MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jampa | 2025-09-04 19:33:51+00:00
"Carbon offsetting is like saying to your husband or spouse: ‘I’m going to cheat, but I’ll buy you a diamond ring.’"

Sometimes, the carbon offsets are from projects that would be built anyway, and there is a lot of sketchiness all around.

It might be better than nothing or it might empower companies to pollute more and then say, "Look, we are offsetting all this!"
by derefr | 2025-09-04 19:34:05+00:00
I'll ignore your other points, because sibling comments are addressing them better. So here's something more unique:

> Also the permitting of stuff across state lines is so time-consuming it's effectively illegal.

This is true in general, but in this specific case, there are a lot of obvious ways to get around the problem, because Nevada is a moth-eaten shirt of federal land reservations — Nevada-the-political-entity only owns/regulates ~15% of the land of Nevada-the-geographic-territory.

With the current state of the US federal government, lobbying to privately use one of those federal reservations would be a walk in the park; and once you're going "California -> federal land" instead of "Calfornia -> Nevada", regulation gets a lot simpler.

Fun fact: there's a National Forest in Nye County (bordering California) that runs right up to the edge of the DoE-reserved area where they did the nuke tests. The feds are fine with running HVDC lines through National Forests (they're not Parks, after all), and "repurposing nuked ground for solar" is actually an easy-to-sell narrative at all levels. You could build solar there and backhaul it to California without ever touching land regulated by Nevada-the-political-entity.
by unregistereddev | 2025-09-04 19:34:07+00:00
No issues browsing or playing media on Mint XFCE, but I'm not using Flatpak.

On old hardware (~10 year old laptop with a Core i5-5200u and integrated graphics), I do have trouble with Google Video calls lagging. This seems to be caused by a combination of old hardware and certain Google products being overly optimized for Chrome.

My guess is that you don't have hardware acceleration enabled. That could be due to Flatpak packaging, or it could be due to running a less-than-optimal graphics driver. Granted it's been awhile since I've tried the open source graphics drivers and I hear they have improved, but I've had better success with closed source graphics drivers.
by notatoad | 2025-09-04 19:34:13+00:00
i think that's exactly it, it's not fundamentally a scam, but it's not as simple as 1:1 "5g in, 5g out" because there's always some formula to calculate how much carbon has been "saved" by the company selling the offsets taking whatever actions they are taking. which gives the companies selling offsets a financial motive to maximize that calculation, and in some cases does lead to outright scams.

the classic example is landowners selling offsets for the mature forests on their land - that's good! and incentivising the preservation of forests is good! but that forest already existed, and has existed for hundreds of years, so does it really make sense that some company can count it against their carbon emissions and claim to be "net zero" just because they paid a landowner to not cut it down?

it makes the whole concept of offsets less of an overall pure good than emitters simply not emitting carbon in the first place, because that is actually a very simple and clear calculation.
by nis0s | 2025-09-04 19:34:28+00:00
I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-04 19:34:35+00:00
That's changes in brain chemistry via lifestyle changes.

Meditation, if practiced at least adequately intense, creates a time interval that is entirely different to anything an ADHD mind is accustomed to. Meditation is not a dream, not the Default Mode Network under control. You are awake, "lucid", not rooted in your imagination or some other cognitive style/process resulting from "hyperlight association" or similar common phenomena.
by colechristensen | 2025-09-04 19:34:44+00:00
It's going to happen anyway for at least a large portion of every day simply because it's cheaper. Electricity is a sizable chunk of the cost to operate a datacenter and at least while the sun is up, solar is significantly cheaper than any other energy source. Grid scale battery overnights is cheaper but less so obviously.

You don't need climate pledges when the thing you're pledging to do saves you substantial amounts of money, and we really don't need quite so much climate moralizing when now the transition to carbon free electricity seems obvious, inevitable, and imminent because of direct immediate cost.

