MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-09 11:12:45+00:00
> There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
by vidarh | 2025-09-09 11:13:42+00:00
> Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable

This would involve proving that humans exceed the Turing computable, which would mean proving Church-Turing thesis is false.

Because if humans do not exceed the Turing computable, then every single human brain is existence-proof that AGI is intrinsically computationally tractable by demonstrating that sufficient calculations can be done in a small enough computational device, and that the creation of such a device is possible.

Their paper accepts as true that Turing-completeness is sufficient to "computationally capture human cognition".

If we postulate that this is true (and we have no evidence to suggest it is not), then if their "proof" shows that *their chosen mechanism can be proven to not allow for the creation of AGI, then all they have demonstrated is that their assumptions are wrong.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-09 11:14:26+00:00
> I believe in the UK you are legally barred from having access to iCloud ADP.

Apple are still busy fighting the UK government on it in closed-court.

Apple-bashers can continue their hate, but give Apple their due:

1. they are going in all guns blazing fighting the UK government instead of rolling over 2. if they succeed, I think they well-deserve the credit.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-09-09 11:14:50+00:00
The analogy is incorrect though.

There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.

You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.

A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.
by hopelite | 2025-09-09 11:15:49+00:00
It varies, just like across the USA. Some places have low pressure and rate limiting requirements for faucets of various types, other places do not, because they have ample amounts of water.

In many places in Europe it is ironically the sewage system that actually depends on high rates of flow to function properly and retrofitting them is effectively not plausible, while also causing sewage issues because water has been made expensive, which then causes lower usage. In other places in Europe you aren’t even able to flush toilet paper because the system cannot handle it. In America, because of the nature of our development we don’t really have the antiquated sewage problem as much, but we have things like septic systems and private wells that are still widely used in places because they are so sparsely populated or even just because connecting into the public sewage system is getting increasingly financially infeasible as the financial chickens come home to roost after squandering ~$100 trillion dollars over 25 years.
Show HN: Go-mirror-Zig – A simple way to create a Zig community mirror
by savalione | 2025-09-09 11:15:51+00:00
Hi everyone, I'm Savelii, an open-source software supporter.

I've built a self-hostable solution written in Go for creating a community mirror for the Zig programming language. This application is designed for communities, companies, or individuals looking to provide faster local access to Zig toolchains, reducing latency and bandwidth usage on the official servers.

Key features: Full support for ACME (Let's Encrypt) to automatically obtain and renew TLS certificates, supports HTTPS and automatic redirection from HTTP to HTTPS, compiles to a single binary, all settings are manageable via command-line flags, caches files using the official Zig directory layout.

The project is open source (GNU GPL v3.0). I welcome all feedback, bug reports, and collaboration from the community.

The source code, build instructions, and pre-compiled binaries are available on GitHub: https://github.com/savalione/go-mirror-zig

Thanks for taking a look!
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-09 11:16:56+00:00
If you ever write some HTTP endpoint where tabulated data is returned, you could quite reasonably return RFC 4180 style CSV.

However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint, so why not code up a simple little reusable bit of code where you can write any simple tabular data (string, numbers, and dates, in one or more sheets of data made up of rows and columns) that lets you choose the output format? A zip-archive of CSV-files (one per sheet), JSON, ODS, or XLSX; pick your poison.

I did just that, and while it is perfectly doable, any low-level, low-resources, low-dependency approach will mean actually touching the XML in LibreOffice's ODS (fine), and Microsoft's OOXML (…).

This is how you write a date in a cell in both.

ODS:

<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1"> <table:table-cell office:value-type="date" office:date-value="2021-04-10T12:34:56" calcext:value-type="date"> <text:p>10/4/2021, 12:34</text:p> </table:table-cell> </table:table-row>

OK, a bit verbose, but trivial to implement. Format the date however you like — you'll probably use two different formatters on the same datetime instant.

