MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2025-09-10 01:56:12+00:00
> It looks to me like they just reflect operating costs on assets that are already paid for, or mostly paid for.

In Ontario there used to be a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro. They built all the nuclear plants (and everything else).

But at some point things were re-jigged so parts of Ontario Hydro could be privatized (the government still owns shares), but because of how it was broken up its debt could not be split up or given to any of the resulting components.

* https://www.oefc.on.ca/debtmanage.html

So a separate legal entity was created where the debt is now held, and rate payers give money to that corporation to pay off old debt (both nuclear and non-nuclear) as part of their rate.

Also worth noting that the nuclear plants in Ontario are going through a refit currently, so it's not like the plants were built and nothing has done with them except for OpEx; there's a whole bunch of CapEx happening right now (and has been for the last few years):

* https://www.brucepower.com/life-extension-program-mcr-projec...

* https://www.ans.org/news/article-6280/bruce-power-refurbishm...

* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/darli...
by rossdavidh | 2025-09-10 01:57:22+00:00
On the one hand, there are a lot of unfair market concentration issues working against them.

On the other hand, no one today in any other part of the economy would decide they want to start a new business, with small scale, in a commodity market. Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce.

I grew up in a farming area in the midwest, and even then (several decades ago) there was no realistic prospect of doing well, but most (not all) farmers insisted on growing corn, soy, or one of a very few other commodity crops. I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well; it doesn't work out in any non-agricultural sector either. Small businesses have to go into niche markets, and that is not a new phenomenon. I recall reading (and hearing) almost exactly these same complaints in the 1980's, straight from the farmers, but the idea of growing other crops just made them irritable.

And then, they would cheer the arrival of a big Wal-Mart in town, and go shop there instead of the small store they had been buying from.
by mdaniel | 2025-09-10 01:57:32+00:00
Given a test of https:// news.ycombınator.com [1] it seems that no, hovering over the URL shows it in its rendered form

data:text/html,<meta charset="utf-8"><body><a href="https://news.ycomb%C4%B1nator.com/login">login to news.ycombinator.com</a></body>

and only by clicking it and getting an NXDOMAIN does one see the Punycode:

> We can’t connect to the server at news.xn--ycombnator-1ub.com.

1: Ironically HN actually mutated that link, I pasted the unicode version news.ycombınator.com (which it seems to leave intact so long as I don't qualify it with a protocol://)
by throwaway31131 | 2025-09-10 01:58:23+00:00
That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-10 01:58:34+00:00
NYT: "Why France’s Financial Woes Are Pushing Its Government to the Brink"

https://archive.is/oXDiI

I understand Marine Le Pen and friends are on track to win the presidency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
by foxglacier | 2025-09-10 01:58:43+00:00
Yes, that was a bit defeatist about phishing and tolerant of poor security. Anyone employing the "hang up, look up, call back" technique would be safe. It sounds like the author doesn't even know that technique and avoids phishing by using intuition.

I've had emails like that from various places, probably legitimate, but I absolutely never click the bloody link from an email and enter my credentials into it! That's internet safety 101.
by bluGill | 2025-09-10 01:58:55+00:00
You can find the same in Minneapolis with a better cost of living. (At least the other reply mentioned weather). there are more people in the bay area, but in minneapolis you can find more people in minneapolis than you have time to meet.

there are many other cities in the us that likewise have a great tech scene. The bay is not unique - it has a little more but it isn't unique-
by throw0101a | 2025-09-10 01:59:27+00:00
> Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.

Well the current plants have been running for 4-5 decades and are in the middle of being refurbished to run for another 4-5 decades.

Only paying for itself for the life of the plant is actually a good thing: it means that it is basically being run at-cost with minimal profits being extracted from the public.
by keeda | 2025-09-10 01:59:39+00:00
In addition to the other comments (yes, very much a powerplay) it is also likely that employers simply realized remote work is a huge perk they had not accounted for, and RTO is simply a means of renegotiating:

https://www.tiktok.com/@keds_economist/video/746473188419558...

The video presents a compelling theory that post-Covid employers realized that employees CAN be productive remotely, but also put a pretty high premium on being able to do so -- studies show employees are willing to take a hit to bonuses, pay and promotions to keep that perk.

