MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-17 06:15:56+00:00
Red Wood Materials by former Tesla CTO is already reusing and recycling batteries at scale. Basically, they process all sorts of batteries. They've developed tools and electronics to monitor battery packs and cells. In their main facility in Nevada, they simply wire up the batteries and put them outside. They use solar power to charge the battery. The whole facility runs on that.

An interesting aspect with degraded EV batteries is that there's still plenty of life left in them. Also, they last longer if you limit their power output, charging speeds and cool them properly.

The batteries don't actually get recycled until they stop working. They have a few gwh of battery storage made out of repurposed EV batteries and a facility that processes expended cells to recover all sorts of materials. A lot of what they do boils down to inspecting and monitoring packs and cells and interfacing with existing battery management solutions.

Apparently, they are recovering a lot of material and selling it back to battery manufacturers already. Both the storage business and the material selling business have the potential to generate nice amounts of revenue.

The main limitation for growing the business isn't technical but the fact that there simply aren't that many batteries yet to recycle. It will be some years before supply of end of life EVs and batteries starts ramping up. And years more before their batteries stop being useful for storage. A lot of the batteries they process are discarded during the production process.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-17 06:16:27+00:00
Economics is the study of resource allocation at various levels ranging from individuals to global societies and everything in between. Resource accumulation is certainly something people, groups of people, organizations, societies, etc tend to do, and so it is something economists would study. Many economists are greedy jerks that believe hoarding wealth is a good thing. None of that changes what economics is any more than any any political faction changes what political science is.
by lwo32k | 2025-08-17 06:16:39+00:00
The "best" programmer you work with can be fired on any day of the week if corporate wonderland doesn't hit its quarterly numbers. They know this and the ones who survive get quite good at getting others fired, especially people better than them.

I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.

The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-17 06:18:00+00:00
>By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.

The raw materials used to create a boeing 747 are not rare at all. They are easily accessible. The aggregate value of material cost of a 747 is significantly less than the actual value of the 747 itself meaning that much of the worth of the 747 is in the crystallization of the idea of what a 747 is. The 747 is at it's core an idea, that's what separates it from just being a just a mishmash of random materials. It is at it's core an IP.

Yes it's not infinitely copyable so it doesn't suffer from the ill effects of software. But they are one in the same, it's just that the 747 has additional protections of the "idea" being encrypted into the plane itself and the people who make the plane. Software the idea is fully crystallized into a single place: the source code and it suffers from being easily copied.

This is where IP law comes from. The idea of a 747 is by nature not easily copied, so people didn't need to instantiate the concept of IP because by default it's just harder to copy. IP was invented because of the distinction between ideas that are easily copied and not easily copied. People wanted to bring the properties of the 747 to software.

>Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.

I think we're in agreement. We agree on the benefits and downsides of IP. You just think that altruism could function just as well as the incentives created by IP and it seems you're clear that there is currently no evidence to support your hypothesis other than a smattering of freak anomalies like Linux. Whether that evidence will materialize in the future remains to be seen.
by sandspar | 2025-08-17 06:18:32+00:00
People get upset when I share this anecdote but I think it's enlightening. I talked to a guy whose sister has Williams Syndrome. About her personality, he said "She's like a Golden Retriever who can text." I got the sense that he was referring to her cheerfulness, kindness, and inspiring openness. I also got the sense that he felt very protective of her, as if she were a young woman with a beautiful soul who is nevertheless extremely vulnerable.
by spauldo | 2025-08-17 06:20:05+00:00
Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.

I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.

That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.
by nine_k | 2025-08-17 06:21:22+00:00
> 1980s protocol

TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.

What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.

The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.

A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.

(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)
by righthand | 2025-08-17 06:21:22+00:00
Texas gerrymandering won’t even help them in the long run. Again you are missing the point. The pendulum will just swing back twice as hard. Whether Republicans gerrymander an already deeply red state or not. Newsom is getting push back as is Hochul, so what? Doesn’t seem to be actually stopping anything.

I think you’re smoking something if you think Democrats are high on ideals. There is no democracy if you gerrymander out your opponent. That’s why maps are redrawn every 10 years. So Republicans aren’t winning elections for democracy or to shove it Democrats. They’re gerrymandering to remove your right to even have a choice or a democracy. You’re stuck knee deep in a culture war designed to keep you too preoccupied to see this.

