MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bayareapsycho | 2025-10-06 02:49:21+00:00
I agree with the sentiment of this but I don't think the root issue is state involvement

The root issue is that the state is involved in the wrong way. It refuses to fund childcare, so marriage is economically incentivized.

But then it makes divorce super financially one-sided and easy to get, so now high earners will try to avoid marriage. But high earners are the ones who make marriage worthwhile, per the above point

Then it has LGBT acceptance in urban centers now, so there's an easy, convenient, and legally protected way for people to avoid the whole marriage pipeline

The only real fix we have for this is to just import more people, who knows whether that will pan out

In general though, I agree with the sentiment that for high earning men it's the shittiest deal imaginable and even the extreme option of dying alone is better
by elevation | 2025-10-06 02:50:31+00:00
> Not even the Trump admin is alleging levels of indirect costs that high.

The 70% "indirect cost" number had latched into my brain. I was willing to concede this point, but it looks like 50, 60, 70% are accurate as of 2025 [0].

While there exist institutions with only 30% indirect cost, every single not-especially-prestigious university in my region are retaining 60% or more.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48540

> As of May 2025, indirect cost reimbursements for [institutions of higher education (IHE)] are typically determined by an indirect cost rate that is pre-negotiated with the federal government and varies by IHE—ranging from 30% to 70%.
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-06 02:51:07+00:00
You're not getting his point.

Germany has a space problem. There aren't large swaths of land available to put solar panels on. Added to that you have to realize just how far north Germany is, and consequently how... Bad solar is because of that.

Seriously, dropping down the same amount of panels gets you significantly less electricity in Germany then where China is building them, much closer to the equator.

Overall, Germany is in a shit place for renewable energy
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-06 02:51:57+00:00
Personally I think Swift can be a good choice that is more familiar to existing C++ developers than the others, and a lot of people seem to be sleeping on it.

It has full native interop with C and C++ so you can already use all your existing libraries. Historically it lacked cross-platform support but this is not true anymore. It does lack a native GUI framework, but for now you can keep using C++ ones.

Some people complain about its ties to Apple, but hopefully with it gaining much wider cross-platform support, it may not matter that much in the future, but I guess it remains to be seen.
by markasoftware | 2025-10-06 02:52:11+00:00
Their example of why Ada has better strong typing than Rust is that you can have floats for miles and floats for kilometers and not get them mixed up. News flash, Rust has newtype structs, and you can also do basically the same thing in C++.

I don't know much about Ada. Is its type system any better than Rust's?
by toomim | 2025-10-06 02:53:10+00:00
> If he says "God's perfect law" demands killing gay people

He did not say that.

Again, Christians do not follow Leviticus. I'm not a Christian, but I just looked this up:

> Mainstream Christian theology holds that Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection fulfilled the ceremonial and civil aspects of the Leviticus laws, making them no longer obligatory for believers, while the moral principles are reaffirmed and expanded in the New Testament under what is often called the "law of Christ."

You seem to think Charlie wants to stone gays because he's a Christian, and you're assuming that Christianity believes in stoning gays. But that last part is false. Christ revised the old testament. Charlie's making a point that you can't just take Leviticus at face value, and interpret its passages out of context from the new testament.

You're now interpreting Charlie's point to mean the opposite of what he meant. You're assuming that he actually wants to stone gays, because he's pointing out that the old testament talks about it, and because you don't understand Christianity.

Full clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CceJpiUPgPU

Again, I'm not a Christian, and I myself appreciate gayness. But we have to stop taking clips out of context and framing people as evil to justify political violence.
by schoen | 2025-10-06 02:54:05+00:00
Oh sorry, I thought you were conflating the two because the talent you described was for mirror writing.

I'm also left-handed and learned belatedly that I can do mirror-writing with my non-dominant right hand. I'm not that coordinated with that hand, so the writing is a bit messy, but it doesn't seem to require noticeable extra cognitive effort to do the mirroring.

