MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fpoling | 2025-10-01 21:53:36+00:00
Anything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.

The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.

In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.
by ruben-davia | 2025-10-01 21:53:38+00:00
If you’ve ever tried making a Notion page do more than just hold text, embeds, or basic databases — like building a public form, a mini dashboard, or something where parts of the page act like real apps — you’ve probably run into friction. Maybe you felt stuck with weird hacks, duplications, or components that barely talk to each other. The big deal isn’t that Notion can’t do stuff; the deal is what you have to do to get there. And that’s where the trade-offs start to show.
by alliegoodson | 2025-10-01 21:54:03+00:00
Location: California, US Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Not at this time Technologies: Figma, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite Résumé/CV: https://allie.goodson.dev/resume-2025-09-04.pdf Email: allie [at] goodson [dot] dev

I am Allie Goodson, a designer based in California, focused on user centered design. I communicate easily and clearly with technical teams to ensure products are usable and accessible. I am looking for opportunities with companies that provide the chance to get my hands on a variety of products at all stages of development. If you would like to know more about me, please visit my portfolio website: https://allie.goodson.dev/
by ryancnelson | 2025-10-01 21:54:09+00:00
This really resonated with me, it's echoing the way i've come to appreciate Claude-code in a terminal for working in/on/with unix-y hosts.

A trick I use often with this pattern is (for example): 'you can run shell commands. Use tmux to find my session named "bingo", and view the pane in there. you can also use tmux to send that pane keystrokes. when you run shell commands, please run them in that tmux pane so i can watch. Right now that pane is logged into my cisco router..."
by stsffap | 2025-10-01 21:54:34+00:00
Restate 1.5 adds some nice QoL improvements for durable execution:

Observability: Full execution history with live timelines showing retries, nested calls, and state changes. All stored locally in RocksDB, no external deps needed.

Better failure handling: Instead of dead-letter queues, you can now pause invocations that hit terminal errors and restart them via UI once you fix the root cause. Invocations retain their progress/state.

Granular retry policies: Configure retries per service/handler. Invocations can pause after max retries instead of failing (useful for config errors, blocked APIs, etc).

Performance: SQL queries 5-20x faster, making the UI much snappier.

AWS Lambda: Automatic payload compression when approaching the 6MB limit, plus new Rust SDK support.

Also includes a docs overhaul with new tutorials for AI agents, workflows, and microservice orchestration.

Cloud version is now public (managed option), or self-host the open source version.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2025-10-01 21:54:37+00:00
> You can construct lambda calculus with Turing machines and Turing machines in lambda calculus.

I realize that these models of computation are equivalent. My point was rather that the imperative paradigm collapses into the functional paradigm in practical programming when I disregard the admissibility of arbitrary side effects.

> e.g. Functions can be formalized as sets and sets can be formalized as functions

I can derive functions from set theory in my sleep, and I can kickstart set theory without functions, but I wouldn't know how to define the concept of a function without sets. And even if I did: I can't even specify the characteristic function of a set without resorting to the inclusion relation.

> But it's hard to argue the machine at the end is stateless.

I'm not really that interested in the relationship between the various paradigms and the machine. What interests me most is how well I, as a human being, can write non-trivial programs. To me, it is immediately obvious that the composition of purely functional program units is conceptually simple enough to be done by a child, while unrestricted side effects can very quickly make things very complicated. However, I don't want to get involved in the discussion on this topic. I have accepted that others see it differently, although I find that completely baffling. I don't want to take away anyone's for loops, etc. To each their own.
by luhn | 2025-10-01 21:55:00+00:00
> IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked.

I've heard that before but was never able to make sense of it. Overflowing into the cloud seems like a nightmare to manage, wouldn't overbuilding on-prem be cheaper than paying your infra team to straddle two environments?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-01 21:55:28+00:00
Demis Hassabis is estimating 5-10 years to AGI, and is about the only person who's opinion on this I think is worth listening to. His/their (DeepMind) plan is to retain a pretrained LLM but add something like search around it (cf AlphaGo or AlphaFold). He does say a couple of "Transformer-level" major breakthoughs may be needed to get there, and is still only 50% confident because of AGI-requirements he may have missed.

