MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by no_carrier | 2025-09-09 09:54:10+00:00
Niri looks promising to me. After I discovered PaperWM I moved on to Material Shell, which was still the best workflow I've come across to date. It was basically gnome with a 2d grid: you could scroll workspaces left and right and then again on the vertical axis. The author sort of abandoned it (it was a Gnome extension) in order to go all in on their own desktop environment with the same concept. I'm guessing that'll take a while to get off the ground.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-09 09:55:15+00:00
Its a similar story for gas.

Previous government sold off the land on which gas storage once sat to private developers to build houses and business parks.

Roll forward 25–30 years later, UK is something like 65% dependent on gas imports from the EU who kept the majority of their gas storage ... quite an ironic position in the post-Brexit era.
by NicuCalcea | 2025-09-09 09:56:06+00:00
I wish there was a middle ground where I could block ads like the ones you mention, while allowing privacy-respecting ads that don't ruin my browsing experience. I know Adblock Plus have their "Acceptable Ads" policy [1], but that just meant letting through ads from companies that paid them, like Google [2].

[1] https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4496852/adblock-plus-eye-g...
by monadgonad | 2025-09-09 09:56:11+00:00
The article, and especially much of the discussion here, is about how privatisation has led to this situation. Privatisation of a public utility which _even in many other developed liberal capitalist countries_ is not privatised. Yet to you this is not evidence that we are an extreme example of neoliberalism, but somehow “defacto socialist” and your solution is throwing fuel on the fire with more privatisation. You’re living on a different planet, mate.
by khazhoux | 2025-09-09 09:56:13+00:00
Why are you trying to redefine a word? My most low-effort refutal is simply to consult Webster’s Dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conflict

> Definition #1: : Fight, battle, war

So, having proved my point, I’ll note that (1) this war could certainly end in compromise, and (2) even a devastating military defeat would be a resolution.

And I’ll appreciate not being called an invasion-sympathizer when I’m only pointing out that using the word “conflict” is not a political statement.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-09 09:56:26+00:00
Whenever I open Google's Play Store on Android I get this feeling of walking into some dystopic shopping mall. I hardly ever come there (F-Droid covers all utilities for me, so Google's own app store is really only for official apps from banks, public transport, etc.), so its user hostile design always hits me like a wall of visual noise and clutter.

At these moments that feeling that for most people getting bombarded by ads is normal hits hard. I'm always wondering when the ride will end and uBlock Origin can't protect us any longer.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-09 09:57:09+00:00
> Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!

And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.

And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...

I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
by richliss | 2025-09-09 09:57:11+00:00
So yes the geniuses early retiring problem is a thing, but there could be a way of managing this IF the government wasn't useless - secure phantom options.

The idea would be that you wouldn't own the actual shares but a fully legal option that you can cash out at a fixed age and would be legally protected from bankruptcy etc.

So the idea would be you could cash out say up to £1m (enough to buy a property) before the age of 30, another £1m before the age of 40, another £5m at 50, and then all of it at 60.

You'd have skilled people remain in the workforce for longer but wouldn't overstay into their pensioner years.

I'm certain there's other ways of doing it too.
by jansan | 2025-09-09 09:58:12+00:00
I was actually thinking about implementing exactly this (using feDisplacementMap), but never found time and I was not sure if it would be possible at all. Great to see that it actually works and someone with deep SVG knowledge implemented it.

The whole blog entry is a piece of art and on one level with Bartosz Ciechanowski's work. If you want to make money from it, you will have to find less niche subject's, though.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-09 09:59:10+00:00
> It's harder if they can't read the older examples, but I can google for a more modern example as well. It gives nomenclature and examples.

Don't do that. Ostensibly you're giving these people the book so that they'll learn to deal with legacy code. Those older examples are exactly what they need to see, even if they're in a language that those devs are not using.
by epolanski | 2025-09-09 09:59:21+00:00
1. What you say can be applied to literally everybody. Literally. What is the USP of "insert literally any other company"?

2. FWIW as a business consumer of multiple APIs, Mistral models are absolutely excellent/fast/cheap compared to other offerings. The only real competitors they have is Google from all of our research. And we'd rather give money to Mistral.

3. Being EU-based is a strong USP as the 2020s are proving.

4. France has cheap energy and lots of AI talent. In fact, I would even argue that while american companies need to fight each other for the very same talent Mistral can get plenty of it just by being EU based. Believe it or not, most Europeans really don't want to live in the US and would rather make very high salaries here rather than extremely high salaries in US.
by zarzavat | 2025-09-09 10:00:48+00:00
Good find, I admit I had jumped on the Thames Water is Evil bandwagon, and for the record they are evil, but in this case they have been out-eviled by that other driver of British societal regression:

> Campaigners had fought the plan, claiming there was no need for such a large reservoir and that it would damage the environment.

