MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tipidNasuada | 2025-09-07 01:25:57+00:00
I thought exactly the same thing. Peltier's themselves don't really have a pathway for becoming as efficient as steam turbines but there are other methods currently in research. One promising idea is to use sodium vapor in a fuel cell style device: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2017.10.022
by diego_moita | 2025-09-07 01:26:04+00:00
I have a Kia Niro EV 2024.

Before buying this car I didn't like driving.

Now I like driving.

Actually, I like it so much that I began doing something I never did before with any car I had: I read the whole owner's manual, I wash and clean the car every month and I pay attention to maintenance routine.

That's how good it feels to drive electric.
by filchermcurr | 2025-09-07 01:26:21+00:00
Thank you for mentioning this. You often see comments like the OC that are dismissive of articles and seem to think people doing one thing know everything about that thing. I guess when people get to a certain level themselves, they forget that others have to learn things too and don't implicitly know all of the things that you know. I really do appreciate seeing your comment gently reminding people that learning is a thing that has to happen and should be encouraged.
by bigiain | 2025-09-07 01:26:28+00:00
Note too, if you read far enough onto the article, Hudson got a "short term bonus cut" of $250,000 - but in the same time period her base salary went up by $1.9 million dollars.

This is just bullshit media-spin.

> Qantas has slashed short-term bonuses for its senior leadership

> Group CEO Vanessa Hudson will see her pay slashed by A$250,000

> the annual report shows that Qantas’ senior leadership salaries were higher than the year-ago period, despite the bonus cuts. Hudson’s annual salary, for example, stood at around A$6.3 million, higher than the A$4.4 million in the previous financial year.
by pljung | 2025-09-07 01:27:07+00:00
You essentially describe the motivation for Stiftung Warentest [0]. They’re massively successful in Germany, and I rely on their tests for many consumer goods I buy. Access isn’t free though, typically costs around 5EUR per test. Coincidentally, they recently tested sunscreen [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest

[1] https://www.test.de/Test-Sonnencreme-und-Sonnenspray-fuer-Er...
by clbrmbr | 2025-09-07 01:27:17+00:00
Ooo so glad you asked. That's something I am super passionate about. I built those decks during the COVID lockdowns when I needed to connect with nature a bit more. Those Anki decks were incredibly efficient for learning to recognize many plants and mushroom species!

I actually did very little coding. It was more of like just some light scripting and today with LLMs you should be able to figure it out even without coding experience.

Here's how I did it:

1. I fetched information on the 500 most commonly observed plant species in my area (Northeastern USA and Canada) on iNaturalist. I think I did this just by downloading the web pages with wget. inside of those downloaded files were the common and scientific name of the species as well as a link to the photo.

2. I then wrote a very simple script to download all of those images.

3. Finally, I had a script that I think just created a CSV file that I was able to load into Anki and I created my template, making sure to have a notes section so that as I'm studying, I add interesting facts, such as the genus Eupatorium being named after an emperor infamous for his use of poisons [1].

A note on copyright: Although I would have liked to have a deck that I could freely share with people on the internet, I really wanted to have the best possible photos to help with identification. So I chose to use the primary photograph associated with each species on iNaturalist and most of these are copyrighted without any Creative Commons license. So it's totally fair use to use it for your own edification, but I'm unable to share one of these decks with you directly without getting permission from hundreds of iNat contributors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI_Eupator
by jdietrich | 2025-09-07 01:28:06+00:00
>People also tend not to understand the absurdity of assuming that we can make LLMs stop hallucinating. It would imply not only that truth is absolutely objective, but that it exists on some smooth manifold which language can be mapped to.

Frankly, this is a silly line of argument. There is a vast spectrum between regularly inventing non-existent citations and total omniscience. "We can't define objective truth" isn't a gotcha, it's just irrelevant.

Nobody in the field is talking about or working on completely eliminating hallucinations in some grand philosophical sense, they're just grinding away at making the error rate go down, because that makes models more useful. As shown in this article, relatively simple changes can have a huge effect and meaningful progress is being made very rapidly.

We've been here before, with scepticism about Wikipedia. A generation of teachers taught their students "you can't trust Wikipedia, because anyone can edit it". Two decades and a raft of studies later, it became clear that Wikipedia is at least as factually accurate as traditional encyclopedias and textbooks. The contemporary debate about the reliability of Wikipedia is now fundamentally the same as arguments about the reliability of any carefully-edited resource, revolving around subtle and insidious biases rather than blatant falsehoods.

