MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by schoen | 2025-10-06 02:07:25+00:00
There are probably other periods of time when I might have advocated running hybrids of different families of primitives, although I'm not sure that I was ever following the details closely enough to have actually advocated for that.

The cool thing is the dramatic security improvements against certain unknown unknowns for approximately linear additional work and space. Seems like a pretty great advantage for the defender, although seriously arguing that quantitatively requires some way to reason about the unknown unknowns (the reductio ad absurdum being that we would need to use every relevant primitive ever published in every protocol¹).

I see PQC as somehow very discontinuous with existing cryptography, both in terms of the attacks it tries to mitigate and the methods it uses to resist them. This might be wrong. Maybe it's fair to consider it an evolutionary advance in cryptographic primitive design.

The casual argument from ignorance is that lattices are apparently either somewhat harder to understand, or just less-studied overall, than other structures that public-key primitives have been built on, to the extent that we would probably currently not use them at all in practical cryptography if it weren't for the distinctive requirements of resistance to quantum algorithms. I understand that this isn't quantitative or even particularly qualitative (for instance, I don't have any idea of what about lattices is actually harder to understand).

Essentially, in this view, we're being forced into using weird esoteric stuff much earlier than we'd like because it offers some hope of defending against other weird esoteric stuff. Perhaps this is reinforced by, for example, another LWE submission having been called "NewHope", connoting to me that LWE was thought even by many of its advocates to offer urgently-needed "hope", but maybe not "confidence".

I'd like not to have to have that argument only in terms of vibes (and DJB does have some more concrete arguments that the security of SIKE was radically overestimated, while the security of LWE methods was moderately overestimated, so we need to figure out how to model how much of the problem was identified by the competition process and how much may remain to be discovered). I guess I just need to learn more math!

¹ I think I remember someone at CCC saying with respect to the general risk of cryptographic backdoors that we should use hybrids of mechanisms that were created by geopolitical rivals, either to increase the chance that at least one party did honest engineering, or to decrease the chance that any party knows a flaw in the overall system! This is so bizarre and annoying as a pure matter of math or engineering, but it's not like DJB is just imagining the idea that spy agencies sometimes want to sabotage cryptography, or have budgets and staff dedicated to doing so.
by GaggiX | 2025-10-06 02:07:50+00:00
You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
by mindslight | 2025-10-06 02:09:08+00:00
Man, you people will really turn off your basic empathy and reasoning on the flimsiest of excuses. That could just as easily be your family getting attacked at 3AM. And if you dare to exercise your 2nd amendment rights to defend yourselves against a night time home invasion, perhaps even being summarily executed. I assume until this actually happens to you or at least someone in your community, you will just keep on inventing reasons why it couldn't possibly. It's easier than confronting the truth, for sure.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 02:09:12+00:00
This is a ridiculous take. Germany did not screw up their energy policy, they had a transition plan that ended up not working due to one of the partners in that plan starting a war and believing that they had Germany by the short hairs to stop them from interfering.

For individuals in Europe that have the possibility to spend a few hundred (or even a few thousand) bucks up front to lower their energy bill is a win for everybody, it lowers emissions, decentralizes energy production and generates ROI. My own system (which is a little bit larger) paid for itself in the first three years and has allowed me to do all kinds of things that I would not have been able to do otherwise if I had had to pay for the electricity. The surplus that I don't use I sell at a discount to the grid and that's fine by me.
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-06 02:09:24+00:00
My partner is a pro-democracy fighter for her country of origin (she went to prison for it). She used to translate english articles of interest to her native language for all the fellow-exiles from her country. I showed her Google translate and it blew her mind how much work it did for her. All she had to do was review it and clean it up.

The AI hype train is bs, but there're real and concrete uses for it if you don't expect it to become a super-intelligence.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-06 02:09:24+00:00
haha it's not the savings. It's the accessibility! This phone is out on a balcony by a herb garden. The big annoyance with electric devices is that they need to be connected to an outlet. PVs have saved this.

