MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robenkleene | 2025-10-13 15:19:56+00:00
Yeah I do the same sometimes, at the risk of going too deep into personal preference. A couple of notes about that approach:

1. I don't recommend using shell functions or aliases for this (e.g., `bashrc`) because then these scripts can't be called from other contexts, e.g., like Vim and Emacs builtin support for shell commands. This can easily be solved by creating scripts that can be called from anywhere (my personal collection of these scripts is here https://github.com/robenkleene/Dotfiles/tree/master/scripts). Personally, I only use Bash functions for things that have to do with Bash's runtime state (e.g., augmenting PATH is a common one).

2. The more important part though, is I don't always want to search in `*.foo`, I want a flexible, well-designed, API that allows me to on-the-fly decide what to search.

#2 is particularly important and drifts in philosophy of tooling, a mistake I used to make is building my workflow today into customizations like scripts. This is a bad idea because then the scripts aren't useful as your tasks change, and hopefully your tasks are growing in complexity over time. I.e., don't choose your tools based on your workflow today, otherwise you're building in limitations. Use powerful tools that will support you no matter what task you're performing, that scale practically infinitely. "The measure of a bookshelf is not what has been read, but what remains to be read."
by necovek | 2025-10-13 15:20:10+00:00
Not sure who are "they" and where are they "representing themselves" in your question?

My point was that you can be protected as a user even without the "secure enclave": that's how GPG, SSH and HTTPS PKI works (a user has their own private key, and they are as safe as their key is). Leaking any one of those only impacts that single user, similar to someone stealing your phone and using your logged in accounts or even secure chips if they get your PIN or password (or biometrics) — if you even have it set up, which most people outside the tech bubble don't.

You might be misunderstanding some of the nuances I brought up: what are you talking about?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-13 15:20:17+00:00
The only coal plant economical to run in the US is Dry Forks, WY compared to new renewables and storage.

> The cost of running existing coal power plants in the United States continues rising while new wind and solar costs keep falling. Our first Coal Cost Crossover report (2019) found 62 percent of U.S. coal capacity was more expensive to run than to replace with renewables, while our second (2021) found 72 percent of capacity more expensive than renewables. Our latest Coal Cost Crossover research finds incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act accelerate this trend – 99 percent of all U.S. coal plants (209 out of 210) are now more expensive to run than replacement by new local solar, wind, or energy storage.

> This report finds 99 percent of the existing U.S. coal fleet is more expensive to run compared to replacement by new solar or wind. Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S. Our report provides policy recommendations to facilitate a just transition through the Coal Cost Crossover.

(report is from 2023, the economics of renewables and solar have only improved since then)

https://energyinnovation.org/report/the-coal-cost-crossover-...
by Retric | 2025-10-13 15:20:18+00:00
It’s likely, dividends provide higher levels of exponential growth long term for an otherwise steady state company. It makes them more compelling than many long term investments.

Convert X% of a stocks value into a dividend and you pay taxes on that before you can buy more stock, but someone who keeps buying stock sees an exponential return. (Higher percentage of the company = larger dividends)

A company buys back X% of its stock functions like a dividend w/ stock purchase, but without that tax on dividends you’re effectively buying more stock. Adding a tax on stock buybacks could eliminate such bias, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
by jfengel | 2025-10-13 15:20:56+00:00
I don't doubt it that all of the formal Turning tests have been badly done. But I suspect that if you did one, at least one run will mis-judge an LLM. Maybe it's a low percentage, but that's vastly better than zero.

So I'd say we're at least "remotely close", which is sufficient for me to reconsider Searle.
by stryan | 2025-10-13 15:20:59+00:00
> bat it's a useless cat. Cat concatenates files. ANSI colour breaks that.

From the README:

>Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e. when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents

bat works as normal cat for normal uses of cat and a better cat for all those "useless cat" situations we find ourselves in.
by NetMageSCW | 2025-10-13 15:21:03+00:00
Sold very well for your home business is very different than sold very well for Apple. At the time the first Mini was released, when the previous regulat iPhone (5s) was available for cheap and the new Mini had few compromises not dictated by size, it was may be 1/6 of Apple’s sales in the first year and dropped precipitously after that. It never sold well.
by photochemsyn | 2025-10-13 15:21:11+00:00
The article doesn't mention that Bayh-Dole made it legal for a university to exclusively license a patent generated by a government-financed researcher to a corporation.

