MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petesergeant | 2025-10-13 05:40:02+00:00
Two thoughts:

* Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese

* Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries
by maplethorpe | 2025-10-13 05:40:13+00:00
> Hallucinations are incredibly fucking overrated as a problem. They are a consequence of the LLM in question not having a good enough internal model of its own knowledge, which is downstream from how they're trained. Plenty of things could be done to improve on that - and there is no fundamental limitation that would prevent LLMs from matching human hallucination rates - which are significantly above zero.

Why is there no fundamental limitation that would prevent LLMs from matching human hallucination rates? I'd like to hear more about how you arrived at that conclusion.
by shakna | 2025-10-13 05:40:25+00:00
You appear to have taken offence, at people taking offence. Which points towards beliefs you may hold.

Yes, there is balance to be found. But if people point out you've made fun of their beliefs, then adapt. No need to act out. We all have beliefs, whether or not that is an organised belief. Ideaology is everywhere in everything.

People are still people. Communicate and the irritation can fade.
by hollerith | 2025-10-13 05:40:47+00:00
>Only 20% of European homes have air conditioning vs 88% of American homes.

Also, screens on windows (to keep out mosquitoes and such) are almost ubiquitous in the US (even in government-funded housing for poor people, the disabled and the elderly) whereas many homes in Europe do not have them (even though Europe has mosquitoes that spread illnesses).
by curious9999_2 | 2025-10-13 05:40:56+00:00
That seems more an argument against Rust than one for, sorry. Library assistance, not part of the standard library, does not seem to be used much, not many examples.

> Use at your own risks[sic]!

>This is very much an Alpha quality release, at best.

Last update 1 year ago.

Unsafety.

Interesting research, however.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-13 05:41:11+00:00
Also not winning:

‘World’s largest’ solar plant in Calif closing – $1.6 billion Ivanpah casts a shadow on DOE loans – ‘Federal data concluded the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year’

The 386-megawatt plant lagged in producing promised electricity levels and faced criticism from environmental groups like the Sierra Club because of its associated bird deaths. While estimates vary, some federal data concluded that the plant killed roughly 6,000 birds a year flying into concentrated beams of sunlight.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/05/worlds-largest-solar...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-13 05:42:06+00:00
The same violence that stops you from running a red light, yeah.

In my view, it's more important to have freedom of software choice than to have the very narrow freedom of association based on what software someone else chooses.

Because again I'm fine with you rejecting me for just about any other reason. But that one? No, I think we should all have to interoperate.

Another way to look at it is that I should be able to keep what software I use private.

Also the important part is applying this rule to companies with 7+ figures of revenue. Not so much to actual people.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-10-13 05:42:08+00:00
but that just late-stage capitalism ?????

I understand where your coming from but the words of choice make it maybe more hyperbole

also stop acting like most user is idiot tbh they just dont care enough for this shit

they do care if the situation get worse, and until then if said corporation is "refuse" to

serve customer like they used to be people can retaliate
by SendItUp | 2025-10-13 05:42:22+00:00
Currently working on expanding the Pacific Northwest’s largest durable carbon removal project using Enhanced Rock Weathering and starting a $1m SAFE fundraising round.

We received data last week verifying we are effectively mineralizing CO2 at a high rate while saving our farmer $135/acre annually in liming costs.

We’ve come this far on grants. Now it’s time to fundraise so we can bankroll our PhDs whilst we secure pre-purchase offtake deals.

If you know of any impact investors or are an offtake buyer at a large company, please email me at zach@goal300.earth
by adrian_b | 2025-10-13 05:42:26+00:00
The computers of Zuse resembled much more a modern computer than ENIAC.

Also the electromechanical computers of Howard Aiken (made by IBM at Harvard, hence "Harvard architecture"), which were conceived as a modern implementation of the ideas of Babbage, and which preceded ENIAC, resembled much more a modern computer than ENIAC.

ENIAC, as actually said by its name (Electronic Numerical Integrator) was an electronic and digital version of the mechanical analog computers known as "differential analyzers", e.g. that of Vannevar Bush.

ENIAC was not as special purpose as the British Colossus, but it was not as general-purpose as the electromechanical computers of Aiken and Zuse that preceded it, which were really controlled by writing programs, not by reconfiguring a bunch of connections. ENIAC was more like an FPGA than like a computer.

The main connection between ENIAC and later electronic computers was in the digital electronic circuits used to built it, however even those were not completely original, as they have used information from the circuits used in the previous special-purpose electronic computer of John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State University, which in turn were based on the digital circuits invented in UK for the necessities of nuclear and elementary particle physics research during the decade preceding WWII.
by kragen | 2025-10-13 05:44:40+00:00
As usual, I'm divided between too many interests.