Keep kicking and screaming about social posturing issues that go no where.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-17 06:21:58+00:00
The idea of exchanging paper for material goods is also absurd. There are also vested interests that rely on maintaining this illusion. They want people to believe that something like a tesla can actually be exchanged for worthless paper. None of this is real so there's endless fights against people who try to make illegal copies of the paper. It's an endless fight, because it's not actually real.

The entire economy is an illusion. But it works because most people buy into the hallucination. IP is much of the same thing. If there's only a few people creating IP laws it doesn't mean anything. It only works because the majority of people respect said IP laws. IP exists because the majority hallucinates it into reality.

Even the concept of "laws" are illusions. They are total fabrications created by mankind. Your entire life is built upon thousands of fabricated concepts and illusions that are in many ways incompatible with your ancient genetic biology. So saying that IP isn't "natural" is meaningless.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-17 06:22:24+00:00
I do have a sense of unease about most smaller hosting services and self-hosting solutions, in that I don't trust them to stay up in the long term, once no one is left to care about projects on them, or at least not about the old versions. (This isn't so big an issue for something as big as FFmpeg, but I'm talking about the general case.) Just try to download some old version of a minor library from the late 90s or early 2000s: unless it's been continuously using the same source control repo, the odds are better than not that the files disappeared during the intervening decades.

In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-17 06:22:35+00:00
> For example you know context and a poor explanation of what you are after. Googling will take you nowhere, LLMs will give you the right answer 95% of the time.

This works nicely when the LLM has a large knowledgebase to draw upon (formal terms for what you're trying to find, which you might not know) or the ability to generate good search queries and summarize results quickly - with an actual search engine in the loop.

Most large LLM providers have this, even something like OpenWebUI can have search engines integrated (though I will admit that smaller models kinda struggle, couldn't get much useful stuff out of DuckDuckGo backed searches, nor Brave AI searches, might have been an obscure topic).
by lijunhao | 2025-08-17 06:23:11+00:00
Thank you.

1. In its early development, `x-cmd` was designed to integrate its modules directly into the shell's namespace. This approach meant that common commands, such as `ping`, could potentially be overridden to run `x ping`, leading to conflicts and behavior. 2. Recognizing these potential issues, we decided to retain the `x` prefix for all `x-cmd` commands. This ensures clarity and prevents namespace pollution. The `x` is intentionally short and acts as a dedicated namespace for `x-cmd`'s features.

I think this will provide a kind of flexibility for our users. Users could try something new or interesting using x-cmd script. But if these sripts fail, users could alway return to the mature original command and finish the tasks.

Future versions of `x-cmd` will introduce a comprehensive cross-shell shortcut configuration system, empowering users to easily manage their personalized command shortcuts.
by jraph | 2025-08-17 06:26:06+00:00
That's a totally valid concern that I also have and that does need to be addressed.

I'm thinking of setting up mirrors for my stuff for this exact reason. Now that codeberg exists, that could be the solution and why not accept contributions from codeberg too if it doesn't make the development process too messy.

OTOH GitHub is a huge SPOF. I also trust that my stuff that matters is checked out by other people who will reupload somewhere else should something happen.
by dabockster | 2025-08-17 06:26:37+00:00
Open vs closed source software

Open vs closed web

Both of the open options are nice on paper, until you realize that they were largely being pushed by big tech. The same big tech that is scraping them hard for AI training, and possibly have been using them silently without respecting licensing agreements for an even longer period of time.

"Open" only works when everyone plays nice and fair. This whole kerfuffle of AI scraping has shown that this isn't happening, and likely hasn't happened for a long time if at all.
by elric | 2025-08-17 06:28:40+00:00
I strongly disagree with the issue handling & CI/CD part of your comment. Those are concerns are orthogonal to distributed version control and greatly complicate any system.

Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.
by kevmo314 | 2025-08-17 06:29:35+00:00
I was able to get a little bit faster than the multithreaded version with a single thread using page-aligned reads and Grand Central Dispatch for asynchronous read operations: https://github.com/healeycodes/counting-words-at-simd-speed/...