Large neural networks do not have to be omniscient to be demonstrably more reliable than all other sources of knowledge, they just need to keep improving at their current rate for a few more years. Theoretical nitpicking is missing the forest for the trees - what we can empirically observe about the progress in AI development should have us bracing ourselves for radical social and economic transformation.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-07 01:28:10+00:00
Yes, both are writing code. But nearly all the time, the constraints you want to express can be expressed with zod, and in that case using zod means you write less code, and the code you do write is more correct.

> Of course, you hope zod is robust, tested, supported, extensible, and has docs so you can understand how to express your domain in terms it can help you with. And you hope you don’t have to spend too much time migrating as zod’s api changes.

Yes, judgement is required to make depending on zod (or any library) worthwhile. This is not different in principle from trusting those same things hold for TypeScript, or Node, or V8, or the C++ compiler V8 was compiled with, or the x86_64 chip it's running on, or the laws of physics.
by staplung | 2025-09-07 01:28:14+00:00
They can but it's an involved process. Modern cables manage their slack very precisely - a complicated job in and of itself - and usually cannot be hauled to the surface without snapping them. So if the cable is not already cut (an anchor can damage a cable in a variety of ways short of physically snapping it) it will be cut while still on the bottom. The ends are then winched up and a splice is patched in but now there's a rather lengthy section of extra cable to deal with. They deal with that by laying it down precisely on the seabed in a nice sideways loop.
by Jotalea | 2025-09-07 01:29:20+00:00
Good for you.

But for me, personally, I went with the lazy route. I just downloaded the songs I like and saved them to a USB stick, plugged it into my speakers and called it a day.

Honestly, I don't really know much about audio quality other than higher kbps = higher quality (I might be wrong on that though).

My library consists of ~120 .m4a files, 128kbps, most (if not all) downloaded from YouTube.
by loeg | 2025-09-07 01:29:39+00:00
This kind of SPF fatalism doesn't really make sense to me. There's absolutely no reason to quantize sun damage into "below burn time" and "above burn time." Damage is dose-dependent. Even burns come in different classes at different exposure durations; and maybe you'd prefer to get, you know, 30 seconds unprotected equivalent of sun damage instead of 3 minutes equivalent, at the same re-application interval.

If someone can make a true SPF 200 economically, it's valid for consumers to prefer that to a true SPF 100 or true SPF 50.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-09-07 01:29:39+00:00
I like this advice, and yeah, I always try to make illegal states unrepresentable, possibly even to a fault.

The problem I run into here is - how do you create good error messages when you do this? If the user has passed you input with multiple problems, how do you build a list of everything that's wrong with it if the parser crashes out halfway through?
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-07 01:30:05+00:00
> 22 year old western hacker for a 3 letter agency is going to have maybe a 6 month softball tangentially related internship of experience under their belt while the north korean might have years and years by that point.

I was with you right up until this bit

The agencies concerned tend to recruit people that have demonstrated ability in that field, and they've usually got it with "self-directed" training :)
by phire | 2025-09-07 01:30:48+00:00
The report only states the conclusion that the breaks did not work for the current configuration.

Which is a slightly awkwardly worded way of saying, “well obviously they didn’t work because we know they were applied and look at the result“

This is only an initial report. They still have no idea why the breaks didn’t work, and for how long they haven’t been working. Could have been a recent malfunction, something that happened during redesign, or a an inherent flaw going back to the original design.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-07 01:31:12+00:00
Sometimes advice is like this:

In Zion National Park, there's a hike called Angel's Landing. You wind up going along a ridge, with a dropoff of 1000 feet on one side, and a dropoff of 500 feet on the other side. And the ridge isn't very wide - sometimes only a couple of feet.

Mistakes in life often come in pairs. "Don't fall off that cliff!" That's good advice. But the problem is, there's more than one cliff. And if you move too far away from the cliff you're worried about, you may fall off the other cliff.

And the biggest danger is that we come in with our own bent, our own bias. Therefore the advice that most resonates with us may not be the advice that we actually need.
by sbierwagen | 2025-09-07 01:31:23+00:00
Looks like it hasn't been updated in a while. Wikipedia has us at 26 stars within 12.5 ly now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

Notably, Luhman 16, which is just 6.51 ly away, but is so dim and in such a crowded patch of sky it was only discovered in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhman_16
by smcin | 2025-09-07 01:32:59+00:00
"rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible."

is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind.

Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom.

After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value.

As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit.

[0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...
by csb6 | 2025-09-07 01:33:15+00:00
Has anyone had experience using Crashpad or Breakpad? When I looked into them there seemed to be a lot of boilerplate needed and I wasn’t sure which one to use.

Are there other cross-platform (i.e. macOS, Linux, Windows) crash reporting libraries? It seems like it should be common enough to warrant a reusable library.
by bawolff | 2025-09-07 01:33:42+00:00
> But a fork is not a simple matter; it is a lot of work, and will fail without people and resources behind it

Well yes. There is no free lunch. Open source only works if enough people are willing to give back. If your fork dies, that probably means the project had a lot of free riders.

The main issue i have with rug pulls is its essentially false advertising. They grew their customer base by promising open source and reneged when it was no longer convinent. This feels morally gross to me.

However i don't know that i actually am worried about the no longer making contributions aspect. Nobody is obliged to continue working on something forever. Its a totally normal thing for individuals to retire from a project, its fine for companies to stop too.
by prewett | 2025-09-07 01:35:56+00:00
My understanding of the history of Chinese writing is that it kept trying to go phonetic, but each time they prevented it, because the writing had to be read across an empire with multiple languages. Even so, something like 20% of the characters are quasi-phonetic, with the radical giving the topic and the rest of the character giving the approximate pronunciation, so "the word for {a plant|a thing of metal|a person|etc} that is sounds similar to X".

When the Japanese imported it, they used the characters much more phonetically. They used the whole word when that worked, but the characters got assigned to the Japanese pronunciation of the word, as well as the pronunciation from the pieces of other words where that character appeared, as well as the Chinese pronunciations. Then six hundred years or so later they imported them again, by which point the characters had evolved in Chinese but not in Japanese. So its sort of phonetic, but it's a complete mess.
by inkyoto | 2025-09-07 01:36:21+00:00
For one, it is a US study. In Australia, anyone will get sunburnt, and moreso in summer. Going to an Australian beach at the height of the summer is akin to getting irradiated with a UV gun of epic proportions.

The article also notes the difference between the sunburn incidence rate vs sunburn severity rate:

Those who identified as Hispanic and Black with darker skin tones (FSP V-VI) had more severe and painful sunburns compared to those who identified as White. In contrast, those who identified as Hispanic with a similar average skin tone to those who identified as Asian (FSP I-IV), reported higher sunburn incidence rates.

Awareness levels also vary across different ethnic groups. From the linked study:

68% Relative to those who identified as White, Hispanics were 68% more likely to describe sunscreen as important for health, but 2.5 times less confident in their knowledge about skin cancer. Those who identified as Asian were 70% and Hispanic 79% more likely to believe the sun’s rays are the most important cause of skin cancer relative to those who identified as White. 24x Those who identified as Hispanic were 24 times more likely than Whites to say it is not worth getting sunburned for a tan.
by bigiain | 2025-09-07 01:38:46+00:00
I've read (or perhaps watched on YouTube) the same thing.

Finding both ends of the cable to grab abd raise it took longer than the raise/splice operation.

I suspect a sufficiently malicious attacker could intentionally cut the cable twice, so when the repair crew drag up one end of the cut they know about, the section between the cuts drags its other end away from it's cut-point making the second repair significantly more difficult...
by user5994461 | 2025-09-07 01:38:48+00:00
> Why do security researchers privately inform companies of vulnerabilities and wait for them to patch before public disclosure? Are they afraid of liability?

You don't publish because you don't want to cause harm and you don't want to be liable for it.

You need to realize that vulnerabilities don't exist in a vacuum. They grant access to computer systems that control the life of people (millions of people) including their personal information, passwords, passport photos, card numbers, jobs, paychecks, transportation, food, etc... which is very likely to cover yourself, your mom, your family, your friends as you deal with larger companies.

