MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pietro72ohboy | 2025-10-15 10:55:51+00:00
The GNU stuff was precisely what FSF managed to do. They didn't manage to do more because they had a fraction of the resources large corporations had. People wanting more just doesn't create more by itself, they were reliant on our contributions and we failed them.

Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
by ninkendo | 2025-10-15 10:55:57+00:00
When it came out, my first thought was that if was a theme on gnome-look.org or something back in the day, I would’ve totally installed it on my Linux desktop, and would’ve thought it looked really kewl. It’s nice in that “gee whiz” kinda way, like back when compiz was in vogue and there were wobbly windows that would burst into flame when you closed them. Liquid Glass would’ve felt right at home.

But stuff like that feels dated quickly, and nowadays I can understand the drive to have less distracting UI elements. I still don’t hate it but I understand those who do.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-15 10:56:06+00:00
Sure but some areas are better than others - east coast is preferable because it's more continuous than west coast even though wind is stronger (and gustier) on west coast.

It's even more dramatic between countries, I saw in my previous job that for e.g. a country like India with monsoon season typically curtails it's turbines for a large part of the year.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-15 10:56:09+00:00
I labeled the statement insane not the person. It's also a common slang to call an opinion insane without it being taken to a level of seriousness that you implied.

Given two sets of data: The statistics and your anecdotal evidence.

The probability of anecdotal evidence being correct must be lower than than the anecdotal evidence being incorrect when it conflicts with the statistics since the statistics come from anecdotal evidence.

Therefore, all other things being equal, if you are presented with data that conflicts with your anecdotal evidence the data has the higher probability of being correct.
by p_l | 2025-10-15 10:56:31+00:00
Actual execution of curtailment depends on mechanism of individual turbine and various support equipment at provider.

Essentially the "electricity market" is putting out orders for increasing or decreasing production (plus various auxilliary services, like frequency stabilisation), and production companies use often pretty complex mechanisms to both bid and trade them dynamically. It goes from somewhat large portions traded day ahead, to even minute by minute adjustments, and the actual pricing/trading etc. involves details like "how fast can you deliver/reduce the energy".

Some double-fed generator turbines carefully manage waveforms generated into excitation coils to very dynamically adjust power flows, some use permanent magnets and pretty beefy inverters. Some can even provide dynamic reactive sinks in case of big load falling off the grid.
by piva00 | 2025-10-15 10:56:51+00:00
It's the same breed of people, bred from the same system, not literally the same people but the people following on the footsteps. Greed is the constant.

Hell, it has been going much longer than only 40 years ago, on "In Praise of Idleness" Bertrand Russell talked about how industrialisation with its automation should be helping workers to work less 90 years ago.
by cedilla | 2025-10-15 10:57:01+00:00
Why wouldn't you build wind turbines in Southern Germany? "Generally less wind" does not mean "wind power is infeasible", which it is absolutely not. There are fewer good spots, but that's why, say, the state of Bavaria aims for less than one fifth of the total capacity than the state of Lower Saxony, despite being almost twice as large.

It's also not "aggressively" subsidised at all. It's actually about 0.3 cents per kWh actually produced, which is basically nothing compared to fossil power subsidies (8.6 cents per kWh using gas, or 20 cents per kWh using coal), and let's not even start talking about nuclear power (34 cents per kWh)

Wind power is so cheap compared to fossil and even a bit cheaper than solar, so maybe Germany should start expand it agrresively.
by Angostura | 2025-10-15 10:57:05+00:00
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.

Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
by barrkel | 2025-10-15 10:57:07+00:00
It all sounds somewhat impressive (300k lines written and maintained by AI) but it's hard to judge how well the experience transfers without seeing the code and understanding the feature set.

For example, I have some code which is a series of integrations with APIs and some data entry and web UI controls. AI does a great job, it's all pretty shallow. The more known the APIs, the better able AI is to fly through that stuff.

I have other code which is well factored and a single class does a single thing and AI can make changes just fine.

I have another chunk of code, a query language, with a tokenizer, parser, syntax tree, some optimizations, and it eventually constructs SQL. Making changes requires a lot of thought from multiple angles and I could not safely give a vague prompt and expect good results. Common patterns need to fall into optimized paths, and new constructs need consideration about how they're going to perform, and how their syntax is going to interact with other syntax. You need awareness not just of the language but also the schema and how the database optimizes based on the data distribution. AI can tinker around the edges but I can't trust it to make any interesting changes.
by arghwhat | 2025-10-15 10:57:19+00:00
Sorry, being in effect banned from a country (and possibly anyone it has an active extradition agreement with, which is unrelated to EU membership) is a big deal.

