MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by georgecmu | 2025-09-27 02:03:53+00:00
You're not wrong, but you're not right either.

In 2015, the Department of Energy estimated that the CO2 footprint for production, processing, and pipeline transportation of natural gas averaged between 8 and 14 kgCO2-e per MMBTU of natural gas [1].

The average natural gas CO2 emissions (kgCO2/MMBTU) has been going down over time [2], and will be reduced even further in the next few years thanks to increasing fines [3] on one hand and financial incentives to reduce flaring and venting [4] on the other hand. A large percentage of these emissions are not due to accidental leaks, but are essentially intentional -- due to flaring, venting, and high-bleed controllers and actuators [2].

For an idea of how much emissions can be reduced, consider that the so-called certified gas has 90% lower CO2 footprint than the average today [5]. For example, the methane emissions for a natural gas utility in Oregon are 90% lower than EPA nationwide assumptions [6].

[1] https://greet.es.anl.gov/files/EERE-LCA-NG

[2] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

[3] https://community.citizensclimate.org/resources/item/19/530#...

[4] https://www.epa.gov/inflation-reduction-act/methane-emission...

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/documents/us...

[5] https://www.cfindustries.com/newsroom/2023/bp-certified-natu...

[6] https://www.nwnatural.com/about-us/environment/less-we-can
by muzani | 2025-09-27 02:05:02+00:00
Arecibo's radar had a EIRP of up to terawatts. They were basically pinging space for asteroids etc. It feels a lot like using lasers at a helicopter kind of thing. Quiet and suddenly a sharp pulse.

The cables snapped at some point. These things were tough, able to last decades. This whole thread made me think aliens cut it.
by roughly | 2025-09-27 02:05:24+00:00
You’re right, that’s true - I’d glossed over the folding@ methodology a bit. I think the core distinction is still that Folding is trying to divine the fold via simulation, while Alphafold is playing closer to a gpt-style predictor relying on training data.

I actually really like Alphafold because of that - the core recognition that an amino acid string’s relationship to the structure and function of the protein was akin to the cross-interactions of words in a paragraph to the overall meaning of the excerpt is one of those beautiful revelations that come along only so often and are typically marked by leaps like what Alphafold was for the field. The technique has a lot of limitations, but it’s the kind of field cross-pollination that always generates the most interesting new developments.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-09-27 02:07:22+00:00
It's been a while since I left math for industry but I once heard that the shape and contents of "the space of all problem sets and solution sets for enumerative geometry on arbitrary n-manifolds" is something that is amenable to investigation through something called Gromov-Witten theory. I did a quick number of searches on GW theory just now and cannot decipher the results so I still don't know if that claim had any merit to it but a sanity check suggests there's no obvious computational reason that it couldn't be true for n=2 or 3.
by qgin | 2025-09-27 02:07:25+00:00
I have a $6500 deductible. I definitely care what things cost because my insurance almost never actually helps pay for anything unless I have an unbelievably bad year.

The problem is that literally nobody can tell me how much anything is going to cost until I get the bill in a month. Not even because they don't want to tell me. Nobody at the desk even knows what my price is going to be because it's all numberwang.
by axiolite | 2025-09-27 02:08:46+00:00
> 2. If getting through downtown by bus is slow, getting through it by car isn't any faster.

If the buses and cars are on the same roads, going the same speed, the car will get you to your destination faster, and everyone will go by car. Buses only get ridership if they have dedicated lanes where they can go faster than regular car traffic:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
by lz400 | 2025-09-27 02:08:50+00:00
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.

Strong disagree there. I think that's true of a very small % of consumers nowadays. I mean, total honesty, I think that Suno is not worse than a large fraction of the commercial pop made by humans (maybe) that tops the charts regularly. It's already extremely formula based artificial music made by professional hit makers from Sweden or Korea.

The objective was never to grab discerning listeners but the mass of people. It would work even if they grab 50% but honestly I think it's going to be higher.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-27 02:11:00+00:00
4.2v for 100% SoC (State of Charge, charging), settles down closer to 4v once charging stops (likely not exactly correct, just my rote memory). 80-90% of capacity/SoC is between 3.7-3.8v.