We have our blinds on PVs which is very convenient. No charging required and no wires required. Same thing applies here. The PVs allow battery recharge for places where power cables are inconvenient. The phone is a convenient tailscale device with a battery that can webcam!
by pvankessel | 2025-10-06 02:09:26+00:00
Hard disagree. I gave up a top-10 engineering scholarship and switched to liberal arts largely because my entire curriculum was predetermined in the former. Five courses in calculus and two slots for electives in your entire undergraduate schedule - that doesn't teach you how to think. Political philosophy, symbolic logic, comparative history, econometrics - having the freedom to explore and dabble and push yourself into new ideas instead of being fast-tracked into a pipeline, that's how you learn how to learn. And the "difficulty" is entirely what you make of it. Sure, if you show up to college and want to major in anthropology and put no effort in, you get nothing out. But I saw very quickly that with absolute unfailing effort applied to my engineering degree, I was still going to get exactly one and only one thing out of it. The liberal arts gave me a cornucopia of possibility. I've gone on a human trafficking sting op with the FBI, I've presented my research at the White House, I've been cited by the Pope - that's all wild shit that an engineering degree never would have enabled. Breadth of learning and soft skills matter. I'd be a shell of a person today if not for my liberal arts education. I owe everything to it, and the constant condescension towards non-STEM education in tech would frustrate me more if I didn't run laps around my peers.
by mikercampbell | 2025-10-06 02:10:39+00:00
> A few days ago, the CEO of Vercel—an AI coding startup that, as of Tuesday, raised a $300 million Series F at a $9 billion—posted a selfie with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Vercel is a product for AI developers that companies like Meta are investing heavily in in order to develop their AI faster than competitors.

As an aside, when was Vercel ever an AI company? I’ve been (past tense, but I left a bit ago) a customer for years and it was a “hosting service with convenient feature bundling”.

Labeling everyone an AI company is watering down so much detail and nuance to put it lightly.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-06 02:11:02+00:00
A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.

It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.
by itsme0000 | 2025-10-06 02:11:28+00:00
Well I’m celebrating my 10th anniversary in April, but it it’s how you play your cards. I just go to meetings keep up with the stack and agree with everything. The developers love me because I will always endorse any decision they make. Product loves me because I’m bailing out projects the seniors won’t touch. If I succeed, Product hero, if i fail well we should have listened to the engineers in the first place.
by cryzinger | 2025-10-06 02:12:27+00:00
I think you and I are probably in agreement there :) I would also wager, although obviously it's hard to say without hard data, that today's Macs are roughly as profitable as yesterday's Macs, and that today's design choices are at least partly a reflection of evolving materials, changing tastes, etc.

The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"

IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.
by mindslight | 2025-10-06 02:13:44+00:00
Just make sure there is an indeed a rubber washer for the sealing. And if it leaks, try replacing that or even adding a second one first. Although none of this applies if both threads do indeed look tapered. And also the rubber washer often has a built in screen in the middle, to catch pieces of whatever (like bits of teflon tape, lol) rather than them clogging up the showerhead's holes.
by nonrecursive | 2025-10-06 02:14:09+00:00
It’s possible for something to be more than one thing at the same time. You can both leave a company as a protest of its politics and move on to some other venture that you have the means for.

And anyway the article, which doesn’t dig deeper into this person’s motives, doesn’t even paint it as a protest. It could simply be not wanting to participate in harm, which is not exactly the same as a protest.
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-06 02:14:54+00:00
What isn't tested here, and what I can't test myself as a mono-linguist, is how well english is translated to other languages. I'm sure it's passable, but I absolutely expect it to be less sufficient because most of the people working on this live in the USA / speak english and work the most on that.

I want to know how it holds up translating Spanish to Farsi, for example.
by slow_typist | 2025-10-06 02:15:56+00:00
True, the cut of 19% VAT on panels, inverters (which is applicable to any household PV installation, not only on the balcony) are a subsidy but in the meantime prices came down so much that it’s not really relevant anymore. (440 Wp panels go for 60 EURO a piece and a 800 W Hoymiles inverter for around 120 so total subsidy is around 50 EURO.) Other subsidies paid for by the communal bodies are long gone. Cutting the VAT helped to accelerate diffusion but that is what subsidies are made for. Probably the simplification of the registration process is by far more important. And last but not least the VAT cut for solar is a rounding error compared to the subsidies of ICE car traffic.
by gpm | 2025-10-06 02:16:28+00:00
The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.

They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.
by qingcharles | 2025-10-06 02:16:36+00:00
These prices are actually better than Hetzner, which is pretty crazy. If the service is comparable.