Prior to this, if a corporation wanted to have exclusive rights to basic patents, they'd have to run their own private research labs to generate those patents. Prior to Bayh-Dole, university inventions were patented but there were no exclusive licensing deals. This means no competitive advantage; anyone can use license the patents (I believe any US citizen) before Bayh-Dole.

So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships; on the academic side we saw the rise of the shady enterpreneurial researcher whose business plan was to use government funds to generate patents (not uncommonly based on fraudulent research) which formed the basis of a start-up which was sold to a major corporation.

The fix is simple: patents generated with taxpayer dollars at American universities should be available to any American citizen for a small licensing fee; if people want exclusive rights to patents, they need to put up the capital for the research institution themselves, as was the case with Bell Labs. Practically, this starts with a repeal of Bayh-Dole.
by permo-w | 2025-10-13 15:21:13+00:00
>Cruelty and contempt for the weak is a specifically human trait, and not only that, but a very recent one too.

just as there are countless examples of animals helping other animals, there are countless examples of animals abandoning weak young and leaving behind the elderly and infirm. if anything humans are far far more likely to be compassionate towards the physically weak, as physical strength is far far less valuable in human society than in nearly any animal society
by DaveZale | 2025-10-13 15:21:36+00:00
maybe this:

One more flare happened since then, in 2022, but because of instrumental limitations, it was caught only at a prestage (M. J. Valtonen et al. 2023; M. J. Valtonen 2024). At the same time, more flares were discovered in historical photographic plate studies so that only eight of the expected 26 flares remain unconfirmed (R. Hudec et al. 2013). All the unconfirmed ones are due to lack of known photographs at the expected epochs.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae057e
by yobbo | 2025-10-13 15:21:49+00:00
From an economist's perspective, energy is not typically recognised as a critical quantity. In so far as it is considered, it's thought of as an incidental property of some good or service being traded like oil or electricity.

But technological progress can be understood as successively more sophisticated ways of capturing and directing energy from natural processes. Economic growth has always occurred downstream of technologies that extract more energy or increase efficiency. Sheep, horses, windmills, coal, oil, nuclear ... etc.

Metrics like kWh per capita might become more interesting as the understanding of energy/growth matures. Or externally added energy (by electricity, oil, and fertiliser) per calorie of food.

To achieve growth while also reducing energy use, efficiency must be increased proportionately through technology. Electrification of transport (bc low thermodynamic efficiency of combustion engines) is an example of how we are doing this.

So even if technology continues to develop, unless efficiency grows faster than energy sources wane, there will only be economic degrowth.
by yvdriess | 2025-10-13 15:22:06+00:00
Yep air-gapped security is a thing. But servicing, patching and communicating with air-gapped devices still needs to happen, which involves connecting to them somehow. Likely a manufacturing plant has started to connect everything together to streamline the process and created an attack surface that way.

You can see the appeal for not needing to go through all the issues, complexity and costs that entails.
by mullingitover | 2025-10-13 15:22:34+00:00
I read somewhere that old coal plants would in theory be trivial to drop-in upgrade to nuclear: you just need to replace the heat source with a nuclear one, but the rest of the infrastructure can continue to be used.

The problem is that coal plants are sprinkled with a whole bunch of radioactive fly ash, and normal radiation level for a coal plant would violate the hell out of regulations for a nuclear plant.
by tamnd | 2025-10-13 15:22:50+00:00
Was the very first edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms written in Pascal? I heard that but never actually saw that version myself.

Your comment brought back an old memory for me. My first programming language in high school was Turbo Pascal. That IDE was amazing: instant compilation, the blue screen TUI, F1 for inline help, a surprisingly good debugger, and it just felt so smooth and fast back then. No internet needed, no AI assistance, just pure focus and curiosity. Oh, how I really miss those days :)
by MezzoDelCammin | 2025-10-13 15:24:22+00:00
personally : proxmox /VM is great if You'd like to separate physical HW. In my case - virtualized TrueNAS means I can give it a whole SATA controller and keep this as an isolated storage machine.

