MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-23 02:54:27+00:00
I figure MIT still has lots of people who are above average in math.

These may not be them.

>A major barrier for clean hydrogen today is that dirty methods based on fossil fuels are just so much cheaper than cleaner ones.

That's not the only thing.

Good amounts of hydrogen are produced by oil refineries utilizing surplus energy that was being largely wasted during much earlier decades. Plus the hydrogen atoms come from the hydrocarbons that they are already processing at huge economies of scale. Not only that but that dirty hydrogen in refinery gas itself is also largely surplus since it is the product of refineries producing fuels having lower molecular hydrogen content than the crude oil feedstock coming in. That's a lot of barrels.

As if that's not enough, there's chemical equations that fairly well represent reactions that have remained unchanged since the beginning of time.

Like to make clean hydrogen from plain water, which is an ideal way, it's electrolysis, which is really clean but it takes electricity. Nice to know that clean electricity is already widely available and becoming more so all the time.

According to some pure financial equations, there would be a point where clean, renewable, electricity may become cheap enough for clean hydrogen to undercut refinery hydrogen. Or one particular player may work an exceptional deal on their electricity in some way that might not be available to the general public. Completely free electricity would of course be the ultimate, and with water as raw material there are people who will buy this who would never think of investing in an old bridge into Brooklyn.

Seems promising since at any energy price there will be a margin that could be worked with, but when you do the math, price doesn't end up figuring in at all. It cancels, might as well be free.

Quite simply because the conversion from electricity to hydrogen is not 100% efficient, in addition to the cost of the further processing needed beyond the raw electrons coming in, the hydrogen produced can never compete with the cost of the the raw electricity itself that is used to produce the hydrogen. If what you really need is energy itself more than anything else, you're better off using the electricity straight rather than the lesser amount of energy you get from the amount of hydrogen that it would produce.

For situations where you really, really need hydrogen and nothing else will ever suffice, that's a good reason to continue pursuing this, focusing ideally on the scale needed for that exact market.

I just don't see how it could pay best to try and fool Mother Nature, we still see people trying it all the time anyway :\
by freejazz | 2025-09-23 02:55:09+00:00
It's not two minutes per citation and the notion that something that is "very expensive" but otherwise doesn't have a use case unless you're using AI in the first place is a ridiculous proposition. To call what I wrote a "huge time waste" seems to really miss the point. The citations are already hyperlinks into "some relevant database". Attorneys figured that out when they started publishing judicial opinions in reporters (books). I take the citation string and it gives me the decision. Wow!

> Two minutes per filing full of citations is unrealistically fast and also adds up

Also adds up to what? The amount of time it takes to do your job? Vs not doing it and just letting AI rip? Oh I see, people here think that paying another service to fix the poor job the "do your job for you" AI service did makes sense? I don't think so. But then again I'm not the one wondering if lawyers keep cases stored in "relevant databases" out of what could only be sheer ignorance (I bet AI could get that one right). Never heard of Westlaw or LexisNexis?
by necovek | 2025-09-23 02:55:15+00:00
If one wants to dig deeper, that's surely welcome: it's not me bundling these people groups together, it's different research authors (and you).

The discussion was on safety of touchscreens in cars, and you brought the claim that pedestrians are more at risk, which I countered with some statistical data from one study.

By contextualizing the data without supporting it with evidence, you are driving your unfounded point. For example, I can argue touchscreens are used much less on roads with pedestrians, since you tune your AC/music/navigation... more often on long motorway trips (I similarly have no basis for this claim other than personal gut feel).

The point is that more people who are injured or die in a traffic accident are not pedestrians: the "machine engineered for safety" does not protect them any better than pedestrians have it: if there are deaths due to touchscreen use, plausibly it's more drivers/passengers than pedestrians.
by baobun | 2025-09-23 02:55:21+00:00
Shared-private sounds like what's really needed and useful.