This was a nice opportunity to learn about Grand Central Dispatch through AI for me as well. I knew about the page alignment and async read techniques but not on OSX.

Edit: actually you can get even faster with mmap https://github.com/healeycodes/counting-words-at-simd-speed/...
by f1shy | 2025-08-17 06:29:39+00:00
Not author, but I made the experience of writing a compiler, linker and assembler for a little programable ASIC.

We did it in CL, because we had only 1 month. The big advantage of a lisp for a compiler, is that you don’t need to make a parser: if you accept to follow lisp syntax, you can reuse the reader.

For making the linker is helped to have all in structs and lists structures. Each compiled piece of code was a list with actual binary code, where it had prepended the information as symbol name, pointers to where to change for relocation, etc.

The dynamic typing (sorry if I’m pedantic, but lisp is typed, even strong typed, but dynamic) played in favor. As a matter of fact, after we did 90% of the work we decided to change the type of some parts of the structures, it was almost no work. Had it been a static typed language, it would had been a MAJOR rewrite.

The fact that CL can also be static typed helped with performance, as for some thing we forced long int.
by technick | 2025-08-17 06:30:02+00:00
All of that noise is K band and soon to be spread out across 77 ghz, outside of the bands being used by law enforcement (for now). If you take high velocity seriously, I recommend getting a Uniden R9 and a ALPriority Laser Jammer system. Then add in a dedicated android tablet running Highway Radar, you'll be a hard target to target. Also get a pair of binoculars (bonus points if they're thermal).

I haven't had a speeding ticket since 2018, before I had my tools. Just this week I was averaging 120 mph across Utah, turned my 11 hour trip into 8 hours.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-17 06:31:41+00:00
That is, because the metadata is shared between worktrees. So you when you modify a branch in one worktree, it isn't modified per worktree, but in the whole repo. So what you need to do is to duplicate the branch metadata. That's what git clone does. You essentially have these cases:

shared worktree, shared branch/index data, shared object storage -> single repo, single worktree separate worktree, shared branch/index data, shared object storage -> repo, with worktrees separate worktree, separate branch/index data, shared object storage -> git clone separate worktree, separate branch/index data, separate object storage -> git clone --no-hardlinks

You can checkout a commit twice though. What I don't get is what checking out a branch twice gets you. As soon as you add a single commit, these branches will be different, so why not just create another branch? Branches in git are cheap.
by kace91 | 2025-08-17 06:33:07+00:00
Nope. The shock is a medical possibility if you accidentally fall in Arctic water or something like that, but it’s not something that will come up in a swimming pool scenario unless you’re doing one of those influencer ice baths or something of the sort.

It’s mainly caused by extreme sudden temperature change, not much to do with the stomach.

Funnily enough, even medical pages in Spain will talk at length about the medical phenomenon without mentioning that little detail.
by burnerthrow008 | 2025-08-17 06:33:26+00:00
Customs officers everywhere have almost unlimited discretion to deny entry.

While I think the Vance meme reflects very poorly on my country, it is always advisable to remember that you have very limited rights in every country while crossing the border and that it best not to piss off the officers. Travel StackExchange is filled with Q&A’s about how to what to do when the customs officials of various rich countries apply their discretion to deny entry, often for reasons even more petty than having a meme.
by firefoxd | 2025-08-17 06:35:31+00:00
"What do you mean you and your friend chat over Signal when there are dozens of other chat apps? Sounds like you two have something to hide, if you ask me." [0]

Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me. The joke still goes over people heads sometimes.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/nothing-to-hide
by mindslight | 2025-08-17 06:35:59+00:00
That's why I gave a range. That average stat actually seems to line up with the low end of that range, and since every car isn't scrapped at the same age it's going to be a distribution. There are not many cars from 1985 on the road today, but there sure are some. And since we're talking software which doesn't actually degrade, it shouldn't be the thing limiting the overall lifetime.
by ElFitz | 2025-08-17 06:36:46+00:00
According to Wikipedia, the Russian constitution mentions the following:

1. Everyone shall have the right to the inviolability of private life, personal and family secrets, the protection of honour and good name.

2. Everyone shall have the right to privacy of correspondence, of telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other messages. Limitations of this right shall be allowed only by court decision.

