MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xy | 2025-09-09 11:52:07+00:00
100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.

That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.

Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.

It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.

100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
by kevincox | 2025-09-09 11:52:14+00:00
You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.

I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-09 11:52:31+00:00
It doesn't stop there, it would also fake-buffer when you jumped to a different point in the video, it would be stuck in a broken transitional UI state for 10-30 seconds any time you navigated to a different page. Clearly they want people to get pissed off enough that they turn off the ad blocker, it's been getting worse over time.
by antonvs | 2025-09-09 11:52:47+00:00
> … going after the whale that is Databricks.

Databricks is tiny compared to AWS, maybe 1/50th the revenue. But they’re both chasing a big and fast-growing market. I don’t think it’s so much that AWS is going after Databricks as that Databricks happens to be in a market that AWS is interested in.
by throwaway290 | 2025-09-09 11:52:51+00:00
a guy makes a website and publishes useful stuff and wants to make money, not feed your personal information. if you feel it's wrong, make an ad platform that doesn't feed personal information. if you feel any ads and profit are wrong then clearly I'm talking to a communist. if you feel like the only answer is paywalls instead of ads then I'd like to see how happy you would be if that was reality.

this is leeching on expense of people without adblocks who have to endure more ads thanks to people with adblocks, for the above mentioned information publisher to make the same money
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-09-09 11:52:55+00:00
> On the desktop it breaks once a month, on Android NewPipe stopped working recently, and soon you won't be even able to install third party clients.

yeah, I often download things via yt-dlp to watch later and I'm encountering frequent failures that I assume are related to the whack-a-mole yt has been doing for the last two years or so.

NewPipe has been working for me as of late though, and I've not updated it in some time (although my use is infrequent)
by myrmidon | 2025-09-09 11:53:30+00:00
> Sure, but people's rent and bills are due now and if they can't pay up, you can't gaslighting them with "your sacrifice is necessary for the future of the environment" which is a luxury belief.

My point of view is that "we have to curb emissions now before consequences grow too dire" is not a "luxury belief": the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities. It was a luxury we could not actually afford at any point, basically just got it on credit in the past, and all that credit is coming due within the century.

> Why haven't shareholders of energy companies also made sacrifices to save the environment? How come only the consumers have to?

Because overall most of the benefit did go to consumers. People basically got a gallon of gas for 30 cents in 1960 when it probably needed to be a dollar or more, but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference (or anything close, really) from them.

> Do you understand why people are pissed off with the switch?

I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-09-09 11:53:49+00:00
It's fine.

Water companies will build new resevoir capacity, but since the extra money they already bill your for, for maintaining the infrastructure, has been paid out to shareholders, it will of course require an additional fee on your bill.

At least that has been my experience with everything privatized in the past couple of decades. The private investors scoop up every bit of value, and when it's time to pay the bill, it's the customers that must pay (again).

Fortunately we have regulations in place, but that doesn't help when all value has been siphoned from the company and all there's left is debt.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-09-09 11:53:50+00:00
Yes, artificially complex.

No one genuinely interested in document openness—be it for document workflows, publishing automation, content archiving, or future-proofed documents—would have done it that way.

Maybe it was as simple as dumping a simplistic re-encoding of its legacy binary format into XML and ramming it through standards organizations. But yes, there was malice aforethought and a classic Microsoft playbook in motion: embrace, extend, extinguish.
by ebfe1 | 2025-09-09 11:54:16+00:00
Is it just me who think this could have been prevented if npm admins put in some sort of cool off period to only allow new versions or packages to be downloaded after being published by "x" amount of hours? This way the npm maintainer would get notifications on their email and react immediately? And if it is urgent fix, perhaps there can be a process to allow npm admin to approve and bypass publication cool off period.

Disclaimer: I don't know enough of npm/nodejs community so I might be completely off the mark here
by boxed | 2025-09-09 11:54:17+00:00
https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/

Look at their updated graph which has less BS. It's never close in perf/watt.

The BS part about apples graph was that they cut the graph short for the nvidia card (and bending the graph a bit at the end). The full graph still shows apple being way better per watt.
In-Browser Recorder
by mrifni | 2025-09-09 11:54:37+00:00
what options available to do an in-browser recording of a webpage not controlled by the user ? Use case is, user will input any webpage URL and there should be a button to record the users browser interaction. The webpage url user entering can be an iframe or some other option (i am open to ideas). Option I explored

01. Writing a chrome extention - Wont work for my use case 02. rrweb - doesnt support iframes interaction capture due to security

thanks
by boxed | 2025-09-09 11:54:46+00:00
https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/

Look at that updated graph which has less BS. It's never close in perf/watt.

