MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by positron26 | 2025-10-06 01:07:12+00:00
UPS, check. Any kind of reasonable fire extinguisher, nah.

A Kakao datacenter fire took the de-facto national chat app offline not too many years ago. Imagine operating a service that was nearly ubiquitous in the state of California and not being able to survive one datacenter outage.

After reading the Phrack article, I don't know what to suspect, the typical IT disaster preparedness or the operators turning off the fire suppression main and ordering anyone in the room to evacuate to give a little UPS fire enough time to start going cabinet to cabinet.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-06 01:07:37+00:00
Another possibility is retrofitting the coal plant with a thermal battery.

https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy

> 3) (medium term) The world-conquering dream is for our PV-based steam to replace fossil-generated steam at conventional power plants. That will let us feed electricity back into the grid using otherwise stranded generating assets (e.g. a coal plant). You might see this as a way to combine an existing, uncompetitive coal plant with thermal energy storage and captive renewables to give it economics more similar to a natural gas power plant.

See also: "Thermal Energy Storage in Dirt for Repowering Decommissioned Coal Plants" (although I believe this assumes the storage is using power from the grid):

https://findingspress.org/article/141340-thermal-energy-stor...
by simonw | 2025-10-06 01:09:53+00:00
Hard to say. Sam wrote that on June 10th this year: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

GPT-5 came out on 7th August.

Assuming the 0.34 value was accurate in the GPT-4o era, is the number today still in the same ballpark or is it wildly different?
by mikewarot | 2025-10-06 01:09:58+00:00
Just yesterday I was listening to a story about a language that was meant to convey multiple viewpoint with the same writing by simply looking at it from different angles. I referenced ambigrams as a possible starting point for actually doing it.

Quite the coincidence.

If someone actually pulled it off, you could test the Sapir Whorf hypothesis rather easily.
by only-one1701 | 2025-10-06 01:10:46+00:00
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. The surveillance here isn't Palinitr; it's TikTok. And the kids love TikTok.

Same goes for pissing off their elders -- as the comment above said, it's about their peers, not society at large, who matter (as it is for all of us).
by phire | 2025-10-06 01:10:50+00:00
> A Haskell analysis showed that integer workloads (the most common in normal computing) saw some 4.8w out of 22.1w dedicated to the decoder.

You are mixing studies, the Haskell paper only looked at total core paper (and checked how it was impacted by algorithms). It was this [1] study that provided the 4.8w out of 22.1w number.

And while it's an interesting number, it says nothing about the overhead of decoding x86. They chose to label that component "instruction decoder" but really they were measuring the whole process of fetching instructions from anywhere other than the μop cache.

That 4.8w number includes the branch predictor, the L1 instruction cache, potentially TLB misses and instruction fetch from L2/L3. And depending on the details of their regression analysis, it might also include things after instruction decoding, like register renaming and move elimination. Given that they show the L1 data cache as using 3.8w, it's entirely possible that the L1 instruction cache actually makes up most of the 4.8w number.

So we really can't use this paper to say anything about the overhead of decoding x86, because that's not what it's measuring.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool...
by kragen | 2025-10-06 01:12:29+00:00
> Don't misunderstand us. We at Quantum have a great deal of respect for Unix. It was a major force in moving operating systems out of the 60's and into the 70's. QNX however, was designed in the 80's and will be a driving force of the 90's. Over 20,000 systems have been sold since 1982.

Things they weren't anticipating included GNU, the internet, Microsoft Windows, third-party development, the Windows applications barrier to entry, the World-Wide Web, shareware, BBSes, VARs, and the free-software movement. They didn't understand how operating systems were a winner-take-all game, so pricing your OS at hundreds of dollars was a losing strategy.

But it was 01986, so who could blame them? Their 01987 ad does try to reach out to VARs.

Still, they were certainly aware of Unix, and you'd think that would mean they were aware of uucp. They just didn't anticipate its significance. Again, though, who did?

They also don't seem to have appreciated the importance of GUIs until version 2.0 in 01987, despite the popularity of the Macintosh, the "Jackintosh" Atari ST, and GEOS on the C64. The article says that the "Photon" GUI everyone remembers wasn't until QNX 4.1 in 01994.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-06 01:12:31+00:00
#1 is that they redid all the routes. v4 routes don't carry to v6, it's a separate network.