Last month:

• wrote my first NEON SIMD code

• implemented adaptive quadrature with Newton–Cotes formulas

• wrote a tiny Markov-chain text generator

• prototyped an interactive pipeline system for non-normalized relational data in Lua by abusing operator overloading

• load-tested and taste-tested primary batteries at loads exceeding those in the datasheet; numerically simulated a programmable load circuit for automating the load testing

• measured the frequency of subroutine calls and leaf subroutine calls in several programs with Valgrind

• wrote a completely unhealthy quantity of commentary on HN

New ideas I'm thinking about include backward-compatible representations of soft newlines in plain ASCII text, multitouch calculators supporting programming by demonstration, virtual machines for perfectly reproducible computations, TCES energy storage for household applications beyond climate control such as cooking and laundry, canceling the harmonic poles of recursive comb filters with zeroes in the nonrecursive combs of a Hogenauer filter, differential planetary transmissions for compact extreme reductions similar to a cycloidal drive, rapid ECM punching in aluminum foil, air levigation of grog, ultra-cheap passive solar thermal collectors, etc. Happy to go into more detail if any of these sound interesting.
by phi-go | 2025-10-13 05:45:39+00:00
But they do not get payed the same. Let's say Spotify has two users that total 100 listens, 99 Taylor listens and one listen for the obscur artist.

If payed by total listens Taylor gets 99%.

Now if those 99 listens are from the one user and the other from the other user. Paying by listens ratio per user, Taylor will get 50%.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-13 05:46:17+00:00
Not all the integrations are equal in quality/usability, and in the case of F*, the VSCode extension is by far the most advanced.

I switch between Emacs, VSCode, JetBrains IDEs, and Xcode regularly depending on what I am working on, and would be seriously annoyed if I could not use VSCode when it is most useful.
by baq | 2025-10-13 05:46:48+00:00
This is true.

Microsoft and GPU companies (nvidia, amd, intel mostly, but there obviously were many others) collectively spent literally billions (not a typo - think about the engineer-hours on these multi-million-LOC code bases) on getting the windows graphics driver model mostly right. The amount of tooling is staggering and the fact that a crash in the driver most of the time just causes the screen to blink for a second instead of a bsod is amazing.
by ZYZ64738 | 2025-10-13 05:47:12+00:00
UX flaws:

Switching between C and F does not change the label of the field accordingly.

I can enter negative, unrealistic values or no values at all.

Maybe round (floor, ceil) the temperature results in steps of 5 (most devices cannot be adjusted in 1 degree steps)

Improvements: Timer (1st alarm at 1/2 the cooking time. 2nd alarm when done)
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-13 05:47:37+00:00
I work across 5+ desktops (phy and vm) over the course of the day, 3 running multiple Ffx instances + forks. I support and maintain several dozen more Ffx installs for clients. Mostly because Firefox is the most capable (ex:containers) and trustworthy of my browser options.

Of the few problems I have, some are due to my unconventional setups - like the one I'm typing on now. It's a remote app, running on a vm w/ a copy of a profile storing logins.

I presently don't have any Ffx issues pending. Ironing them out took less time and energy than posting a rant about it.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-10-13 05:47:40+00:00
The problem with ORMs is that they're a very leaky abstraction. Database performance matters a lot for any non-trivial application, and in order to use an ORM performantly you need to understand both the underlying SQL+database but also all of the nuances of how the ORM maps to SQL.

So basically you end up with two situations:

1. You need to hire engineers with double the expertise (not just a SQL engineer, but a SQL+ORM engineer).

1a. You hire a SQL engineer who now has to learn Yet Another ORM.

2. You hire engineers who only know the ORM but not SQL, and your app ends up having shit performance.

Basically, ORMs are simply complicated SQL generating macro frameworks. They are way too leaky to provide a useful level of abstraction like most programming languages.

LLM coding tools may displace ORMs, because they can take away a lot of the tedium with integrating application SQL, which is what ORMs are supposed to do.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-10-13 05:48:49+00:00
> Pico died burning up with fever; bundles of unintelligible notes were found stuffed in his cabinets.

I am reminded of a part in "Poet and the Pendulum" by Nightwish, where the band's composer, Tuomas, fantasizes about his own death:

> Today, in the year of our Lord, 2005

> Tuomas was called from the cares of the world

> He stopped crying at the end of each beautiful day

> The music he wrote had too long been without silence

> He was found, naked and dead, with a smile in his face, a pen and 1000 pages of erased text.

(Tuomas is still alive as of a few weeks ago)
by danielscrubs | 2025-10-13 05:50:15+00:00
You are criticising them for their lack of CVEs?

And to top it off you add Microsoft into your mentions, that just had a disastrous security bug, that was just mind blowing?