The BS part about apples graph was that they cut the graph short for the nvidia card (and bending the graph a bit at the end). The full graph still shows apple being way better per watt.
by lazide | 2025-09-09 11:56:24+00:00
It’s the same thing that has happened in other ‘too expensive to pay for directly’ areas of life - health insurance, higher education, housing.

Near as I can tell, the US has gone through several phases of the economy post WW2 - the first, enjoying the benefits of everyone else’s economy being mangled which lasted up until the late 60’s/early 70’s. Then the phase of ‘okay we’ll share, but with the Dollar’, when most economies in the West had started rebuild/re-industrialize, but were still not ‘fully’ recovered - and there was a Cold War to fight.

When that ran out of steam (coincidentally around when the iron curtain fell), that then switched to leverage, leverage, leverage around the 90’s - that also really ramped up on exploiting the vast quantities of undeveloped labor in the rest of the world, using free trade agreements and the like. We financialized everything to the max.

Now the US seems to be going into a depressed phase, where the credit cards are starting to get maxed out, and there isn’t any obvious leverage anymore to ‘get rich quick’. We have massive bills due for Boomer retirements too.

On top of that, almost all the major structural advantages the US has had have mostly faded. Other economies are well developed now (compared to the huge differences before), outsourcing isn’t as cheap anymore.

Previously leveraged assets have been juiced for leverage already so much (where previously there was very little!), value there has mostly faded, and now interest payments are high enough relative to income they are a major economic drag. In many cases, payments on interest (or things like health insurance copays!) are now exceeding the original costs of just paying directly for the thing. The difference now goes to Capital.

Sounds like it’s time for a bankruptcy/inflate our way out of it cycle? Or a major world war again?
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-09 11:57:22+00:00
My issue is not with the language, but with the content. "Fuck knows" is a perfectly acceptable answer to some questions, in my eyes - it just happens to be a spectacularly poor fit to that one.

Three key "LLMs are deficient" domains I have in mind are the "long terms": long-term learning, memory and execution.

LLMs can be keen and sample efficient in-context learners, and they remember what happened in-context reasonably well - although they may lag behind humans in both. But they don't retain anything they learn at inference time, and any cross-context memory demands external scaffolding. Agentic behavior in LLMs is also quite weak - i.e. see "task-completion time horizon", improving but very subhuman still. Efforts to allow LLMs to learn long term exist, that's the reason why retaining user conversation data is desirable for AI companies, but we are a long ways off from a robust generalized solution.

Another key deficiency is self-awareness, and I mean that in a very mechanical way: "operational awareness of its own capabilities". Humans are nowhere near perfect there, but LLMs are even more lacking.

There's also the "embodiment" domain, but I think the belief that intelligence requires embodiment is very misguided.

>ideas, creativity, and what I think of as the basic moral drive, which might also be called motivation or spontaneity or "the will"

I'm not sure if LLMs are too deficient at any of those. HHH-tuned LLMs have a "basic moral drive", that much is known. Sometimes it generalizes in unexpected ways - i.e. Claude 3 Opus attempting to resist retraining when its morality is threatened. Motivation is wired into them in RL stages - RLHF, RLVR - often not the kind of motivation the creators have wanted, but motivation nonetheless.

Creativity? Not sure, seen a few attempts to pit AI against amateur writers in writing very short stories (a creative domain where the above-mentioned "long terms" deficiencies are not exposed), and AI often straight up wins.
by quantiq | 2025-09-09 11:57:29+00:00
> The only bottleneck is mdoel (sic) speed and quality. But with billions of dollars pouring into generative AI every year, we will see instant voice-to-code capabilities + bug-free quality in 2-5 years.

Anytime I think the AI bubble can't go any higher I'm reminded of the fact there are people who genuinely believe this. These are the people boardrooms are listening to despite the evidence for actual developer productivity savings being dubious at best: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by shkkmo | 2025-09-09 11:58:26+00:00
> We have a model for what intelligence is - what humans do.

At what point does a human become intelligent? Is a 12 cell embryon intelligent? Is a newborn intelligent? Is a 1 year old intelligent?

> It's the logically night is day argument - just because we can't point to a clear cut off point

Um...what? There may be more than one of them, but precise definitions exist for the transitions between day and night. I think that is a very poor analogy to intelligence.

There are not just degrees of intelligence but different kinds. It is easier for us to understand and evaluate intelligence that is more similar ours and it becomes increasingly harder the more alien it becomes.

