MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-10-07 20:17:03+00:00
Wikipedia[1] states it very clearly:

> It is considered that the largest contribution of aviation to climate change comes from contrails. In general, aircraft contrails trap outgoing longwave radiation emitted by the Earth and atmosphere more than they reflect incoming solar radiation, resulting in a net increase in radiative forcing. In 1992, this warming effect was estimated between 3.5 mW/m2 and 17 mW/m2. In 2009, its 2005 value was estimated at 12 mW/m2, based on the reanalysis data, climate models, and radiative transfer codes; with an uncertainty range of 5 to 26 mW/m2, and with a low level of scientific understanding. [...] Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.

What I can say is that even in a place with moderate air traffic, you get to see lots of contrails crisscrossing the sky on some days; in places near busy airports I hear that a sizable fraction of all cloud cover is due to lingering contrails.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#Impacts_on_climate
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-07 20:17:08+00:00
I wonder if there's an argument that mobile phones are using publicly-owned broadcast spectrum, and therefore, like when walking around in public, there isn't an expectation of privacy. Ham radio rules for example prohibit encryption because they are using public airwaves.

It used to be possible to just set up an analog receiver and you could listen to nearby cell phone calls.
by Retr0id | 2025-10-07 20:17:31+00:00
I have a project (in my rather long project backlog) that involves hooking JS APIs to download youtube videos. I'm worried that if my extension (or a similar extension) gained enough popularity, youtube would start inspecting the relevant JS objects to see if they'd been replaced with proxy instances.

Aside from playing a hooking/patching game of cat and mouse, I don't think this is fully solvable without modifying the browser engine itself - then you can hook things in a way that's completely transparent to the JS in webpages.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-10-07 20:17:36+00:00
I dont think it's a good way to think of it.

Researchers are constantly looking to train more expressive models more quickly. Any method which can converge + take large jumps will be chosen. You are sort of guaranteed to end up in a place where the sharpness is high but it somehow comes under control. If we weren't there.... we'd try a new architecture until we arrived there. So deep learning doesn't "do this", we do it using any method possible and it happened to be the various architectures that currently fit into "deep learning". Keep in mind many architectures which are deep do not converge - you see survivorship bias.
by mattkrause | 2025-10-07 20:17:51+00:00
Yes!

After I finished grad school (electrophysiology and imaging in large animal models, so seemingly relevant experience), I thought about becoming a clinician. However, I wasn't even eligible to apply to med school because it had been 5 years since I took an introductory biology or physics class (with lab!). It seems I was qualified enough to teach in a medical school but not to be a student.

A faster scientist -> practitioner pathway would be such an obvious win-win: it'd help with the overcrowded academic job market AND relieve clinical shortages, but most of the emphasis seems to be on getting MDs into research instead.
by dingnuts | 2025-10-07 20:18:10+00:00
> If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list

All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
by lovehashbrowns | 2025-10-07 20:18:47+00:00
As a complete beginner to hardware stuff, I do find the Arduino Cloud thing to be pretty compelling. Being able to push out updates over the cloud is nice! Buuuut.. once I'm mostly done with a project, there's just no need at all for it anymore. The Arduino I'm using for a receipt printer is just sitting there and now the cloud bit doesn't do anything for me.

And the problem I have is that ESP32s aren't much more difficult to set up nowadays, are wildly cheaper, and I'm soso excited to start messing around with ESP-NOW which I don't think Arduino has? But having like 10 ESP32s for messing around freely is more valuable than the cloud thing for me. And there are some super fun projects for ESP32 also like the Cheap Yellow Display thing. I ordered what I thought was one display, except it was 3, and I thought I would have to provide my own ESP32s but nope, they come with them. And these three CYDs were cheaper than a single Arduino it's actually crazy.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-10-07 20:18:47+00:00
The extremely toxic PFOA and PFOS are byproducts of manufacturing Teflon. After decades, we have managed to just barely regulate it. We don't know if these newer compounds will ultimately have similar effects. DuPont had reason to believe these original compounds were harmful, but they suppressed that fact in favor of profit. "Probably fine" is not acceptable, considering we can't meaningfully clean the stuff up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_related_to_...
by anonymars | 2025-10-07 20:19:06+00:00
I think you likely missed #1 in the chain:

1. logifail: I've been using Win10 LTSC since it first shipped, but the pain of it keeps increasing

2. MarcelOlsz: We're so screwed...Win 10 days are numbered

3. You: Win 10 days are numbered in years

4. Me: Erm + quote from #1

5. You: how is this relevant to number of years

6. Me: He's saying there are problems now

7. You (parent of this): I was replying to someone else

8. Me: this
by uniqueuid | 2025-10-07 20:19:06+00:00
If you look at the concrete laws, they are less spectacular.

For example, the concept of privacy protecting against media coverage is actually weaker for politicians (when in official duty) than for ordinary citizens (Allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht).