The other things you're naming aren't L3. But they're still different for v6 because of the split network.

There's a lot of other stuff that makes it not a seamless cutover. Randomly-assigned addressed, ULAs, no NAT by default, and all the other v6 extensions.

What they could've done (and maybe will do) instead is just make a new thing with a larger address field but keep the rest the same.
by lolc | 2025-10-06 01:12:55+00:00
The weird thing to me is how investors can hold shares and vote against this outrageous compensation. Because the valuation of Tesla is tied to the belief in a glorious future as told by the main character. Either you believe in that future and hodl, or you got the hell out yesterday. Is what I would assume.

The letter says that these investors have no confidence in how the show is run. Why haven't they sold? What value do they see?
by sneak | 2025-10-06 01:13:43+00:00
Yeah, there's a trend of people who don't actually believe in software freedoms releasing a subset of their proprietary software under free software licenses and pretending.

It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code.

Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights.

Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1].

It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software.

[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
by plantain | 2025-10-06 01:15:58+00:00
This is such a total failure of state capacity.

Why can the government or industry not build solar power at an industrial scale, and then bring it to people's homes via the existing infrastructure at a price that makes this kind of micro-scale setup completely uneconomical?

It's bad enough when we have to put solar panels on actual roofs to reduce electricity bills. This is just absurd. Where are the economies of scale? Why are individuals having to take responsibility for their own energy generation? Are we doing our own sewer and water supplies next?
by rglullis | 2025-10-06 01:16:09+00:00
> How is that better?

Things elsewhere are bad, but the EU is worse because it lies to people about the efficacy of its regulations and the whole apparatus only exist to make lawmakers and lobbyists a justification for their existence.

Let's stop pretending that the EU has done anything more than political theater.

> What do you suggest instead?

Break apart any company that has more than 150 employees (by employee, also count individuals working more than 50% of the time to the same company): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641
by system2 | 2025-10-06 01:17:08+00:00
Dull electronics, because of the convenience factor. Nobody wants to carry a brick anymore, and instead of a huge CRT monitor, we can have 4-6 thin displays for the same weight. Also, no need to buy a Walkman or cassettes because streaming is convenient. This is the natural evolution of tech, serving humans to live more conveniently. Nostalgic? Yes. Desirable? No.

There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
by Paracompact | 2025-10-06 01:17:19+00:00
> And humanities should indeed relate to the experience of humans. Normal humans. Because that's why it's humanities. If normal, well-read and educated humans can't do anything with it then it's a pathological version of it ... The more real knowledge there is in a field, the more informal and conversational and relaxed the researchers tend to present it. While those in insecure fields tend to use lots of jargon to say even simple things.

Yeah, that's another point of it that gets me: What actually imparts on me the understanding of these cultural or literary universals has never been the impenetrable literary analysis, but instead the media itself, which is accessible to much wider audiences and doesn't reek of sectarian baggage. (Such rampant sectarianism is itself evidence against the notion that literary humanities represent a rigorous discipline rather than an insular art form.)

But anyway, not all humanities are like this, granted. I'm usually quite impressed with the level of meticulousness that archival and linguistics humanities bring to the table. It feels like a lot of "technical" classical domains of study had their lunch eaten in the modern day when the breadth and accessibility of STEM subjects exploded. I can see an overlap between people who would enjoy studying Latin and those who would enjoy Haskell...
by blackjack_ | 2025-10-06 01:18:07+00:00
Yeah so depends on your cost per kWh, and usage time versus production time. My 800W of balcony panels can theoretically produce 3-4 kWh per day (they peak at about 550w of actual production), but they generally produce a lot less than that. This is because my usage during production time is both less than that and also very spiky (my power usage is often 0w or 100-200w base load, with 2kw spikes as the compressor in the refrigerator kicks on, or some other device kicks on). So the savings for me isn't 3 years payoff, it's probably more like 6. But yes, these panels will product for 25-30 years. So yeah, they can pay for themselves very quickly depending on your usage patterns.