Hassabis has the Google DeepMind team of 5000+, very many of who are PhD's, working for him, so a lot can be done in 5-10 years.
by 48terry | 2025-10-01 21:55:35+00:00
> At Branch, we spent weeks and over $5K just to get basic privacy compliance docs. Our attorneys charged hundreds per hour to essentially fill out forms about our data practices. The kicker? The policy didn't even cover our specific use cases properly, and we had to redo everything when new regulations kicked in.

So your company wasted a bunch of money working with people who got the wrong thing? Should I read this as incompetence from your company, your attorneys, or both?

> compliant privacy documentation using AI trained on current regulations

Given the above, why should I trust that your group, of all people, are the people who know privacy regulations enough to build this correctly? Or that I can actually trust you with my own company's data? Or that your knowledge banks are correct and up-to-date?
by paxys | 2025-10-01 21:56:44+00:00
My personal experience lines up with this. From what I've seen all the AI hype is coming from:

- Companies building AI models & tools - this one is obvious.

- Executives using AI to justify layoffs - there have been constant rounds of layoffs across corporate America since ~2021, but recent ones have been rebranded as "AI taking the jobs" so no one points to the obvious corporate mismanagement, offshoring and greed.

- Bosses using AI to push employees to work harder - I have personally seen this at my own company. AI is an excuse to increase forced attrition. "You aren't good enough" is harder to justify, so now it is "you aren't using AI well enough".

Real-world use cases of AI meanwhile haven't really moved beyond the prototype stage.
by afiodorov | 2025-10-01 21:57:19+00:00
Data all-rounder with 10 years building everything from low-latency Go microservices to training ML models to large-scale AWS data pipelines. Looking for a senior, autonomous role at a small company/startup.

Location: Las Palmas, Spain Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Python, SQL, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS (S3, EMR, RDS, Aurora, Athena), Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, TypeScript, React, gRPC, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, faster-whisper Résumé/CV: https://cv.fiodorov.es Email: hn@fiodorov.es
by agedclock | 2025-10-01 21:57:27+00:00
> It was definitely true at some places. My first job was web dev using the LAMP stack. The "developer" side of the house would generally write something up, wrap everything in a bunch of divs, and hand it off to the "designer" half who would add CSS/assets and make it look good.

So someone wrote a bunch of server code (backend) and then handed off for someone to style the frontend. This is what happens now in most teams. The person styling the frontend was never referred to as a "designer".

> Sometimes there would be more interaction to have the code output things in a form more amenable to the desired design, but a lot of the time it was really that simple - the designers worked in CSS and the exchange format was divs with well-defined classes. You can do a lot with a workflow that simple.

I am aware. However that isn't the norm in most places. What happens is that the best dev that can style stuff is lumbered with doing all the frontend work and most of their colleagues don't understand it.

Larger orgs have dedicated frontend/backend teams.

> I imagine it's a bit harder if you're using a modern stack where your code is separated from what's actually rendered to the user by a dozen layers, but designers are quite capable of working with CSS rather than Photoshop.

This are actually simpler than they were back then and there is better separate between the frontend and backend. So it actually easier IMO.
by red369 | 2025-10-01 21:57:29+00:00
I've been trying to work out for a while how much aphantasia I have, and I think it might help to give more detail to your instruction, and then your follow-up question.

If you said that to me, I would imagine the exterior of my house. But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different. I would think of, and sort of see different details of the house at different times. Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.

I've tried a few times to actually _see_ something in my mind, and there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly. So much more vividly than usual, that I remember thinking that if this is what other people can do easily, then sketching must be far easier than for me - you'd just copying down what you see in your head!

Edit: I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it. I picture things with less vividness/detail, so I'm not sure whether I really see them.

Ironically, the Wikipedia image is not loading for me right now, so I can't see that either :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-01 21:57:31+00:00
They've been deleting pushback and criticism on a lot of their posts for a couple years now. The "new UI" forced update generated a whole lot of negative feedback, which they deleted and proudly announced that some impossible number of people chose the new UI and that it was exclusively an opt-in feature (which is a blatant lie).

They've become extremely shitty in recent years. I canceled my ten year old subscription to their whole product line because I'm not going to pay to be lied to.
by adev_ | 2025-10-01 21:58:04+00:00
> Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".

It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.

Most of the solar production will go wasted.

That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period.

And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.
by probablyrobert | 2025-10-01 21:58:10+00:00
ah yeah sorry about that, the API docs aren't quite complete yet.

I'd recommend just looking at the glide.d.ts[0], it should be pretty readable (I hope).