Personal-private sounds like scope-creep - the mentioned examples (many of which I would classify as "application configuration") should arguably not be solved by AT but by each app. While common solutions, patterns and libraries are useful, they can live outside normative AT specs. And for the actually valid use-cases, aren't those just a special case of private-shared with an audience of one? Doesn't seem warranted with a separate flow for that special case.
by epistasis | 2025-09-23 02:55:31+00:00
Yikes that sounds terrifying! What program is doing the writes? Apple or third party? Some demon going crazy with logging?

I've had my M1 Air since they launched, five years, and it doesn't show any sign of getting retired soon (except for the slight bend in my case where my lid jumped on it when it was open on the couch... but that mostly bent back.)

I had a 2011 MBA but vastly prefer everything about this one.
by blinkingled | 2025-09-23 02:57:14+00:00
I am happy for a new browser/engine but I'm highly skeptical that Ladybird will ever come close to Chrome or Firefox in terms of features, compatibility and performance. It's just very hard to imagine. There's servo and look at where it is after 13 years!

No offense to anyone really but browser engines are inhumane amount of talent and effort. Might as well just keep making Firefox better.
by freejazz | 2025-09-23 02:57:20+00:00
And? Trademark isn't copyright law. It doesn't operate the same way. You can indicate that something isn't being used as a mark to indicate source (all trademark protects) and therefore it isn't necessarily an infringement of someone's mark, the same way direct verbatim copying would most likely be.

What's your point anyway? That copyright should be subsumed into trademark? Some others here are posting it, not that it makes any sense. Even funnier, they complain about the term limitations of copyright... but trademarks are indefinite.

Oh here I go arguing about IP law on HN again...
by z3ugma | 2025-09-23 02:57:33+00:00
Ugh, I'm so incensed. This is the 2nd IOT product in my home getting bricked within 2 months.

This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat over at https://sett.homes/ . It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant. Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.

I bet the same approach would work for the Kevo lock that I've got too...
by zamadatix | 2025-09-23 02:57:37+00:00
But here every type of screen (watch, phone, tablet, Laptop, TV) happened to hit the same angular resolution target (different resolutions based on distance but the same perceived density) at different times, purportedly by chance if not for being the meaningful limit for the average person. That may well not be the limit for you, but you'd still have to explain why this is if you want to claim anything about the average.

It's a feature on the phones https://www.sammyfans.com/2025/07/06/display-setting-actuall...
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-23 02:58:01+00:00
In Google Workspace, rooms are resources with calendars that can be configured to auto accept any invitation unless they’ve already booked. So it’s basically first come first serve. Even if two people are literally trying to book the room, at the same time, simultaneously, one request will go through first and will be accepted and the second will be declined. I imagine outlook is similar.
by idoubtit | 2025-09-23 02:58:09+00:00
> Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe.

Wrong.

In the article, the nearest link that was supposed to prove that claim points to a blog post that uses the 2019 PISA data. And in that post, there's not just Ireland and Estonia in Europe that do better than USA, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden. US-Americans have a reputation of knowing little of the world geography, maybe that's why these countries were forgotten ;-)

The article also has a link to a blog about 2021 PISA data, but with a very limited sample: e.g. Estonia is missing. And Poland still does better than the USA.
by gigatexal | 2025-09-23 02:58:23+00:00
I don’t care for the rest of Jimmy’s show with the celebrities and the interviews. I don’t give an f about famously rich folks and their lives but I find jimmy hilarious and his monologue funny. So I watch the clip of that when it hits YouTube. He’s got 20m YouTube subs for the show. I bet the monologue I watch gets more views than the TV show and by extension also has a more favorable demographic for advertisers on Youtube than the TV show on ABC.
by bdangubic | 2025-09-23 02:58:59+00:00
99% of my kid’s education happens outside of the school. in 2025 if a student is “dumb” it is 100% her/his and parent’s fault, not “administration” or “school system”

both could be better but if you rely on any “system” or “administration” for your well-being you are not going to end up well…
by zovirl | 2025-09-23 02:59:59+00:00
> My problem is that I cannot see how control flow works in Forth, e.g. a simple if-then-else.

