rush but not what to rush. The programmers fall for the trap (afraid to push back) and never pull up a profiler. Maybe over worked and over stressed but those problems never get solved if no one speaks up and everyone is quiet and buys into the rush for rushing's sake mentality.

It's amazing how many problems could be avoided by pulling up a profiler or analysis tool (like Valgrind).

It's amazing how many millions of dollars are lost because no one ever used a profiler or analysis tool.

I'll never understand how their love for money makes them waste so much of it.
by tyilo | 2025-08-18 20:31:18+00:00
Last week I created a script for finding which TLD's have MX records. Result:

cf: ["mail.intnet.cf."] gp: ["ns1.nic.gp."] gt: ["aspmx.l.google.com.", "alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.", "alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.", "aspmx2.googlemail.com.", "aspmx4.googlemail.com.", "aspmx5.googlemail.com."] hr: ["alpha.carnet.hr."] km: ["mail1.comorestelecom.km."] mq: ["mx1-mq.mediaserv.net."] mr: ["mail.nic.mr."] tt: ["ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.", "ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM."] ua: ["mr.kolo.net."] ws: ["mail.worldsite.ws."] موريتانيا: ["mail.nic.mr."] عرب: ["your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.عرب."]

PS: Only http://uz/ seems to have a "working" HTTP server, returning the 500 status code.
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-18 20:31:29+00:00
I'm just a sysadmin trying to do fun stuff, so when I put this idea into v0 it of course spat out typescript which I have no clue about. So while it came out kinda cool/neat, it runs only ok ish on render but it could be a lot better. It's not really randomized (which I had asked it to stream the search results randomly but that didn't happen) and I think archive.org will likely ban the render instance source IP after awhile, and also likely the render free instance is too small.

All that being said I'd love to probably redo this with maybe flask/htmx or FastHTML/htmx and serve it somewhere other than Render/Vercel etc...
by JCM9 | 2025-08-18 20:31:51+00:00
You can almost see the business school case study developing.

“Rather than focusing on core competencies leadership panicked and rushed a poorly guided focus on GenAI without the right leadership and technical talent. Shifting resources towards this price competitive space eroded margins, and took focus away from core areas where AWS was a technical leader. Several years of misguided strategy, poor leadership, and intense fiefdom building during the chaos spelled the beginning of the end of AWS’s once dominant position in cloud. While still a respectful business, AWS is now a low margin commodity player that’s struggling to innovate and is the number 3 cloud provider by revenue.”
by alexjplant | 2025-08-18 20:32:11+00:00
> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad?

Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
by starwatch | 2025-08-18 20:33:02+00:00
> At that point, a Tesla will have more than 80% of its initial capacity, and in some cases, even more. So people will probably give up their car, well, well before the battery gets close to becoming a burden.

I looked into the secondhand EV market (in Norway). In doing so I read quite a bit of academic research to figure out the lifetime of an EV. Apparently the 80% capacity is the accepted end of life for an EV battery:

"For batteries, 80% of the initial capacity is referred to as the point after which it tends to exhibit an exponential decay of capacity and is considered an unreliable power source after this point for EV application" [1]

So, the Tesla the article talks about won't be much good, or at least not for very long.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3271287
by peytonshields | 2025-08-18 20:33:24+00:00
This is something we've been working on and are planning to release a "decision" update to the game which should allow for multi-step, configurable options to choose if the LLM actually gets to contribute to the current world / chat. There's a lot of trial and error involved and we're all ears, if you have ideas we'd love to hear them! We actively monitor our discord https://discord.com/invite/theinterface
by bracketfocus | 2025-08-18 20:33:25+00:00
That probably means you are an outlier.

One thing I see, is that people in urban environments typically opt-in to exercise (like voluntarily going on a run). Whereas those in more rural areas have more physical demanding jobs and responsibilities.

I’m an urban-based desk jockey who exercises a lot but it doesn’t really compare to my more rurally-based friends who are on their feet working blue collar jobs 5 days a week.
by Lammy | 2025-08-18 20:33:32+00:00
I did a cross-continent drive last month with my T-Mobile US phone and got a rude awakening of how real-time this is when the “source” area codes of all the spammy phone calls followed me from state to state.

e: I thought I had opted out of everything that was opt-out-able in TMo's privacy settings <https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/dashboard/controls> years ago when I first set up my line/account, but I just checked again and more than half of the settings were enabled. Hate that I have to be in the habit of looking for new settings that default to enabled.
by Nemo_bis | 2025-08-18 20:33:35+00:00
I believe this was already brought up in the court proceedings, and Brewster Kahle already addressed it in April 2024: «Trying to blow protections we have put on files, for instance, does not help us– and usually hurts».

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/commen...
by xandrius | 2025-08-18 20:34:10+00:00
Same here.

Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it.

So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it for someone that usually means it was something which I'd be ok not to have consumed.
by nxpnsv | 2025-08-18 20:34:11+00:00
I don't know if

result = (df .pipe(fun1, arg1=1) .pipe(fun2, arg2=2) )

is much less readable than

result <- df |> fun1(., arg1=1) |> fun2(., arg2=2)

but I guess the R thing also works beyond dataframes which is pretty cool
by sgarland | 2025-08-18 20:34:12+00:00
It's written that way because it stems from relational algebra, in which the projection is typically (always?) written first.

>The order should be FROM -> SELECT -> WHERE, since SELECT commonly gives names to columns, which WHERE will reference.

Per the SQL standard, you can't use column aliases in WHERE clauses, because the selection (again, relational algebra) occurs before the projection.

> You could even avoid crap like `SELECT * FROM table`, and just write `FROM table` and have the select clause implied.

Tbf, in MySQL 8 you can use `TABLE <table>`, which is an alias for `SELECT * FROM <table>`.