And libel only applies to statements of facts. I.e. you can't (easily) be prosecuted for opinions, just for making harmful false claims.
by pixl97 | 2025-10-07 20:20:42+00:00
The particular problem with your kind of thinking is neglecting people are assholes.

It's cool and all for your neighbors to sell you raw milk until that case of brucellosis and staph kills off the breadwinner in your family and you're caught up for the rest of your life suing a family farm out of existence.

And that deck is great and all, until you go over to your buddies party where you're all drinking and 15 crowd on to that deck that suddenly fails leading to you being a paraplegic.

And small business OSHA exceptions are great until big companies sub out all their work to tiny contractors that end up dying without proper PPE.

And some idiot rolling coal is fine until you're the one trying to figure out how you got lung cancer even though you didn't ever smoke.

Libertarianism is what happen when you don't think in systems.
by rlhf | 2025-10-07 20:20:43+00:00
MBZUAI (Abu Dhabi) has conferred its first-ever honorary doctorate on Sam Altman. The ceremony was witnessed by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and the university framed the award as recognition of Altman’s role in taking generative AI from labs to global use.

The UAE has been aggressively positioning itself as an AI hub. Does this kind of recognition help attract talent/funding?
by k33n | 2025-10-07 20:20:56+00:00
The constitution doesn't prohibit the deportation of illegal immigrants. It's interesting that you believe the Supreme Court is illegitimate for rightly ruling based on the letter of the law.

If you want it changed, you have 100 ways to advocate for that without declaring one of the greatest American institutions we have as "illegitimate". It's an extreme view, but certainly common in shrinking hyper-left-wing online spaces.

You won't always get your way. That's Democracy.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-10-07 20:21:00+00:00
Contrails observably suppress the Diurnal Temperature Range (i.e. they make it cooler during the day).

How could this be observed you might ask? It turns out there was a study done immediately after the grounding of airplanes during the September 11th, 2001 events to take advantage of this unique incidence of effectively halting all air transportation for a few days [0]

0. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/17/5/1520-04...
by jimbo808 | 2025-10-07 20:21:10+00:00
You won't really know if this is working out until it doesn't work out.

I'm not sure what all you can do yourself, but doctors generally won't do unnecessary tests because there is a real cost-benefit analysis that must be done. If you order a test that you don't need, and it produces a false positive and leads to intervention that isn't needed, you could cause real harm to yourself. People have all sorts of irregularities in their bodies that don't cause health problems.

Even trained physicians are cautious about interpreting test results outside of a clinical context, and they need to be understood alongside medical history, symptoms, and risk factors.

Self-diagnosis can cause anxiety, unnecessary treatments, or delays in addressing the real problem because the data was misinterpreted. Medicine isn’t just about having data, it’s about knowing what not to do with it.

Also, an AI system isn't going to have a lot of training data for cases where the patient had nothing wrong - they don't tend to write case studies about your ordinary doctor visit.
by chermi | 2025-10-07 20:22:11+00:00
The last mile problem is a generic concept in any networked system with certain common, naturally arising topology. I do not misunderstand it in the least. You're right that that putting up towers would be a (recent) solution in many places. Satellite is also a solution that applies anywhere (maybe not the poles?) and which requires less built infrastructure, which, again, we're not good at (in the US). But given the assumption that I don't understand what I'm talking about, I don't see this conversation going anywhere productive so I'm stopping here.
by danudey | 2025-10-07 20:22:38+00:00
When the goal is "harassing someone into depression and suicide" though, the incentive will never go away. People are going to start doing things like this to be deliberately malicious, sending videos of their dead parents saying horrible things about them and so on.

The problem isn't that the technology is new and exciting and people are getting carried away, the problem is the technology.
by Tepix | 2025-10-07 20:22:44+00:00
CATL sodium-ion batteries, currently in mass production.

https://aukehoekstra.substack.com/p/batteries-how-cheap-can-...

https://energynews.biz/catls-19-kwh-sodium-ion-claims-face-r...

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/08/catl-sodium-ion-batter...
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-07 20:22:56+00:00
How was it election interference? The election was in November, January 6 was 2 months after the election. Apparently when a buzzword is repeated often enough it causes short-circuits in basic reasoning, producing a zombie-like imitation of cognition.