I used to have no issues with OVH for hosting, but I moved to Hetzner because the cost was significantly cheaper previously. I've not had one single scrap of trouble with Hetzner, but I'm always looking for something I can use for failover in an emergency.
by bane | 2025-10-06 02:16:43+00:00
Goodness, I have over 100TB at home and it cost less than a two or three thousand dollars to put in place. That's like $25 per TB.

> The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets.

No, the 858TB amounts to under $25k for the government of the 10th largest economy, of one of the most sophisticated countries on the planet, to put in place.

Two of those would be less than the price of a new Hyundai Grandeur car.

> “It’s daunting as eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.”

So they're clocking in at around 100TB/year or 280GB a day. It's respectable, but not crazy. It's about 12GB/hr, doable with professional, server level hardware with backup moved over dedicated fiber to an offsite location. Multiply the price 10x and you can SSD the entire thing.

Even with data sovereignty consideration demanding an entirely 100% home grown solution rather than turning to AWS or Azure, there's no excuse. But it's not like the cloud providers don't already have CSAP certification and local, in country, sovereign clouds [1] with multiple geographic locations in country [2]

South Korea is full of granite mountains, maybe its time the government converts one into an offsite, redundant backup vault?

1 - https://erp.today/south-korea-microsoft-azure-first-hypersca...

2 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/regions-...
by ponco | 2025-10-06 02:16:52+00:00
A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa...

Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).
by sgjohnson | 2025-10-06 02:17:30+00:00
That rule was brought about by the UN Security Council Resolution 242.

And funnily enough, nobody objected when Egypt annexed Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1948.

As far as the international law is concerned, Israel was completely in the clear to annex the entire place until 22nd of November, 1967. After that it gets a bit murky.

That still doesn't change the fact that the entire idea of an independent Palestinian state happened because Israel just didn't annex it all in 1967.

But going back to the UNSC Resolution 242.

> Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force

There are still no recognized boundaries of Palestine, and there sure as hell weren't in 1967. The original UN Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted, but the problem with its adoption is the fact that it was a General Assembly resolution, and the problem with General Assembly resolutions is that they are notoriously non-binding, and thus not worth the paper they are printed on.

Which brings me back to my initial point that the international law just doesn't matter, because technically speaking, the original Partition Plan was settled international law. Worked out great in practice.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-10-06 02:18:26+00:00
From my experience, there are different cultural aspects to privacy and sometimes, simple metal bars balconies are fitted with fabric to hide what's happening inside the apartment from the outside world.

I guess in many places where this is more culturally predominant, they install solid barriers on those balconies.

Usually those barriers leave a gap at the bottom for water and debris.

https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8025956-5559700-solar-power-ba...
by orionsbelt | 2025-10-06 02:19:01+00:00
Your links are misleading:

- Jassy: "When Jassy became CEO in 2021, he received a special stock award with a total value of $212 million. This award vests over 10 years..." - Ellison: "Founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison was awarded $138.6 million in the year ended 31 May 2022...However the bulk of the headline-grabbing figures, some $129.3 million of the total awards for both the CTO and CEO, will not be realized for a further three years. The performance-based stock options (PSOs) were granted in May 2018 and were supposed to vest in May 2022 "at the earliest" but were expected to take five years."

Zuckerberg may have agreed to forego additional equity comp, but he is a rare exception. Most executives receive new equity grants, subject to vesting, as compensation, even if they already own a lot of stock, as the stock they already own is not compensation for work.
by nativeit | 2025-10-06 02:19:35+00:00
My step-father was a very active bluegrass musician in North Carolina, and when he died I inherited all of his instruments. In particular, I have a unique banjo made by a local luthier (Bob Shue) specifically for my step-father. The banjo features a machined bronze tone ring that lends a very dark tone to the instrument, rounding out the typically nasal characteristic nicely. It weighs a ton, but features a lot of very beautiful hand-carved inlay and absolutely gorgeous mahogany and ebony. The artistry is undeniable.