XLSX (OOXML):

<row r="1" ht="12.8"> <c r="A1" s="1" t="n"> <v>39448.5</v> </c> </row>

Obviously, as you can all plainly see, the date here is 2008-01-01T12:00:00…

And of course it makes perfect sense to hardcode the cell coordinate there. It's not like you would dynamically generate a bunch of cells (…).
by ethbr1 | 2025-09-09 11:19:20+00:00
The issue with strategic industry building tariffs is that they need to be time limited, so industry has a clear incentive and timeline for capital investment.

The issue with politically-controlled tariffs is that politically sensitive industries (the ones that get tariffs in the first place) are happy to play chicken with politicians to keep them in place.

To wit, the Jones Act is a bit over 100 years old and the chicken (aka light truck) tax lasted for 30 years!

It'd make more sense to hand tariff policy to an independent entity.
by jdietrich | 2025-09-09 11:19:35+00:00
The regulator (Ofwat) also deserves a great deal of the blame. They determine the maximum prices that water companies can charge. Since the start of privatisation, they have prioritised low bills above all else and are proud of the fact that water bills fell by 45% in real terms between 1989 and 2020. The consequences are obvious - the supposed "efficiency" that pays for those lower bills inevitably means neglecting maintenance and reducing infrastructure investment. The short-term thinking that has led to this situation has been dictated by government, not shareholders.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the planning system is also a huge obstacle to infrastructure investment, with numerous important projects being blocked due to spurious environmental concerns.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/687dfcc4312ee...
by vidarh | 2025-09-09 11:19:44+00:00
If such 2nd generation AI's are AGI, then their claim that "as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable" is false.

Indeed, if their proof is true, they have a proof that the Church-Turing thesis is false, and that humans exceed the Turing computable, in which case they've upended the field of computational logic.

Yet they assert that they believe a Turing complete system "is expressive enough to computationally capture human cognition".

This would be a very silly belief to hold if their proof is true, as if that claim is true, then a human brain is existence proof that a computational device that can produce output identical to human cognition is possible, because a human brain would be one. They'd then need to explain why they think an equally powerful computational device can't be artificially created.

If they want to advance a claim like this, they need to address this issue. Not only does their paper not address it, but they make assertions about Turing-equivalence that are false if their conclusions are true, which suggest they don't even understand the implications.

Indeed, if they understood the implications of their claim, then a claim to have proven the Church-Turing thesis to be false and/or having proven that humans exceed the Turing computable ought to be front and center, as it'd be a far more significant finding than the one they claim.

The paper is frankly an embarrassment.
by supitsj | 2025-09-09 11:20:08+00:00
I am laughing at this because of the shit storm it actually started but funny since well hmmm.

None of this "scamming" or whatever you say about my industry could be further from the truth. Perhaps you are just not educated well enough to also pick up the phone and verify since my info is not even hard to find.

Still laughing tho.

*edit* Actually this was a well orchestrated post by my past partner named Teguh Probowo - who lied and ran off with $100,000 of mine. Nice try.
by benreesman | 2025-09-09 11:20:51+00:00
I'd like to "reclaim" both AI and machine learning as relatively emotionally neutral terms of art for useful software we have today or see a clearly articulated path towards.

Trying to get the most out of tools that sit somewhere between "the killer robots will eradicate humanity", " there goes my entire career", "fuck that guy with the skill I don't want to develop, let's take his career", and "I'm going to be so fucking rich if we can keep the wheels on this" is exhausting.

And the cognitive science thing.
by mauvehaus | 2025-09-09 11:21:48+00:00
Have you filled a car with gas any time in the last ~5 years? The pumps around here (New England, USA) start playing ads with sound once you start pumping fuel. It's an absolute delight when your pump and the pump on the other side of your island are playing different ads with different audio or the same ad with the audio just out of sync.

Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.
by uncircle | 2025-09-09 11:22:54+00:00
All technologies go through the hype cycle, but the magnitude of the cycle and its effects on the economy are very different.