The remaining 10-20% is above 3.8 and below 3.70v. 4.2v is the max to ever intentionally apply to a cell, and 2.5v is the minimum anybody specs as end of discharge.

As such- the "nominal" voltage is 3.7v or 3.8v.

Possibilities for 3.3v cut off include: LEDs' combined forward Voltage, a BMS set to that voltage, high drain applications pulling the voltage below a lower (potentially much lower at 10C to 50C discharge) cutoff voltage.

These are, of course, for NMC lithium secondary/lithium ion cells. NOT LiFePO4/LFP/LTO/Na-ion.

Theres lots of FUD, but most lithium stories are Li-Po cells (cell phones, RAdio-Control, laptops). Of the Li-Po's- most of them are for RC usage without any inbuilt protection.

LiPo's are beat treated like they're ziplock baggies full of 100mL of gasoline. If you handle them, I suggest buying an Ash Pot- their double walls give you a chance of containing a flaming pack. Best to just do it outside though.
by psunavy03 | 2025-09-27 02:11:19+00:00
This is not entirely true. Daniel Kahneman wrote about it if you want a source. Humans generally have two ways of thinking: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is fast, heuristic-based, and not always accurate. Arguably, that's why things like racism and bigotry take hold. Type 2 is slow, analytical, and what lets us do things like send men to the Moon or write large software applications.

The trouble is that you have to consciously shift to Type 2 thinking, it takes longer, and it's tiring. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has a great bit (paraphrasing here) about the purely Type 2 thinker in ancient days on the African savannah getting eaten by a lion. Because he or she sits there doing a complex analysis of "OK, felid, yellow fur, moving towards me, etc. etc." while the Type 1 thinker goes "Oh shit! Lion!" and runs away.

Type 1 thinking has a role. You just have to be mindful about when you're misusing it.
by georgecmu | 2025-09-27 02:13:01+00:00
Water is critical but not hard to get.

Right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity

You would want to use solar power for electrolysis. In the US, regions with abundant solar power are also the ones that: - have true water scarcity - Nevada and Arizona - have low population and industrial density, so any generated hydrogen would need transported to the point of use.

The bigger problem is the energy disparity. Electrolysis of water requires 50 kWh/kgH2 or more. Even a 70% efficient fuel cell would get ~25 kWh/kgH2 -- horrible roundtrip efficiency. With pyrolysis, that equation is exactly inverted: at 9-12 kWh/kgH2, you can generate excess electricity with no CO2 emissions.

Plus for pyrolysis, you have to deal with the carbon which makes up 75% of the methane by weight. A non-trivial issue.

Exactly. 20 kg of methane costs $3 today, but contains 15 kg of carbon that could be worth $20-$30. It's a non-trivial issue if you hate generating value.

https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/carbon-black-42
by int_19h | 2025-09-27 02:14:12+00:00
I look at these things and think how amazing it would be to have one back when "home microcomputers" with TV as output were in their heyday.

But these days, I'm struggling to think of a use case. For casual users it makes more sense to get a regular mini-PC or laptop, and for hacking... well, what exactly would you be hacking on that makes this form factor preferable?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-09-27 02:15:31+00:00
I've mapped paired symbols to the same finger on opposite hands, so ()[]{}<>/\'" are mirrored, and then also I've got numbers and symbols corresponding as well so the 123... pad on my right is a !@#... pad on my left. It gets me pretty far, but not everything has a mate so I occasionally have a brain fart moment and suddenly I'm hunting for | even though I have years worth of muscle memory on this layout.

So I guess I'd say: design to lean on familiar structures as much as you can and then just commit to using it a lot and don't give yourself too hard of a time when it gets wierd. Whatever you come up with will surely beat the pain associated with having your right on of pinky in charge of 50% of the symbols plus enter.
by cyberax | 2025-09-27 02:16:06+00:00
> What's this supposed to mean?

A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning. You can verify by looking at the maximum lane throughput in vehicles per hour.

