MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-29 04:47:21+00:00
Since the 2006 passage of AB 32, which set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals, the state has experienced frequent power outages…

We've had frequent power outages since before then. It's really since the passage of CEQA, and the corresponding lack of construction of power generation that is the root of the problem. Further limitations on power generation aren't doing much when we weren't going to get it in the first place.

Couple that with Califormia's whether, where years with average heat and rainfall are uncommon, instead swapping back and forth between extremes every few years, and about every decade you get a summer so hot that we don't have enough power generation to run everyone's air conditioners.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-09-29 04:47:30+00:00
> It is always very humbling to read such notes - the self-written post passing away letters. There have been others in hacker news, and they always make me think about life, about what matters to me the most and of course, what matters to others.

Am I nuts or are they appearing more often recently on the front page of HN?

Not sure what to make of that. Are the increasingly common thing to do for the terminally ill? Are people more attracted up voting them?
by elcritch | 2025-09-29 04:47:50+00:00
Claude and ChatGPT can both search the web for you now. It’s actually quite handy as they can search for updated data on topics if prompted.

Though I agree and believe personal LLM agents with access to our personal data would be much more effective. Though perhaps we should give LLMs a few more years to mature and safeguards to be created before letting it say gamble your house on the newest meme coin. ;)
by klodolph | 2025-09-29 04:47:57+00:00
This does not make any sense to me. Can you elaborate on this?

It seems “obvious” to me that if you have a tool which can request a web page, you can make it so that this tool extracts the main content from the page’s HTML. Maybe there is something I’m missing here that makes this more difficult for LLMs, because before we had LLMs, this was considered an easy problem. It is surprising to me that the addition of LLMs has made this previously easy, efficient solution somehow unviable or inefficient.

I think we should also assume here that the web site is designed to be scraped this way—if you don’t, then “Accept: text/markdown” won’t work.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 04:48:27+00:00
If they had accurately stated the value and cash flow of the businesses and been transparent about where the money was going then technically they would have been fine.

But if they had been honest about the performance of the businesses and the way the money was being used, they would not have attracted as much investment money. A few gullible people, but not $112 million worth.

The misrepresentation was key to attracting the investment.
by rtpg | 2025-09-29 04:49:50+00:00
> None of the plans to achieve China's level of internal control over communication can work without banning all user-administrated devices from the web

Not that I want that future, but it's not like China has banned all user-administrated devices from the web. Seems odd to say this is necessary when, axiomatically, China has China's level of internal control over communication.

There's a part of me that really wishes that we could have policies around things like age verification that implictly understand the existence of workarounds and accept them. If we're going to have these policies, anyways.
by maxglute | 2025-09-29 04:50:21+00:00
> inefficiently allocated capital

Every 6 months of US health spending above OECD baseline i.e. ~8% of GDP, aka ~2T/y buys you the entire HSR network in China, stations included. How inefficient is PRC capital allocation really? A few 10s of millions of extra housing units when they have 200-300m more people to urbanize? The point is PRC over allocates but quickly readjusts, i.e. even housing allocation basically capped in 2010s when new floor space peaked. The even more important point is PRC thinks it's important to over allocate and have in abundance than to have not enough. I argue most would prefer problems of over allocated abundance over under allocated scarcity.

Like US has plenty of cheap labour (mexicans), they just choose to exploit it maximally in some sectors (like agriculture), and partially (like construction), vs maybe maximally exploiting cheap labours in the latter would do US some good.
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-29 04:50:24+00:00
you can basically put instructions into any LLM which will make it a dick who belittles you and makes fun of your bad ideas. spells out each time why they are bad and how bad they are.

also to have it say mean things or send u dont the wrong way on purpose if you ask it lazy questions. :')

the fact there is ppl who do this might both be a source of answers for you and an indication its maybe not a bad idea entirely.
by duskwuff | 2025-09-29 04:52:25+00:00
Two and a half issues:

1) The handling of dynamic blocks leaves something to be desired. The parameters are left mostly undecoded. It'd be really neat if the Huffman symbols were listed somewhere, rather than just being left implicit.

2) The visualization falls apart pretty badly for texts consisting of more than one block (which tends to happen around 32 KB) - symbols are still decoded, but references all show up blank.

Large inputs make the page hang for a bit, but that's probably pretty hard to avoid.

And as an enhancement: it'd be really cool if clicking on backreferences would jump to the text being referenced.
by rock_artist | 2025-09-29 04:52:29+00:00
Sadly, our current age of computing is getting locked in devices. Not only most computing today is SoC with closed drivers but it's actively locking the user.