Imagine being a US citizen, and suddenly being banned from Texas and Utah. It's not like you were planning on visiting those, right? Just remember to never accidentally take interstate 10, 15, 20, 40, 70 or 80 when driving around, that can't be too hard.

Suggesting it is okay to have arbitrary freedoms taken away because "you wouldn't use it anyway" is a very slippery slope. Who needs privacy and free spech, not like you want to badmouth the eternal supreme leader anyway.
by orloffm | 2025-10-15 10:57:22+00:00
That's because Russia/Ukraine/Belarus are heavily on Telegram, everything is there, all blogs, chats, memes, friends etc. since the US sites are almost-blocked and the Russian ones (VK, RuTube etc.) have been managed down to complete unusability. They couldn't afford losing the key blogs because of this law since Russia is heavily pushing Max messenger and there was a chance that it would be the only permitted thing.
by fidotron | 2025-10-15 10:57:46+00:00
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.

It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
by ghusto | 2025-10-15 10:58:46+00:00
Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines?

I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
by petercooper | 2025-10-15 10:59:16+00:00
They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.

I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
by zyber | 2025-10-15 10:59:56+00:00
For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production). I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])

[0] https://ngenic.se/en/tune/
by wongarsu | 2025-10-15 11:00:55+00:00
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.

The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-15 11:00:56+00:00
People always claim statistics are inaccurate when the statistics contradict their subjective experience or sincerely held belief.

One proxy for crime statistics is homicide. Any other stat can be juked, but homicide cannot because bodies stink. To someone who was insisting to me that the UK crime rate has increased over time, I pointed out that it was possible, but unlikely. Homicide is at a multi decade low in absolute numbers, and much lower in per capita numbers. That’s likely to be correlated with violent crime.

So in the case of the UK both homicide and violent crime have followed a gentle downwards trend line, and we can trust the first line completely. Therefore, the second is likely to be true.

Did it convince the guy I explained this to? No it did not. “You don’t live in a rough area like I do”. Ok then.
by jopsen | 2025-10-15 11:00:57+00:00
A quick search points to: https://tamarindo.global/insight/analysis/uk-storage-need-in...

Which claims curtailment is about 10%

That's not nothing, but could also just be the cost of doing business. If you stop building when curtailment occurs at peak wind, you'll have less cheap energy when wind isn't at peak.
by nashashmi | 2025-10-15 11:01:09+00:00
Imagine if wind slowed down all across the country because of wind turbines. The long term effects would be less soil erosion and less mountain erosion and water turbulence. What would the short term effects be? Bird populations will find it more difficult to travel long distance with fewer winds? Temperatures would sore in some places while dropping in other places? Pollution will become more stationary instead of being distributed and diluted?

What is the critical point of build out that would have such visible effects?
by jasonvorhe | 2025-10-15 11:02:18+00:00
hope this helps:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-15 11:02:48+00:00
This is called re-dispatch. The market is setup up to treat Britain like a copper plate but the grid is limited north-south.

The solutions are:

1. Divide the grid into two zones along the bottleneck. Then no redispatch is needed and building more capacity in the south is worth it since the prices will go up.

2. Expand the transmission grid capacity to remove the bottleneck therefore removing the need for re-dispatch.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-15 11:03:00+00:00
The phone size is too limiting for a lot of work, and since most work involves writing in some form, it's a pain in the ass.

A lot of the things you listed are utilities, which I'd agree the phone is great for. If any of the things you've listed are a key feature of your job, for you it works. For the endless office hordes who write emails, code, documents etc. for a living, their only using a smartphone would suggest their job is largely superfluous to me.

A tablet is a happy medium, and a tablet with connectable keyboard is perfect. I wish VS Code (the full version) worked on an iPad. It's that extra bit of real estate.
by delichon | 2025-10-15 11:03:02+00:00
My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness. We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence. Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.
by formerly_proven | 2025-10-15 11:03:07+00:00
Binaries are memory-mapped, there is no guarantee for code to be resident. Modifying a running binary hence can cause a mixture of code to be paged into a running application. Which is why unix traditionally has a special "non-advisory" file locking for mapped binaries, which tries to give you an ETXTBSY error. This is nowhere near fool-proof though, e.g. Linux stopped doing this for mapped .so files, it probably doesn't work on NFS etc.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-15 11:03:59+00:00
> Who opposes Power lines?

A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].

> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.

That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...

[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
by c0n5pir4cy | 2025-10-15 11:04:08+00:00
A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).

Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
by 3D30497420 | 2025-10-15 11:04:40+00:00
I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.

Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
by nabla9 | 2025-10-15 11:04:51+00:00
Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.

> Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step. From there, the FSF and Savoye aim to reverse-engineer and replace the remaining nonfree software. Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
by sourdoughness | 2025-10-15 11:05:07+00:00
We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).

The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.

It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
by radu_floricica | 2025-10-15 11:06:26+00:00
You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.

You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.

Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
by arghwhat | 2025-10-15 11:06:41+00:00
It is extremely relevant an entity granted powers by their sovereign governemnt is threatening that the next legally mandated escalation should they not comply with their unrealistic demands is imprisonment. And yes, ending up in jail is a realistic outcome when their laws dictate it, so if it goes that far you are now playing the floor is lava but instead of lava it's nations with UK extradition agreements.
by RIMR | 2025-10-15 11:06:48+00:00
Why partner with postmarketOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or CalyxOS? This would be an open source initiative that contributors from any of those projects to add to. The results could be used by any of the aforementioned distributions, and more. It might even make running vanilla Linux on our exiting smartphones viable.

Why partner with Fairphone and Pine64? They already have open hardware, and require zero reverse engineering to get a fully open solution working. In a world with thousands of Fairphones and Pinephones, and billions of corporate smartphones, replacing the proprietary software needed to run those billions of corporate smartphones is a hell of a win for software freedom.

And are you really expecting the argument "open source loses" to be a real argument against a project by the Free Software Foundation? This is like asking a cancer charity why they don't endorse your preferred brand of cigarettes.

What the FSF is doing here isn't about maximizing your experience with your preferred custom ROM, it is about tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users from fully owning the hardware they purchased. It fits perfectly with the FSF's goals.
by coldtea | 2025-10-15 11:06:51+00:00
>What exactly is the point you are making?

1- That "cancer/strokes/heart problems" happens is hardly news, despite "killing more people" than other things reported. Especially since almost everybody old enough eventually suffers such health problems.

2- Despite their little newsorthiness, they're still covered in a big way, and there are huge industries around their awareness.

3- Homicide is inherently more newsworthy than "people get heart attacks". And even more important to cover where those crimes happen disproportionately compared to other comparable countries.

> Until its less of a problem?

As if the problem with people being fat is that there's not enough reporting of them being fat?
by ginko | 2025-10-15 11:07:53+00:00
Package managers are the only sane way to install software. Even Windows + Mac OS somewhat came to realize this (even though their implementations are terrible compared to what we have in Linux land).

It's shocking that people disagree with this. Do you really want to go back to the days where you had to download installers from the internet or copy-paste random 'curl | sudo sh' lines?

Running software shouldn't even have the file permissions to change anything about its own installation.
by skydhash | 2025-10-15 11:08:50+00:00
That’s a very poetic description. Mine is simpler. It’s a generator. You train it to give it the parameters (weights) of the formula thag generate stuff (the formula is known). Then you give it some input data, and it will gives you an output.

Both the weights and the formula is known. But the weight are meaningless in a human fashion. This is unlike traditional software where everything from encoding (the meaning of the bits) to how the state machine (the cpu) was codified by humans.

The only ways to fix it (somewhat) is to come up with better training data (hopeless), a better formula, or tacking something on top to smooth the worst errors (kinda hopeless).
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-10-15 11:09:35+00:00
No - I have visited two universities in the past month in France and each of them has its own Wi-Fi logins and passwords. And then one more a few months ago in Poland.

AHHHH - I just called a friend of mine at one of the French schools. He told me that this is for researchers only and thsi is why I was given another (permanent) access.

I stand corrected and I apologize. This is actually awesome. Working in the field, this is probably one of the most interesting deployments I have seen over many years and I will have a close look at it now.
by k33l0r | 2025-10-15 11:09:49+00:00
Electricity contracts with 1-hour pricing are already pretty popular at least in Finland, even for consumers. I myself have one.

Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...

You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-10-15 11:10:15+00:00
> Probably the simplest solution is just to not pay for curtailment. If you build your wind farm in Scotland then you just have to accept that you aren't connecting it to an "infinite demand" grid.

That requires splitting the market into two zones along the bottleneck. Like for example Sweden has done. Then those wind turbines won't be bid into the market when the cross zone transmission capacity is maxed out.

You can imagine how palatable the politicians finds' it to split off Scotland to be its own market zone with vastly cheaper electricity.
by csande17 | 2025-10-15 11:10:22+00:00
I agree that it's a tough situation. "The type system guarantees memory safety" is an extremely important pillar of Rust's identity. They kind of have to portray all soundness issues as "more compiler bugs than something broken in the language itself" (see eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21930599 which references a GitHub label that AIUI would've included the trait coherence thing at the time) to keep making that claim. It is a core part of the marketing strategy.