What made it click for me was http://www.exemark.com/FORTH/eForthOverviewv5.pdf, specifically sections 2.3 "Loops and Branches" and 5.3 "Structures". With a slight simplification, if/else/then branching is defined in 7 words.

Two primitive words, branch and ?branch (in python because I know it better than assembly):

def branch(): """ branch is followed by an address, which it unconditionally jumps to.""" ip = code[ip] # Get address from next cell in code, jump to it. def branch_if_zero(): """ ?branch is followed by an address. ?branch either jumps to that address, or skips over the address & continues executing, depending on the value on the stack.""" if stack.pop() == 0: # Pop flag off stack ip = code[ip] # Branch to address held in cell after ?branch else: ip += 1 # Don't branch, skip over address & keep executing

Two helper words for forward branching. >MARK adds a placeholder branch address to code and pushes the address of the placeholder. >RESOLVE resolves the branch by replacing the placeholder with the address from the stack.

: >MARK ( -- A ) HERE 0 , ; : >RESOLVE ( A -- ) HERE SWAP ! ;

And then the actual IF, ELSE, and THEN words. IF puts ?branch and a placeholder address in code. ELSE puts branch and a placeholder address in code, then updates the preceding branch address (from an IF or ELSE) to land after the ELSE. THEN updates the preceding branch address to land after the THEN.

: IF ( -- A ) COMPILE ?branch >MARK ; IMMEDIATE : ELSE ( A -- A ) COMPILE branch >MARK SWAP >RESOLVE ; IMMEDIATE : THEN ( A -- ) >RESOLVE ; IMMEDIATE
by rmason | 2025-09-23 03:00:36+00:00
In Detroit there's the Eastern Market, it's over 180 years old. I remember going there as a boy with my dad and it was like I'd imagine the United Nations is like with people speaking dozens of different languages. A very wide range of food, crafts and beverages. The aisles were packed and you could hardly make your way. Lots of small different restaurants. .

https://visitdetroit.com/inside-the-d/detroits-eastern-marke...
by sqircles | 2025-09-23 03:02:10+00:00
Jason is phenomenal. There is absolutely no telling how many hours he has had a deck of cards in his hands.

The foundations of card magic are certainly out there, and for me knowing how the fundamental slights work make it that much more magical to see it performed at such a level. No different than having played a sport makes spectating that much more interesting and appreciable.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-23 03:02:41+00:00
I think this kind of tracing-caused complexity only arises when the language doesn't let you easily represent and manipulate code as data, or when the language doesn't have static type information.

Python does let you mess around with the AST, however, there is no static typing, and let's just say that the ML ecosystem will <witty example of extreme act> before they adopt static typing. So it's not possible to build these graphs without doing this kind of hacky nonsense.

For another example, torch.compile() works at the python bytecode level. It basically monkey patches the PyEval_EvalFrame function evaluator of Cpython for all torch.compile decorated functions. Inside that, it will check for any operators e.g BINARY_MULTIPLY involving torch tensors, and it records that. Any if conditions in the path get translated to guards in the resulting graph. Later, when said guard fails, it recomputes the subgraph with the complementary condition (and any additional conditions) and stores this as an alternative JIT path, and muxes these in the future depending on the two guards in place now.

Jax works by making the function arguments proxies and recording the operations like you mentioned. However, you cannot use normal `if`, you use lax.cond(), lax.while(), etc,. As a result, it doesn't recompute graph when different branches are encountered, it only computes the graph once.

In a language such as C#, Rust, or a statically typed lisp, you wouldn't need to do any of this monkey business. There's probably already a way in the rust toolchain to interject at the MIR stage and have your own backend convert these to some Tensor IR.
by tmpfs | 2025-09-23 03:04:17+00:00
I am totally sold on local first apps. I think the recent enshitification of many services (which is also inevitable for the new wave of AI services) plus the inherent privacy risks with allowing third parties access to our personal data is no longer a trade-off I am willing to make.