Whatever uses that storage usually runs in a Docker inside an LXC container.

If I need something more isolated (think public facing cloudflare) - that's a separate docker in another network routed through another OPNSense VM.

Desktop - VM where I passed down a whole GPU and a USB hub.

Best part - it all runs on a fairly low power HW (<20W idle NAS plus whatever the harddrives take - generally ~5W / HDD).
by san4d | 2025-10-13 15:24:25+00:00
Hi! I'm the author. Great question.

"I probably would have returned a blob of data from the servers" That would certainly work, but adding new functionality to the rooms would require changes on the controllers (implementing the new JSON API) and on the client (calling, handling, and rendering the new feature). I wanted to minimize development time for myself now and make it possible to add new features using only C++ later.

Having the server declare the supported actions (not all rooms support the same features) and how to invoke them accomplished that. This independent evolution was a big reason why I leaned into HATEOAS.

"wouldn't have figured that doing handlebars style html templating is a good use of resources" I didn't do a size comparison between the HTML fragment and a JSON response. Next time I'm at the house I'll come up with some measurements and add it to the article - I think it's interesting. That said, the performance was more than enough for the business and each of the controllers still had plenty or RAM and Flash Memory available, I didn't need to optimize this area. If I was going to, I'd want to avoid going through the buffer so many times.

That said, the simplicity and robustness of the HATEOAS approach were the main goals. I wouldn't use it for something like high-frequency trading where every byte matters.
by dmix | 2025-10-13 15:24:44+00:00
Comparing idealized costs of one form of energy replacing another doesn't make it a non-economical form of energy.

> Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity, and generate $589 billion in new investment across the U.S.

That sort of wishy-washy language is classic political sales pitch stuff. And I say that in favour of transitioning to solar/wind where it makes sense.
by mapt | 2025-10-13 15:25:30+00:00
Can we agree that with close to 10,000 Starlink birds in the air and counting, that whatever succeeds GPS needs to be a much larger constellation than the 30-unit GPS constellation in MEO, flying much lower?

It is absolutely insane to me that Japan would be trying to economize using Molniya orbits or geosynchronous orbits in 2025.

Some BOTE math:

There are ~40k square degrees in a sphere. If I'm in a dead-end alley in an urban canyon and I have access to a 40 degree by 100 degree viewshed of sky (~4000 square degrees), that's 10% of the sky. Surface area of a 900km sphere is ~10 million square kilometers, 10% of that is 1 million square kilometers, Earth's radius is ~6400km, the orbital radius at 1000km is ~7400km, surface area of a 7400km radius sphere is ~700 million square kilometers, 1 million / 700 million ~= 1/700. Fly 3500 birds and you'll on average see five of them at a time in a 40 by 100 degree viewshed. But you'll have such a large angular parallax between their positions, and so little of the ionosphere in the way, that you get extremely high accuracy.

...

Many countries have their own SBAS to correct for ionospheric ephemera using a combination of regional ground stations and low flying satellites - The US calls their WAAS, Europe uses EGNOS, Japan uses MSAS, Russia and China have versions for their respective constellations, etc.

QZSS is a related but distinct idea that poses a little more like a localized addition to the GPS constellation.
by BrouteMinou | 2025-10-13 15:25:36+00:00
For my part, the day I was confused why "grep" couldn't find some files that were obviously there, only to realize that "ripgrep" is ignoring files in the gitignore, that was the day I removed "ripgrep" of my system.

I never asked for such behaviour, and I have no time for pretty "modern" opinions in a base software.

Often, when I read "modern", I read "immature".

I am not ready to replace my stable base utilities for some immature ones having behaviour changes.

The scripts I wrote 5 years ago must work as is.
by alphazard | 2025-10-13 15:26:03+00:00
QUIC allows identities to be signing keys, which are used to build public key infrastructure. You need to be able to sign things to do web-of-trust, or make arbitrary attestations.

