MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-09-13 05:46:45+00:00
> power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does.

In the sense that you're using this, doesn't this apply to every power company?

Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.

To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?

All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.

> per capita

Did you continue reading and see how that's 200mg of long lived waste? France has 66.7 million people. For long lived waste that's 13k tons total. That's a bit shy of the trade waste per capita. So about 67 million times more. Or let's go back to full. For power reactor they only produce 60% of that 2kg, 1.2kg. So that's 80k tons of waste, total, per year.

Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
by realusername | 2025-09-13 05:46:51+00:00
It was a nuclear + a renewable crisis. When the nuclear production dropped to 65% in France because of the offline plants, the wind production was hovering at 9% (bad luck) and the solar production at 5% (because it was winter).

That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
by krispyfi | 2025-09-13 05:47:41+00:00
> The Terminids Icon Terminids, sometimes referred to as the Terminid Horde[1] or Terminid Swarm, and commonly called Bugs, are one of the enemy factions in the Second Galactic War. They have control over 21 planets. The Terminids have been identified as "Fascist"[2] by Super Earth Icon Super Earth, despite the individual Terminid clearly being incapable of comprehending the ideology.

https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Terminids

But you're missing my point, which is that it's too early to speculate. Pundits were blaming trans people and leftists before the bullets were even found.
by photomatt | 2025-09-13 05:48:52+00:00
My blog post is my genuine expression of happiness and joy at the ruling. The legal process is slow, and the court date is not until 2027! Reflecting on the strength of the WordPress community, we recently had a great WordCamp US in Portland a few weeks ago.

The case is still happening. I attended the settlement conference, but their CEO did not. There are still many things that need to be worked out through the legal system, and that will take time, but this was a nice moment.
by brokegrammer | 2025-09-13 05:51:10+00:00
This is a quirk that could cause data loss in rare scenarios but basically, in most cases, you'll have a single instance of your application because your load balancer will only send traffic to the other instances if the main instance isn't responding. But the load balancer will have to be setup to send traffic to a single instance at a time, and only try other nodes if the current node isn't responding.

The other instances are mostly redundant. That's how sites like Hacker News tend to operate, and why I chose this architecture. It's simple and stupid but doesn't work in scenarios where you have multiple servers in different locations for example. There's LiteFS to solve this problem but I don't have experience with it yet.
by anfilt | 2025-09-13 05:52:16+00:00
I would say part of it is that ARM never really had wide spread socketed chips. It's pretty much just always a soldered highly integrated unit.

Go go back far enough you had a point in time for example you could swap an Intel or AMD cpu onto the same motherboard. Also using expansion cards for additional hardware capability was the norm. So software kinda evolved to handle disparate configurations of hardware.

ARM evolved differently. It end up being to be used more in embeded and then SoC systems. Hardware around the CPU and later on Die ended up with often a unique configure for the system/device. So the need to handle disparate hardware configurations was less important. Also the way ARM licenses their IP definitely pushed things to be more like this.

RISC-V atm is often being used in place of ARM so a lot entities are kinda are treating similar to ARM when developing a system/device. However, RISC-V since it's an open license on the ISA does not have to be used in similar way. Like imagine if there was some standardized socket for RISC-V chips and that took off, we would probably see things like UEFI and drivers/kernel drivers meant to work with more than just one single configuration of hardware ect...
by happy_malone | 2025-09-13 05:52:17+00:00
Haha, I tried it after your comment. It was unexpected yet kinda knew it was coming. Here is the roast (2nd fix is my favorite ):

Roast: This website is so hot, it's on fire... with embarrassment! The design is as basic as a kindergartener's drawing, and the content is about as exciting as a recipe for plain toast. I mean, who needs a website title or meta description when you can just have a big button that says 'Roast me'? It's like they're begging for a good roasting!

Friendly fixes

1. Add a title and meta description to give search engines (and users) a clue about what your site is about 2. Invest in a designer who's at least graduated from kindergarten, or try a website builder with more templates 3. Add some actual content, like a description of what the AI roast does, or some examples of its roasting prowess

Try it: https://ai-roast-vert.vercel.app/
by lll-o-lll | 2025-09-13 05:52:27+00:00
It’s not AGPL though, and AGPL would have solved the underlying problem. GPL existed to force companies to release changes so “I can have it also”; and that’s a political view, the whole “free as in freedom”. Cloud wasn’t accounted for in this pre-centralised internet. 2001 (B2), is long before AGPLv3, but if you have the same ideology, that’s what you want. You built a thing using GPL based code, I want it also.