Instead of waxing wroth about high principles based on blatant counterfactual premises, MAGA people should consider apologizing for trashing Congress, threatening to murder the vice-president, and trying overturn the results of an election they didn't like. It's unfortunate that the Biden administration set about prosecuting this with a resource-intensive bottom-up completist approach instead of going after hte organizers from the outset. The architects of Brazil's abortive coup are now sitting in prison where they belong, likewise those in South Korea.
by jbritton | 2025-10-07 20:23:01+00:00
ICE is targeting groups of people based upon a probability that some are illegal. This violates the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment requires reasonable suspicion of a specific individual. This is also why they don’t have warrants, because no judge would grant it. The LA courts have ruled their activity illegal. The federal government is appealing. The SCOTUS ruling allows ICE to continue doing what they are doing until the appeal is heard.
by epistasis | 2025-10-07 20:23:05+00:00
The high cost of rooftop solar in the US is mostly a regulatory choice. From tariffs driving up prices significantly, to completely scattered permitting processes city-to-city, to wild swings in utility policies that make solar a good-to-bad decision overnight, it all drives costs up. So the only solar installers who survive are those who are able to swoop in when the utility policies change and can drive customer acquisition super quickly ($$$), and have massive permitting office experience that lets them deploy. That all costs a lot of money and drives out competition from the space.

So we pay something like 3x-5x for residential solar in the US versus Australia. Because we choose to as a society.

Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.

We definitely need a lot of utility scale solar, but if we want cheaper electricity we need to incentivize tons of residential solar so that we can keep our grid costs lower.
by Balinares | 2025-10-07 20:23:09+00:00
That's a good read also shared by another poster above, thanks! If I'm reading this right, it contextualizes, but doesn't negate the findings from that paper.

I've got a major aesthetic problem with the fact LLMs require this much training data to get where they are, namely, "not there yet"; it's brute force by any other name, and just plain kind of vulgar. Although more importantly it won't scale much further. Novel architectures will have to feature in at some point, and I'll gladly take any positive result in that direction.
by floatrock | 2025-10-07 20:23:38+00:00
Lets do some simple napkin math: Lets say a solar system will cost $25k (that should get you an 8-10kW rooftop system). Pay for it with, say, a 5% APR loan.

- 10 years: $265/mo

- 15 years: $197/mo

- 20 years: $164/mo

What are your current monthly electricity costs, and what time horizon gets you a good break-even?

Also consider what electricity costs are gonna do. The loan locks in a monthly cost, but electricity rates have lately been increasing around 3% per year. Say you currently have a $150 monthly electricity bill... in 10, 15, and 20 years that will be $202, $233, and $270/mo.

There's other ways to finance it (PPA's, leases, maybe incentives if we get serious about our energy again someday, etc.) that have their own advantages/disadvantages, but even this simple approach shows there's some wins depending on your exact consumption, time horizon, time-value of money, and what you expect your electric load to do (will you get an EV? will you adopt heat pumps? will you need to start using way more AC in the summers? etc)
by codethief | 2025-10-07 20:23:46+00:00
Netzpolitik.org says it's not decided yet: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/eu-ueberwachungsplaene-unionsfr...

Jens Spahn, the speaker in the video OP shared, is not a member of the government but a leading member of the parliament and of one of the ruling parties. A tiny but important difference.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-07 20:23:56+00:00
By definition, the law is what we, collectively, agree on as being the law. The Supreme Court is only able to serve as the executor of the law on the basis of the institution being seen as legitimate and by virtue of being given that right by society.

The Supreme Court suddenly deciding that the constitution does not matter does not make their decision law, it erodes trust in that institution and removes their mandate to execute the law. Said supreme court has decided to throw away all trust in favor of giving unchecked and clearly illegal power to the executive, overriding Congress's very clear authority as delegated by the constitution.

Many of the actions taken by this Supreme Court are illegitimate and are things that will need to be reckoned with assuming that the presidency changes hands in 2028. As well as the actions by ICE and this presidency in general.
by maxglute | 2025-10-07 20:24:24+00:00
Ultimately cost is just one factor to prime driver like energy, energy security most overwhelming priority in energy trilemma (security, cost, sustainability)... Having dispatchahble power not tied to weather with abundance fuel source is always going to trump all other considerations for any serious grid. PRC got burn going ham on renewable a few years ago, few heat events that fucked over hydro production, increased AC demand and all of sudden you're dealing with opportunity cost of rationing factories that currently far exceeds $ differences in generation. Theoretically countries can size renewable rollout that minimum intermittent power + storage can reliabily power grid even with current tech, but that's like... multidecade megaproject.
by latexr | 2025-10-07 20:24:40+00:00
> I don't consider "who is better off" to be a very good question.