I'm in the US, and over here we also have some other complicating factors (here we have 2 sets of breakers that are 180 degrees out of phase and so the solar panels can only feed into one half of the breakers without extra complications. I only sort of understand this, someone else can explain better), so solar panels plugged into the balcony that don't backfeed straight to the grid can only cover a subset of the usage. In Germany you have 240v power so I would assume you would hit payoff very quickly.
by blibble | 2025-10-06 01:18:49+00:00
the "AI" industry have identified that energy usage is going to be used as a stick to beat them with

if I was altman then I'd release a few small numbers to try and get influencers talking about "how little energy chatgpt uses"

and he can never be accused of lying, as without any methodology as to how it was calculated it's unverifiable and completely meaningless

win-win!
by RhysU | 2025-10-06 01:18:54+00:00
If I gamble by joining a startup, I am trying to provide something of value to someone. Otherwise, my startup will fail. The bet is not societally zero sum in expectation. Long odds, sure, but possibly value creating.

If I gamble on a sporting event, the outcome of the sporting event does not change. Someone wins. Someone loses. No value created. The outcome is societally zero sum in expectation.
by ares623 | 2025-10-06 01:19:19+00:00
the infrastructure needs to go somewhere. And that somewhere needs to have access to abundant water and electricity. It just so happens those are things humans need too.

Before GenAI we were on our way to optimizing this, at least to the level where the general public can turn a blind eye. It was to the point where the companies would brag about how much efficient they are. Now all that progress is gone, and we're accelerating backwards. Maybe that was all a lie too. But then who's to say the current numbers are a lie too to make the pill easier to swallow.
by AppleBananaPie | 2025-10-06 01:20:32+00:00
A ton of people have mine and no one has ever given anyone shit about it.

It's mostly just 'yooooo I didn't realize you were near X' or 'how was Y? I saw it when checking where my buddy was'

Dunno maybe someone's has been messing with me all these years and I'm oblivious
by dse1982 | 2025-10-06 01:21:05+00:00
Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).

Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:

Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.

If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.

And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)

I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.

Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.

Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.
by schrodinger | 2025-10-06 01:21:36+00:00
I never thought too much about what you just said — specifically about web interfaces and their single-window nature — but now that you mention it, a lot has changed as a direct result.

I think of an app like Photoshop, and it had one window for each image you had open, and then floating toolbars, another window for layers, etc. You could really organize your workspace and have a sense of "mise en place" in a way that doesn't really exist anymore.

Now every application is essentially a 16:9 rectangle squeezed into a tab. The web's enabled some amazing things, but not at zero cost…

Something's lost but something's gained, in living every day.
by Razengan | 2025-10-06 01:22:18+00:00
Yeah I also have felt it weird and anachronistic that computer GUIs STARTED with a windows-based system, in an era of small screens, limited colors, limited resolution, and limited user expertise!

Working with such few resources, an iPad-like fullscreen UI would have made more sense and been more efficient.

Companies just wanted to show off I guess.
by Gunax | 2025-10-06 01:22:43+00:00
I just don't think those are good analogies.

For one, we are just discussing financial ruin. Not deaths by guns or cars. And it does not impact you. Or else you would need to just regulate poor spending habits. At worse.

I think in principle just about everyone agrees in freedom and liberty where it does not affect society. We usually disagree just about what constitutes 'affecting others'.
Show HN: XedOut (A Safari Extension filter for X.com)
by govmaspy | 2025-10-06 01:22:59+00:00
The background for this is that I'm a pretty frequent X-user like I think most people here might be. I use X on safari because I think it reduces my engagement. During the lead up to the 2024 election I was getting spammed with political posts. And also I noticed the TikTokification of the website where they were pushing more and more short-form content, which I hear is still a problem. So the extension includes three things for people: 1. Filter ads (it does this in a dumb way right for now) 2. Filter videos (this has been the killer feature for me, getting rid of all the short-form video content) 3. Custom LLM filter (I've added the ability to write a custom prompt and add an OpenAI key, and it'll run it against GPT-4 mini. You might quickly hit your request per minute, so I suggest putting some money in your OpenAI key) There's was a bit of trickiness with the way Safari extensions allow network requests vs. direct Chrome extensions. The actual repo is a little messy - I'm just putting the Xcode project which I converted from a Chrome extension and did a little bit of work to get this working in Safari. I think there's lots of interesting ways this could go if anyone wanted to encourage me to add to it. But yeah, just putting it out there to see if there's any other like-minded people who don't want their timelines filled with slop.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-06 01:23:33+00:00
woah this is my first time hearing about dns64, this seems really fascinating.