Neither VR, mobile video calls or 3D printing were expected to radically change the entire work economy, if not bring about actual human-like intelligence. None of those three technologies were in the hands of a handful of ultra-valuable companies, that in turn pretty much all depend on a single American manufacturer of hardware. None were threatening to destroy the Internet as we know it, or the concept of truth and credibility our modern world rely upon.

VR going nowhere was a wet fart, AI going nowhere is gonna, in my opinion and hope, crash the entire tech economy that's been injecting high doses of the hopium in the long period of post-COVID stagnation and inflation.
by babaceca | 2025-09-09 11:24:23+00:00
> So to claim that the C programmers do not want change, first you need to ignore the vast majority that do want but already dropped C...

Good, we can ignore them. It's not a language for everybody, and if you're happily using C++, or Zig, or Nim, keep doing that.

Developer experience is a weigted sum of many variables. For you cool syntax features may play a huge role of that, for most C programmers a simple language with clear and understandable semantics is much more important.

There are many languages with cool syntax and shiny features, and very few of the latter kind. C belongs to the latter, and it also happens to be running a vast majority of the world's most important software.

You keep bringing up Rust as an example. It's probably the most famous of the new-age systems languages. If it's such a great language, when will we see a useful program written in it?
by zimpenfish | 2025-09-09 11:24:55+00:00
> you just have to get lucky.

You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck.

[0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU
by bernds74 | 2025-09-09 11:25:09+00:00
It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.

Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.

10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
by Chris2048 | 2025-09-09 11:25:15+00:00
stochastic vs deterministic is arguable a property of modelling, not reality.

Something so complex that we cannot model it as deterministic is hence stochastic. We can just as easily model a stochastic thing by ignoring the stochastic parts.

separating subjective appearance of things from how we can conceptualise them as models begs a deeper philosophical question of how you can talk about the nature of things you cannot perceive.
by jansenmac | 2025-09-09 11:26:34+00:00
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier.

Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
by boricj | 2025-09-09 11:26:50+00:00
> However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint

Excel can directly ingest a CSV file served over an URL as data source, with the Accept header manually set to text/csv.

I wrote a backend once that supported this feature so that management could pull whatever data they wanted off an internal application without pestering me. They could literally take the URL of a page and pull it as a CSV file as-is.

Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.
by cluckindan | 2025-09-09 11:27:01+00:00
Blind from birth, sure. A bit off topic, but a person who has experienced colors normally and later become blind could still imagine seeing the colors, and that would likely produce the same activation pattern, at least in some parts of the brain.

Then there’s the fact that some people are unable to distinguish between blue and green colors, because their language uses the same word for both. They simply cannot perceive the colors being different. How would they compare?
by ellen364 | 2025-09-09 11:28:20+00:00
Based on "a third of customer bills go on interest payments", I'd guess the original comment was about Thames Water.

In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67357566
by dinfinity | 2025-09-09 11:29:48+00:00
If you look at his facial movements in the video it looks as if he is pretty actively using his facial muscles, 'trying' to speak while moving as little as possible (which would cause the clearest signals to be emitted).

If that is what is happening, to me it feels like harder work than just speaking (similar to how singing softly but accurately can be very hard work). It would still be pretty cool, but only practical in use cases where you have to be silent and only for short periods of usage.
by diggan | 2025-09-09 11:30:08+00:00
I think that's pretty unlikely. I aren't even a high-profile npm author, and if I publish any npm package they end up being accessed/downloadaded within minutes of first publish, and any update after that.