So the current coordinated RTO push is basically a renegotiation of salaries to account for that perk, especially now that it is very much an employer's market... which, BTW, is also the outcome of another very coordinated effort across the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192092

Edit, some recent studies:

- https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...

- https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...
by notepad0x90 | 2025-09-10 02:00:33+00:00
Why don't they just pay people less if they think WFH causes less value to the company? Give them an option to RTO or take a pay cut. Why would you want people who don't want your company to succeed anymore working for you? I can't imagine anyone used to 3-4 years of WFH (and liking it) wanting the company to succeed after RTO. If they stay, it's probably because they don't have a choice and they'll probably be the least motivated and minimally productive employees.

OTOH, I've noticed the "disruptors" of yesteryears are now full-on right-wing jerks whose mission is to preserve wealth instead of create wealth by doing new and disruptive things. This tells me one important message if nothing else: There is no shortage of talent for the perceived wealth-creating opportunities. The gold rush is over.

I fear this is less about ZIRP and more about complacency (in general) and would-be investors and VC's not having faith in the possibility of high ROI investments.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-09-10 02:02:56+00:00
The flip side of this is that Thames Water is clearly not an ongoing concern and can therefore be re-nationalised at zero cost [0]. I believe there's language in the original privatisation deal around this.

Ofc, that doesn't claw back the billions that the PE pirates made off with, but at least the UK wouldn't have to pay them even more to get its water supply under control again.

[0] even if the UK had to pay market value for it, the market value for a business so drowning in debt would be close to zero.
Show HN: Subway Wrapped. Your NYC transit year in review
by faisal_software | 2025-09-10 02:03:19+00:00
I built Subway Wrapped because I thought it would be cool to see my NYC transit habits the same way Spotify shows your music year in review. You upload your OMNY trip history csv and it creates a personalized summary of how you've traveled around the city.

You get to see things like your busiest month, favorite travel day, spending patterns, and whether you're more of a night owl or early bird commuter, etc.

Check it out if you're curious about your own travel patterns! Feedback is always appreciated!
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-10 02:04:18+00:00
Hmm,

One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.

I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).

I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.

Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.

Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
by runako | 2025-09-10 02:04:43+00:00
> 4. The grain industry must diversify.

Since these folks by and large do not grow food for people in America to eat, just how important is this to Americans who do not work in ag? Why do we subsidize farmers to produce products for export? Why do we not do that for other industries?

Two things are true: farming is very hard & a certain set of rich[1] family farmers are coddled.

1 - Chappell, the farmer in the lede, grows 2,400 acres on an 8,000 acre family farm. That's about $5m of land under cultivation on a farm potentially worth near $20 million. This is the type of farmer we are bailing out. This farmer, who is richer than 99% of Americans, and those like him.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-10 02:05:00+00:00
> Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot).

There is load-following thermally and load-following electrically. Newer nuclear designs allow for the steam to be diverted and quenched so they don't reach the generators.

Of course this is inefficient, but as you can see in the following link:

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data § Supply

the Ontario nuclear plants basically run at full-tilt 24/7 to provide base load.

Hydro-electric is also supplying a bunch of base load, so if more nuclear can be built so that it takes up more of that hydro is doing, hydro can then be used in a more variable fashion (so perhaps (nat/methane) gas can be reduced and we have fewer GHGs released).
by nemothekid | 2025-09-10 02:05:45+00:00
I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.

Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.

Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that

* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)

* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.

So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).

All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
by bloomingeek | 2025-09-10 02:06:04+00:00
ICE and the use of the National Guard is very terrifying. The current administration could use them both to try to hold onto power when it terms out. The lunacy of SCOTUS and congress is beyond the pale. If, and I do mean if, the Epstein situation blows up on the big orange dummy, no one should doubt he will try to declare some type of marshall law to stay above the law. Then we will find out if the National Guard members really pledged allegiance to the Constitution.
by JBlue42 | 2025-09-10 02:07:07+00:00
Agreed. My org can take some of the blame but with our big vendors:

10s of millions on Adobe - admin side craps out all the time, terrible outsourced support (easy to escalate past them but still annoying that we sometimes have to start there)

10s of millions on Microsoft - Laissez-faire attitude about when they will update stuff during renewals and true-ups. Not specific date. Little help.

Broadcom - PE play (as we know from Broadcom) to squeeze every penny out. Have been through several account managers now. They won't sell through VARs anymore, only direct, and to get anything beyond VCF you have to be on a very special list that supposedly the CEO personally approves (which is beyond mind-boggling).