I could also pretty easily read upside down or backwards from around the time I learned to read.

However, I've never found it easy to make ambigrams!
by slow_typist | 2025-10-06 02:54:21+00:00
Yeah retail prices. And yes you can buy them in a store like home depot or order them on the internet but shipping is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. Cheapest source are local firms that install PV professionally and sell via kleinanzeigen.de as a side business or to get rid of excess stock.

Thanks for the clarification, also on the use of the word diffusion. In social sciences it is common though, there is even a book titled “Diffusion of Innovations”.
by hedora | 2025-10-06 02:54:46+00:00
The sunlight is going to follow a bell curve. Assume 800W at noon, and pessimistically approximate the curve with a triangle. That’s 400W * 12 hours. That’s 4.8 kwh per day.

If your house is provisioned for 900W peak, you aren’t running a furnace, a/c, electric heat, or an EV. 4.8 kWh will go a long way in those circumstances. (It’d handle a fridge or two if you could time shift the power, or got one that’s designed to hold cold over night with no power)

I don’t think you strictly need utility approvals to install balcony solar. Usually, you can either not wire them into the house at all, or have a switch to switch the house between grid and solar. (It’s better to back feed into the grid, but that requires utility cooperation. If properly installed the switch I describe is safe but maybe illegal.)
by lock1 | 2025-10-06 02:55:00+00:00
Hidden indirection & runtime magic almost always refer to DI frameworks.

Reflection is what makes DI feel like "magic". Type signatures don't mean much in reflection-heavy codes. Newcomers won't know many DI framework implicit behaviors & conventions until either they shoot themself in their foot or get RTFM'd.

My pet theory is this kind of "magic" is what makes some people like Golang, which favors explicit wiring over implicit DI framework magic.

> Just don't write bad code

Reminds me with C advices: "Just don't write memory leaks & UAF!".
by GaggiX | 2025-10-06 02:55:09+00:00
>A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent

Acquiring land-use rights, permitting, environmental reviews, and zoning changes for an industrial power plant costs far more than the raw rent.

>Power consumption in the EU has flatlined

This is dangerously short-sighted, the mass adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps will place enormous new demands on the grid.

> put the solar farms next to some of the shut down nuclear plants

Solar is much more land demanding than what the decommissioned sites of nuclear power plants can offer.
by noduerme | 2025-10-06 02:55:51+00:00
Yeah, for me as well. Although for me, it's not because I wonder why someone hasn't responded... it's because often I'm in the middle of something and don't feel like responding right away, and I get overly concerned that the other person will think I'm being rude! So I don't use RCS with anyone besides my girlfriend. But there's an implicit agreement in it that we try to get back to each other fairly quickly. Neither of us wants the other to think we're up to something sketchy. This helped ease me into our new non-tracking reality.

As a side note, one other reason I developed such severe distrust along with the location glitches was that occasionally some of my SMS texts simply never went through to her. This led to a situation where I thought she just ignoring them, so I'd just feel kinda shitty and leave her alone, until we finally went through our chat thread together and realized she'd never gotten them.
by nine_k | 2025-10-06 02:56:38+00:00
A simple encrypted channel for file transfer. A great way to send a file to a stranger who is near you but shares nothing with you, e.g. at a conference.

/* A modern version should, of course, work in a browser, so that there'd be no Python packages to install. But the browser security model does not allow listening, so a signaling server would be needed to create a WebRTC connection. It could run on one of the devices involved, but still can't be a pure web app. */
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-06 02:57:30+00:00
Most of the claimed provinces of China did not belong to a historical nation of China. Tibet, Xinjiang are obvious. But even the other provinces were part of separate kingdoms. Also the BRI is a way to invade without invasion. It’s used to subjugate poor countries as servants of China, to do their bidding in the UN or in other ways. I would also classify the vast campaign of intellectual theft and cyberattacks as warfare.
by ffsm8 | 2025-10-06 02:58:24+00:00
GN did a video a few weeks ago in which they were showing a slide from Nvidias shareholder meeting in which it was shown that gaming was a tiny part of Nvidias revenue.

