MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-04 14:59:05+00:00
> Consider, if people get the new housing developments that they want, that would also add load to the system.

It's a matter of scale and efficiency. Housing also adds (full-price) customers new taxpayers. A major problem with housing development is that low density (e.g. single-family zoned suburbs) are net-negative contributors. (But this effect is primarily seen with infrastructure like roads)

> Any model you do that tries to prevent this is essentially rent stabilization for early members.

The problem with datacenters is twofold:

1) It's a demand-shock. Because of the rapid rollout of datacenters, energy production and transmission capacity simply can't scale up. This causes prices to spike locally.

2) 'Industrial' electricity like this tends to pay very cheap rates, leading to residential electricity customers subsidizing them. Especially as such industry tends to be given high tax & other incentives.

> Any model you do that tries to prevent this is essentially rent stabilization for early members. And that has a pretty good track record of not being a good idea.

A question here is whether or not we're in a datacenter construction bubble. (To anyone who says we're not: Nvidia's stock price has soared more than Cisco's during the dotcom bubble.)

If you're in charge of a major electricity company, are you going to sign off on major expansion investments right now, knowing that it will take 5-10 years?

A lot of these datacenters are not owned and operated by Big Tech itself, but instead disposable companies like CoreWeave. If there's a bubble, it'll pop, and these companies will just go bankrupt. The power purchase agreement'll be worthless then.
by nerdsniper | 2025-09-04 14:59:12+00:00
They're actually two cones jetting out from a binary star system, at an angle where we see the discs of the base of the cone edge-on (from an angle where the disk that forms the base of a cone would look like a line).

Think of like a wine glass, where you see clearly right through the part closest to you (normal / perpendicular to you) where you're only looking through the thinnest amount of glass, but cannot see through the sides/edges of the wine glass because you're looking through more glass with more "effective" thickness.

Those edges of the cone (from our perspective) create the bright "X" (the sides of the 2 wine glasses). Then some of this X is filled with dust (brighter) and that shows the rest of the cone (the front/back of the 2 wine glasses) and some of the X is not filled with dust (darker) (no cone at all there).

The effect is enhanced by a series of straight parallel lines connecting parts of the "X". This is caused by periodic bursts of emissions, so basically those are disks viewed edge-on from our angle. Geometrically, they'd form the "base" of cones of ever-increasing size.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/red-rectang...

https://esahubble.org/news/heic0408/

https://www.astronomy.com/observing/weird-object-red-rectang...
by bluGill | 2025-09-04 14:59:56+00:00
I'm in favor of them only if they are extended to renters. I don't know how to do this, but everyone should get a lower cost for their first home, even if it is an apartment. If you want a second home, apartment, campsite, or whatever additional place to dwell I'm fine with you paying a little extra for that luxury, but for your first home we should make it affordable.
by rayiner | 2025-09-04 15:00:08+00:00
The Senate voted not to confirm Bork because Democrats controlled the Senate 55-45 and had the power to insist on a more ideologically liberal nominee. (Which I think is a fair use of the advice and consent power by the way. And a successful gambit, because they got Anthony Kennedy, who swung liberal on many key votes.)

Bork was subject to attacks on his views of constitutional law. Many of the attacks were just not true. The Wikipedia write up on this is quite even-handed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork.

Apart from that, “abhorrent” is not a word that makes sense in discussing legal interpretation. It’s a category error. For example, Bork believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his party got through Congress) was unconstitutional. To this day, the law rests on shaky Commerce Clause footings with all sorts of exceptions and caveats to avoid conflict with the first amendment freedom of association and to overcome Congress’s lack of authority to regulate morality directly.[1] The attacks on him over it was midwits having an emotional reaction to a complex legal debate that was beyond their understanding.

Bork’s antitrust theories, and its foundation in armchair economics analysis, is far better target for criticism. Ironically, that wasn’t the subject of Ted Kennedy’s speech against his candidacy.

[1] You can see this tension in the laws themselves. Why doesn’t the Fair Housing Act apply to small, owner-occupied rental properties? Because Congress lacks the constitutional power to force people to not be racist in their choice of who they live with. In more than half a century, liberals haven’t even seriously attacked these carve outs even though they would seem like low hanging fruit.
by minraws | 2025-09-04 15:01:27+00:00
Now let's consider a different form of govt/shared charges.