Ironically it all started with Cydia and "hacking" the iPhone until executives understood they can make a cut.

The EU did help to some extent by requesting Apple to enable non-appstore apps. but sadly, instead of doing the right thing of simply having a user switch that allows me to decide if I want to put my device at risk, they went with provisioning that seems to be agreed.

So now, we're getting the same slap from Google/Android which I must say very strangely gets blessing from very specific governments:

> The requirement goes into effect in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. At this point, any app installed on a certified device in these regions must be registered by a verified developer.
by tomhow | 2025-09-29 04:52:50+00:00
Could you please stop posting in this inflammatory style? The guidelines ask us not to fulminate, to eschew flamebait and to avoid using HN for ideological battle. It's fine to have an ideological lean and to argue for your positions, but this inflammatory style of commenting is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for, and you've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by zmmmmm | 2025-09-29 04:52:50+00:00
I don't like the artificial distinction b/w thinking and coding. I think they are intimately interwoven. Which is actually one thing I really like about the LLM because it takes away the pain of iterating on several different approaches to see how they pan out. Often it's only when I see code for something that I know I want to do it a different way. Reducing that iteration time is huge and makes me more likely to actually go for the right design rather than settling for something less good since I don't want to throw out all the "typing" I did.
by toast0 | 2025-09-29 04:54:11+00:00
In my neck of the woods, we have mostly aerial fiber and not a lot of redundancy, so I hear about a lot of of fiber cuts. In the past several years we've had a lot of wires downed by trees, a couple by cars running into poles, several cuts that seem like intentional cuts --- usually attributed to people cutting lines to try to steal copper, a couple times people shooting down cables cause shooting things is fun; and then we also have tree trimmers that trim the fiber instead, and we also had an underwater cable taken out by someone driving a piling in the wrong place (I've seen a report saying the place not to disturb was clearly marked).

Outside plant is basically indefensible, so if you can't trust humans not to destroy it, you've got problems.
by mothballed | 2025-09-29 04:55:34+00:00
Why would a bully care if they are suspended or expelled.

The most stubborn bullies in reality will often only reliably respond because they will starve to death, face violence, or have necessities taken away. I.e. a Nazi can't do nazi shit at work or they will get fired and starve.

A child cant get fired. Their parents must provide no matter what, and it is neglect if they don't and abuse if they use violence. End result is a bully knows the worst can happen is they lose luxuries and get a vacation from school, but always be taken care of. So really any punishment you can mete out is a nothingburger.

A difficult problem to solve indeed.
by zebomon | 2025-09-29 04:56:10+00:00
My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.

The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.
by oivey | 2025-09-29 04:56:31+00:00
Because it’s nice to reuse code. It’s virtually never the case that a function being compatible with too many types is an issue. The issue is sometimes that it isn’t clear what types will be compatible with a function, and people make mistakes.

Python’s type system is overall pretty weak, but with any static language at least one of the issues is that the type system can’t express all useful and safe constructs. This leads to poor code reuse and lots of boilerplate.
by stebalien | 2025-09-29 04:57:49+00:00
I still haven't seen anyone discuss the issues with distributing applications containing GPLv3 components under these new rules given the clause (from the GPLv3):

> “Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.

At the moment, the workaround here is that keys can technically just be generated on the fly (with some caveats). With Google's new requirements, that's not possible.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-29 04:59:08+00:00
> I’ve been asking for browser-native markdown support for years now. A clean web is not that far, if browsers support more than just HTML.

You can always do the markdown -> DOM conversion on the client. Sure, there's a bit of latency there, but it means easier deployment (no build step involving pandoc or similar).

Browser-native markdown support would be better though; you'd get ability to do proper contenteditable divs with bold, italic, etc done via markdown
by yojo | 2025-09-29 04:59:10+00:00
Every time someone says “but dark fiber”, someone else has to point out that graphics cards are not infrastructure and depreciate at a much, much higher rate. I guess it’s my turn.

Fiber will remain a valuable asset until/unless some moron snaps it with a backhoe. And it costs almost nothing to operate.

Your data center full of H100s will wear out in 5 years. Any that don’t are still going to require substantial costs to run/may not be cost-competitive with whatever new higher performance card Nvidia releases next year.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-29 04:59:31+00:00
> I just tried it on Mac, its sorted in the order you listed. Extending it a bit, the order is:

> photo1 photo01 photo001 photo0001 photo2

What you enumerated is known as "ascending lexicographical ordering" and has nothing to do with "the shorter representation of the same number", but instead the ASCII[0] character values in each file name.

