MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-06 21:12:03+00:00
That story is not representative of the American aerospace industry as a whole, though. Lockheed were producing among the highest-quality airframes in the world at that point.

The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) were desperate for new aircraft after the war. They would have bought Lockheed Constellations if they hadn't been pressured into rescuing the British aircraft manufacturing companies from financial obliteration, which had of course narrowly avoided direct obliteration from German bombing. Instead of buying new American aircraft, they converted British bombers like the Avro Lancaster into sub-par airliners and eventually brought the Bristol Britannia into service, which was a fine aircraft, just ten years too late.

The de Havilland Comet eventually made BOAC and British engineering competitive internationally again, but I think it would be improper to not give credit to American workers and designers for being the first to create such advanced aircraft as the Constellation which really did keep the Allied war effort going behind the scenes.

As for the Germans, they had rockets and all kinds of incredible experimental aircraft, but nothing quite like the USA when it came to high-altitude air freight.
by iLemming | 2025-09-06 21:12:10+00:00
So what's your point? I guess you haven't even used Clojure, just looked at this specific piece of code and decided for whatever reason is not "good"?

It's as if I posted some text in Sanskrit (which I don't know) and complained that some people put Bhagavad Gita on a weird pedestal - "verdic concepts don't make your religion magically better".

Can you elaborate the heck you're complaining about? Arguing that "this FP code doesn't look nice to me, but OOP generally does", without more context is like arguing that "this French poem doesn't sound nice to me, but English poetry generally does" without understanding either language deeply.

That's just comparing surface aesthetics rather than understanding the underlying paradigms, idioms, and design principles, not to mention the fact that Clojure isn't "purely functional" - it does have object-orientation and polymorphic dispatch and other mechanisms that you've apparently put on some other weird pedestal.
by fspeech | 2025-09-06 21:12:14+00:00
When their EV transition is complete most of the old gas car lines will be obsoleted. As these are not the same owners and the EV factories are trying to accelerate the ICE carmakers' demise, it doesn't make sense to add the two capacities together. Interestingly the ICE makers are mostly JVs between foreign brands and Chinese SOEs, so the process of driving out the foreign brands also hurts the big SOEs.
by djfobbz | 2025-09-06 21:12:21+00:00
Back in 2008–2009, we had a lot of bare metal servers at SoftLayer's (Dallas, TX) facility. One of our customers ran a South American music forum, and anytime someone uploaded an MP3, the data center would honor the DMCA request and immediately stop routing traffic to the server until the issue was resolved. Now imagine what tools they might have in their arsenal in 2025.
by cshores | 2025-09-06 21:12:47+00:00
I did a bit of research on the environmental impact with regards to the United States. Recent numbers suggest that ChatGPT handles about 2.5 billion prompts per day worldwide, with roughly 330 million of those coming from the United States. Since the U.S. population is about 335 million, that works out to about one prompt per person per day on average, though actual users issue several times more.

On the energy side, Google recently estimated that an average Gemini inference consumes around 0.24 Wh, which is roughly the same as running a microwave for a single second. Older rule-of-thumb comparisons put the figure closer to 3–6 seconds of microwave use, or about 0.8–1.7 Wh per prompt. If you apply those numbers to U.S. usage, you get somewhere between 79 MWh and 550 MWh per day nationally, which translates to only a few to a few dozen megawatts of continuous load. Spread across the population, that works out to between 0.09 and 0.6 kWh per person per year — just pennies worth of electricity, comparable to a few minutes of running a clothes dryer. The bigger concern for the grid is not individual prompts but the growth of AI data centers and the energy cost of training ever-larger models.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-09-06 21:12:50+00:00
I find this rather oddly phrased.

LLMs hallucinate because they are language models. They are stochastic models of language. They model language, not truth.

If the “truthy” responses are common in their training set for a given prompt, you might be more likely to get something useful as output. Feels like we fell into that idea and said - ok this is useful as an information retrieval tool. And now we use RL to reinforce that useful behaviour. But still, it’s a (biased) language model.

I don’t think that’s how humans work. There’s more to it. We need a model of language, but it’s not sufficient to explain our mental mechanisms. We have other ways of thinking than generating language fragments.