I set up a little Pi NAS and have moved all my git repositories there thanks to gitea (I still mirror to github for community interaction) and am gradually migrating everything to be stored locally with encrypted cloud backups.

I've also been working on a local-first, open-source, eventually consistent password manager[0] (using last write wins) for the last 3 years as I can't think of anything more important that we should have control over.

It will be hard for local-first to become more commonplace as SaaS and cloud has become so entrenched but I will keep forging towards a future where we take back ownership of our personal data.

[0]: https://saveoursecrets.com/
by phil21 | 2025-09-23 03:05:32+00:00
This simply is untrue for a huge portion of work done in IT. It seems in the last decade or so many people have forgotten that programming is simply a way to achieve a business goal or task.

Some things are highly valuable (e.g. validating electronic equipment via scores of hardware testing) and can be curated by a skilled "amateur" programmer (we used to call these folks "scripters" back in the day) more or less indefinitely. Adding "real programmers" to the mix would simply cause costs to skyrocket with no discernable impact on revenue produced - just some smug programmers showing off how much better their code looks and how much more maintainable it is.

Stuff like this is domain knowledge distilled into a bash script. If you have the domain knowledge it is typically pretty trivial to simply do a full rewrite if you come in after this guy retires. The domain knowledge and understanding of what the automation is actually doing is the hard and skilled part of the job.

I'm not downvoting the low-value comment because I believe it needs high visibility for many who come here and see the responses to it. You don't need to "engineer" software for every use-case. Sometimes the guy with deep domain knowledge who can hack and kludge a bash or python script together is 10x more valuable than some guy with a CS degree and a toolbox of "best practices" who doesn't give a shit about the underlying task at hand. I'm sure some fancy new frameworks will be used though!

Sysadmins of yesteryear who were expected to deeply understand hardware and OS level things, but not be able to program all understand this and would be able to make great use of AI. The advance of programmers into the sysadmin (aka devops) space is really a travesty of speciality skills being lost and discarded. A whole lot of very pretty overengineered code sitting on top of hardware and systems that are barely understood by those who wrote it and it shows.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-09-23 03:05:45+00:00
> There are a lot of times that Trump says things that people take for granted that what he meant was... but that isn't strictly what he said. It seems to me that maybe 60% of the time, what people are up in arms about are things they're sure he meant, but strictly speaking he didn't actually say.

The people doing this kind of reframing of Trump's statements are typically doing so to make them seem less inflammatory, usually in response to those who take him at his literal word. 'It's just a joke', 'an exaggeration', 'he didn't mean it literally'. Given how things have been going, it's clear he hasn't been joking.

Kimmel's monologue, taken literally, is completely benign.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-23 03:06:40+00:00
> “Well, I’m going to do Sudoku and I’m going to have this class and first thing I’m going to do is write a bunch of tests.” But then he never got anywhere

There's a blog post I read once and that I've since been unable to locate anywhere, even with AI deep research. It was a blow-by-blow record of an attempt to build a simple game --- checkers, maybe? I can't recall --- using pure and dogmatic test driven development. No changes at all without tests first. It was a disaster, and a hilarious one at that.

Ring a bell for anyone?
by pseudalopex | 2025-09-23 03:07:46+00:00
> I'm taken aback by a president who recommends bleach as an antiviral.

Trump asked if disinfectant could be injected. He did not recommend injecting or drinking bleach.[1]

> I'm taken aback by a member of congress who married her brother as part of her visa process.

There is no credible evidence Ilhan Omar married her brother.[2]

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-inject-bleach-covid-...

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ilhan-omar-marry-brother/
by ashayh | 2025-09-23 03:08:19+00:00
Buy locally configurable stuff only.