Yes the TS API supports it as well with the `selector` property:

``` glide.hints.show({ selector: "..." }); ```

> Also, would you consider making it return a promise instead of taking a callback? I think that would be more ergonomic.

The reason it doesn't return a Promise directly is because the hints that are generated are not static, try scrolling while hints are active and you'll see them refresh.

So the return type would have to be something else to work well with this functionality imo.

[0]: https://github.com/glide-browser/glide/blob/8171c5c2af000b71...
by mikepurvis | 2025-10-01 21:58:31+00:00
What are the specific aesthetic complaints here?

In my limited rust experience, I’ve found that it does a pretty good job of using the ugliness of something like an explicit lifetime to signal to the developer and reader that the code is doing something complicated and non-obvious. Like “here’s a part where the types logic required more help than what the compiler could figure out on its own; here be dragons.”

In that way the “ugliness” is really just a manifestation of “hard things possible” and the language not hiding the underlying realities from you.
by grayhatter | 2025-10-01 21:58:39+00:00
> The fact that people have started applying social-justice-y terminology ("gatekeeping," "weaponize," "shared experiences," etc) to medical diagnosis is a clear sign we've gone too far. "You can't question my diagnosis because it's part of my identity! Stop gatekeeping me!"

But at least you've found a way you can feel superior to both groups right?

It's not social justice, it's just basic fairness. I've never been called weak or out of shape when I couldn't keep up with my friends when running. People are happy to adjust their expectations when I share that I have asthma, so it's harder than it might look. But I have been called lazy because I was unable to start on a task because I didn't have enough dopamine. Tell someone you have ADHD and many will suggest just making a list, or ask, "have you tried eating gluten free?" Before going on to explain they think in's over diagnosed. Please, tell me my asthma is over diagnosed, or my conversation and treatment plan with wy physician is inappropriate?

It's stupid that we blame people for admitting that things are harder than they expect. And telling someone they "don't seem autistic" or "don't look like you have asthma" are equally fucked up, but as a perfect case example, this thread. So many people are gladly willing to minimize and discount someone's description about mental health, but not lung health.

That is all I'm objecting to.

> Please. "Austism" is not a settled category and it's okay to argue about boundaries. The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling" e.g. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings". When sorting out the definition of autism (and similar conditions), we should be a little more autistic.

There's a bit of room between what I'm suggesting, and what you're replying to. I'm actually thinking we should be a little bit less autistic, because clinging too tightly to the literal written definition of individual words, limits the flexibility required for reasonable communication.

What I said was; it's inappropriate for anyone to tell somebody else that the way that they describe their experience is wrong.

but what I believe you're objecting to is; anybody can be autistic if they want to.

Which is not what I said.

the two phrases "I have very mild case of autism" and " I identify with a lot of the symptomology of autism and find that it's community and its skills and techniques to be very effective and beneficial in my life" should be treated as equivalent phrases. if you tell somebody that they're wrong to say either you are the asshole. You are rejecting their description of their life. You may disagree if they qualify for a medical diagnosis of autism. But unless someone claims that, your just arguing against a straw man that you created. (rhetorical you)
by vidarh | 2025-10-01 21:59:54+00:00
That almost all our language about recalling physical objects talk in terms related to images in retrospect should've been a dead giveaway, and I do remember many instances growing up I found it weird, because it seemed like dumb ways of talking about things you couldn't see...

It's to the point as we see it's hard to even talk about recall without recalling such words - e.g. "imagination" itself presumes images.
Show HN: Manta – graph-based extension for Claude Code
by makosst | 2025-10-01 22:00:44+00:00
Hi HN! I am Konstantin, building Manta (https://github.com/manta-ide/manta) alongside my co-founder Yehor. It is a graph-based IDE with natural-language nodes, that lets you index your codebase and work by creating and connecting nodes.

I always loved how Miro works - you can describe software in a few different ways, and make it clear how you think it should work on technical or product level.

I tried several solutions that let you build software by using nodes, but all those are forcing you to use the nodes they created, with strict connectors, and instead of making it easier, it becomes visual programming which is just harder to maintain than plain code.

That's why we build this solution, that is not restrictive of which nodes and connections you want to make.

We use a coding agent (your local Claude Code) underneath, and it is smart enough to understand what did you mean by the nodes you created.