> At higher speeds it's even less as the footprint of each vehicle equals "vehicle length + following distance".

The commercial speed of buses in cities is around 10-15 mph. There are no "higher speeds" when talking about the city traffic.

> I've never seen a bus block a busy city road. Either way this is an easily solvable problem stemming from poor design and lack of investment and not some inherent issue with this mode of transportation.

I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space. These days, it is apparently considered a feature in the pro-misery community...

> Citation?

For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

This is a very loaded topic. The average raw bus pollution is about 75g CO2e per kilometer, and a passenger EV is around 50g. However, these calculations neglect that a bus needs about 3.5 drivers per bus to be viable. And these drivers become by far the most polluting factor.
by int_19h | 2025-09-27 02:16:20+00:00
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.

Um, have you seen the pop charts at any time in the past... well, since forever, actually?

The majority of commercially produced music today is created with intent to take your money and nothing else, with performers little more than actors lip-syncing to the same tired beat. Because it sells.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-27 02:17:06+00:00
You want to be hired? Jobs post should go in the official whoishiring threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Take a look at the last edition that is read only now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093190 The next edition will be on Wednesday, remember to repost there.

(Also look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093192 in case you find something useful to apply.)
by arp242 | 2025-09-27 02:17:16+00:00
> "once it compiles, it works"

That is not a quote from that post. I am very much not pedantic about only using quotation marks for quotes as long as it reasonably accurately gets the gist right, but in this case it very much doesn't.

You are leaving out the qualified language of "generally", which completely changes what was said. And worse, the post explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't solve all bugs in the next sentence.

And even if you can dig deep and find someone using unqualified language somewhere, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that this is an oversight and when pressed they will immediately admit so (on account of this being an internet forum and not a scientific paper, and people are careless sometimes). "I like coffee" rarely means "I always like coffee, all the time, without exception".
by tpmoney | 2025-09-27 02:17:28+00:00
I don’t have a moonlander but I did get one of their ergodox keyboards after noticing an increase in pain myself. I tried using it in querty and my experience was unless you type with proper hand position and finger movements (and possibly not even then) querty on an orthinear was even more painful than on a regular keyboard. I tried colemak for a while but something about the layout didn’t feel comfortable still. I landed on using “middlemak” [1] which at least for me has been much more comfortable. It preserves a decent bit of qwerty placement to help with muscle memory, but I’ve also found that only using it on the ergodox keyboard and keeping qwerty on all of my “normal” keyboards has also helped the muscle memory a lot.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Middlemak/wiki/index/
by neilv | 2025-09-27 02:19:29+00:00
> small green sticker

Two additional ways to calm an indicator LED are with the modern self-laminating labelmaker tape:

* White tape -- Put 1 or more layers over the LED, to dim and diffuse.

* Black tape -- Use a pin to poke a hole through the tape, from behind, before putting it over the LED. (If there's 3+ LEDs, like on a network switch or server front panel, it will look neater if you measure the pitch of the centers of the LEDs, then use a ruler over the back of the labelmaker tape to match that with the holes. If the back of the tape has two strips you peel off to expose the adhesive, you can use that as a guide for keeping each hole level.)

You could also put black tape over white, but I haven't had to do that so far.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-27 02:20:14+00:00
> aren’t the damages limited to the deposit amount?

No.

They might be. There may also be compensation for time, effort and distress. In some cases, statute provides double and treble damages, or allows for reïmbursement of legal costs.

More directly: the links I provided are more criminal than civil in nature. Damages are relevant in sentencing.
by estearum | 2025-09-27 02:20:37+00:00
Uh no, they don't. Not if they're also the ones who provide healthcare. Simply denying claims isn't even remotely close to the financially (and obviously not the politically) optimal strategy.

The optimal strategy if you own both the insurer and the provider is a combination of premiums, copays, deductibles, and maybe even some totally unnecessary care to drive up volume.