I also know projects who are reading the update feeds and kick off CI jobs after any dependencies are updated to automatically test version upgrades, surely at least one dependent of DuckDB is doing something similar.
by devnullbrain | 2025-09-09 11:30:57+00:00
>We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

- Kurt Vonnegut

and

>If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

>A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

- Roald Dahl
by webdevver | 2025-09-09 11:31:29+00:00
getting a full motorbike license is also expensive. there's a chicken and egg problem, which is that for an unrestricted license you must do the Mod1 and Mod2 on a 600cc bike or greater, which ofcourse you're not allowed to ride if you're on a CBT.

so you have to pay a school, and itll cost in total probably £1k or a bit more. when i did it, the guys also told me, there's basically only one company now that provides insurance for instructors/riding schools.

motorbiking i think is becoming less of a guy thing and more like skiing - an expensive, occasional thrill, but very much an upmarket upper-middle-class type of activity. there were more girls than guys at my lessons too, which was pretty surprising at first, but not really once you consider the prior.

which was very much at odds with the instructors, who were all guys' guys - when they got into it at 16, motorbiking was much cheaper than a car, and had a real economic argument to make (it was much cheaper all-round) - today, if you add up the insurance, protective gear, bike, and school money, you will be on-par with a car, which is far more practical.
by hopelite | 2025-09-09 11:32:41+00:00
How can we just ignore the elephant in the room; that not only has the UK population risen by almost a 1/3 since 1960, but the nature of that population has also been changed since that time, regardless of how one feels about it.

The UK (as only one example) is simply not the same thing as it was in 1960. Why would we expect the same results as if it’s just a matter of catching up from being behind, all while the ability to do so has changed?

If the UK wasn’t able to keep up with water storage capacity between 1960–1989, and has not built any capacity whatsoever since 1989; what makes one believe that somehow the UK, with massive headwinds blowing right into its face, could not only maintain the current capacity but expand it by about 50% (pop growth plus backlog), at the same time that the population has increased by ~1/3 and the nature of the people in the UK has changed significantly from a people that was able to do that in the past, but clearly could not do so since 1960, and while the finances of the country are inverting?

It is a gamblers fallacy. It is the aging man who still thinks he is in his prime, but also after decades of neglect and abuse of his body on advice of a devil on his shoulder, the serpent whispering assurances in his ear to indulge in harmful things and to win back his loses.
by mattmanser | 2025-09-09 11:32:59+00:00
That's according to the water companies though, you've taken those figures directly from water UK, an industry run company:

https://www.water.org.uk/about-us/our-board

We must look at the reality more critically.

We already know that the investment is open to profit extraction, the companies doing the work are owned by the same investors and there's low oversight, they have occasionally been caught using inflated prices. We don't know the extent though as OFWAT has been criticized for only really catching the really obvious ones.

All that investment is our own money, it's now apparent they've not taken on debt to pay for that investment. They claim they have, but it's now turned out that they've taken on that debt simply to pay for dividends to shareholders. Debt is around £60 billion, while share holder dividends over the years are about £80 billion (this figure varies depending on who you believe, but it's always higher than the debt). And that's without accounting for the inflated cost of "investment".

And that debt is now apparently tax-payer guaranteed because it's all to people who are too big to fail.

So they've basically made off with £20 billion in 35 years, plus however untold billions in profits from related companies in "investment", and we've got a water crisis developing, constant sewage discharge into rivers, etc.
by tptacek | 2025-09-09 11:33:58+00:00
The comment to which I responded claimed that IQ tests "probably aren't legal in the US", which is false. They aren't more widely used because they don't work well for candidate selection, but they are used by very large companies that are attractive targets for employment discrimination suits, and wouldn't be if they were legally risky. There are well-known tech companies that up until a few years ago gave IQ tests to candidates!

Empirical observation trumps axiomatic derivation in this case.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-09 11:34:24+00:00
> Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.

That is very much possible. It is also completely impossible when you live in a country where Microsoft decreed that the C in CSV stands for semicolon; as far as Excel is concerned (no, seriously). Welcome in the Netherlands!

Now whether or not Excel can open a CSV file depends on the locale of the user, which will inevitably vary, and of course, whether they are using Excel at all.

So yes, you could offer just CSV, but not if your user is a spreadsheet jockey and you would like to stay on good terms with your support staff.