This has a few interesting effects: - You can describe software on different levels of abstraction - You can choose to work with features, user flow, architecture diagram, timeline, or any other way you want - Node properties are now chosen by you, so you can decide which configuration (or no at all) you need for some component.

We are also working on more features for describing your software - edge and node types, comments on the canvas, supporting multiple graphs for a single solution.

On the technical level, it is a graph described in XML, that is editable on the screen. There are 2 states of the graph - "base" that is already implemented, and "current" which you are editing, and you see which nodes are modified.

Once you are ready to build it into code, you click a "build" button and the agent sees the difference between current and previous version, and can build out the changes and iteratively "fill in" the base graph with implemented changes.

For the property system we tried generating properties directly in code as a configuration, but it required to change the code while indexing a codebase. So while it worked well, it might introduce new bugs, and we switched off to graph-only properties. So the properties only exist on the graph, and once you modify them you need to "build" with the AI agent to see the changes. The AI agent just sees the direct commands of implementing some specific change in some node.

To make the coding agent's work easier we added metadata to the node, and it can specify which files were modified during creation of the node. While editing it next time he can go directly to the right files.

You can also use the chat to ask the agent directly for some fix, to index the codebase or to do some graph changes to automate some of the work. I personally either ask it to index on some level of abstraction/projection or if I know the codebase already - I just create the rough outline of how the architecture looks, and ask it to index in, to expand the descriptions and fill in the properties for nodes.

Would love to hear your feedback!
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-01 22:00:49+00:00
I don't see a good off-ramp for the current shutdown, so I think this is going to be a very turbulent couple of weeks (months?) ahead. Republicans have the majority and can't even whip together enough votes for a funding resolution, and Democrats don't want to negotiate because all the Republicans have been doing is threatening them and asking for things that are obvious no-gos. And the moment the shutdown triggered, they've started targeting blue states to tear away more funding arbitrarily so that just ensures people rightfully dig in further.

Guess we'll see how long they keep the hand on an increasingly hot stove.
by malwrar | 2025-10-01 22:00:51+00:00
I’d suggest reading their (free, online) book if you haven’t already, that’s what motivated me to actually try using it. It sells its core features pretty well and eased me into it better than just trying to grok the syntax. What kept me using it is how annoyingly frequently my code would _just work_ once I got it compiling, which I could often get to pretty quickly by catching errors early with a linter. I’d highly recommend giving it an honest try, the aesthetics make sense with a minimal amount of experience.
by vkou | 2025-10-01 22:01:26+00:00
> The dems are choosing to shut down the government that they willingly funded earlier in the year for their reasons.

Those reasons are 'The funding congress voted for isn't being spent on the things congress voted for'. They have every right to stop further spending.

> I believe it’s a tantrum that will ultimately backfire on them.

The recent history of the Republican party and Trump is nothing but one political tantrum after another, while they screech from the rooftops about some social wedge 20% distraction issue[1]. If any of that actually caused political blowback from centerist voters, they'd have about 30 seats in the Senate and 180 in the house.

[1] It's interesting that you seem to think that access to healthcare is some pet 20% issue.
by drdaeman | 2025-10-01 22:01:39+00:00
Somewhat similar in the "think of the children" and "we want this to fight the baddies" arguments. Both SORM and ChatControl have stated goals of mandatory warrant-less eavesdropping.

That's about all in similarities, though. AFAIK, there's a difference in the system architecture: Russian SORM was a push from an existing agency (FSB) who became it's sole operator (and basically took over the country: Putin is KGB/FSB spawn), EU proposal seem to establish a clearinghouse-like system for various law enforcement agencies to access through. There's also a difference in oversight: FSB has none, EU proposes some, though I'm not really knowledgeable on the details.

And - yeah - any tool that allows government to violate citizen rights is inherently dangerous if the government becomes hostile. This is clearly the case in Russia, and I'm not knowledgeable about EU at all so I cannot possibly tell.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-10-01 22:01:52+00:00
Some of my complaints are petty, and I think can be dismissed as just personal preference. I don't have a great deal of complaint with languages with different syntax, just ones that are so intentionally cryptic so as to invent needless specific sigils that you need to memorize.

I agree that most of the awkwardness of reading comes from explicit declarations, but really, even if it's more verbose, I would prefer that that explicit nature is defined elsewhere rather than reading like a compact run-on sentence. (I'm hypocritically writing here, since I do this too often myself.)