Basically, almost half of their revenue is pure profit and all of that comes from AI.

While the slide looked a lot nicer, the data is also available on their site https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
by oceanplexian | 2025-10-06 02:59:33+00:00
I built one in Utah which is the only part of the US where it's currently legal, so I can give you the numbers.

- 4x Hyundai 435W Solar Panels @ 167$ each for $670 total

- 1x EcoFlow Stream Microinverter for $257.

- Various cables, MC4 crimping kit, etc.. about $150

Grand total was $1077, I set them in direct sun on my patio and have generated 6-8kWh per day. At Utah energy prices (0.12 where I live), they will pay off in about 4 years. Somewhere like California with 4x the energy prices as here, it would probably pay for itself in <1 year.
by ndiddy | 2025-10-06 03:00:52+00:00
Their OS was fairly unique in that it was a POSIX OS that could scale up to being used on desktop/servers, was extremely stable, and could handle real-time control. From a desktop perspective, the real-time aspect also meant that using the system was a joy, everything was super snappy. They never managed to become mainstream, but in the 001980s through the 002000s that was a good enough niche that the company managed to stick around. The 1.44 MB demo QNX put together in 001999 with a full GUI, networking stack, web browser, file browser, utilities, demo programs, etc. was super impressive and I've never seen anything with that level of functionality squeezed into anything close to that size.

Of course most of this advantage has gone away, both because real-time Linux has become good enough to compete with QNX for a lot of use cases, and because QNX stopped supporting self-hosted development with QNX 6.6 in 002014. From a business standpoint of course it makes sense to focus on the automotive and other embedded markets where all the paying customers are, but from a tech enthusiast standpoint it makes me a little sad. Given the licensing cost and competition from real-time Linux on the high end, and Zephyr/FreeRTOS on the low end, I'm not sure why anyone would choose QNX for a new project today. If anyone reading this has chosen QNX for a new project relatively recently, I'd love to hear your perspective.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-06 03:00:54+00:00
If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes.

Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead.

Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-tied inverters: When there is nothing for them to sync to, they output nothing.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 03:01:59+00:00
For context, a hectare (10000 m²) directly facing the sun receives 10 megawatts of sunlight at 1kW/m². The city of Kiel is at 54°19' north, so at the equinox a hectare near it receives about cos(54°19') ≈ 58% of that: 5.8 megawatts. If you were to cover the whole field with horizontal solar panels with a mainstream 22% efficiency, the peak electrical power generated that day would be 1.28 megawatts. But you'd need 2.20 peak megawatts of solar modules to do it, because the modules are rated based on directly facing the sun and getting 1kW/m² of sunlight, which they could never do in this situation. According to the prices on https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... those modules are currently 0.100€/Wp, so that's 280 kiloeuros of solar panels. This is about an order of magnitude more expensive than the land under them.

The average produced would only be on the order of 100–200kW, because Germany's capacity factor is for shit. Kiel is in an especially terrible place, with only about 2.7kWh/m² per day on average, according to https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali....

In real life people tilt the panels in a solar farm toward the sun and leave space between rows of panels so they don't shade each other even in the winter. That is because, even at today's historically record low prices, the panels cost enormously more than the land they're sitting on, so it makes sense to economize a bit on panels even at the cost of needing more land.
by pseudalopex | 2025-10-06 03:02:43+00:00
> Aw, sorry to have hurt your feelings.

You did not. I rebutted false comparisons and called a philosophy boring. My other comment included a popular meme which mocked false comparisons and self congratulation. You made this assumption because you misunderstood the meme?