Now the question is just how can we accelerate this a little without creating false economies or distorting the market too much, just a small incentive here and penalty there along with funding for big projects to make them happen earlier.
Show HN: ToysQuiz – A toy gift finder for parents
by ssoossoo | 2025-09-04 19:34:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ToysQuiz.com to solve a problem I kept running into as a parent/uncle/friend: choosing the right toy for kids. Most gift guides I found online were either generic lists or overly commercial. I wanted something more interactive, so I put together a quiz that asks a few simple questions (age, interests, play style) and recommends toys that are actually appropriate.

A few things about the project:

Personalization: Instead of browsing endless product lists, the quiz narrows down options based on the child’s profile.

Categorization: I manually tagged toys across categories (STEM, creative play, outdoor fun, etc.) so suggestions aren’t random.

SEO + UX challenge: I tried to balance making it friendly for parents while also lightweight and fast-loading.

Tech stack: Built on Shopify for the storefront + custom quiz logic. Still tweaking the recommendation algorithm.

I’d love feedback on:

Does the quiz experience feel useful or gimmicky?

Any ideas for making the recommendations smarter (e.g., data, filters, UX)?

Suggestions for how to keep it parent-friendly while not overwhelming with choices.

This is a side project, and I’m experimenting to see if personalized toy discovery can actually help reduce the stress of gift shopping. Curious what the HN crowd thinks!

Thanks in advance
by Slow_Hand | 2025-09-04 19:35:02+00:00
Can’t speak to the cognitive benefits of video games in late life, but my grandma really took to our N64 one summer when my brother and I stayed with her.

She used to stay absorbed in a little battery powered draw poker game that she had, but by the end of the summer she had gone through a large part of our game collection and could put up a real challenge in Mario Kart 64.

Eventually we gifted it to her and she played it for years after that.
by runako | 2025-09-04 19:35:17+00:00
Salesforce revenue growth has decelerated from ~24% in FY 2021 to just over 8% for the trailing 12 months.

A company that was tuned to double revenue in 3 years transforming in one expecting to double in 9 years is definitely carrying too many people. It made sense for them to reduce headcount to align with their much slower growth curve.

Side note: Benioff also said earlier this year that they were done hiring programmers because AI. I'll let their careers page put the lie to that.
by geye1234 | 2025-09-04 19:35:47+00:00
The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows:

> a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system

or

> ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’... yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing." [emphasis in original]

(If you search for this second sentence and see it in context, you will see that substituting 'thought' for 'pain' is a fair reflection of the document's position.)

But this is problematic. Consider the following:

1. Thoughts are, at least sometimes, about reality.

2. My thought in some way refers to the object of that thought. Otherwise, I am not thinking about the thing I purport to be thinking about, and (1) is false.

3. That reference is not limited to my subjective, conscious experience of that thought, but is an inherent property of the thought itself. Otherwise, again, (1) is false.

4. Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above).

5. "A particular stimulation of neural fibers" does not refer to any object outside itself. Suppose I'm thinking about a tiger. You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.

6. But a thought must refer to its object, given 2 and 3. So "thought" and "particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to the same thing. (I will grant, and it is my position, that the latter is part of the former, but physicalism identifies the two.)

This seems to imply physicalism is false.

What step am I going wrong on?
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-04 19:37:27+00:00
So many of the crypto skeptic comments on this story are massively out of touch with the products and sophistication of the crypto industry. For those of us who aren’t, the question has basically been flipped to “what does a bank add to this situation?” .

I’m typing this shortly after buying my groceries with a visa debit card that was funded 30 seconds before the transaction over Lightning Network with Bitcoin that was sold at a 0.1% fee for USD and immediately then transacted on Visa debit payment network.

The reason banks are lobbying so hard recently to close “loopholes” in latest US legislation is because with stablecoins you even need them less and less to hold dollar exposure.

The days of traditional banks are likely numbered and the crypto skeptics commenting on HN have their world models upside down. At least that is my view currently.
by brazukadev | 2025-09-04 19:38:26+00:00
Not really and this is totally not related to Slashy, it just look like the same as the other 20 Slashys launched last month. Launch HNs used to be exciting.