When you publish a vulnerability, it will immediately be used by bad actors that intend to cause harm to all these people, including employees and customers.
by robotcapital | 2025-09-07 01:38:49+00:00
It’s interesting that most of the comments here read like projections of folk-psych intuitions. LLMs hallucinate because they “think” wrong, or lack self-awareness, or should just refuse. But none of that reflects how these systems actually work. This is a paper from a team working at the state of the art, trying to explain one of the biggest open challenges in LLMs, and instead of engaging with the mechanisms and evidence, we’re rehashing gut-level takes about what they must be doing. Fascinating.
by loeg | 2025-09-07 01:39:29+00:00
Reef-safe sunscreen is bullshit anyway. The marketing is well out in front of the science. There's no real evidence it's harmful to reefs and there's no real evidence (or reason to believe) the other kinds of sunscreen aren't just as harmful to reefs. It's just marketing jibber jabber.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/sunscreens/the-truth-...
by srikar_alter | 2025-09-07 01:39:34+00:00
Alter is a zero-trust identity and access control platform purpose-built for AI agents.

It sits in the middle of every AI agent interaction, verifying identity and applying fine-grained RBAC (Role Based Access Control) & ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) to check every parameter against policy. It instantly rejects dangerous actions and provides clear audit trails logging every request/response and decision.

We are allowing developers to make autonomous agents without worrying about writing their own custom constraints to prevent agents from getting derailed and taking actions they are not supposed to. If this sounds useful feel free to reach out :)
by sneak | 2025-09-07 01:40:57+00:00
Google doesn’t owe you anything after purchase.

Google does quite literally owe their shareholders ROI, by law.

Why would one expect them to do anything other than the minimum support period and expense that they can get away with that won’t trigger a class action?

There are no surprises or bait and switch here. Nobody was promised eternal support or updates.

It’s a business, not a charity.
by bawolff | 2025-09-07 01:41:42+00:00
Is that a bad thing?

I don't write code specificly so google can use it. If they find it useful and are willing to abide by the license, then by all means great, but if they don't want it, that is their business.

As far as white room reimplementations go - why would i care about that at all? Its no longer my code at that point. Copyright is not a patent, all that is their right to do. Just like i have the right to do the same thing to them. (How do you think our nice linux computers manage to interact with proprietary protocols?)
by xoa | 2025-09-07 01:41:45+00:00
>It can be helpful to remember that while less efficient, for scenarios where ssh as root is a no-go you can ship snapshot syncs (including incremental ones) as files:

This capability can also be extremely helpful for bootstrapping a big pool sync from a site with mediocre WAN (very common in many places, particularly when it comes to upload vs download). Plenty of individuals or orgs may be characterized by having quite a sizable amount of data accumulated by this point, but they're not generating new data at a prodigious clip. So if you can get the initial replication done, ongoing syncing from there can be possible over a fairly narrow pipe.

Latency might not be quite the best, but sometimes the greatest bandwidth to be had is a big fat drive or set of them in the trunk of a car :)
by jibal | 2025-09-07 01:42:25+00:00
And they often speak very quickly--I often rewind to catch critical plot points. It's a lot different from a stage play, where actors enunciate so clearly. (Not that I want stage cadence and booming voices from a film ... they are different art forms.)

Also I watch of English language material that uses accents quite different from what my ears are tuned to.
by Vorh | 2025-09-07 01:43:18+00:00
> Why do you think copyright has anything to do with the post?

Because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is for copyright. You haven't stated how the blog post infringes upon BK's copyright at all, so... yes, seems like a standard fraudulent DMCA claim.

> First thing first. This is NOT DMCA abuse. The DMCA is the only way to communicate with web companies and take down content. As such, it has become the legitimate way to take down any content that needs to be taken down, in the absence of alternatives.

This assumes that companies should be able to take down any content they do not like. This is very much not the case. The DMCA is very specifically only for copyrighted content.

From copyright.gov[1]:

> To be effective, a notice must contain substantially the following information:

> ...

> (v) a statement that the person sending the notice has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and

> (vi) a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the person sending the notice is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner .

This is pretty clearly DMCA abuse. TFA isn't using any of BK's copyrighted content, which is what a DMCA claim alleges. Just because people have abused the form... pretty much since inception does not mean that it's not perjury to do so.

If BK wants to press charges for unauthorized usage of computer systems, that's another route. This would involve a police report, not perjury, and would probably not take down the website.

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/512/
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-07 01:43:55+00:00
I found the content novel and helpful (applying a known but underappreciated technique (Parse, Don't Validate) to a common problem where I hadn't thought to use it before) and the tone very enjoyable. In fact, it's so idiomatically written that I can't even believe it's just a machine translation of something written in another language.

In short, a great article.