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-is-zero-difference-betw...
by qnleigh | 2025-10-06 03:02:50+00:00
For reference, global energy consumption is about 180,000 TWh[1]. So while the numbers in this article are large, they're not a significant fraction of the total. Traveling and buying things are probably a much bigger part of your carbon footprint. For example:

- 25 LLM queries: ~8.5 Wh

- driving one mile: ~250-1000 Wh

- one glass bottle: ~1000 Wh [2]

- a new laptop: ~600,000 Wh [3]

- round-trip flight from LA to Tokyo: ~1,000,000 Wh

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

[2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2008/03/17/study-finds...

[3] https://www.foxway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/handprint-...
by bane | 2025-10-06 03:03:06+00:00
One of my first jobs was helping build an expert system for a, even today, complex computational linguistics problem. The company had a rich corporate library full of academic books on expert systems, decision trees, first gen (pre-winter) AI, and some early books on early ML approaches. I remember seeing this book in particular and its evocative title caused me to look deeper into the library than I would have normally.

Our core system was built of thousands upon thousands of hand-crafted rules informed by careful statistical analysis of hundreds of millions of entries in a bulk data system.

Part of my job was to build the system that analyzed the bulk data and produced the stats, and the other part was carefully testing and fixing the rulesets for certain languages. It was mind-numbing work, and looking back we were freakishly close to all the bit and pieces needed for then bleeding-edge ML had we chosen to go that way.

However, we chose expert systems because it gave us tremendous insight into what was happening, and the opportunity to debug and test things at an incredibly granular scale. It was fully possible to say "the system has this behavior because of xyz" and it was fully possible to tune the system at individual character levels of finesse.

Had we wanted to dive into ML, we could have used this foundation as a bootstrap into building a massive training set. But the founders biased towards expert systems and I think, at the time, it was the right choice.

The technology was acquired, and I wonder if the current custodians use it for those obvious next-step purposes.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 03:05:05+00:00
Indonesia gets a great deal more sunlight than Germany, almost twice as much: https://solargis.com/resources/free-maps-and-gis-data?locali...

Legality can be a funny thing. Governments can make anything they want illegal. Here in Argentina it's illegal to import used capital equipment that hasn't been refurbished by the original manufacturer or to import maps that say that the Malvinas Islands aren't part of Argentina. In Thailand it's illegal to step on paper currency because the king's face is on it.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-10-06 03:08:34+00:00
That's pretty good. I'd _consider_ flipping it around so the familiar part comes first?

Perhaps, something like:

«Toybox provides a set of utilities like cp, mv, cat, ..., which are each just links to a single binary (a "multicall binary").

In this way `toybox` is like a Swiss Army knife -- several tools combined into one.

Installing toybox adds a symlink for each [of the x] command name[s] to the $PATH.»

The last sentence might be better if it said how many symlinks are added?

Aside, Busybox uses the term "Swiss Army Knife" in their description. Using the same term like that, which isn't an inherent term, might open you up to a 'passing off' claim. Multi-tool, or EDC, may work?
by me-vs-cat | 2025-10-06 03:09:37+00:00
FWIW, I've been able to cancel my NYT subscription with only a web form since I first subscribed in 2020. It works, and I use it every year. Some years there were several weeks before I got the discounted price again.

I wonder how many years need to pass after a company removes a user-hostile pattern before it should stop being lambasted for it. I don't know how long they did what you say, but I could see that 5 years might not yet be enough.
by keeda | 2025-10-06 03:10:18+00:00
Hmm, my first thought was, 1.81% of 440M enterprise customers after two years sure sounds bad, but I had no reference frame to compare to. That's 8 million users, which is negligible compared to ChatGPT numbers, but it is also an enterprise tool, not a consumer product. So I thought it may help to recontextualize this number to the realm of adoption of enterprise tools, maybe even specifically Microsoft enterprise tools.

So I thought, maybe the Copilot GTM is probably following the same strategy as another enterprise tool that was pushed onto its existing customer base: Teams. So I went looking for data on the rate of Teams adoption.