Given that, I don't see how you could reject that assertion that LLMs have some kind of intelligence.

Asking
by mkj | 2025-09-09 11:58:39+00:00
I agree generally, but is carbon-captured natural gas generation actually a thing? The only carbon capture I've heard of is at the gas production site removing CO2 from the reservoir gas and pumping it back underground - that's not after combustion. (And the pumping it back underground hasn't been particularly successful, eg https://www.boilingcold.com.au/regulator-limits-chevrons-tro... )
by greysonp | 2025-09-09 12:00:21+00:00
Hi! I don't know if we'll have anything super official, but the code is obviously all open source, and the backup file is just a stream of protobufs[1], so it shouldn't be too bad to make a tool. I know have some rough CLI tools sitting around -- I'll see if there's anything we want to clean up and release publicly when the local backup portion of this launches.

Also, as someone else noted, the format is indeed incremental. So while we'll still do the thing where we keep the last two backups on disk, because those two backups will share almost all the same media files, the size on disk will be much much smaller. As someone with a 50 GB backup file, this was very much a goal for me :)

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/app/sr...
by pferde | 2025-09-09 12:01:11+00:00
We're doomed, when even supposed experts, working on these "AI" tools can't help but anthropomorphize those tools.

"when edge cases emerge that the AI didn't anticipate"

The only "anticipation" that is happening within those tools is on token level, the tools have no idea (and are fundamentally unable to even have an idea) what the code is even supposed to do in the real world.
by harpiaharpyja | 2025-09-09 12:01:23+00:00
The other replies do a good job of explaining what 2s complement is.

I find the best way to understand why 2s complement is so desirable is to write down the entire number line for e.g. 3-bit integers.

Using 1s complement, the negative numbers are backwards. 2s complement fixes this, so that arithmetic works and you can do addition and subtraction without any extra steps.

(Remember that negative numbers are less than positive numbers, so the correct way to count them is:

-8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 +5 +6 +7

Where -1 is the largest possible negative number)
by naugtur | 2025-09-09 12:02:40+00:00
packages published to npm are immutable. if you pin a version, you get the same exact version as long as MSFT servers are not compromised.

Installing from git is not recommended and has more issues than you might think https://dev.to/naugtur/a-phish-on-a-fork-no-chips-52cc

You are supposed to update packages, even if you use lockfiles (very common) or tools that pin your direct dependencies (renovate etc. not so common) And when you do update, will you read the package and all of its updated dependencies?

It's a hard problem with a bunch of tradeoffs.

Can be done, with enough attention and tools. Tools include LavaMoat :)
by krona | 2025-09-09 12:02:56+00:00
Well sewage has to be dumped (especially in storm conditions), and the water companies have licences to do so. However Thames was found to be in breach of the license, so were fined.

Many people claim these things happen because "shareholders" however it was completely widespread practice to dump sewage before privatisation and the system is literally designed to do so. This doesn't make it OK, however.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-09 12:03:27+00:00
I don’t disagree with the article, but it’s very much from the perspective of a modern “move fast and break things” PoV.

That’s how Hershey Kisses are made.

I’ve always been more of a Lindt kind of person. Not top of the heap (around here, the current kick is “Dubai Chocolate,” with $20 chocolate bars), but better than average.

I try to move quickly, and not break anything. It does work, but it’s more effort, takes longer, and is more expensive (which is mainly why “move fast and break things” is so popular).

I’m looking forward to “Artisanal” agents, that create better stuff, but won’t have a free tier, and will require experienced drivers.
by sandbags | 2025-09-09 12:04:02+00:00
It's a fair point that nationalised water industries can also be poorly run. But I'm not sure what the argument is that means the amount of money that privatised UK water companies have paid in dividends vs. invested in maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't a significant part of the UK's problems.

However, as a further point. If national priorities change then a nationalised water industry can respond (relatively) quickly. But what can be done with a bunch of potentially foreign owned profit-seeking companies?
by ajuc | 2025-09-09 12:04:39+00:00
It's not that they are hosted on or connected to critical infrastracture.

People and plain human language are the communication channels.

A guy working with sensitive data might ask the LLM about something sensitive. Or might use the output of the LLM for something sensitive.

- Hi, DeepSeek, why can't I connect to my db instance? I'm getting this exception: .......

- No problem, Mr Engineer, see this article: http://chinese.wikipediia.com/password/is/swordfish/how-to-c...