That means Zigbee and Zwave and use them with Home Assistant. There are many locks and devices which support either. There's a learning curve in the beginning, but once you set it up correctly not only you get privacy and control your own devices, you also get far more options for automations and useful or plain cool things in general.
by wmichelin | 2025-09-23 03:08:50+00:00
To play devil's advocate here, clearly there are hosting costs and maintenance costs beyond a one time mobile app payment 14 years ago.

Kinda sped read the article so apologies if I missed it, but why does the author here feel so entitled to something that clearly the company feels unreasonable to continuously maintain? They're clearly a struggling business, it feels like this author has a personal vendetta against the company and would rather they go out of business than break a 14 year old promise made from an entirely different internet economy era.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-09-23 03:09:39+00:00
> You were a pay-once app. Released in 2011, pay once each for Android, iOS, and Web and keep for life.

You know. I approve the pushback on enshitification. But there’s something weird about righteous fury over an app which literally costs money to run didn’t provide free updates for literally decades on what probably cost like $5.

I dunno. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-23 03:09:50+00:00
>they're able to topple regimes.

Just making this more concrete

https://youtu.be/EwXAz8MJ5l8

https://archive.today/latest/www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-as...

(But that regime was already fragile so it could have been other types of catalyst.. no this is not South Asian spring

(SSEA sputtering?)
by anonymars | 2025-09-23 03:10:18+00:00
This might be the missing piece of a puzzle (fall in love vs fall in line).

Essentially in broad strokes (at the risk of caricature), you have one group that is cursed by trying to always build consensus: no one can be left behind/marginalized. Hence little gets done because heaven forbid someone's feelings get hurt or gets left a bit behind. It's also easier to subvert because it tends to be a more open tribe.

On the other side you have the hierarchy. Fall in line, know your place. It's effective at getting things done but steamrolls those at the bottom of the totem pole. Outsiders are not even on the totem pole.

Both of these, you could say, are attempts to cope with the slings and arrows of life: the consensus version attempting to minimize the harm to an equal minimum for everyone. The hierarchy version shunts the harm down to each lower level in the hierarchy (sucks to be at the bottom).

Perhaps two opposite points on a spectrum of organizing parts into a whole in general, and if you look you should see things move between the two everywhere. From personal relationships to code organization.
by lukeschlather | 2025-09-23 03:11:43+00:00
My main use for laptops is as a notepad. If it takes a minute to start when I need it it's vastly inferior to a sheet of paper. If it can't remember what page I was on that's doubly so. Windows works more or less like a sheet of paper (though automatic reboots to apply security updates are a point in favor of paper that has no such issues.)

And I often use my laptop for things where seconds matter. I've got things on the stove that could burn, I may not have 5 seconds to spare locating the next step in the recipe.
by waltbosz | 2025-09-23 03:11:43+00:00
The NIMBY argument is often one of aesthetics: windmills on the horizon will look ugly.

I want to see a barge with one of these windmills anchored off the coast at the proposed install spot. So people can actually see what one would look like in real life.

I know it's not representative of the array of windmills the projects seek to install, but it something.

Also, I wonder if the same people who object to the windmills ever raise objections to the boats with giant LED advertisement screens that creep past the beach close enough to shore that you can smell their engine exhaust.
by fuzztester | 2025-09-23 03:11:48+00:00
nonsense. it's the exact opposite of what you think it is.

you are either not reading the news enough or are not able to understand it.

"Drill, baby, drill!"

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/iF17bGH65gU

from the description of that YouTube short:

Trump to Starmer: "Drill, Baby, Drill’ in North Sea to cut energy bills; Calls Wind ‘Expensive Joke
by Aeolun | 2025-09-23 03:12:05+00:00
It’s so weird. I can never bring myself to truly blame the hacker in these instances. If you can call up a random company as an 18 year old, and do anything that costs them $100-200M that’s the fault of the company. If you decided to stick all your saving in crypto instead of a bank account, then I just don’t have any sympathy for you.

That’s not to say that it is good or desireable, but…