Lower margin on dramatically higher volume is still dramatically more money. Lower margin actually provides political cover for your $400 billion revenue years.
by dmbche | 2025-09-27 02:22:39+00:00
Same - I get the gist, but "how many lines lie on a cubic face" doesn't make sense as a question to me, what is a "line" in this context? I struggle to understand the issue as my only understanding is that the face is divided by line width which determines how many lines, but that's nonsensical and non interesting.

As an aside (again, as a layperson) I've had this feeling with most Quanta articles, it's interesting and I feel like I get the gist but that's all. Kinda like it's both too simplified and touching on too deep concepts to tie together the article.

Sorry for the rambling.

Edit0: how many straight lines going through the whole length of the face it is on on a cubic surface. Honestly, I just hadn't really pictured a cubic surface to start with - that was the main part. Had that picture been higher up I think I would have liked the article right away! Thank you peeps
by f5ve | 2025-09-27 02:22:59+00:00
I agree. I also get much more out of playing Bach than listening to him. I almost never listen to Bach for pleasure, but I know a few fugues and the like. Playing them makes you feel like a god; listening to them feels like an assault.

The exception, for me, is the Goldberg Variations which I find have a stately and refined beauty. It's one of very few in the classical canon that I find myself returning to over the years.
by eboynyc32 | 2025-09-27 02:23:19+00:00
. The UK is in shambles. For 15 years, raw sewage has poured into its rivers unchecked. The government shrugs. Meanwhile, the nation wallows in self-pity about losing “world power” status, yet produces little of note. In the AI race, the space race, the EV race? Nowhere to be found.
by econ | 2025-09-27 02:23:33+00:00
So be it? An additional thought I had was that new tools can have awesome discoverability in a webdirectory of tutorials. Normally the more exotic the creature the better it hides. We could be publishing a lot of things that could be great for an audience near zero. It wouldn't even need an awesome name to point at, just the right location in the right tutorial(s).

If llms are to do it we could probably have it make videos too. I want Derek Banas on the project.
by arp242 | 2025-09-27 02:23:45+00:00
Who? When?

Writing bugs in Rust is trivial and happens all the time. "do_stuff(sysv[1], sysv[2])" is a bug if you reversed the sysv arguments by accident. You can easily create a more complex version of that with a few "if" conditionals and interaction with other flags.

There are many such silly things people can – and do – trivially get wrong all the time. Most bugs I've written are of the "I'm a bloody idiot"-type. The only way to have a fool-proof compiler is to know intent.

What people may say is something like "if it compiles, then it runs", which is generally true, but doesn't mean it does the right thing (i.e. is free of bugs).
by dapperdrake | 2025-09-27 02:24:39+00:00
Thank you for boiling it down to essentials.

Lisp is all about the read-eval-print loop (REPL). John McCarthy's first lisp paper focused on implementing function EVAL in terms of "itself".

Maybe with LLM "attention" this is a new and perhaps lossy take on eval via predicting text tokens.

Cool thought. Thank you.
by cyberax | 2025-09-27 02:25:31+00:00
> Is this reasoning really true?

Well, yes. The kernel _now_ has all kinds of data structures, but you can look at the documentation from 2006 and see the horror of even the simplest rbtrees back then: https://lwn.net/Articles/184495/

A simple generic hashtable was added only in 2013!

> Linked lists have a few other advantages - simplicity and reference stability come to mind, but they might have other properties that makes them useful for kernel development beyond how easy they are to create.

The main property is that it's easy to use from C. Think about growable vectors as an exercise.
by psunavy03 | 2025-09-27 02:25:47+00:00
Having flown military jets . . . I'm thankful I only ever had to high-speed abort in the simulator. It's sporty, even with a tailhook and long-field arresting gear. The nightmare scenario was a dual high-speed abort during a formation takeoff. First one to the arresting gear loses, and has to pass it up for the one behind.

There's no other regime of flight where you're asking the aircraft to go from "I want to do this" to "I want to do the exact opposite of that" in a matter of seconds, and the physics is not in your favor.
by mb7733 | 2025-09-27 02:26:02+00:00
Interesting! On the guitar when alternate tunings are used, the pitches are written as they sound.

