MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2025-10-06 04:46:35+00:00
Larry Ellison received 138.6 M$? Wow, that might fill up his piggy bank right next to his, let's see... ~400 billion dollars and ~300 billion dollars of stock appreciation based compensation since 2021. That is almost, gonna need to bring out the calculator for numbers this small... 0.04% of his compensation.

Can you explain how this is not, as I said: "primarily in the form of their own stock appreciation"? Also crickets on how your interpretation means that sole proprietorships and fully owned businesses are not being compensated for their work. The only reason it looks like such compensation is uncommon is because executive teams in long-standing companies that have long since lost their founders, common of publicly traded companies, infrequently have enough prior stake to justify such forms of compensation which is absolutely not the case for Elon Musk who currently owns 1/8 of Tesla's growth and profits.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-06 04:47:42+00:00
Using a different codec can improve call-carrying capacity of any compatible link, for sure. But that's wiggling a different variable: Packetization-vs-not is a whole different game than g.711u vs g.723 is.

And I agree, completely: There's very good reasons for packet-switched networks having won over TDM technologies like PRI, with IP to tie it altogether. What we've arrived at is beautifully generic in that the packets themselves don't care at all about what combination of lower layers were used to get them from A to B. However it gets there, it's just IP. That's really neat.

Latency-wise, I'm a little torn: With the latency involved in a normal phone call on my normal cell phone today, I find that I "talk over" people on phone calls more than I did decades ago in the TDM days. The pacing is very different than it was.

Sometimes, when the echo cancellation fails at some level, I can hear myself echo from the far end of a call.

That echo is annoying, but I mention it because it is something that lets me hear the latency of the call. It's often on the order of 500ms RTT...which is quite a lot. We never had latency like that in the TDM days for domestic calls.

(Historically, in TDM world: The voice data always arrived at the right time and there was also always a place to put it at the right time. It was real-time instead of best-effort, so there just wasn't any utility to having any large buffers along the way: The timing was either resolutely correct or it didn't work at all. Things are a lot mushier today.)
by aiisthefiture | 2025-10-06 04:49:05+00:00
This is the type of statement that often comes from pro China people. Because the quality of BYD in China is lower than outside of China, making it more propaganda than truth.

Edit: Sigh. I wish people would actually travel to China and try a BYD and then go to Australia and try BYD. it’s like 2 different cars. The China BYD is trash. BYD in Australia is actually quite nice and feels like really good value.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-06 04:51:07+00:00
I wanted to update some paperwork to add my wife as a beneficiary to some accounts. I go to the bank in person and they tell me “call this number, they can add the beneficiary”. I call the number and wait on hold for 30 minutes and then the agent tells me that they will send me an email to update the beneficiary. I get an email over 24 hours later with a PDF THAT I HAVE TO PRINT OUT AND SIGN and then scan and send back to the email. I do that, but then I get another email back saying that there is another form I have to print and sign.

This is the state of banking in Canada. God forbid they just put a text box on the banking web app where I can put in my beneficiary.

Not to mention our entire health care system still runs on fax!

It blows my mind that we have some of the smartest and well educated people in the world with some of the highest gdp per capita in the world and we cannot figure out how to get rid of paper documents. You should be issued a federal digital ID at birth which is attested through a chain of trust back to the federal government. Everything related to the government should be tied back to that ID.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 04:51:51+00:00
As I understand it, their market is dependent on it. They can't store electrical energy, only thermal energy, and their system is designed to store it at fairly high temperatures (they don't say explicitly, but I'm guessing 800° and up from the problems they report having to solve) which you can avoid doing if you're just targeting the process heat market. So turning their stored heat back into electrical energy is necessary for their process to make sense, and that requires a heat engine, such as a steam turbine.

But utility-scale steam circuits cost more per watt than solar panels, and much more than batteries, the electrochemical kind.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-06 04:51:51+00:00
Of course you'd encrypt the data before uploading it to a third party, but there's no reason why that third party should be under control of a foreign government. South Korea has more than one data center they can store data inside of, there's no need to trust other governments sigh every byte of data you've gathered, even if there are no known backdoors or flaws in your encryption mechanism (which I'm sure some governments have been looking into for decades).
by kragen | 2025-10-06 04:53:09+00:00
That could start happening if Germany's electrical energy consumption were to grow 100× or so, yeah. That might sound like I'm being sarcastic, but no, cheaper forms of energy tend to lead to more energy usage, and solar energy is cheaper, so we might see a lot more energy usage. But we're talking about problems we'll have in 20 years after we've solved global warming.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-06 04:53:40+00:00
There's a lot of software involved in GPUs, and NVIDIA's winning strategy has been that the software is great. They maintained a stable ecosystem across most of their consumer and workstation/server stack for many years before crypto, AI and GPU-focused HPC really blew up. AMD has generally better hardware but poor enough software that "fine wine" is a thing (ie the software takes many years post-hardware-launch to actually properly utilize the hardware). For example, they only recently got around to making AI libraries usable on the pre-covid 5700XT.