Taxes, why are individual and corporate taxes and structures different?

Both are doing work and generating income?

Why do corporations get to deductions and do so much tax magic that individuals don't?

why don't we charge them both with the same laws, and structures?

Cause corporates generate jobs? Isn't that unfair to the people born individuals...

I don't think anyone is saying there should be stabilization of electricity prices. But costs for grid improvements for industrial, data center or AI usage should be on the said companies.

They are using that resource to generate a profit.

While people in residential homes are just living their lives, you are comparing cost of essential commodities to production inputs...

We make taxes on poorer people less as well for the same reason.

But yes if someone is saying electricity prices should be stabilized for early consumers that's definitely unfair. But I didn't see or read that here.
by tptacek | 2025-09-04 15:01:35+00:00
I think people overthink this, and we should just have a library standard full-strength CSPRNG, and then people with fussy fast-randomness needs (Monte Carlo or whatever) can just pull in libraries. "Don't need secure random and can't use it" is a very niche problem space.

It'll never happen in Go though! They're over a decade committed to this library shape.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-04 15:02:13+00:00
Popping back into this thread because I just heard a clip of Steve Balmer introducing a new player to his Clippers basketball team in very much a classic Balmer way. (re: Developers! Developers!...)

And he's in the news for it because the team might have used a sketchy tactic with a fake endorsement company to lure the player in. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-le...

Same ol' Balmer. haha
by bazzargh | 2025-09-04 15:02:18+00:00
A word of caution. A few years ago we had a production impact event where customers were getting identical cookies (and so started seeing each others sessions). When I took a look at the code, what I found was that they were doing something very like your code - using a time() based seed and an PRNG.

Whenever we deployed new nginx configs, those servers would roll out and restart, getting _similar_ time() results in the seed. But the individual nginx workers? Their seeds were nearly identical. Not every call to the PRNG was meant for UUIDs, but enough were that disaster was inevitable.

The solution is to use a library that leverages libuuid (via ffi or otherwise). A "native lua" implementation is always going to miss the entropy sources available in your server and generate clashes if it's seeded with time(). (eg https://github.com/Kong/lua-uuid, https://github.com/bungle/lua-resty-uuid)
by paulorlando | 2025-09-04 15:02:19+00:00
I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks.

(Longer-term we focused on connecting people recovering from serious health issues.)
by all2 | 2025-09-04 15:02:50+00:00
Qwen3 wasn't the important part. You can use pretty much any model you want. For example, you'll see in the .bashrc function I have two different models called out (though Deepseek _still_ doesn't support tool calling on Ollama, after almost a year).

What I've been trying to dodge is the 5 hour limits on Claude Code. This lets me do that.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-04 15:02:50+00:00
> In richer societies you can afford to be alone.

I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.

If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.

So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.

> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements

Just to be clear: my work is different.

But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.
by margotli | 2025-09-04 15:03:01+00:00
We at Metabase asked 338 teams in our community about how they build and use their data stacks, from tool choices to AI adoption, and built a community resource for data stack decisions in 2025.

Some of our findings: - Postgres wins it all: #1 transactional DB and #1 analytics storage - 50% of teams skip warehouses/lakes - Data teams stay small: most are just 1-3 people, even at big companies - AI trust is shaky: average confidence only 5.5/10

There’s much more to see. Check it out and let us know what you think.
by em-bee | 2025-09-04 15:03:14+00:00
sure, threat model matters. no protection is 100%, but more is better. using my own hosted proxy means that my identity is out in public. it's not even hidden. no need to even seize payment records. anyone can look up the ip address and eventually figure out who owns the server. i might hide it somewhat if i use that proxy only for this purpose, not point any DNS records at it, not reveal any public data, never use it for services where i log in, etc.

truly anonymous hosters are high profile targets for law enforcement, so in my opinion they are higher risk than even VPN providers. not interested in getting caught up with that crowd. and for the good VPN providers at least a court order is necessary, and if the VPN doesn't log usage, they can't prove anything.

there is no threat model where your own hosted proxy could ever provide better protection than any VPN. i use my own proxy because it's free, because i already have a server where i host my website, not because it provides me with any kind of protection. to get that, a VPN would be easier and cheaper.
by koliber | 2025-09-04 15:03:15+00:00
My point is that all ads are bad and marketing can provide value for consumers.

Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point. There are plenty of examples of bad advertising. It does not take a lot of effort to find them. But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.
by atoav | 2025-09-04 15:03:56+00:00
You read "living of" as a monetary value, that isn't what I meant. That particular app is useless without musicians that upload stuff for free, meaning the fact that musicians do that is of existential importance for it.

And that means such an app enters a certain relationship with these musicians. This relationship can be symbiotic (good) or parasitic (bad).
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-04 15:04:16+00:00
Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found.

It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
by jimkri | 2025-09-04 15:04:51+00:00
I’m not backing that comment claim, but from recent research I’ve been doing.

My ADHD brain is lacking non-essential and essential amino acids/minerals,I think that comment stated the brain then rewires to compensate for the lack of nutrients. Thats what I’m taking.

I’ve been taking Spirulina as my booster to help fill in my nutrition deficiencies and then I’ve been feeling better leading me to get past the anxiety and rumination.

Richard Feynman wrote about it, that you can be hypothesized and want to do something and know you can, but you don’t or just can’t.

The article is great. One thing I’ve been doing is trying to make Arts and Crafts again.

I’m starting to incorporate Ai and my family to show what we can do. Then it’s starting to lead to everyone documenting their days with voice notes and more conversations
by jmull | 2025-09-04 15:04:54+00:00
> What was the Browser Company even doing?

Probably something like this all along.

If you have investors, and give away for free a product that costs a lot of money to develop, there is surely a strategy for those investors to get their money back, plus a lot more.

It doesn't always work, of course. But it seems to have worked well in this case.
by traverseda | 2025-09-04 15:05:02+00:00
Advertising beamed directly into your face. Eye tracking to build a better psychological profile to better manipulate you.

The better question is do the major tech companies have enough power to force you to use smart glasses, like you can be forced to have a google or apple account to interact with certain banks? What can they break and make it so you need to use smart glasses to continue to use them?

With the matter protocol and smart IoT, maybe you'll need glasses to turn on lights, or some much clunkier interface with a phone. Maybe something more facebook like where you'll need them to communicate with your friends, leverage some network effects. I'm sure someone is figuring that out as we speak.

---

There's a lot of legitimate use for a HUD too, but I doubt that is what will drive investment.
by mhurron | 2025-09-04 15:05:02+00:00
I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything.

To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
by CarbonNanotubes | 2025-09-04 15:05:11+00:00
One thing I noticed shortly after when I initially switch Arc a couple years ago from Firefox, ads were more targeted at me and I definitely felt more tracked online. I started using Zen Browser at work because they blocked Arc for Windows (Zen blocked as well but I can run the Twilight build without being blocked :D) and the more I used it I just like it better than Arc in general and it was nice to be back to using Firefox again. When Arc went into maintenance mode it was just that last thing to finally get me to move off of it and over to Zen everywhere.
by satiated_grue | 2025-09-04 15:05:14+00:00
Is the increased electric bill offset by reductions in taxes? The answer looks like "probably".

https://www.loudoun.gov/6188/Data-Centers-in-Loudoun-County

"Loudoun County is home to one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world through which much of the world's internet traffic passes every day. The industry has helped to diversify Loudoun County's economy, which has included bringing new jobs and revenue streams to the county over the past 14 years that have helped to keep real property tax rates relatively low."
by busterarm | 2025-09-04 15:06:24+00:00
Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor...

For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.

Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
by bityard | 2025-09-04 15:06:25+00:00
I joined a gym for a few months last year partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet some people. BIG misread on my part. It turns out most public gyms around here have a strong "leave me the hell alone vibe." Essentially zero eye-contact. Pretty much everyone had earbuds in and I didn't bother them. I said "hello" to those without earbuds once in a while but only got a silent death glare in response. So I stopped doing that.
by spenczar5 | 2025-09-04 15:07:08+00:00
I agree, but there are other possibilities in between those two extremes, like Quivr [1]. Schemas are good, but they can be defined in Python and you get a lot more composability and modularity than you would find in SQL (or pandas, realistically).