Starting to see some post production software be licensed based on having limited amount of contiguous time zones which is also crazy for a global company

Note: Media and healthcare industries may be SOL because there are lots of content and cybersec 'requirements' for having private clouds. Curious what others in those industries are doing

A lot of it is the cost of doing business. We'll see how it goes when MS moves to the consumption model they're proposing.
by jondwillis | 2025-09-10 02:07:33+00:00
Almost 100 years since the dust bowl! History sure does rhyme.

>“Right now, if I was to walk into Congress and ask all the senators and reps, ‘Who thinks the agriculture industry is hurting to the point of collapse?’ all the hands would go up. Instead, the question should be, ‘Who thinks farmers are hurting to the point of collapse?’”

>“There’s a giant difference between the two questions, and that difference is indicative of the separation between local Ag and Big Ag,” Buffalo concludes. “Farmers, not the giant agriculture manufacturers, are the ones hurting to the point of going belly up. There’s no solving any of this until that difference is recognized.”

I'm not quite gripping why lower-scale farmers are hurting more than "agriculture manufacturers"-- or why those two things should be compared directly. This article seems to conflate agricultural suppliers and industrial-scale agriculture (aka farming.)

If it is that small scale farms are less efficient? Then yeah, you're going to need bail-outs WITH BETTER PLANNING, OVERSIGHT, and eventually OUTCOMES, if we want small scale farmers to continue existing (which, btw, I am all for.) Do that while also monopoly-busting suppliers of farming inputs. Also, maybe it sounds like fixing short-term profit motive shareholder capitalism might be implied. hah. But you'd have to do it in a global market-aware framework, as other governments meddle with ag markets in a sometimes adversarial way.

To bring it back to the dust bowl, one of the few actually effective programs was to improve ecological practices that prevented dust from blowing as much. And restoration of buffalo grass from buying out farmers' lands and letting it re-naturalize.

---

Fun: this article is really heavy on the "for defense", "security" language, even bringing up the Chinese spy balloon for basically no reason. I guess cynically that makes sense. I suppose the irony of pandering to the current crop of American right-wing politicians-- who are accelerating the private-equity gobble-up hellhole expansion faster than ever-- might be lost.
by SturgeonsLaw | 2025-09-10 02:07:41+00:00
I'm sure the people placing multibillion dollar bets have done their research, but the trends I see are AI getting more efficient and hardware getting more powerful, so as time goes on, it'll be more and more viable to run AI locally.

Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.

Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.
by foxglacier | 2025-09-10 02:07:45+00:00
That's true but it's like saying most everyone has a small chance of crashing their car. Yet when someone crashes their car because they were texting while driving, speeding, or drunk, we justifiably blame them for it instead of calling them unlucky. We can blame them because there are clear rules they are supposed to know for safety when driving, just as there are for electronic security. The rule for avoid phishing is called "hang up, look up, call back".
by zer00eyz | 2025-09-10 02:08:40+00:00
It's not (only) Ag Monopolies.

Every one, at every step in the supply chain is over leveraged.

When credit was cheap(free) every one at every step in the chain borrowed heavily. Farmers, Suppliers, Buyers. Now that the bills are due (it's all commercial paper most had 5 year terms) the last of it is now running through the banks there is NO wiggle room left.

Why are farmers squeezed out? Because they have little control over their direct costs (equipment, seed, fertilizer) are heavy users of credit, and dont control the value of their sales.

Honestly the writing was on the wall -- farmers know that crop marketing (when to sell, what to sell as a futures contract) is a big part of what they do. The services they pay for to help them in this task got it very wrong. This is contrary to the data they had, and may have been motivated by emotional choices regarding the political climate and outcomes...
by aeonfox | 2025-09-10 02:08:45+00:00
> Note that in the iPhone cases, the glass blur is mostly an internal widget rendered by the app, what is emitted to the display server/hardware is opaque.

This sounds wild to me, so I'm just going to ask. Do you work on these kind of optimisations for a modern OS? If so, just ignore my ponderings and I'll just accept what you're saying here.

I honestly couldn't imagine this kind of compositing not happening completely on the GPU or requiring any back and forth between the CPU and GPU. That is, the windowing system creates a display list, and that display list is dispatched to the GPU along with any assets it requires (icons, font etc.). I'd also imagine this is the same as how the browser renders.