Trying to eliminate cases where a stochastic model the size of an LLM gives “undesirable” or “untrue” responses seems rather odd.
by jasoneckert | 2025-09-06 21:12:55+00:00
These are sage points that make sense to me - I can see how it might have come across as tone-deaf or misaligned with deeper values some people hold. Likewise, I've also noticed the same regarding left-leaning here on HN (and when it comes to tech, Apple-leaning too). I'm a generally left-leaning person myself, but my flexible 996 job (of which I have complete control over) affords me a view on it that others won't appreciate. Thanks for sharing!
by wnoise | 2025-09-06 21:12:59+00:00
They are quite related, but the Fourier transform seems far more beautiful and generalizable: you can do 2-d, 3-d, etc transforms, and they automatically respect the symmetries of the problems (e.g. rotating the coordinate system rotates the Fourier transform in a corresponding way; frequencies and wave-vectors have meanings). This fully extends to any "nice" abelian group satisfying minor technical conditions, where the mapping is to it's dual group. It even mostly extends to non-abelian groups (representation theory), though some nice properties are lost.

The Laplace transform shines in having nicer convergence properties in some specific cases. While those are extremely valuable for control problems, it really is a much more specialized theory, not nearly as widely applicable. (You can come up with n-d versions. The obvious thing to do is copy the Fourier case and iteratively Laplace transform on each coordinate; the special role of one direction either directly in the unilateral case, or indirectly via growth properties in the bilateral case make it hard to argue that this can develop to something more unifying; the domain isn't preserved under rotation.)
by WalterBright | 2025-09-06 21:13:06+00:00
Two history books, "Code-Name Downfall" by Allen and "Downfall" by Frank point out that the Japanese high command was horrified by the effects of the nuclear bombs, cared a great deal about the loss of life, and were highly concerned that the next target would be Tokyo.

So they chose to end it.

There's a fair amount of detail and references in those books if one wishes to dig into it.

(I say they are "history" books as opposed to "activist" books. The latter are not worth reading.)

Some material I've seen claimed that the Japanese leadership didn't know it was a nuclear bomb. The Japanese knew immediately it was nuclear bomb, because they had a nuclear bomb development program themselves.
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-06 21:13:10+00:00
I think you have a reasonable take and kudos for re-examining your beliefs with new evidence. I also believe in personal freedoms but at the same time god damn it do us humans have a penchant for "freely choosing" things that are terrible for our wellbeing. Freedom lets us live without fear of injust incarceration, but also gave us potentially society-ending things like climate change. I'm starting to believe that many freedoms we have we'd be better off without - however the issue arises of how to implement that when it seems easy for bad actors to abuse broad controls on the masses.
by ninkendo | 2025-09-06 21:13:15+00:00
It’s not just the destructor you have to worry about, it’s all of the state accessible to callers.

If you have any type that represents validated data, say a string wrapper which conveys (say) a valid customer address, how do you empty it out?

You could turn it into an empty string, but now that .street() method has to return an optional value, which defeats the purpose of your type representing validated data in the first place.

The moved-from value has to be valid after move (all of its invariants need to hold), which means you can’t express invariants unless they can survive a move.

It is much better for the language to simply zap the moved-from value out of existence so that you don’t have to deal with any of that.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-06 21:13:19+00:00
Not sure why you’re downvoted but I agree. First off most who claim they work 80-100 hours aren’t actually doing that. It’s what they demand of others verbally and what others pretend to do. Everyone knows everyone is lying. And even if they’re at the desk, their productivity is not as good beyond 50 or so hours. Maybe even lower. I doubt 80 hours is 2x 40 hours. And as you said, in any field, it’s not about time but skills, passion, etc.
by anakaine | 2025-09-06 21:13:53+00:00
You just brought back a core memory. Mass netsplits followed by a few minutes of "wtf", and then some new yorkers who had bouncers not routing through the WTC jumping on channel to let us know what was going on.

I was, and still am, on the other side of the world and lost a few people I talked to every day during that event.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 21:14:40+00:00
Agreed. When you have multiple developers working on the same code, you end up with overlapping test coverage as time goes on. You also end up with test coverage that was initially written with good intentions, but ultimately you'll later find that some of it just isn't necessary for confidence, or isn't even testing what you think it is.

Teams need to periodically audit their tests, figure out what covers what, figure out what coverage is actually useful, and prune stuff that is duplicative and/or not useful.

OP says that ultimately their costs went down: even though using Claude to make these determinations is not cheap, they're saving more than they're paying Claude by running fewer tests (they run tests on a mobile device test farm, and I expect that can get pricey). But ultimately they might be able to save even more money by ditching Claude and deleting tests, or modifying tests to reduce their scope and runtime.

And at this point in the sophistication level of LLMs, I would feel safer about not having an LLM deciding which tests actually need to run to ensure a PR is safe to merge. I know OP says that so far they believe it's doing the right thing, but a) they mention their methodology for verifying this in a comment here[0], and I don't agree that it's a sound methodology[1], and b) LLMs are not deterministic and repeatable, so it could choose two very different sets of tests if run twice against the exact same PR. The risk of that happening may be acceptable, though; that's for each individual to decide.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152504

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152668
by ComplexSystems | 2025-09-06 21:15:41+00:00
It isn't a hallucination because that isn't how the term is defined. The term "hallucination" refers, very specifically, to "plausible but false statements generated by language models."