I get what you are saying but the FANG evangelism gotta stop. They are just like other huge companies. When was the last time your bank got hacked?
by bruce511 | 2025-10-13 05:50:22+00:00
Inverters have more electronic parts, but the parts themselves are very off-the-shelf, and the electronic design is pretty straightforward.

Inverters are still fairly expensive for a couple reasons; Firstly economies of scale. A residential site buys 1 inverter, but 10 to 20 panels. A commercial site has an even bigger ratio.

Secondly Inverters are the bit that connects to the grid. So there are regulatory requirements which need to be tested for. And likely tested in multiple different jurisdictions.

Panels on the other hand are "difficult" to produce in volume. Largely because of the quality of raw silicon that is required. Its not that the panels themselves are complex, but the supplier chain to them is.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-10-13 05:50:22+00:00
i am working on something pretty radical in this space. it is a book of algorithms that derives all the algorithms without telling what the algorithm is. for example for binary search your book quickly went into the low + high / 2 = mid thing. my method is radically different. i take an even sized array then try to actually find it step by step , then take an odd sized array , find it step by step, derive a general hypothesis and then create the formula from it for that algorithm. this is going to be orders of magnitude above any data structures and algorithms books and courses when it comes out. pinky promise
by at-fates-hands | 2025-10-13 05:50:25+00:00
Germany tried to go 100% renewables and then found out it wasn't possible, then made a deal with Russia to supply what they needed to cover what renewables couldn't. Right up until Russia invaded Ukraine:

A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.

Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.

“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German housing enterprises GdW. “Germany’s social peace is in great danger.”

https://www.ft.com/content/d0c5815f-f0a2-49ad-8772-f4b0fbbd2...

They did eventually move to get off of their reliance on Russian energy over a year later, but what they did as go back to coal and nuclear to keep the lights on after divesting from Russian energy imports:

In its race to find alternate sources of energy, the country has reopened coal-fired power plants, delayed plans to shut down its three remaining nuclear power plants, and pushed to increase capacity to store natural gas imported from other countries such as Norway and the US.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Lindner pointed to the speed with which a new liquefied natural gas terminal had been built in Germany - in a record of around eight months, he said. More infrastructure investments were planned, he added.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400
by jacquesm | 2025-10-13 05:50:55+00:00
My BIL is a wildlife photographer. One day he went into his favorite area to photograph the local Bison. He was as quiet as he could be moved into the terrain slowly and stopped every few minutes so as not to spook the animals. Only to be suddenly berated angrily that he was spoiling the shot... another, far more experienced wildlife photographer had been lying in wait there for days knowing the bison would have to head his way. In spite of that bad introduction they became fast friends. Wołkow has since died, he was one of a kind. I spent a night with him just looking at some of his slides, he found so much beauty.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-13 05:51:03+00:00
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.

Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.
by baq | 2025-10-13 05:51:16+00:00
At this point there are only two things stopping me from using kde or gnome on my work box: Apple and my employer, and I could probably convince my employer. The hardware though is something I’m not willing to compromise on and Apple is in a tier above everyone else currently, so I’m stuck with subpar macOS, not planning upgrading to Tahoe for as long as possible.
by ciju | 2025-10-13 05:52:14+00:00
https://finbodhi.com — It helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a double-entry accounting. You own your data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit. Supports multi-currency.

We are in it for long term. Not a startup, not looking for investment. Just plain paid product (free while in beta) by a few people. We have a few active users, and are looking for more before we remove the beta label :) It's a PWA app. Currently targeted for desktops. For personal software, I think local-first makes a lot of sense.
by eimrine | 2025-10-13 05:52:15+00:00
You don't need hundred of commands to use vim, have you at least finished vimtutor? Finish it in the way it proposes, then start it again and think on your own, what commands for more effective passing the problems from vimtutor might have been there as well.

Letters w and b may be located wherever they are located, if you can not touchtype vim is not for you for the same reason we do not learn how to run before we master how to walk.
by c0l0 | 2025-10-13 05:52:18+00:00
Yes, Jumbo frames unlock a LOT of additional performance - which is exactly what we have and need on those links. Using a vanilla wg-bench[0] loopback-esque (really veths across network namespaces) setup on the machine, I get slightly more than 15Gbps sustained throughput.

[0]: https://github.com/cyyself/wg-bench
by justinc8687 | 2025-10-13 05:53:02+00:00
I've been suffering from migraines for the last month, so have channeled my (non-migraine) time into a migraine tracker to try and find the root causes. All the tracking apps I tried all have nice complex forms, which is all well and good, unless...you are having a migraine.

Rough idea is easy to use voice mode to record data, then analyze unstructured data with AI later on.

I want to track all relevant life information, so what I'm eating, meds I'm taking, headache/nausea levels, etc.