I grew up teaching myself to play guitar using the Online Guitar Archive (olga.org I think it was, all user-submitted ASCII text files). I was one of the teenage brats in the guitar shop putting their grubby hands on everything when the Parker Fly was first released. It blew my little mind, I have a lot of memories playing grunge riffs in a corner of Reliable Music. RIP Mr. Parker, good show old chap.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 02:21:09+00:00
Balcony solar panels isn't necessarily a bad outcome. It's enormously more resilient to natural disasters and warfare than centralized power stations, it's potentially more responsive to individual power needs than an electric regulator, and it may not even be inefficient—while solar panels in a utility-scale solar farm will have a higher capacity factor than balcony solar panels, that only saves you money on solar panels, but requires transmission, distribution, metering, and utility-scale storage capacity between the solar farm and the apartment, all of which are costly. At some price point, putting up a solar panel costs less than running a power line to your house.

With "mainstream" solar panels costing €0.100 per peak watt as of August (according to https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...) it's getting harder and harder to justify the efficiencies of centralization.

That is, maybe with single-axis trackers and optimal angle, your solar farm gets a capacity factor of 15% (I think Germany's average for utility-scale solar is 10%) so an average 500-watt load requires 3300 peak watts of utility-scale generation (€330), plus 3000 additional watts of inverter capacity, 2000 additional watts of storage capacity, 1000 additional watts of transmission capacity over something like 100km, and 1000 additional watts of distribution capacity. Maybe your capacity factor on the balcony is only 7.5%, so you have to spend €660 for 6600 peak watts, and you probably still need some storage capacity, so maybe you end up spending €1000, €670 more than the solar-farm panels. Maybe you need to spend €80 on a 12-volt car inverter, too.

It's very easy for the cost of utility-scale inverters, transmission capacity, etc., to exceed the €750 savings you get in this case from centralization. Also, note that about 20% of the energy produced in utility-scale generation is lost in power conversion, transmission, etc.

Note that I'm only talking about costs here, and only about the essential costs that come from the form of production. I'm not talking about prices, which may incorporate subsidies, permitting costs, taxes such as tariffs, transaction costs, lawsuits against non-performing building contractors, and market inefficiencies such as homeowners not having access to the zero-marginal-cost excess power that can be produced on sunny days for regulatory reasons.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 02:22:53+00:00
Are those retail prices? Are you buying them in a store, or what? 440Wp/60€ is only 0.136€/Wp, which is higher than the wholesale 0.100€/Wp price reported on Solarserver, but only barely.

The word "diffusion" does get used in this way in English, but many native English speakers may be unfamiliar with it.
by rmunn | 2025-10-06 02:23:48+00:00
I've known that the correct pronunciation of "mic" was to sound like "mike" (because it's short for "microphone") for so long that the pun in the "Mic-E-Mouse" name escaped me until after I finished reading the article.

(If you also didn't notice the pun, it would sound like "Mickey Mouse" if you pronounced "mic" the way it's written instead of the correct way).
by StrangeDoctor | 2025-10-06 02:24:12+00:00
I think the unit you and the article want are MW-Day of un enforced capacity UCAP, not MW/Day.

PJM claims this will be a 1.5-5% yoy increase for retail power. https://www.pjm.com/-/media/DotCom/about-pjm/newsroom/2025-r...
by Klonoar | 2025-10-06 02:24:28+00:00
I played this back when it first released. SEGA has absolutely known about it for the entirety of its existence; the Sonic fangame/modding/etc community has a long and storied history behind it.

They've taken action against things in the past, but they're not Nintendo. I'd be shocked if they did much about this particular effort.
by thunky | 2025-10-06 02:25:15+00:00
> Do you think GenAI LLM would be so efficient at coding if there were no names and comments in the training data ? I doubt it.

Sure, but if you remove human facing programming languages from the equation - which are diverse and messy due to human understanding and varied preferences - then the intermediate language that the LLM generates would be much smaller and simpler to "understand" and produce.

Public code could be converted into this intermediate language to train the LLM so it has examples of human intent -> AST.

I don't think this could eliminate programming languages, but my position is that a large percentage of development work today is not very unique at all: it's the same patterns being done over and over by different people in different (or in many cases, the same) way. We could solve this problem without LLMs, but we never will because the will is not there.
by Rochus | 2025-10-06 02:26:45+00:00
> "it doesn't mean "I don't need to read the legal fine print, I can just go by my interpretation of the press release"

That's not what I said. Anyway, I don't know where you are located, but at least in my country it is no problem to download the code from github for non-commercial educational study, especially given the listed facts. I think we can leave it at that.