NVIDIA basically owns the market because of the stability of the CUDA ecosystem. So, I think it might be fair to call them an AI company, though I definitely wouldn't call them just a hardware maker.
by Animats | 2025-10-06 04:54:02+00:00
Not that wrong.

I went through Stanford CS when those guys were in charge. It was starting to become clear that the emperor had no clothes, but most of the CS faculty was unwilling to admit it. It was really discouraging. Peak hype was in "The fifth generation: artificial intelligence and Japan's computer challenge to the world" (1983), by Feigenbaum. (Japan at one point in the 1980s had an AI program which attempted to build hardware to run Prolog fast.)

Trying to use expert systems for medicine lent an appearance of importance to something that might work for auto repair manuals. It's mostly a mechanization of trouble-shooting charts. It's not totally useless, but you get out pretty much what you carefully put in.
by peterpeppers | 2025-10-06 04:54:06+00:00
No.

Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.

Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.

Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.

Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.

Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.

Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
by colonial | 2025-10-06 04:54:59+00:00
> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV

Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
by danielepelleri | 2025-10-06 04:55:31+00:00
I tried the same thing, and that’s why I tried using mcp-orchestro—to have a Trello-style board with a Scrum Master that supports Claude Code so it doesn’t miss anything and works better with its sub-agents, memory, and to-do list. If u have time I have publish open source the project here orchestro.org
by D-Machine | 2025-10-06 04:55:36+00:00
This is too metaphorical, but, still, basically correct. Nice to see that.

Essentially, in the latent / embedding / semantic space, "seahorse emoji" is something that is highly probable. Actually, more accurately, since LLMs aren't actually statistical or probabilistic in any serious sense, "seahorse emoji", after tokenization and embedding, is very close to the learned manifold, and other semantic embeddings involving related emoji are very close to this "seahorse emoji" tokenization embedding.

An LLM has to work from this "seahorse emoji" tokenization embedding position, but can only make outputs through the tokenizer, which can't accurately encode "seahorse emoji" in the first place. So, you get a bunch of outputs that are semantically closest to (but still far from) a (theoretical) seahorse emoji. Then, on recursive application, since these outputs are now far enough from the the sort of root / foundational position on the manifold, the algorithm probably is doing something like an equivalent of a random walk on the manifold, staying close to wherever "seahorse emoji" landed, but never really converging, because the tokenization ensures that you can never really land back "close enough" to the base position.

I.e. IMO this is not as much a problem with (fixed) tokenization of the inputs, but moreso that tokenization of the outputs is fixed.
by jesterson | 2025-10-06 04:56:21+00:00
Given how you twist facts, I usually don't waste time to discuss things with people who are throwing unsubstantiated accusations, blame everyone else when asked to substantiate.

You made accusation that is absolutely unsubstantiated and blatantly false. When suddenly asked to substantiate it, you bailed out by telling everyone to do their work.

Thats the answer why noone reasonable would engage in any discussions of that quality and manner.
by holri | 2025-10-06 04:56:33+00:00
I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household. Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.
by replwoacause | 2025-10-06 04:56:38+00:00
I have ADHD-PI and have never been diagnosed as autistic, but many of the traits described around masking and socializing are relatable to me. I’ve always just referred to myself as an introvert though. Being around people is such a drain and feels so performative. I’m not claiming to be autistic either, just saying I sometimes question if there isn’t a condition that may fit the ways I feel when it comes to being around people.

The Covid lockdowns were a godsend. I imagine they were for many others too.
by linuxissortof | 2025-10-06 04:59:54+00:00
I could be wrong, but the Ferrocene Language Specification, FLS, adopted by Rust as its specification, may be severely incomplete.

For instance, it describes atomics, but I am not sure that it defines Rust's memory model or the semantics of atomics anywhere.

This Ferrocene page looks very short, and has a lot of links to Rust API documentation.

https://public-docs.ferrocene.dev/main/specification/concurr...

Conversely, the Rustonomicon has this page that says that Rust just uses C++20's memory model for its atomics. Yet I do not believe that memory model is defined anywhere in FLS.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html

I do not know if FLS defines unwinding of panics anywhere either.