Maybe HN/ycombinator is just not interesting anymore. I saw some of you commenting that this might be similar to the famous Dropbox situation. That could not be more delusional and representative of what HN became, a meme of itself.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-04 19:38:29+00:00
That's been done already for years. OpenAI were training on bulk AI transcribed YouTube vids already in the GPT-4 era. Modern models are all multi-modal and cotrained on audio and image tokens together with text.

The AI companies are not only out of such data but their access to it is shrinking as the people who control the hosting sites wall them off (like YouTube).
by IshKebab | 2025-09-04 19:38:52+00:00
> carbon-free energy on every grid where they operate also sounds like a significantly more ambitious goal than net-zero across the company, because it means actual reduction in emission

Not necessarily. In the UK the market for zero-emission electricity is separated from the actual electricity itself. So you basically sell the "greenness" of the electricity separately from the electricity itself. Customers who want green electricity buy the electricity, and buy some "greenness" (called a REGO).

It does make sense, and a lot of people claim it's some kind of scam when it really isn't... But it does make the relationship between the consumption and production of green energy more complex.

For example, suppose 10% of power comes from green energy, but only 5% of people care about it remotely. The market value of a REGO is basically zero. Even if the number of people who care about green energy doubles to 10%, there's still perfect supply so the market value is still zero and it won't have any effect on green energy production. That isn't quite the case but it doesn't seem far off - I couldn't find up-to-date numbers but it seems like the market price of REGOs is on the order of £5-15/MWh, which is very low. Probably because the UK's energy mix is actually very green these days.

No idea how common this system is in other countries.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-09-04 19:39:08+00:00
You may find this interesting!

https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...

> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus
by uyzstvqs | 2025-09-04 19:39:53+00:00
> Tempo is a neutral, permissionless blockchain open for anyone to build on.

> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.

> Protect your users by keeping important transaction details private while maintaining compliance standards.

Sounds like it actually has potential. This could enable global QR-code payments using and open, decentralized, and private system. Something like fiat cash payments, but digital. I hope that Valve is keeping track of it, for starters.
by easygenes | 2025-09-04 19:40:06+00:00
Definitely not. At global scale, the offset effects of solar installations outweigh albedo effects on the order of about 30x. [0][1]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w.pdf [1] https://acs.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Net_Radiative_Forcing_from_Widespread_Deployment_of_Photovoltaics/2871685
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-04 19:40:59+00:00
Yeah, and in my opinion they are completely deranged. Governments are the source and guarantor for money. They create money for the economy to control, as a proxy for resources. However for them it's not a proxy, they need to deal with the messy reality of resources, since they are setting up the rules and framework for their economy, i.e. they govern them.

The government still needs to raise money for e.g. funding the roads. This is not, because the government wouldn't be able to direct the resources of the economy towards this goal otherwise, but because the costs of that goal should be part of the beneficiaries of that goal. This should prevent inefficient pursue of goals.

For example when you get too less money for roads, it can be because all the foreigners use it for transit, but don't actually fund it, meaning the government subsidizes another governments economy, or because too less people drive on your roads/ people don't care much for the roads, so maybe you are building too much of them. When on the other hand you have to much money for roads, then maybe you are not building enough roads.

However this is not the only measure, as roads also create induced demand/economic activities, i.e. you need to put up roads to foster specific activities, before you see the demand. In other words it's complicated and you need to be an expert in the field you are governing and governing itself.

But while money on its own is (nearly) free for a government, once you have handed it out it isn't free anymore, since it now represents resources, that are also restricted for the government. This means that it still makes sense to be frugal with money, just not for money that was just created by it, but with money that comes to the government for the second time, and is now to be spent again, since this already is a proxy for specific resources.

> governments often act and talk like like their goal is to maximize revenue

I think this often comes from business people who promote (themselves) to government, but don't got the memo, that they aren't working for a company anymore, but instead decide on the framework for companies to thrive or not.