Freedom is never a given, it must be continually fought for or lost.
by zarzavat | 2025-09-13 05:52:59+00:00
> Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly.

Very much this. I tried to get Claude to move some code from one file to another. Some of the code went missing. Some of it was modified along the way.

Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!) so they can't do this.

Claude can only reliably do this refactoring if it can keep the start and end files in context. This was a large file, so it got lost. Even then it needs direct supervision.
by highwaylights | 2025-09-13 05:53:03+00:00
> I get that Matt based WordPress on open source software initially, but 99% of the work that became what WordPress (and by extension, WP Engine) is today was done by him and his company.

Wordpress became as successful as it did because of the open-source license.

If you were starting a website of your own using a tool just like this, and it wasn’t up on GitHub with a fully open source license, would you use it or look for an alternative that met those criteria?

Wordpress extracted significant value from the open-source license itself (and probably wouldn’t exist today without it). I’m not sure they realise that.
by davydm | 2025-09-13 05:53:36+00:00
Cool idea, but probably not that useful outside the US, where most people don't waste food like Americans do, at least, that's what's portrayed on tv and movies from America. We're always appalled at the giant spreads of rood which are summarily tossed into the garbage disposal or bins in American entertainment media. We teach our kids to take what they're actually going to eat, we don't produce 10 servings for 4 people, etc. There is no actual food in my garbage that goes out every week. When there are small scraps, that's doggy treats.
by Animats | 2025-09-13 05:53:48+00:00
> Yeah, non-hierarchical references don't really lend themselves to static safety enforcement, so the question is what kind of run-time support the language has for non-hierarchical references.

Yes. Back references are a big problem.

I just wrote a bidirectional transitive closure algorithm that uses many back references, with heavy use of Rc, RefCell, Weak, and ".borrow()". It's 100% safe rust. This is the "proper" Rust way to write this sort of thing. The nice thing about doing it the "right" way was that, once it compiled, it needed few changes to work correctly. No mysterious errors at all. But it took a lot of work to get it to compile. Some sections had to be rewritten to get the ownership plumbing right.

I put it up on the Rust forums for comments, and got replies that I should stop doing all that fancy stuff and just use indices into arrays.[1] Or arena allocation. Things that bypass the Rust ownership system. Those approaches would probably have more bugs.

(I'm starting to see a way to do compile time checking for this sort of thing. The basic concept is that run time borrows must be disjoint as to type, disjoint as to scope, or disjoint as to instance. The first is easy. The second requires inspecting the call chain, and there are problems with templates due to ambiguity over what a type parameter does in .borrow() activity. The third is almost a theorem proving problem, but if you restrict compile time checks for disjoint instances to a single function (or maybe a "class", a struct and its functions), it might be manageable. All this might take too much cleverness to use in practice. Too much time getting the ownership plumbing right, even with compiler support. But I should write this up.)

[1] https://users.rust-lang.org/t/bidrectional-transitive-closur...
by bigyabai | 2025-09-13 05:54:12+00:00
I expect my experience will degrade. The whole web's felt stale since Flash died, I doubt the next few years will feel any different. We're post-that, sadly. Apple and Google already got the pass, they won't be litigated in this admin unless they fail to kiss the ring.

We have to live with these damages, the same way we've limped alongside a broken internet for the past decade. Its possible these abuses will be encoded in American identity for decades to come. The next step is surviving top-down control, and freely-licensed software will be the only alternative to the digital monoculture.
by btown | 2025-09-13 05:54:37+00:00
To say that 99% of what became WordPress was "done by him and his company" completely ignores the rich ecosystem of free and non-free plugins that have driven its value. A competitive landscape of hosting solutions like WP Engine drives increased demand for that plugin ecosystem; such demand, in turn, increases the value of WordPress and the company that shepherds its development.

My sympathies would lie, say, with a small development team, with minimal third-party contributors, for whom donations would make a massive difference in their ability to focus on their passion project, being stiffed by the AWS's of the world without as much as a corporate sponsorship of the project. Or even a small startup who sees a large behemoth supplant their ability to drive revenue via hosting.

My sympathies do not apply to $7.5B companies. At that scale, if your core product is open source and you're not continuing to innovate (including on business models beyond mere hosting) to stay ahead of competitors who are using your product the way the entire contributor community (not just you as the creator!) licensed it to them, there's no moral high ground.
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-13 05:56:20+00:00
Fastmail has an open source API they call jmap. You could probably find or write something that could help convert to the fastmail masked email. I was able to setup an integration with a local llm to read my email and act on it in about an hour.