At the end of the day, the goal is to train models that are able to differentiate between true and false statements, at least to a much better degree than they can now, and the linked article seems to have some very interesting suggestions about how to get them to do that.
by giggyhack | 2025-09-06 21:16:09+00:00
I have been following this company and several others (Quaise, Fervo, Sage) in the EGS Space for a little bit now, and I think we are on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in baseload renewable energy. This site in Utah is one of the largest test cases that expands the use of EGS to a much broader area than just a few geothermal hot spots. Prices are dropping dramatically, and these things are moving quickly beyond the R&D phase. There is a world where every major data center across the Western US has its own base load power supply that has essentially no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste, and no need for complicated permitting. EGS truly could be a game changer in the world's push to decarbonize. I'm super excited.
by Animats | 2025-09-06 21:17:20+00:00
> 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers.

The usual value for the geothermal gradient is 25 to 30 degrees C per kilometer. So at 2.5km, in most locations they might be able to get boiling water, but not superheated steam. Most of the geothermal enthusiasts are talking about needing to go down 4 to 12 kilometers. Is there something special about the geology at this site?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-09-06 21:17:21+00:00
That is interesting. Have read his books but never seen videos.

What I was trying to get at is I argue that historically we had no reason to assume magnets to exist until we discovered them. (Sure, today we can explain them in terms of the effects of electrons traveling at relativistic speeds.)

It otherwise seems a safe assumption that we cannot move into a 4th spatial dimension (even if such exists) or do many other outlandish things. I don’t think we can prove them impossible but likely just don’t know how.

But imagine if Newton had been shown an electromagnet and asked to explain it… It would have been witchcraft!
by robocat | 2025-09-06 21:17:40+00:00
There's a lot of people on HN that are not from the USA: at-will doesn't exist in many other wealthy countries.

E.g. I'm from New Zealand, and at-will contracts are not legal for employees. A company can use contracts (employing a contractor) but contracts are effectively restricted to professional specialists. A company can use temping agencies but the agency takes a big commission on top of wages. A company that has to sack someone can often get hit with financial penalties through the employee rights protection laws.
by epolanski | 2025-09-06 21:17:40+00:00
How praised the public transport of your city is irrelevant. What matters is how close/connected you are to it, and it to your workplace.

Trains don't have stop lights nor traffic. They don't care about rush hour. They are always going to be the fastest connection to a city center.

I live 4 minutes by foot from the Colonna Galleria train station, in a village 30 kilometers outside Rome, Italy. The train to Termini (Rome central station) takes 28 minutes, and Termini is the crossway of the 2 main metro lines and the most important city bus lines.

It's 33 minutes at night with empty streets and it's 1:15 at rush hour. Leaving work at 5:30 can easily cost you 2 hours in your car.

But sure, put me 3 miles from the train station, put my office in a place that is just 10/15 more inconvenient from metro/termini and it's drammatically different.
by nirava | 2025-09-06 21:17:44+00:00
To everyone agreeing with the decision, here's the real problem:

The efforts to consolidate power, control the media, repeal stricter corruption-related laws, and allow more power and wealth to the political elite have been crazy high in the last few years in Nepal. This much has been obvious to anyone paying attention.

This Social Media Ban is a pretty clear cut next logical step in that process. This could very well be a dampener, or a distraction, done in preparation for the next step.

So, in theory, in the hands of a reliable government, I'd be totally for a ban. I don't want any "mainstream" social media to be above the local laws.

But as it is, this is scary and will probably be looked at as an important event in history.
by jasoneckert | 2025-09-06 21:18:05+00:00
Thanks for the reply — I really appreciate how I missed the distinction between individual choice and systemic expectation. I was speaking more to personal situations (like artists or self-employed folks), but I see how referencing “996 culture” more broadly brings in serious issues of exploitation and exclusion. Your points about how this affects people at different life stages and the long-term costs gives me more to think about.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-06 21:18:29+00:00
All the time is not a number but in Germany it's common that your legitimate insurance claim gets rejected at first and then you appeal once or twice and do the paperwork and document the proof again, citing all terms & conditions that apply and you get what you are owed or you get a lawyer to do the whole thing again and get what you are owed then.

"Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen" ( German for "employment creation scheme" ) in an industry where there is not enough actual work for--and or to justify the--number of employees. One of the more useful Ponzi schemes; if you are not a real capitalist, that is. Because if you are, then this shit is just fugly drag.
by tombert | 2025-09-06 21:18:36+00:00
That's how it kind of was in my last job [1].