Is FLS severely incomplete regarding rustc and Rust, despite being adopted by Rust as its specification? It almost seems fake.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-10-06 05:00:37+00:00
If you are one of the big boys (FAANG and other large companies who run physical infra) you will have this problem as well. The infra systems run and replace themselves and if something fundamental breaks (for example, your deployment system requires DNS, but your DNS servers are broken, but you cannot deploy to fix them as the deploy service requires DNS).

From what I have seen a lot of time the playbooks to fix these issues are just rawdogging files using rsync manually. Ideally you deploy your infrastructure in cells where rollouts proceed cell by cell so you can catch issues sooner and also implement failover to bootstrap broken cells (in my DNS example, client could talk to DNS servers in the closest non-broken cell using BGP based routing). It is hard to test, and there are some global services (like that big Google outage a few months ago was due to the global auth service being down).
by awesomeusername | 2025-10-06 05:00:59+00:00
I'm CTO of a TINY company, with pretty much exactly half this data. I run all storage and offside backups personally, because I can't afford a full time sysadmin yet.

And the cost of everything is PAIN to us.

If our building burned down we would lose data, but only the data we are Ok with losing in a fire.

I'd love to know the real reason. It's not some useless tech... it's politics, surely.
by softsound | 2025-10-06 05:03:20+00:00
Such a joke right? It's hard to find a good time to schedule most things if you are scheduled properly. My mom had some surgery were they said we aren't sure the day of your surgery but just in case be prepared. We'll let you know the night before, hope you are ready.

Also care speed isn't that bad in Europe, I went to a few clinics while I was there with short notice and didn't have any issues. Same as America honestly, the price difference though was way better though.
by Dagger2 | 2025-10-06 05:04:10+00:00
And it is. That's exactly how deploying v6 works. In fact, even the packet format stays the same, which means you don't lose the ability to talk to peers that require the old format -- people would do more than hesitate if that wasn't the case.

But you understand that after ISPs get short on addresses and start to hand out /64s, it's not going to be exactly the same afterwards, right? You'll have to actually use that /64 and the updated DNS and stuff.

Because we hit that point twenty years ago. We're long past the "everything looks and works in exactly the same way (so only the 32-bits of addresses in v4 work)" stage and deep into the "ISPs hand out /64s" stage. There was a point where v6 deployment just meant that you turned it on and nothing else at all changed, but at this late point in the game it also involves using those new addresses. We already took the approach you're asking for here, we just didn't stop at the beginning of it.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-06 05:04:13+00:00
Yeah, crazy.

I've got 6x 440W panels literally lying flat on the lawn. They produce at least enough (200W) to power all my computers, my Starlink, my fridge, and some LED lighting by about 2 hours after sunrise and until 2 hours before sunset, even if it is completely overcast and/or raining. When there isn't a cloud in the way they produce 2000W-2400W from 11 AM to 3 PM, usually enough (at this time of year, spring conditions) to fill my 6kWh battery by noon if I don't need to use it for heating (4kW output portable air conditioner, using 900W) in the morning, leaving the electricity free for cooling in the afternoon. Otherwise the battery fills in the afternoon. If I don't need heating at night then the battery powers everything from before sunset to after sunrise with typically 2-3 kWh left in the morning to make coffee and breakfast (I use about 1kWh in the kitchen per day) and run some heating until solar generation (and the direct sun heating) pick up.

The solar panels (JAM54D40-440/GB if anyone is interested) cost me the equivalent of US$390 plus tax for all six. The Pecron E3600LFP I use to control them (combined 3kWh battery, 2x 1200W MPPT controllers, 3600W inverter, AC charger) cost ~US$1500, and an extra 3kWh battery US$800. And $200 for 2x 30m 6mm^2 cables. That's it.

I just did this last month. Results so far indicate the panels will pay for themselves by March. I bought the battery unit primarily as a UPS because of the terrible electricity reliability where I'm living, and a $450 petrol generator to charge it in the event of the multi-day outages I get in big storms (most recently 40 hours in April). It was looking like having about an eight year payback period just via time-shifting night rate power to peak times, but adding the solar panels looks like reducing that to about three years.

I'm at 35.5º S.
by ajxs | 2025-10-06 05:05:45+00:00
> Regardless of the language, you cannot write some special program that guarantees an input will be valid if it comes from an external source or a human. It is simply impossible to prove this at compile time.

> ...but from my perspective it looks worse in Ada...

This isn't really true. SPARK obviously can't prove that the input will be valid, but it can formally prove that the validity of the user input is verified before it's used.