0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ascii&apropos=0&se...
by monero-xmr | 2025-09-29 05:00:12+00:00
As a side note, one argument I heard again and again against crypto was the energy use. It’s an argument that has gone so far to the way side it’s incredible to me. Overcoming criticism about energy use and tech was simply marketing. Global warming is barely an issue in the mainstream anymore, it’s truly amazing

If the LLM boom ends then bitcoin miners can eat up all the slack grid power! You can put those ASICs anywhere
by scorpioxy | 2025-09-29 05:01:59+00:00
Interesting and still going through the article but I thought a lot of the metals would come from Africa. Somewhere like the Congo. I read a few articles a few years ago about how the conflict there was being fed by the multinationals that want access to the rare-earth metals that the area is famous for. Specifically, the allegation was pointed at telecom and smartphone manufacturers.

Learning about the conflict that has been going on for quite a while, makes me believe that something is fueling that fire. Didn't expect to see Spain as step 1.
by devsda | 2025-09-29 05:03:05+00:00
I'm glad fdroid is voicing its concerns and asking people to act.

This is not just another technical challenge. If your country is ever in the crosshairs of "American interests" and bears the brunt of its sanctions, it is possible that you cannot install apps from your fellow citizens i.e. your own local government, bank and store apps.

Countries that are likely to face sanctions are also likely to be predominantly Android users, so it affects them disproportionately. Good luck teaching your fellow citizens to root phones their phones(which is getting hard and outright impossible on certain phones) if that happens.

This is a real challenge that countries need to think and plan for.
by mcv | 2025-09-29 05:03:06+00:00
The best example of context sensitive ads I've seen, is on the Penny Arcade webcomic. It's a comic about computer games, so most/all ads there are of interest to gamers. Not only that, but the ads are made by the comic creators in the style of the comic, and they're about games/products they love. It's not just an ad, but an endorsement.

I would think that kind of ad is a lot more effective than an authentically selected ad based on your browsing history.
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-29 05:03:20+00:00
I'm suffering from a serious lung illness that might, "take me out of the game" and honestly it's so cathartic to read stuff like this. You get a sense that death is just another milestone. It isn't degrading. I hope as an atheist that it is, "the end" in the Buddhist sense when I go.

I'm so tired and angry. I miss the calm of the evening. I don't miss my friends. I never fell in love and I don't regret it. Life is worth losing.
by simonw | 2025-09-29 05:03:33+00:00
Converting HTML into Markdown isn't particularly hard. Two methods I use:

1. The Jina reader API - https://jina.ai/reader/ - add r.jina.ai to any URL to run it through their hosted conversion proxy, eg https://r.jina.ai/www.skeptrune.com/posts/use-the-accept-hea...

2. Applying Readability.js and Turndown via Playwright. Here's a shell script that does that using my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io tool: https://gist.github.com/simonw/82e9c5da3f288a8cf83fb53b39bb4...
by SXX | 2025-09-29 05:07:19+00:00
Russia also have very good digital services. Now in one go government can send you conscription notification and immediately block your from leaving country as well as revoke driver license, block your banks and even phone numbers.

Also since all the data available about you in one place any malicious actor who can bribe someone with access can immediately get all your data: passport info and tax id, addresses, work history, all cars and all owned properties, everything.

Having centralized system with information about everything can very easily be used for oppression.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-29 05:07:40+00:00
In my experience, rewriting C++ into Rust is non-trivial because idiomatic C++ expresses things that Rust cannot. This impedance mismatch breaks architecture, and that often isn’t allowed in a rewrite. I’ve seen multiple C++ rewrite attempts fail because of poor interoperability with Rust’s constraints. Language interoperability that is high quality and low friction matters to people, and in the case of C++ that is decidedly challenging.

My view at this point is that you are better off starting from a clean sheet of paper in Rust than trying to make Rust do C++ things it was not designed to do.

In the specific narrow case of performance-engineered code, Rust also seems to consistently produce slower code in my experience for myriad weird reasons, it isn’t one thing. In many cases I don’t even think it is the fault of the language per se, just a side effect of other factors. Nonetheless, customers don’t care about any of that, they won’t accept a performance regression just because you rewrote it.
by scorpioxy | 2025-09-29 05:08:41+00:00
Unfortunately, that's been the reality in most places where I was engaged to maintain a platform. Usually in-experienced developers do this and it just sticks and the list keeps growing and tech debt increasing until the whole thing is no longer maintainable or even operational in some cases.