Politics, literally the art to govern [a city], is really the art of creating hard rules that still don't prescribe anything but instead control the famous invisible hand of a free market towards the right behaviour.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-09-04 19:41:03+00:00
This is a smart pattern with .dockerignore where it keeps a lot of huge things from getting copied into the context... but it's also so confusing every time your container doesn't have the new file you created.

I think you're going to have to allow `app/*` which means you will be checking in some .DS_STORE files anyway.
by kulahan | 2025-09-04 19:42:06+00:00
It’s insane how many are some random idiot in their car, filming with a phone, trying to act like they’re having a conversation with you before it completely switches to sales mode and they’re (terribly) reading a script. They don’t even put EFFORT into ads anymore it seems. Then you want to watch a video and it’s 3 pre-roll ads, 90 seconds of video, then another 2-3 ads.

I’ll never feel bad about using Adblock, and I hate the idea of rewarding these companies’ behavior with money.
by louisanderson01 | 2025-09-04 19:42:23+00:00
Over the past few cycles much of the innovation in the crypto industry has standardized on a instruction set architecture that being the EVM. This won't make sense if you think blockchains are databases because the forefront of the field uses them as full distributed computers (state machines). But with every ne L1(bitcoin, eth, ripple, think base blockchain), there were different instruction set it was essentially the old desktop environment where apps were siloed to platforms(Windows, Linux, Apple). The EVM has become the cross chain dominant instruction set so people who build apps on one chain can insta port the code to other evm compatible chains.

Reth is a rust implementation of the EVM used for running nodes, made by a very prominent research and venture group.
by rfw300 | 2025-09-04 19:42:27+00:00
I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad.

My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-04 19:43:03+00:00
I'm sorry that I don't have the time to look further. But tangential sources could be

fMRI studies in general but definitely those related to cognitive performance during and after recovery from ischemia.

Also: studies on sexual development, the inhibition of sex hormone metabolisms.

And I'm quite certain that some of Michael Levin's research could provide some bits, too. But I am not sure what keywords I would start with.
by petertodd | 2025-09-04 19:43:05+00:00
> Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved.

Often yes. But also blockchain's can be useful simply for backups and scaling: by cryptographically linking every bit of data together you can be confident that you actually have a complete copy without any errors.

Git is basically a blockchain for this exact reason: starting from a git commit hash, git works backwards, checking that every byte of data is what it should be. Similarly, modern filesystems like btrfs use strong (if not cryptographically strong) hashes for this same reason.

Though in a sense, you're still correct: the "actor" you aren't trusting here is your own computer hardware.
by jacobx | 2025-09-04 19:43:16+00:00
I refer to Swift as a "compiled language" because no officially provided interpreter exists for it.

Bitrig runs Swift apps which are dynamically generated by an LLM on the iPhone, despite the iPhone strict security provisions (e.g. inability to write executable pages of memory). The way we do this is by parsing the generated Swift code and mapping that to the compiled calls to the libraries that come in the OS. It's pretty weird, but we think it's worth it to get the ability to immediately render the generated code on the phone.
by mondrian | 2025-09-04 19:43:23+00:00
The GENIUS act enables tech companies to become reserve holders -- buy US Treasuries with customers' money. Stripe offers a "transactional ecosystem" to the customer in stablecoins, the customer gives USD to Stripe in exchange for stablecoins, Stripe buys short-term Treasuries and makes a shitload of money on interest.

Part of the very high level play is the US Govt seeks to diversify away from depending on nation states for borrowing, and to promote tech companies to the status of reserve holders.

This doesn't add much to the consumer however. I think in fact we are looking at a "fragmented currency" future where you hold like 36 different stablecoins in your wallet because certain platforms accept certain stablecoins. The GENIUS act doesn't offer strict guarantees for getting out of a stablecoin into USD, so I predict dark patterns and "incentives" to make it hard to get out of a stablecoin.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-04 19:43:28+00:00
An interesting "control case" is random-chat websites like Omegle. I spent many many hours on that site before it shut down. Omegle pairs you up with a single random stranger, so there's no audience. I typically used it in text-only mode, so there's no face-to-face communication either.

I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)

Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.

Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?

Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.