I like fastmail they seem to have a move slow and don't break things mentality that I like from my email.
by shelled | 2025-09-13 05:57:08+00:00
I wanted to use them. But they had a bug in SMS sending and it's been a few weeks (or more) and they have not fixed it or been able to fix it. Also, it was not clear whether they use the same setup for recovery/alert SMS (I asked, received no reply). I tried following up with their support for a few days (it's a one-person setup; recently a support person was hired who responds on Discord and is apparently swamped), but it didn't happen. I just tried now and the issue still exists. That seemed like not a good sign. Also - ownership has changed few months ago.
by zkmon | 2025-09-13 05:58:35+00:00
This is so true. Glad someone posted about it. But ofcourse, the buyers won't care. They are easily sold with the idea that the far edges of the screen have low angle of view if the screen isn't curved. When people believe myths, sell them myths. When they believe the purpose of computers and phone is to share photos and videos, sell them fb and ig.

Also, for companies buying the curved monitors, the looks of the monitors across the workplace fit nicely into their "modernization" targets. No physics needed.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-13 05:58:45+00:00
> their blog

_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.

While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):

> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
by modeless | 2025-09-13 05:59:08+00:00
Seems like cities will fight transit much harder than before. Add it to the pile of unintended consequences, growing as fast as new legislation is passed, and never shrinking.

To be clear, I'm strongly in favor of more development. But when we solve the problems of bad legislation by adding more legislation instead of removing legislation, we are just kicking the can down the road.
by masklinn | 2025-09-13 05:59:22+00:00
> PyCompactUnicodeObject was introduced with Python 3.3, and uses UTF-8 internally.

UTF8 is used for C level interactions, if it were just that being used there would be no need to know the highest code point.

For Python semantics it uses one of ASCII, iso-8859-1, ucs2, or ucs4.
by rconti | 2025-09-13 05:59:40+00:00
People who pay a premium to live in a condo close to transit will almost certainly have vastly lower VMT than people who live in a SFH in a non-walkable area. Do they need more roads than the handful of houses that condo building replaced? Sure, so I can't disagree with you there. But they're all going to have massive underground garages, so a spot per unit on average is probably plenty.
by simianwords | 2025-09-13 05:59:48+00:00
Slightly off topic but I would really like agentic workflow that is embedded in my IDE as well as my code host provider like GitHub for pull requests.

Ideally I would like to spin off multiple agents to solve multiple bugs or features. The agents have to use the ci in GitHub to get feedback on tests. And I would like to view it on IDE because I like the ability to understand code by jumping through definitions.

Support for multiple branches at once - I should be able to spin off multiple agents that work on multiple branches simultaneously.
by pas | 2025-09-13 06:01:56+00:00
... yes, yes, they fucking are.

It's the people we meet along (and get along with) not the fucking data.

Cherish people who want to work with you, not one more byte saved.

Users are responsible for their own backups. If you want to be really responsible educate them. (As you already helped some of them to build their own kernel, you can nudge them to keep proper backups too!)

If you have problems with downstream being slow then offer workarounds.

How ridiculous is all this, really? Instead of hosting a shell script that sets up a PPA or a cron job with updates or whatever you try to brute force things through Debian and Linus?

If users are that important for you give them your phone number or whatever.

Seriously. Based on all of what you wrote you need to put effort into having a direct line to your users. (Which is completely fine nowadays. Discord and Twitch/YT office hours and whatnot are all the hype nowadays.)

Stop projecting your needs onto other maintainers.

> critical system components (the kernel, the filesystem, and others) absolutely need to be able to get bugfixes in a timely manner. That's not optional.

that's not how these projects are set up. (and even though your code is upstream to them, your users were (are) downstream to them. they were hosting your project for their users, they can (and did) decide to stop hosting your project.)

data integrity and data-loss-prevention are not considered security updates - where we have a culture of out of bad updates. (because the workaround for them is the standing order is to have working backups.)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-09-13 06:05:00+00:00
> They're just leaches on an open source license.

This mentality drives me bonkers. If you don't want other people doing what they want with open source code, then don't open source it, at least not under a permissive license.

People are upset with Matt (though not necessarily the commenters you were replying to - TBH I thought it weird you posted your comment implying they were "attacking" Matt when they were simply pointing out the actual reality of the court ruling) because he wants to have his cake and eat it to: he wants to get all the benefits of open source (i.e. faster adoption and ecosystem creation) but then thinks he can be arbiter of some rules he made up in his head about "how much" someone who makes money off WordPress needs to give back.
by chickenbig | 2025-09-13 06:07:32+00:00
> Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power.