Interestingly, the sources I found suggest that Teams also had 8 million users in 2019, two years after release!

https://www.demandsage.com/microsoft-teams-statistics/

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statisti...

Note, this was before Teams got a massive boost in early 2020 during the Covid push to remote. And for all the hate MS Teams gets, we see where it is today.

So maybe this is just following the normal curve of adoption of Microsoft products. Maybe it's even doing better than Teams, considering Copilot is not free, as Teams was at launch.
by hedora | 2025-10-06 03:11:58+00:00
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase).

However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now).

Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 240V 40A clothes dryer. The island is definitely going to collapse at that point, and might do bad stuff on the way down.
by Dagger2 | 2025-10-06 03:12:52+00:00
At this point, about 25% of traffic on dual-stack ISPs is v4. So no, v4 isn't where all the stuff the phone wants is.

CGNAT is generally only done for v4. v6 isn't needed to provide CGNATed v4, and if v6 is provided as well then it generally isn't NATed. I expect you could find an ISP somewhere that NATs the v6 too as a counter-example if you looked hard enough, but as a rule they don't.

(Sometimes CGNATed v4 is provided by making use of the v6 in some way -- e.g. mapping v4 destinations into v6 with NAT64, or by tunnels -- but the CGNATing still only applies to v4 destinations, so this just an implementation detail rather than an undermining of the above point.)

> Cgnat you are restricted to tail scale stuff.

But only on v4, not on v6. That's kind of the point of bothering to make v6 in the first place -- it allows you to keep the ability to poke holes in your inbound firewall even in a world where v4 is exhausted to the point of CGNAT.

The exhaustion and the CGNAT and the resulting restrictions would still be there if you didn't have v6. It's just providing you with a way out of them.
by k310 | 2025-10-06 03:13:46+00:00
Do not obey in advance [0]

> Historian Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in his book On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.” To obey a tyrant before you are compelled to do so teaches them what they will be able to get you to do, easily, without even needing to expend the resources and energy it takes to carry out that part of their agenda.

[0] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/11/09/do-not-...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-06 03:13:57+00:00
If you are solving their problems and they see you are solving their problems it's pretty easy to get a seat at the table IF you are also put together like you used to make $300k (dress upper level, don't be out of shape, be attractive/well groomed, have upper level hobbies, decent car, picture on your desk from vacation in an exotic place, have a tag or higher watch). You might also need to play a little business politics and build up whoever is your champion/boss.

If you are good at figuring out how to solve problems, your issue will be they will want to raise you up back to higher level stress positions, and it can be hard to resist being 'superman' and getting kudos again. Every $80k job I took after burning out I ended up leading a department or being a Director and pilling myself with stress again.

If you are just an $80k worker bee you will be treated like a worker bee. But you don't have to be that.
by ajxs | 2025-10-06 03:14:01+00:00
I've never worked in aerospace, however I'm interested in safety-critical software engineering, and I've written a lot of Ada (and written about my experiences with it too). My understanding is that yes you can write safety-critical code in just about any language, but it's much easier to prove conformance to safety standards (like DO-178C, etc.) in Ada than in C++.

I regularly do hobby bare-metal programming in both Ada and C. I find that Ada helps prevent a lot of the common footguns in C. It's not a silver bullet for software safety, but it definitely helps. The point of any programming language is to make doing the right thing easy, and doing the wrong thing hard. All things considered, I think Ada does a good job of that.
by ddxv | 2025-10-06 03:14:56+00:00
In hindsight you are correct about the title not being accurate.

"It's trivial to have storage" I'd argue this wasn't trivial for me. Buying $1k of drives+JBOD, acquiring the second hand laptop, getting ZFS working with USB took a couple tries and finally moving my projects to using the dual local network S3 object storage vs cloud S3 took a fair amount of time.

"however you want an shove the S3 API on top." You're right here too. I did find this part pleasantly trivial, which I didn't know before, and hence the article about how pleased I was that this part ended being trivial and has remained trivial once the other parts were setup.