There's never enough time to prune the software just like there's never enough time to consider the long term consequences of any decision. The incentive system is usually set up where the focus is always on the next quarter and the short term. And the result is exactly what you'd expect it to be.
by agnishom | 2025-09-29 05:09:07+00:00
The "credit card" model for buying stuff seems to be flawed. When you give some company your credit card number and CVV to buy something, they could always turn around and give the number to someone else.

The fix is very simple, but requires more interaction: (1) You ask merchant for stuff (2) Merchant sends you a "money claim" (3) you sign your money claim (4) the merchant takes the signed claim to the bank (5) the bank verifies the signature using your public key (6) bank transfers the money to merchant from your account
by nerdface | 2025-09-29 05:09:31+00:00
Last year I had the entirety of my left hippocampus and amygdala removed (yes, seriously). And yet I still work in a highly cognitive area of software engineering as a senior engineer. Has my short term memory gone to hell? Wait, what was this post about again? I joke.

Many, many years ago when I was in college studying computer science I spent an extraordinary amount of time studying holistic learning techniques to help aid in my exams. The next year I was in a coma. Shortly thereafter, I swung back fighting, making sure the universe knew it didn’t have the upper hand. I won.

So there’s several things here. There are people like yourself, battling this kind of thing. Don’t feel like you’re alone. Secondly there are approaches to help improve things, whether it be holistic learning, repetition, or both. And finally, tell the universe to go screw itself, otherwise you’re giving it permission to win.

Good luck.
by hinkley | 2025-09-29 05:10:04+00:00
Older versions of node especially had problems resolving mutual secondary dependencies efficiently, though all versions struggle to an extent. Sometimes you have to declare a dependency at the top level in order to force the most common one to be installed at the root, so the less common one gets installed in all of the places it is needed rather than sharing the single one at the root.

The likelihood you ever get back to zero copies of that module are fairly low, unless it has become persona non grata for some reason (leftpad). So it's easy to forget to back out the disambiguation entry at the top level. Especially if git blame doesn't make it dead apparent (see also people manually adding entries in non-alphabetic order so that the next 'npm install --save' rearranges five lines).
by bdcravens | 2025-09-29 05:11:05+00:00
It's touched on here:

> Unlike with Ground, which will send a driver out for the day to do pickups/deliveries, Express drivers typically have to work around time-committed packages, meeting one or a few loop deadlines for the day, doing on-call pickups, and making a certain number of required delivery attempts.

Various Express services have very hard deadlines (For example, Fedex 2nd Day AM is 10:30AM), whereas Ground/Home Delivery can be delivered at any time during it's commitment date and still be on-time. If a package is late by even a minute then the shipper is entitled to a full refund (with exceptions for things like weather), so the Express side doesn't want Ground slowing it down (plus they were two different organizations at one point, and are still pretty siloed).

(I'm the lead developer for Refund Retriever, and our primary line of business is auditing Fedex/UPS for those late refunds)
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-29 05:11:28+00:00
No, my point is happiness is a choice.

There is no sociopolitical statement, no call-to-arms, no pontification as to the measure of one's life, no generational implications. There is an existential consideration, but not of the nature your post implies.

Happiness is an individual choice, available to us all at any time.

Full stop.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 05:13:38+00:00
> Sequence[SupportsFloat] | Mapping[int,SupportsFloat]

This is really just the same mistake as the original expanding union, but with overly narrow abstract types instead of overly narrow concrete types. If it relies on “we can use indexing with an int and get out something whose type we don’t care about”, then its a Protocol with the following method:

def __getitem__(self, i: int, /) -> Any: ...

More generally, even if there is a specific output type when indexing, or the output type of indexing can vary but in a way that impacts the output or other input types of the function, it is a protocol with a type parameter T and this method:

def __getitem__(self, i: int, /) -> T: ...

It doesn’t need to be union of all possible concrete and/or abstract types that happen to satisfy that protocol, because it can be expressed succinctly and accurately in a single Protocol.
by musebox35 | 2025-09-29 05:14:10+00:00
I found the book from David Mackay on Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms to be well written and easy to follow. Plus it is freely available from his website: https://www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/book.pdf

It goes through fundamentals of Bayesian ideas in the context of applications in communication and machine learning problems. I find his explanations uncluttered.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 05:16:16+00:00
> So the type is anything that implements the index function ([], or __getitem__), I thnink that's a Sequence

Sequence involves more than just __getitem__ with an int index, so if it really is anything int indexable, a lighter protocol with just that method will be more accurate, both ar conveying intent and at avoiding needing to evolve into an odd union type because you have something that a satisfies the function’s needs but not the originally-defined type.