1: https://github.com/B612-Asteroid-Institute/quivr
by ssttoo | 2025-09-04 15:07:13+00:00
Ha, I was just recently thinking about what you do with attention in different languages. In my native Bulgarian (обръщам внимание) you “turn” your attention as in you “direct” it. Same word for when you turn a page. Like you have but a single attention and it’s up to you where you direct it.

In French (correct me if I’m wrong) you “make” attention, « faire attention ». Like there’s unlimited amount of attention and you can always make more.
by jonhohle | 2025-09-04 15:07:26+00:00
> So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.

That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up.

Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated.

The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
by ozim | 2025-09-04 15:07:33+00:00
I like it exactly because it moves through biographies quickly and to the point. I can ponder about “what are the consequences” on my own.

Most of the time I don’t care enough about each topic or what are passions of the experts are to listen to it.

Having an episode where someone prepared information so I can get acquainted with the topic but I don’t have to deal with forwarding some professor ranting about his pet peeve is huge amount of value.
by FabHK | 2025-09-04 15:07:51+00:00
I think they didn't notice the significance of that clarification (which, again, was given in the context of a modified problem). Reading the exchanges again, though, I see that many respondents were not only mistaken, but also impolite or sexist in accusing Marylin of being wrong.

If you specify the problem carefully, anyone with some training in probability should get the answer right. But clearly back then it was a head scratcher.

I wonder whether there've been other problems like that, or we will encounter similar ones: elementary and easy to understand, yet many people get it confidently wrong, until the correct solution permeates through culture.
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-04 15:07:54+00:00
I am an engineer at a large utility in the Pacific Northwest. My ratepayers pay very little for power, We generate with hydro which is very, very cheap. There are very few opportunities for more hydro. Every new MW we add is going to cost two orders of magnitude more per MWh compared with the existing stuff. We would not need to add capacity like this, except that we are being absolutely deluged with requests for enormous new data centers, which will require purchasing power from these very expensive sources. This will drive up prices for everyone. There's a lot of people in this thread that are confidently claiming things will happen in systems they barely understand. I'm here to tell you this will create a power affordability crisis in my region, and it hasn't even started yet. The effects won't be fully seen for years.
by don_neufeld | 2025-09-04 15:08:13+00:00
Curious what you’ve heard.

I certainly enjoyed working with him and Hurst in the early days at Obvious 2.0 when we were incubating Branch.

A bunch of Medium & Obvious 2.0 alumni I respect work or worked at TBC (Dustin, DanB, Connor, Cemre, maybe others).
by JohnFen | 2025-09-04 15:08:13+00:00
> their asinine sign up waiting list kept me from pursuing it further

Yeah, this -- combined with the fact that their website told you nearly nothing about why their browser was worth signing up to something just to try it out someday -- is why I never used it. I don't personally know anyone who did.

It seemed dumb at the time -- I was actively looking for a better browser and certainly would have considered Arc, but they were determined to keep me from learning anything about it (let alone try it), so that never happened.
by bluGill | 2025-09-04 15:08:16+00:00
> The ability to purchase contracts on power that hasn't been generated yet is what is driving all the volatility and exploitation.

That is completely opposite of the truth. The ability to buy a contract is what allows power generators to get loans to build at good rates. Everyone wants someone else to take on the risk, when you buy a contract for power at some rate in the future you are taking on the risk that prices could go down. The generator then goes to the bank and can show that even if competition forces prices down they still are going to get that much from the contract and thus can pay off the loans.

Power is complex and I just touched the surface of the truth.
by giobox | 2025-09-04 15:08:29+00:00
The TV License check is purely an honor based system for now - you can simply say yes and no further inquiry is made, it does not ask for any kind of reference.

I suspect this changes in next few years once they finally decide on what TV license reform looks like, especially given the large drop in TV License receipts, but for now anyone can access in UK/via VPN, license or not.