And yet, they have the SORM and SORM-2 laws.
by dmantis | 2025-08-17 06:36:49+00:00
I tried I2P not so long ago and was quite impressed by the design decisions and the quality of the technology. It's truly an amazing piece of software that covers basically everything you need for a distributed network.

The only thing missing is actually the community and usage, because the technology has a network effect, and more users with stable routers provide faster and a more reliable network. So it's indeed slow at the moment. I highly recommend giving it a chance and playing a bit with it. Even for non-anonymity and security cases, it's fun to play with hole punching, global addressing by public keys, and stuff like that, which you can see in things like Iroh and libp2p.

It provides a simple universal SAM interface and libraries to work with it to plug other apps.
by ezst | 2025-08-17 06:37:02+00:00
You have a spectrum of options going from centralised (Signal, WhatsApp, …) to federated (XMPP, Matrix) to P2P.

In my opinion, federated is the sweet spot: you do have to trust the server with your account management, but that server can easily be yours, or one you ethically align with, and through it, you will be able to talk with anyone on the network.

P2P sounds great on the surface but in a mobile-first messenging world, that comes with practical tradeoffs in bandwidth and battery consumption, unless you offload discovery and push to trusted servers, at which point you are back to federation with more steps.
by latortuga | 2025-08-17 06:37:15+00:00
I found out the hard way that my mouth really doesn't like having SLS in it because I bought the wrong version of Sensodyne once. The "Pronamel" version is the only one I'm sure doesn't have SLS.

Regular Sensodyne in other countries has novamin though, and does not have SLS. I've brought home a few tubes from traveling and it seems to work just as well as the US version - I don't get sensitivity back when using it.
by kqr | 2025-08-17 06:38:44+00:00
I suspect this test gives central values to many test-takers because the internal consistency of the questions has not been verified.

Anyone can come up with ten questions and claim "these measure a programmer's fondness for abstraction". Unfortunately, we cannot verify this claim. What we can do is check statistically if the answers to the ten questions correlate strongly enough that we think they measure the same thing, whatever that is.

This involves a trial run of the quiz followed by statistics such as Cronbach's alpha and principal componoment analysis. Often one finds that the questions do not measure the same thing at all! It is difficult to come up with a set of internally consistent questions.

When we add together inconsistent questions (as is done here to get the final score), we don't get stronger signal: the noise from the uncorrelated questions cancels out and almost everyone gets a result near zero.

I know OP is not the author, but if the author reads this: if you're lucky, the data from this audience mey reveal a subset of two or three questions per dimension that are internally consistent. Use only those in the quiz going forward! Then you can trial more questions one at a time and keep only those that are consistent with the first set. (Is this not p-hacking? Yes but in this context who cares.)
by quectophoton | 2025-08-17 06:39:28+00:00
> What if you make people do the hard part voluntarily by making the device desirable to them?

This. It's like if you want to collect biometric data about everyone's faces with different expressions, different angles, and how those faces change over time, you just make a mobile app where people voluntarily record themselves.

So, if the problems are:

>> It requires several electrodes to be implanted into the patient first. Then there's an adaptation phase in which the patient trains the system.

Then one possible way I can think of to make people do your work for you, is to release a nice VR videogame to the point it becomes popular, and have some features that make it nicer if you ("enhanced controls", or "your HUD shows exactly what you want just by thinking it like Ironman helmet", or whatever).

Taking an existing and popular videogame and making a mod like this would also work.

There's non-zero desire for full-dive MMORPGs, so marketing it like a step towards that would entice a non-zero amount of gamers.

Once it's normalized on niches like that you'll probably have a better time expanding outside that niche, because by then it would be "that videogame tech thingy that cool and rich streamers use" rather than "the sus mind reading stuff".

It doesn't need to be videogames, but the idea is the same, you make an "inoffensive" thing that people want to use, and then leech off the collected data.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-17 06:42:19+00:00
Fair enough, I concede with your assessment, my understanding of bufferbloat (which I have to relearn everytime I look at it) is that the telltale sign is ping to any destination that traverses the uplink exhibits higher latency than usual when you're saturating your download. It's just a tricky thing to test given variability of conditions (and what might be deemed as expected operation) which is why I'm usually hesitant and sceptical, and I don't trust those speedtest websites to gauge it properly.