I wrote about this here: https://ajxs.me/blog/How_Does_Adas_Memory_Safety_Compare_Aga...
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-06 05:06:07+00:00
Safe Rust and Ada SPARK entirely remove classes of bugs like undefined behavior and memory safety issues. The latter will also statically eliminate things like overflow and type range errors.

These are subsets of their respective languages, but all safety critical development in C and C++ relies on even more constrained language subsets (e.g. MISRA or AV++) to achieve worse results.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-06 05:06:58+00:00
A sibling comment links to a phrack page (https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md) about North Korean infiltration in South Korean systems. The timing on that page and the fire make for a possible, though in my opinion wildly unlikely, scenario where either a saboteur started the fire when investigations were supposed to start, or (if you like hacking movies) that a UPS battery was rigged to cause a fire by the spies inside of the South Korean systems.

It's possible that this is all just a coincidence, but the possibility that North Korea is trying to cover their tracks is there.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 05:08:09+00:00
I think the answer is that they are, because there aren't that many infrastructure deaths.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448087/ says that in the US, where the statistics are best, "electrical injuries cause approximately 1000 deaths annually. Of these, around 400 result from high-voltage electrical injuries, while lightning accounts for 50 to 300 deaths." That's 400 deaths per year from high-voltage transmission lines and substations, and from other high-voltage sources such as CRT televisions being repaired or ion-implantation voltage sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... says the USA's utility-scale electricity generation was 4230.723 TWh in 02022.

So that's ballpark 100 nanodeaths per megawatt hour from transmission wires and the like. Or 0.1 deaths per terawatt hour. By contrast, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... claims that rooftop solar claimed 0.44 deaths per terawatt hour at the time; possibly that has improved since then, but I doubt that it has changed that much. Brian Wang returned to the question in 02021 in https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us... and estimated almost 1 death per terawatt hour.

So it seems clear that the infrastructural deaths are much lower than the deaths from falling off roofs.
Show HN: Ready-to-explore, forkable spaces to understand topics
by kanodiaayush | 2025-10-06 05:09:33+00:00
Hey HN — I made Kerns because long, static writeups felt awful for deep learning. On Kerns a “space” is a structured learning environment: a top-level map, concise summaries, linked sources, a search/chat agent, audio version, and a fork button so you can re-organize the material and experiment.

There's many premade spaces on interesting topics — Paul Graham’s essays, AI model comparisons, and recent policy shifts — so you can try exploring right away. The idea is simple: learning should happen in a powerful environment, not on static text.

Please give me feedback!
by dayvster | 2025-10-06 05:09:37+00:00
Some of it is the fault of AI and the belief that software is super easy to create now and maintenance won't be an issue in the future, mainly by folks who have very little to no experience with writing software but attempt it via the many ways you can do it with AI these days.

Then there's the shiny object syndrome of humanity in general even if we just look at websites they went through so many different cycles, plain html, flash, everything built with bootstrap.css, then came the frameworks, then back to SSR/SSG, etc... etc..

Both of those are just symptoms of a larger disease , namely lack of enthusiasm in general has fallen, a lot of it has to do with how demanding day to day software jobs have gotten, or how financially unstable the younger generations feel so they rarely set aside any time for creative endeavors and passion projects
by arjie | 2025-10-06 05:10:01+00:00
Something I wish we could have is some kind of peer mirror of archive.org. The main IA web application gets angry pretty quickly if you're trying to click through a few different dates. If there were some kind of way to slowly mirror (torrent-style) and offer pages as a peer from archive.org that would be neat. It would be cool to show up as an alternative source for the data and the archive.org app could fetch it out of there on a user's choice and validate the checksum if required.

In the end, I've ended up just keeping my own ArchiveBox and it's an all right experience. In the end, it's only useful for things I know I wanted to archive. For almost everything I go to the IA - which has so much.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-06 05:10:15+00:00
It comes with a drop in performance because there are then two sticks on the same channel. Having the same number of slots and twice as many channels would be a way around that.

(It's also because of servers being ultra-cautious again. The desktops say the same thing in the manual but then don't enforce it in the BIOS and people run two sticks per channel at the full speed all over the place.)
by nl | 2025-10-06 05:10:20+00:00
There are lots of electronics that have a wider range of industrial design.

Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.

But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:

Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players

Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages

Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-06 05:12:55+00:00
In the summer the optimal angle where I live (35.5º S) is 12º. Panels lying flat on the lawn are losing only 2% from that. Just now, near the equinox, panels lying flat on the lawn lose around 18% at noon.

I'll find a way to prop them up at 50º for winter when the time comes for that (April or May), though that's for sunny conditions. In our typical overcast in winter flat on the ground is probably still fine to catch the most diffuse light. I'll experiment when the time comes.