I might sound naive but why aren't we moving towards ipv6 if there is already a service which can make migrations easy I suppose for the end customer.

It seems that it is easy for a ipv6 client to connect to ipv4 lets say by using dns64 but it seems that the same isn't true for vice versa?

Now I am genuinely uncertain but Couldn't something like this be possible lets say by having both ipv4 and ipv6 running and the ipv4 could be through some tunneling software like serveo.net or the alikes and map-E seems to allow them to coexist too

I mean it seems that cloudflare warp can do this too if you want to connect to ipv6 and you have ipv4 but that adds a level of trust into cloudflare and etc. but still, do the benefits of ipv6 over ipv4 justify the migration of sorts or would these two things always coexist is a question/mystery

Like.. I searched the benefits and it seems that the truly great benefit is that everyone can get a ipv6 because of its higher size (basically limitless ipv6) as compared to ipv4 which are limited/exhausted right now.

IPSec seems to be another benefit which was optional and complex in ipv4 and its mandatory in ipv6 and it seems really nice to have encryption and so much more at a packet level.

What is the blocker? Like, as a server, do I really ever need a ipv4 if I have a ipv6 server, I think I might need it if I want everyone to view my website or etc. things on my server if their devices could be ipv4 and they can't access my ipv6 website I think but still aren't there any mitigations around it or sorts, I am kinda curious.
by csb6 | 2025-10-06 01:24:14+00:00
Running a YouTube channel is not a viable way to make a living unless you have an existing audience or get blessed by the algorithm. There is an oversupply of people making video content, and only a small portion of them succeed. Plus you are at the mercy of YouTube’s frequently changing ad revenue terms (the “Ad-pocaplyse”) and opaque demonetization/takedown rules.
by feoren | 2025-10-06 01:24:15+00:00
I have been coding in C# for 16 years and I have no idea what you mean by "hidden indirection and runtime magic". Maybe it's just invisible to me at this point, but GC is literally the only "invisible magic" I can think of that's core to the language. And I agree that college-level OOP principles are an anti-pattern; stop doing them. C# does not force you to do that at all, except very lightly in some frameworks where you extend a Controller class if you have to (annoying but avoidable). Other than that, I have not used class inheritance a single time in years, and 98% of my classes and structs are immutable. Just don't write bad code; the language doesn't force you to su all.
by jonahx | 2025-10-06 01:26:14+00:00
Yes, provocation is a viable strategy for clicks and audience-building, but few people are attempting that, and among those who do it's not the only strategy.

Everywhere else -- in corporate America, on Facebook, at churches and family gatherings, even with many friends -- conformity is still the norm, and there are more landmine topics than ever.

Social cooling is real.
by DowsingSpoon | 2025-10-06 01:26:23+00:00
RISC vs CISC is nonsense.

Pre-RISC CPU designs were pragmatic responses to the design constraints of their time. (expensive memory, poor compilers)

RISC was a pragmatic response to the design constraints of its time. (memory becomes less expensive, transistor budgets are tight, and compilers are a little better)

Post-RISC designs of today are, also, only pragmatic responses to the design constraints of today. Those constraints are different than they were in the 80s and 90s.

The supposed dichotomy is just utter horseshit. It was invented as a marketing campaign to sell CPUs. It was canonized by the most popular text books being written by /Team RISC/.

I wish, as an industry, we’d just get over it, move on, and stop talking about it so much.
by jcheng | 2025-10-06 01:27:06+00:00
uv add google-genai uv run scripts/run_benchmarks.py --models google/gemini-2.5-pro --formats markdown_kv --limit 100

And add GOOGLE_API_KEY=<your-key-here> to a file called .env in the repo root.

Unfortunately I started getting "quota exceeded" almost immediately, but it did give 6/6 correct answers before it crapped out.
by commandersaki | 2025-10-06 01:27:25+00:00
Ah yes liberal fantasy.

His promises:

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/trump-promi...

- https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/donald-trumps... (see under LGBTIQ issues)

I'm not saying it is the only reason, but it is a big reason.