I know I came off as a bit negative, but in fairness to them, they did more or less continue working on what I was doing using the newer Java 21 features, and after I got a few pretty interesting changes merged in some of the more junior engineers started using them too; particularly I was able to successfully evangelize against the use of `synchronized` in most cases [2] and got at least some people using queues to synchronize between threads.

It honestly has gotten a fair bit easier for me since I've been doing this for awhile; at my last job I was the most experienced person on my direct team (including my manager) and one of the more experienced software people at the company, so I was able to throw my weight around a bit more and do stuff how I wanted. I tried not to be a complete jerk about it; there were plenty of times people would push back on what I was doing and I would think about it and agree that they were probably right, but I outwardly rejected arguments that seemed to be based on "I didn't learn this in university so it's wrong".

I have had other jobs (at much bigger companies) where they were not amenable to this. I would try and use new features and my PRs would be rejected as a result, usually with some vague wording of "this way is faster", which I later found out was (as far as I can tell) always a lie.

[1] It is not hard to find my job history but I politely ask you do not post it here.

[2] I'm sure someone here can give me a contrived example of where `synchronized` makes sense but if you need mutexes I think you're almost always better off with a ReadWriteLock or ReentrantLock.
Show HN: I'm making an open-source platform for learning Japanese
by tentoumushi | 2025-09-06 21:19:30+00:00
The idea is actually quite simple. As a Japanese learner and a coder, I've always wanted there to be an open-source, 100% free for learning Japanese, similar to Monkeytype in the typing community.

Unfortunately, pretty much all language learning apps are closed-sourced and paid these days, and the ones that are free have unfortunately been abandoned.

But of course, just creating yet another language learning app was not enough - there has to be a unique selling point. And then I thought to myself: why not make it crazy and do what no other language learning app ever did by adding a gazillion different color themes and fonts, to really hit it home and honor the app's original inspiration, Monkeytype?

And so I did. Now, I'm looking to find contributors and testers for the early stages of the app.

Why? Because weebs and otakus deserve to have a 100% free, beautiful, quality language learning app too！

For anyone interested, you can check it out at --> https://kanadojo.com and let me know what you think ^ ^
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-06 21:19:33+00:00
I'm not sure - I certainly see a lot of Vauxhall/Opel cars about, and Ford Transit vans are pretty universal. Caterpillar vehicles are hard not to see on construction sites in Europe. The only sector where American brands seem to have absolutely no market penetration at all is that of heavy trucks, to the extent that I have never seen one except at vehicle shows.
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-06 21:19:40+00:00
We realised things like lead in toothpaste (or whatever the fuck other whack "medicine" they came up with decades ago) were harmful and should be broadly disallowed, why not something like social media too?

Legitimate question. Killing someone = bad. Poisoning people with whack medicine = bad. Causing loneliness and mental health epidemic = good ??

Societies have always decided what is and isn't allowed.
by throwaway22032 | 2025-09-06 21:19:43+00:00
The issue is basically this:

If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.

The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.

This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?
by paulcole | 2025-09-06 21:20:19+00:00
> Those who want to do it are free to do so at any company.

This is the same argument about how when a company is remote anyone is still free to go into the office.

The people who want to work 996 likely want to do it with other people who want to work 996.

A company whose team values 996 should put it as a job requirement to filter applicants.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 21:21:20+00:00
I mean, ok, maybe in a general sense, but do you really think the company is going to hire and employ someone just to sit and decide what E2E tests to run on every PR? No, of course not. What's going to happen instead is that either 1) all tests will continue to run, and productivity will continue to drop, or 2) PR authors will manually decide what tests to run, wasting their time (and they'll get it wrong sometimes, or have subtle unconscious biases that make them less likely to run the tests that take a longer amount of time, and/or the ones more likely to surface bugs in their PR).

So this is in theory a good thing: an LLM replacing a tedious task that no one was going to be hired to do anyway.

And besides, labor destruction could be a truly wonderful thing, if we had a functional, empathetic society in which we a) ensure that people have paths to retrain for new jobs while their basic needs are met by the state (or by the companies doing the labor destruction), and/or b) allow people whose jobs are destroyed to just not work at all, but provide them with enough resources to still have a decent life (UBI plus universal health care basically).

My utopia is one where there is no scarcity, and no one has to work to survive and have a good life. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate the need for every single job, and replace it with post-scarcity abundance, I would. People would build things and do science and help others because it gives them pleasure to do so, not because they have to in order to survive. And for people who just want to live lives of leisure, that would be fine, too. I don't think humanity will ever get to this state, mind you, but I can dream of a better world.