> Leader of the Vale of White Horse Council Tony de Vere said: "We are delighted with this decision.

> "Local residents were very worried about the impact of such a large reservoir and we share their relief that the plan has been axed."
by slightwinder | 2025-09-09 10:01:09+00:00
It's less that it's harder, but simply very annoying. It has so many broken, twisted concepts even from the beginning. This makes it really not fun to experience, which then makes it's harder to play.

It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
by energy123 | 2025-09-09 10:02:48+00:00
> stringing HVDC interconnects

Agree that this solves many of the same problems as storage (as does overbuilding).

The PR problem with renewables is that the solutions are invariably cognitively complicated and multifactorial. The solution is going to be some kind of optimized result that mixes various storage forms, HVDC interconnects, overbuilding, and diversifying with solar and wind, and the exact nature of the solution is going to vary by geography.

It's just a hopelessly difficult communication challenge. If so many HN people can't grasp these concepts and jump to provably incorrect catchphrases like "storage is too expensive", then what hope is there for the general public.
by yread | 2025-09-09 10:06:05+00:00
It's not like these packages are super sophisticated million LOCs masterpieces. ansi-regex is literally just this:

export default function ansiRegex({onlyFirst = false} = {}) { // Valid string terminator sequences are BEL, ESC\, and 0x9c const ST = '(?:\\u0007|\\u001B\\u005C|\\u009C)'; // OSC sequences only: ESC ] ... ST (non-greedy until the first ST) const osc = `(?:\\u001B\\][\\s\\S]*?${ST})`; // CSI and related: ESC/C1, optional intermediates, optional params (supports ; and :) then final byte const csi = '[\\u001B\\u009B][[\\]()#;?]*(?:\\d{1,4}(?:[;:]\\d{0,4})*)?[\\dA-PR-TZcf-nq-uy=><~]'; const pattern = `${osc}|${csi}`; return new RegExp(pattern, onlyFirst ? undefined : 'g'); }
by epolanski | 2025-09-09 10:06:54+00:00
> Mistral models are not very competitive with other proprietary models.

As an enterprise user of various models, this is absolutely wrong and false.

What matters when using models as a service is:

- type of work involved

- speed

- cost

- law compliance

And, believe it or not your benchmarks IRL are worthless for most of the things you want to give to AI (unless we talking about coding idk).

I'll provide you few examples where Mistral is by far the best option for our companies from applications in production, even ignoring the last one.

- customer care assistance. One of my clients is in the business of home renovation, customers call the company to have details about how to install/mount specific things. For my use case: OCR + information retrieval from the scanned documents + reporting to our assistancs Mistral displayed by far the best performance (they have the best AI OCR we tested) and cost effectiveness and speed.

- creating user-tailored daily financial news. We need to summarize, rank and report what happened for user-held securities during the day. The only competitive alternative here to Mistral was Google's Gemini Flash, we need to do this for tens of thousands of users. Mistral Small was absolutely up to the task, with the Medium variant for ranking and bundling. We have tested the other options and literally nobody offered the same performance/cost/speed
by nxobject | 2025-09-09 10:08:10+00:00
I think that would spread Apple’s chip team too thinly between competing priorities - and require them to do E2E stuff they’d never be interested in doing. What’s always happened, even during Jobs, is that Apple would do something nice and backend-y, and then not be able to keep it up as they’d pour resources into some consumer product. (See: WebObjects, Xserve, Mac OS Server.)
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-09 10:08:16+00:00
If you look the battery life benchmarks they did at around the 5:00 mark in the third video, you can see that it achieves similar battery life compared to the an M3 Macbook in typical day-to-day use. This reflects the experience most users will have with the device.

It's true that the perf/watt is still a lot worse than the latest gen M4 under heavy load, but it's close enough to the M1 and significantly better than prior laptops chips on x86.

It is a first gen product like the M1. But it does show the ISA is not as big of a limiting factor as popularly believed.
by rgoulter | 2025-09-09 10:08:52+00:00
In the article, the author does say "I am not advocating to write things from scratch", while also describing third party dependencies as liabilities (e.g. security vulnerabilities), that people are too trusting of third party dependencies, that people overestimate the quality of third party dependencies.