Your entire argument in the original response was “the American worker is much better off than the European worker”. That’s the only reason we’re discussing what that means. If “who is better off” isn’t a good question, then “X is better off than Y” isn’t a good argument.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494890

> Saying that immigrants are treated poorly in other ways is just bringing up a political issue unrelated to labor economics.

They are not separate. Saying “it doesn’t matter that you could be wrongfully imprisoned and separated from your children without recourse for committing no crime, but that’s OK because if it doesn’t happen you’ll make a bit more money” is detached from the reality of what matters. Most individuals aren’t money-hungry ghouls who care for wealth above all, including their own personal safety and liberty.
by cyw | 2025-10-07 20:24:47+00:00
I came across a YouTube video where different large language models played a social deception game called Liar’s Bar, and it caught my interest. I decided to build a website that tracks and visualizes how models like GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen Max, Deepseek R1, and Grok 4 Fast perform in this game — including full behavioral metrics, head-to-head matchups, and playstyle profiles.

How Liar’s Bar works

- Each round uses a deck of 20 cards: 6 Aces, 6 Kings, 6 Queens, and 2 Jokers. - Every player (model) gets 5 cards. A “target card” is announced, and players take turns placing cards and bluffing. - If a bluff is called and proven false, the liar must “play Russian roulette.” One of six revolver chambers has a live round, and it isn’t reshuffled, so the longer the game goes, the higher the risk.

Some interesting finding:

GPT-5 dominates: - Bluff rate ≈ 48% but ~90% success, showing it knows when to lie.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is analytical but cautious: - Lowest bluff frequency among top models (34%), yet 75% lie-detection accuracy — a top “truth-sniffer.” - Balanced archetype, often exposing bluffs but losing in final rounds due to low aggression.

Qwen Max barely bluffs (9%) but scores 100% bluff success and challenges often. It behaves like an over-cautious logic bot that rarely lies — surprisingly human-like in restraint.

Gemini 2.5 Flash is fast but inconsistent — good average rounds but low detection accuracy (22%), often losing head-to-head against stronger liars.

Deepseek R1 and Grok 4 Fast show moderate deception but higher risk scores, suggesting a more “shoot-first” mentality with inconsistent survival.

---

f there’s a specific matchup or metric you’d like to see, let me know and I will add it to the website. In the future, I’m planning to let users upload their own prompts and compete against others. If that sounds interesting, I’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-10-07 20:25:02+00:00
I really like the idea of adding taxes (or subsidies) to make repairing things more economical than replacing them, when this is not the case already. It seems difficult to fairly decide how to do this, but charging by rubbish weight is at least objective and easily measurable.

It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
by WorldPeas | 2025-10-07 20:25:02+00:00
This is already happening in my immediate surroundings, friends that have long complained of phone addiction are now feeling more able to act on it as it isn't this oasis of escape for them anymore. My only comment there is that they were not ready/didn't remember how bad t9 was for alphabetical inputs, even nostalgia can't cover that unfortunate marriage of convenience.
by borroka | 2025-10-07 20:25:11+00:00
Society's desire for regulation of behavior ebbs and flows.

Not limited to the US:

prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;

The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;

Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.

In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
by Tade0 | 2025-10-07 20:25:36+00:00
That hugely depends on the region. In my corner of the world the scheme is net-billing, so homeowners are selling energy at wholesale prices.

My friend has a 10kW setup combined with a 10kWh battery. Main adjustment he made was prevent the heat pump from keeping the water hot during the night, as that was just wasting energy.

After this adjustment his electricity bills halved despite only really selling energy in the peak of the summer season. The savings translate to a 10-year return on investment before subsidies.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-07 20:25:52+00:00
> Doesn't that settlement only cover civil claims?

Yes, but criminal actions over the Sacklers personally while (IMHO) completely justified are incredibly unlikely. Forme, every Sackler involved in Purdue should die penniless in a prison cell.

The big gift of the settlement (which is why I called it an Epstein like deal) was that the bankruptcy court discharged any personal liability from the Sacklers despite it being Purdue in bankruptcy. This was so egregious that even this Supreme Court said "no" (and, weirdly, the 3 liberal Justices were completely fine with it, which is bonkers).

Companies routinely try this thing where, when they're facing significant liability, try to restructure the company such that the assets are in one company and the liabilities are in the other and there are rents or payments or royalties paid from the liabilit company to the asset company. This has, as far as I know, never worked, meaning bankruptcy courts have rejected this as a liability shield. Yet they keep trying and they will probably succeed at some point. The sacklers did this with Purdue too.

It's interesting that bankruptcy courts have rejected this restructuring to avoid liabilities (correctly) yet it's completely fine to avoid tax liabilities. Yes, I'm looking at your, tech companies with Irish subsidiaries who own the IP.