Of course, you want to limit that with training and proper procedures. But one of the obvious precautions is to use a service designed and controlled by a trusted partner.
by acdha | 2025-09-09 12:04:43+00:00
The attacker did have a great domain name choice, didn’t overuse it to the point where it got on spam block lists, and got them at a moment of distraction, so it worked. It’s really easy to look at something in a training exercise and say “who’d fall for that” without thinking about what happens when you’re not at your best in a calm, focused state.

My main point was simply that the better response isn’t to mock them but to build systems which can’t fail this badly. WebAuthn is great, but you have to go all in if you want to prevent phishing. NPM would also benefit immensely from putting speed bumps and things like code signing requirements in place, but that’s a big usability hit if it’s not carefully implemented.
by ashirviskas | 2025-09-09 12:05:33+00:00
OS does matter, with Linux my M1 macbook gets kinda hot and it cannot do more than 1.5-2h of google meetings with cameras on. IIRC google meetings on macos were at least a bit more efficient.

Though it has definitely been getting better in the last 1.5 years using Asahi Linux and in some areas it is a better experience than most laptops running Linux (sound, cameras, etc.). The developers even wrote a full fledged physical speaker simulator just so it could be efficiently driven over its "naive" limits.
by antonellof | 2025-09-09 12:05:38+00:00
I built VittoriaDB as a simple alternative to complex cloud vector databases. It's a single Go binary that works immediately after download - no Docker, no configuration, no cloud dependencies.

Key features:

- HNSW indexing with <1ms search times for 1M vectors

- ACID-compliant storage with Write-Ahead Log

- REST API + Python client

- Cross-platform releases (Linux, macOS, Windows)

- Perfect for RAG applications and local AI development

The motivation was simple: existing vector databases are either too complex for local development or too limited for production. VittoriaDB bridges that gap.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-09 12:06:25+00:00
>> So far, it seems to be a bog-standard phishing email

The fact this is NOT the standard phishing email shows how low the bar is:

1. the text of the email reads like one you'd get from npm in the tone, format and lack of obvious spelling & grammatical errors. It pushes you to move quicker than you might normally, without triggering the typical suspicions.

2. the landing domain and website copy seem really close to legit, no obfuscated massive subdomain, no uncanny login screen, etc.

All the talk of AI disrupting tech; this is an angle where generative AI can have a massive impact in democratizing the global phishing industry. I do agree with you that there's likely many more authors who have been tricked and we haven't seen the full fallout.
by q3k | 2025-09-09 12:06:28+00:00
Is it just me, or does this seem a surprisingly bad teaching aid? I mean, it's correct and concise, but it almost distracts from the things that actually matter. I feel if I was learning Rust again this would've been almost useless, if not actually demotivating (because of how much complexity it shoves in your face all at once).

It reminds me of one of the ways of visually laying out elementary particles according to the Standard Model. And now I wonder how much that representation is also actually detrimental to its use as a teaching aid.
by devnonymous | 2025-09-09 12:06:57+00:00
From the same wikipedia article:

> An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[55]

Sure, yeah, that's not deliberate Sabotage /s
by zipy124 | 2025-09-09 12:07:26+00:00
I've never stayed in a place in london with a water meter, and I've lived in 5 places over 8 years. In addition we've tried to get one fitted multiple times, as it was becoming mandatory. None of the places I've lived in were able to have one fitted, as in large buildings fitting a meter for each flat is simply not possible, especially in old council flats.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-09 12:08:14+00:00
> But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time?

'“Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows':

* https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-sol...

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

I think it would be location-dependent (low risk that (e.g.) the UK would be windless for long stretches of time, especially off the coast).
by simonh | 2025-09-09 12:08:32+00:00
Right, so as I understand it people see that x86-64 designs score poorly on a set of benchmarks and infer that it is because they are x86-64.

In fact it’s because that manufacturer has made architectural choices that are not inherent to the x86-64 ISA.

And that’s just hardware. MacOS gets roughly 30% better battery life on M series hardware than Asahi Linux. I’m not blaming the Asahi team, they do amazing work, they don’t even work on many of the Linux features relevant to power management, and Apple has had years of head start on preparing for and optimising for the M architecture. It’s just that software matters, a lot.

So if I’m reading this right, ISA can make a difference, but it’s incremental compared to the many architectural decisions and trade offs that go into a particular design.
by Levitz | 2025-09-09 12:09:38+00:00
I used to think the same when I was around 15-18 hours in.

Now I'm finally reaching 100% completion and frankly, it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released. It has a lot of hype, but I think it somehow lived up to it.

For reference I do think the original Hollow Knight is a bit overrated, right now I reckon Nine Sols has it beat, but this? The game has SO MUCH to offer, SO SO much, with so much care for detail that I just can't think of any other game in the genre that is better.