Germany has just over 250GW of installed capacity. [0] indicates peak power is 75GW. Replicating the Olkiluoto EPR build for 75GW of capacity would have cost perhaps 500B EUR.

[1] speculates about what would have happened if Germany had retained its nuclear power stations and performed a fleet build-out.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-industry-has-lar...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-09-13 06:08:26+00:00
Great idea to napkin math it, but I think you're off by a very large margin. CA energy commission shows PG&E's energy consumption to be over 70,000 GWh.

$2,500,000,000 profit/70,000,000,000 kWh consumed is ~$0.035 per kWh.

So not exactly the smoking gun that CA ratepayers are looking for.

site: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
by stonecharioteer | 2025-09-13 06:09:31+00:00
I'm the guy you hire when you want to squeeze your application's performance. I have worked in Fintech, defence, FMCG, retail and AI. Ex-Visa, ex-Flipkart, Ex-Composio.

Location: Bengaluru, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Rust, Postgresql, Javascript, Distributed Systems

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/stonecharioteer/resume/releases/latest | https://tech.stonecharioteer.com

Email: ktvkvinaykeerthi[at]gmail.com
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-09-13 06:09:39+00:00
I was blown away when I learned that humanity is mining more coal right now than at any point in history. Even though coal mining is supposed to be superseded by renewables.

The “small web” is (citation needed) bigger and healthier than ever. Yep, big algorithm feed apps are huge. That doesn’t stop the small stuff from being more huge than it was way back, decades ago, when it was the big game in town.

It’s nice to take off the rose colored glasses and look at the present sometimes. The web is awesome - no hacks needed to make your site look amazing; awesome animations or frosted glass effects in one line of CSS; static site generators desperate for you to use their code to write what you care about; blogs with RSS feeds even though RSS is dead.

If you believe these awesome things don’t exist you’ll live in that world - but it does actually exist, so you’ll be very much missing out.
by echelon | 2025-09-13 06:10:15+00:00
I'm sorry this has meandered so much.

Google is playing chess at a level where we mere mortals can only be bystanders.

They can invest billions of dollars into a piece of software that the entire world benefits from. I wouldn't call it pure benevolence or charity, but I'll give them that. It's useful software that they didn't have to write or give away.

The problem is that Google isn't one person. It's a collection of forces seeking to optimize the overall position and profitability of the company. Even if that means that they might impinge upon or even willfully pilfer from the broader commons.

Chrome is now a central chess piece in controlling the web, advertising, and search. Maybe it didn't start that way, but it's what it has become - intentionally or not. And now that most people are using Chrome, Google is free to boil the frog, tighten the noose, etc. Their grip on the funnel is iron clad, and they can apparently operate monopolistically without interference from the DOJ.

Chrome might be open, but you won't be able to afford to deviate from Google's choices. The engineering hurdles are too steep for small teams to overcome. And because of browser monoculture, the experience with other browsing technologies and platforms degrades.

The result is that we're being herded like cattle. I don't think the folks at Google think of us this way, but that's how it is in practice. Behavior at scale to increase profits.

Google gets to proudly proclaim that Chrome is "open source". But in reality the only force that can meaningfully steer the product - the entire web ecosystem at this point - is Google. And they use that power against us.

Open source is a strategy for big tech. In the case of Matt vs WP engine, it's simply enabling a vulture company to dip into the tip jar without tipping out.

My point is that "open source" isn't entirely pragmatic about users and freedom. In some very real cases it's inequitable and not sustainable. By empowering monopolizers, it's orthogonal to user benefit.

Amazon gets to steal databases and make managed offerings that pull profit from the originators into AWS' coffers instead.

Google gets to, well, own the web and search and everything.

WP Engine gets to dip into Wordpress' decades of hard work.

I don't see how the users benefit. Just the greedy growth minded profiteers.

Users aren't even in the conversation. The conversation is entirely about who profits and controls. And that is, to me, what's fucked up about all of this.
by zarzavat | 2025-09-13 06:10:29+00:00
Claude is a junior. The more you work with it, the more you get a feel for which tasks it will ace unsupervised (some subset of grunt work) and which tasks to not even bother using it for.

I don't trust Claude to write reams of code that I can't maintain except when that code is embarrassingly testable, i.e it has an external source of truth.