I think you're splitting hairs if you're saying that these points from the article argue against package managers but don't argue against using third party dependencies.

I similarly think you're splitting hairs if to consider "package managers are useful?" and "third party dependencies are useful?" as distinct points.
by the_gipsy | 2025-09-09 10:09:34+00:00
Okay, I mistakenly thought that Signal was burning on investor money like any run-of-the mill startup, but apparently they manage to run on donations similar to Wikipedia.

I also just learned that you can still backup without a subscription. That's great!

> Also, let me know where me and my friends can sign up on your particular matrix instance. What's your ToS anyway?

I said that was my personal solution and not an alternative to centralized platforms.
by seper8 | 2025-09-09 10:09:52+00:00
Used to work here for a few years.

Funny how they are investing in AI, yet the actual use of AI is lagging VERRRRYYY much behind other tech companies. Probably 2+ years behind in adoption of AI tooling.

So they have their work cut out for them when it comes to figuring out how to get their paranoid security team to enable teams to use the tools they just invested 1.7b in.
by petrichorko | 2025-09-09 10:10:12+00:00
To me it's not as simple as comparing the efficiency under full load. I imagine the efficiency on x86 as some kind of log curve, which translates to higher power consumption even on lighter loads. Apple's ARM implementation tends to eat a lot less power on tasks that happen most of the time, hence greatly improving the battery life.

I've tried a Ryzen 7 that had a similar efficiency to an M1 according to some tests, and that thing ran hot like crazy. Its just marketing bullshit to me now..
by neuralkoi | 2025-09-09 10:10:41+00:00
Roughly a twentieth of all humans who have ever lived were born in just the past 50 years. I agree some of the best painters ever might actually be alive right now.

I've attended local art festivals (i.e. Atlanta Dogwood Festival) where I've bought some incredible prints and paintings in the hundred dollar range which are subjectively more beautiful compared to some of the stuff I've seen in the High Museum of Art in downtown Atlanta. For example:

https://www.instagram.com/alejandro_munoz_art

https://www.instagram.com/marirosafineart

https://www.instagram.com/s.carterscreations

https://www.instagram.com/shealeyartworks

https://www.instagram.com/salazarartes

http://bryanyung.com/ (no instagram)

Artists are the most interesting people you can ever talk to.
by pu_pe | 2025-09-09 10:11:06+00:00
I don't see any way, shape or form in which ASML needs Mistral. If they are interested in AI-based chip design, they should either partner with a leading provider or keep their cards open for buying a startup that focuses on that specifically. Mistral is not even a leader on the segment they specialize in (open-source LLMs).
by metalman | 2025-09-09 10:11:19+00:00
Here in Nova Scotia(new scotland), with weather much like, and conected by the jet stream to England, it rained after the longest rainless period ever, yesterday.Normal rainfall is several times a week, or weeks of rain every day, 3 months of no rain is a new thing.We are lucky in that there are thousands of lakes and a system of dams and locks to direct water so shortages are not a problem, yet.

Though as we are aprox half the size of England, with 1/56th the population the the urgency in a drout will be less acute. 4 years ago we had unpresedented rain and floods with people getting washed away and killed, roads and bridges destroyed and comunities cut off with damage from that still evident, which would be truely devastating if it were to happen now.

Civil engineering calculations were based on max rain bieng 1”/hr, and now there are regular reports of twise and three times that, and I am sure that drout planning was based on now irrelivant tables of average rainfalls and resevoirs sized acordingly. The issue for England is if the will and capacity to build better infrastructure is there, as hydrology is governed by geography and cant be put just anywhere, ie:we are talking water frontage here, dams to raise lakes, and other popular types of projects.Given that it's England, some of the water rights will be written into ancient law, and will be essentialy impossible to override, and then require buy outs of breathtaking proportions. Which leaves tunnel boring machines, sand hawgs, epic infrastructure that has to be built to last forever, and not one but of it suitable to pose in front of.
by throw10920 | 2025-09-09 10:11:24+00:00
Just flag them. They're blatantly breaking the guidelines and they don't care because they're not getting flagged enough.

HN is largely user-moderated and we'll continue to see more drivel like this if people aren't diligent about downvoting, flagging, and reporting especially egregious comments to the mods.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by simonask | 2025-09-09 10:12:46+00:00
It is disproportionately hard to do multithreading in C and C++ because the blast radius is huge and the tooling is not good. Languages with runtimes (Java, C#, etc.) give you lots of analysis and well-defined failure modes (in most cases), and Rust prevents almost all related bugs through the type system.