Adding records is as easy as pressing record on my apple watch and speaking some kind of information. Uses Deepgram for voice transcription since it's the best transcription API I've found.

Will then send all information through to a LLM for analysis. It has a "chat with your data" page to ask questions and try and draw conclusions.

Main webapp is done, now working on packaging it into an iOS app so I can pull biometrics from Healthkit. Will then look into releasing it, either on github or possibly in the app store. It's admittedly mostly vibe coded, so not sure if it'll be something releasable, but we'll see...

Let me know if this would interest anyone!
by curious9999_2 | 2025-10-13 05:53:14+00:00
I think it is fine for C and C++ to be relegated for use caches where they make the most sense. I don't see the point of comparing them to niches, markets or cases where for instance garbage collection is fine.

And, I already mentioned Go, Swift and Ada.

Objective-C is not really on my radar, it's specific to Apple, and it doesn't seem like Apple is betting on it for the future.

D and Nim are languages with low momentum relative to others.

I am not sure the AOT approach will work. Maybe, maybe not. There are direct and indirect obstacles, I believe. D is probably interesting here; as I understand it, it supported both GC and no-GC. But, that meant that a lot of libraries used GC, and thus were not necessarily good options for applications that required no-GC. In some ways, a programming language can also be what people build with it and what its ecosystems are like.
by wahnaton | 2025-10-13 05:53:46+00:00
Launched my first couple of apps this year!

A scanner for pilots to convert handwritten flight logs to CSV files: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flightlogscan/id6739791303

And a silly, fun, speed-based word game: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scramble-game/id6748549424 (my record is <4 seconds lmk if you can beat it!)

Let me know what you think :D
by fluoridation | 2025-10-13 05:55:46+00:00
> No, there are significant differences: [...] does not make them equivalent as currency.

Did I say rice was exactly equivalent to energy, or did I say that it was not too different? Surely you can see that rice is more analogous to energy than to drill bits.

>So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.

Hence the point of notes. "Rice is not such a bad thing to base your currency on" doesn't mean wallets should be literal fistfuls of rice grains in bags that you lug around.

I'm not a big fan of how abstract modern monetary systems are, and I'm still trying to decide whether they confuse people by accident or design.
by devjab | 2025-10-13 05:56:15+00:00
I work in solar, so we have quite a lot of hardware which doesn't run on free software. We couldn't patch part of our inverter pipeline because the hardware was proprietary and had no open alternatives. We had to pay quite a lot of money to find one of the original engineers and have them flown in to help us unlock it, so that we could replace the firmware with some we had a security clearance holding contractor write for us.

To be fair this is a story about not doing your due diligence and buying the wrong hardware, but I think it can give you some insight into what the article talks about. Because yes, you can install Linux, but can you install something on your blender when "BRAND" decides you need to pay a subscription to run the self-cleaning program?
by dcheong | 2025-10-13 05:56:20+00:00
User Mastery: https://usermastery.com

A unified platform for product teams to announce updates, maintain a changelog, share roadmaps, provide help documentation and collect feedback with the help of AI.

My goal is to help product teams tell users about new features (so they actually use them), gather meaningful feedback (so they build the right things), share plans (so users know what's coming), and provide help (so users don't get stuck).

Doing it as an indie hacker + solo founder + lean. Started 13 days ago. Posting about my journey on Youtube every week day https://www.youtube.com/@dave_cheong
by swyx | 2025-10-13 05:56:21+00:00
this is meta and not directly addressing Pedram's points (though thanks for the shoutouts in there - the three pillars here are as good as any) but I wrote up a reaction here -

https://dx.tips/devrel-is-back

I observed a long term decline in the devrel trend last year but it's noticeably perked up a bit to the point that I noticed this post on the front page of HN.

probably nothing? (no it's definitely something going on)
Ask HN: Where have the older questions on Ask HN gone?
by varlock | 2025-10-13 05:56:22+00:00
Though I am not a religious reader of the main HN page, I love to follow up on the questions in the Ask HN section.

I am almost certain that in the not so distant past there were more questions under this section, and you could even go back and read older entries, too.

Am I dreaming up stuff or has something changed in the last few months?
by Traubenfuchs | 2025-10-13 05:57:15+00:00
To prove my expertise in anything from infrastructure, over backend to frontend, I learned how to use terraform to provision a managed kubernetes cluster (on oracle clouds excellent free forever tier).

I am currently developing a web app consisting of a spring/kotlin backend for an angular frontend that is meant to provide a UI for kubectl. It has oAuth login and allows you to store several kubernetes configs, select which one to use and makes it unnecessary to remember all the kubectl commands I can never remember.

It's what I'd like to have if I had to interact with a kubernetes cluster at work. Yes, I know there are several kubernetes UIs already, but remember, this is for 1) learning and 2) following through and completing a project at least somewhat.