I wonder if maybe the difference is due to the fact that alternate fingerings are very common for guitar (because of having more strings spaced closer together). So notating pitches assuming a specific fingering doesn't make sense.

Plus I don't think the mapping from the staff to muscle memory for guitar is nearly as strong because we have frets.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-09-27 02:26:58+00:00
wow, what an awesome biochemistry blog

the post is easy to read - and yet there's wealth of information together with citations of science papers info comes from

I love how author researched and discusses opinions opposite of his too

perhaps most surprising was to learn that vaccine RNA differs from normal U-A-C-G memorized in school. One more piece of knowledge I can come back with to my teachers one day :)
by npinsker | 2025-09-27 02:26:59+00:00
I see it as like having the answer key to every homework assignment for a course. It's easy to convince yourself that it doesn't hurt learning -- but there's probably a reason the answers aren't given to you. The struggle, the experience of "being stuck", the ability to understand why things don't work -- may be necessary precursors to true understanding. We're seeing pretty discouraging results from people who are learning to "vibe code" without an understanding of how they would write the code themselves.

You may wish that learning Suno is no different than learning guitar, but I think the effects of AI may be a bit pernicious, and lead to a stagnation that takes a while to truly be felt. Nobody can say one way or the other yet. That said, I'm happy you can make music that you enjoy, and that Suno enables you to do it. Such tools are at their best when they're helping people like you.
by soganess | 2025-09-27 02:29:53+00:00
Oh yes, I remember reading the am17an report about that! It was incredibly detailed and definitely not just a single-sentence declarative summary of Haidt's "The Anxious Generation."

It is not even like I disagree with the gist. Sadly, my feelings don't decide fact... or so the lesswrong weirdos keep telling me. If it was incredibly damaging, it would be incredibly easy to show. Instead, it's some poorly picked cherries by someone (Haidt) who should know better. Worse still, the best you can get from the data is a "maybe. I mean it is not immediately dis-proven... which is a start."
by vel0city | 2025-09-27 02:32:04+00:00
I've definitely spent way more than $500 over the several models of keyboards, albeit the ASP was more like $200 or so.

My view on it is, a good keyboard will get several years of use out of it, the average yearly price isn't really that much. Second, it's something I'm touching several hours most days of my life. I'm using a keyboard more than I wear shoes personally (I do prefer the barefoot life, so I'm a bit odd there). I'm touching it more than my couch or my dining chairs or other things in my home. Isn't it worthwhile that it's comfortable and exactly what I want from it?
by card_zero | 2025-09-27 02:32:29+00:00
I suspect this particular human was trying to say "straw man fallacy" but ended up with "reductio ad absurdum" instead, which is pretty much the opposite. If you think the first thing entails the second thing then you've executed a successful absurdum, if you think it doesn't then the second thing is a straw man. These are both annoying ways to wrangle about perceptions.
by ccvannorman | 2025-09-27 02:34:54+00:00
As someone who walked into 20k+ loc React/Next project, 95%+ vibecoded, I can say it's a relative nightmare to untangle the snarl of AI generated solutions. Particularly it is bad at separation of concerns and commingling the data. I found several places where there were in-line awaits for database objects, then db manipulations being done inline too, and I found them in the ux layer, the api layer, and even nested inside of other db repo files!

Someone once quipped that AI is like a college kid who studied a few programming courses, has access to all of stack overflow, lives in a world where hours go by in the blink of an eye, and has an IQ of 80 and is utterly incapable of learning.
by 1659447091 | 2025-09-27 02:35:43+00:00
It's not about obeying or any other nonsense.

It's politics, which people seem to miss my point about. Israel’s prime minister is a Trump admin friend, he has a meeting with him on Monday. It follows a pattern of his admin to bring up things related to people he has dealings with just before he deals with them.

It does not match his pattern of a real grievance of having offended him, in which case the bland (by Trump standards) statement was unlikely to be his idea and more likely his strategist politicking a move that also happen to check a couple auxiliary boxes -- so not anything that means anything other then a token to take into a meeting