As for optimisations, if the display list is the same for a particular render target (e.g., window, widget, subsection, or entire screen), there's no reason to rerender it. There's no reason to even rebuild the display list for an application that is asleep or backgrounded. Tile-based culling and selective update of the screen buffer^ can also happen at the GPU level. Though hierarchical culling at the CPU level would be trivial and low-cost.

This is not my wheelhouse, so perhaps I'm missing something crucial here.

^ Edit: It does look like the Apple silicon GPUs do use tile-based deferred rendering.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/tailor-your-...
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-09-10 02:08:54+00:00
Ze devil iz in ze detailz!

Try this one https://www.tesla.com/de_DE/findus/location/supercharger/Ham...

While the site says they are available 24/7 they are in the turnpiked parking space of a shopping mall. Closed between 8PM to 9AM and on Sundays. Fun to see danish tourists desperately try to reach them while very low on juice.

Extreme Fremdschäming/facepalming!
by WaltPurvis | 2025-09-10 02:09:06+00:00
The article is not talking about people who own large tracts of farmland; it's talking about monopolies controlling the supply of seeds, chemicals, and fertilizers. At any rate, if Bill Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland, that means he owns a bit less than three one-hundredths of one percent of the US's 880,000,000 acres of farmland.
by phantomathkg | 2025-09-10 02:12:14+00:00
Anything can disappear in this modern era. Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it. Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-09-10 02:12:22+00:00
The russians have been selling Герпетическая вакцина within russia since the 1990s. Is it approved outside russia? No. Is there any real evidence that it works? No. Is HSV cured in russia? No. Were there systematic reviews or meta-analyses in credible journals to support its effectiveness? No.

Is there any reason to believe in claims of medical breakthroughs in russia? No.
by SerCe | 2025-09-10 02:12:29+00:00
I own a 12 mini, and I'm planning to upgrade my phone this year, it's time. If there were an iPhone 17 mini, I'd buy it, but because there isn't one, I'll probably go for the Pro to get a bigger battery. Apple knows that many folks like me would buy a cheaper mini if there were one, and not spend as much on Pro.
by keeda | 2025-09-10 02:12:40+00:00
There have been some studies on this, turns out employees will give up quite a bit:

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/charting-remot...

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/tech-workers-take-much-lowe...

Just left a comment elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45192176), but it's likely this RTO push is partially to renegotiate to account for this perk.
by breve | 2025-09-10 02:13:26+00:00
> lost a lot of ground in the market

Toyota sells the most cars of any auto maker. What ground was lost?

It's clear Toyota has correctly assessed the market. They got it right.

As time goes on, BEVs will be a bigger percentage of the cars they sell. In the meantime they'll keep selling the cars they've got, including their current BEVs.
by parpfish | 2025-09-10 02:13:27+00:00
same. it happens to me all the time on HN.

on one hand, i feel like this is a text-book example of the Bader-Meinhoff illusion [0].

but... there's an actual causal mechanism that could drive it.

show an interesting article to the HN crowd -> some subset of HN readers are inspired to go down a wikipedia rabbit hole and post some cool thing they found back on HN -> people that saw the original interesting post will not only see the related followup post, but they'll upvote it and cause even MORE to see it

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-10 02:13:38+00:00
It's somewhere in the middle. Ex: there isn't a literal potash or nitrogen monopoly, since it's a worldwide market. There is arguably an oligopoly on some levels, and then at the producer level you can see some OPEC style arrangements.

They are at the bottom and the players above them have leverage on every level. Unfortunately the way for them to gain power at the base level is to consolidate and grow - agriculture mega-farms - but that's something there also strongly fighting against.

Ultimately smaller farmers probably need to be some sort of protected class, which they already sort of are, but not to a proper extent to ensure their survival as they argue. This is the state of things in many countries in the world now, which is something that they see and accept but do not necessarily like, but that won't change policy in regards to Indian dairy Farmers or what have you so there's little prospect except frustration. Even in aggressive trade negotiations with tariffs flying over the seas at full bore, things like fishery rights and such often turn out to be the most steadfast holdouts. Not easy to change.

Or perhaps the trend of consolidation will simply continue, and there is an imminent wave of small farm bankruptcy.