In terms of effort or expense, making any C or C++ program multithreaded is at least an order of magnitude harder/more expensive, even when designed for it from the beginning, so lots of programs aren't multithreaded that could be.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-09 10:12:50+00:00
You don't think it's fair to expect a trillion-dollar business to implement effective technical measures to stop rogue (or hacked!) employees from accessing personal information about their users?

I'm not talking about small businesses here, but large corporations that have more than enough resources to do better than just auditing.

> crime happens but perpetrators will be punished

Societies can't prevent crime without draconian measures that stifle all of our freedoms to an extreme degree. Corporations can easily put barriers in place that make it much more difficult (or impossible) to gain unauthorized access to customer information. The entire system is under their control.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-09 10:12:59+00:00
> He was popular and actually did a decent job at first. I can't understand the self destructive course of action he took during covid.

Putting COVID to one side, because all that is very well documented in the ongoing public enquiry....

He was a bad egg from day one really.

- Prorogation of Parliament ... pre-COVID - Expelling MPs who didn't agree with him ... pre-COVID - etc. etc. ad-infinitum

To this day, I continue to say:

The only reason Boris got into power is because the alternative was Corbyn. People held their nose and chose the least-worst option.

If Labour had a viable alernative, Boris might have still got in, but he absolutely would not have the 80 seat majority and hence would not have been able to show such contempt for the public because of the lack of majority.
by diggan | 2025-09-09 10:13:43+00:00
> OpenAI has no serious open source software

What's "serious" exactly? Codex is open source, is software, can be run with open/downloadable models/weights.

In my testing using Gemini, Claude Code, Codex, Qwen Code and AMP side-by-side for every prompt for the last two weeks, Codex seems the best of all of them so far.
by frotaur | 2025-09-09 10:13:53+00:00
Yes, the paywall is reasonable, I agree. I think what the OP meant by 'social contract' is that if everybody were to use an adblocker, we would end up with a mostly paywalled internet. All the sites that currently have ads, would have a paywall.

The reason why some people get to browse the internet free, and without ads, is because there are some people that don't. Hence the 'leeching' part.

The part that annoys me sometimes, is that when there IS the option to pay to remove ads, and people still use adblockers in this case. How is this justifiable, morally?
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-09 10:14:17+00:00
> I think most people would agree the government should not own oil companies, airlines, car manufacturers, steel manufacturers, or telecoms, etc.

People are starting to revisit the idea that oil and steel manufacture should at least be held domestically, if not run by the government outright, given the current geopolitical situation. Let's talk straight: if China and India would close down export for steel, or if OPEC decides to repeat the 70s... the Western world is fucked. And yes, that includes America, because most US refineries need OPEC oil for chemical composition reasons. The US is only net positive on oil imports and exports, it is by far not self sufficient. Add in a major war, we'd not be able to produce ammo, much less vehicles, even if we somehow found enough staff to man the plants.

As for telecoms: the base infrastructure should belong to the government. That is a lesson we in Germany are learning at the moment...
by epolanski | 2025-09-09 10:14:22+00:00
No, the problem is that HN is blind to the fact that there are multiple definitions of "best".

It isn't just about "more powerful", it's also about "cheaper" or "faster".

Mistral models are faster than anything out of US (bar Gemini Flash) and are cost competitive with them.

For me, having to produce financial news in a short time span for tens of thousands of users speed and cost are important, and the fact that Opus 4.1 is "more intelligent" is worthless.

That's like telling me that a Ryzen Threadripper with 64 cores is faster than than my raspberry pi for controlling the appliances in my kitchen. It's irrelevant when it's much more expensive and energy hungry.
by chpatrick | 2025-09-09 10:14:25+00:00
I think people misunderstand when they see that it's a "statistical model". That just means that out of a range of possible answers, it picks in a humanlike way. If the logical answer is the humanlike thing to say then it will be more likely to sample it.

In the same way a human might produce a range of answers to the same question, so humans are also drawing from a theoretical statistical distribution when you talk to them.

It's just a mathematical way to describe an agent, whether it's an LLM or human.
by krona | 2025-09-09 10:14:58+00:00
> I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst

Cumulative capital investment by water companies in England and Wales since privatisation: £250bn.

The infrastructure they inherited was never designed for the things it's being asked to do today, and it has a life expectancy. It would literally cost trillions to upgrade the entire sewerage system.

This isn't apologia, it's just reality. The road network will also face the same fate since much of it was built >50 years ago and has a life expectancy of roughly 50 years. The country simply can't afford to replace it.