Wireguard has a concept of identity as long term key pairs, but since the algorithm is based on Diffie-Hellman, and arriving at a shared secret ephemeral key, it's only useful for establishing active connections. The post-quantum version of Wireguard would use KEMs, which also don't work for general purpose PKI.

What we really need is a signature based handshake and simple VPN solution (like what Wireguard does for the Noise Protocol Framework), that a stream multiplexing protocol can be layered on top of. QUIC gets the layers right, in the right order (first encrypt, then deal with transport features), but annoyingly none of the QUIC implementations make it easy to take one layer without the other.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-13 15:26:25+00:00
>Most of the actual work to stop males from competing in women's sports,

Males who transition to female are not males. They are female/women. It is already not permissible for men to compete in women-only sports.

This became a national issue when many politicians and pundits saw a new vector to attack the trans community. We have heard it on campaign trails constantly for years now as if it’s some existential threat to the country. Your (incorrectly) characterizing it as some grassroots movement by concerned women across the nation who “simply don’t want men competing in women’s sports” is exactly what they hoped would happen over time because it gives them plausible cover.

Yes sports are a spectator event but I guarantee you not one of these people has watched women’s sports outside of exciting Olympic bids. They can’t name a single women’s soccer team in the US or a single star WNBA player. The sport is not the concern at all and we shouldn’t pretend it is.
by kobalsky | 2025-10-13 15:26:28+00:00
you can have 2 identical partitions on the ESP, the OTA flashes the inactive partition and signals to bootloader to attempt to boot it from there.

the device is restarted, if the new firmware is working correctly you signal the update process that everything is all right and it sets the new partition as default.

if the device doesn't boot correctly, or your sanity checks don't pass, either you or the watchdog restarts the device and it boot from the known-working partition.
by aaaashley | 2025-10-13 15:26:54+00:00
Speaking of using custom CSS with YouTube, I do the following for my experience:

- Completely hide the recommended tab

- Make every thumbnail grayscale (to mitigate eye-catching thumbnails)

- Make every video title lowercase (to mitigate eye-catching titles)

Here's my code, although I have to update it every once and a while when YouTube changes:

yt-thumbnail-view-model { filter: grayscale(); } h3[title] { text-transform: lowercase; } .ytd-watch-flexy #secondary { display: none !important; }

It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-13 15:27:02+00:00
Because cost. Same reason why dash clusters and infotainment systems are now all monitors - its actually way cheaper to use those than analog gauges. The software is built on a famous bullshit paradigm of "never rewrite, always reuse", and as a result shit gets patched together without any concern of how everything cooperates.

Now with hybrid or electrical drives, a motor controller is basically a package that runs its own software, which then interfaces with the rest of the car. And OTA updates can overwrite its firmware.

The only manufacturer that has avoided most issues is Toyota, since they have been doing hybrids for quite some time. Other companies are just starting on this path and to catch up, they can't be bothered to do software deep dives and figure shit out.
by nick__m | 2025-10-13 15:27:11+00:00
Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.

My summary: it's too big big to fail so let's transfer the risk on the taxpayer and if it fails anyway, let them eat cake. And by the way, that cake is a lie !
by Someone1234 | 2025-10-13 15:27:30+00:00
It has everything to do with it.

If OTA updates can update core vehicle computer systems, in ways that can correct safety, performance, and reliability problems then they can also brick that vehicle.

The manufacturer has the ability to push an update that reprograms computers that control how physical components behave in a vehicle. By the very nature of that; they can push good or evil updates.
by toast0 | 2025-10-13 15:27:38+00:00
The Intermountain Power Plant provides energy to many different places. Replacing generation there keeps transmission lines balanced as they were.

Wikipedia says LADWP operates 4 natural gas power plants within city limits, so they do both. It might be hard to find a site for a new generator, and the Intermountain site had additional coal generators planned but not built; building a natural gas generator there makes a lot of sense.
by Figs | 2025-10-13 15:27:44+00:00
In computer graphics, 4x4 matrices let you do a rotation and a translation together (among other things). There's the 3x3 rotation block you found later as well as a translation vector embedded in it. Multiplying a sequence of 4x4 matrices together accumulates the rotations and translations appropriately as if they were just a bunch of function applications. i.e. rotate(translate(point)) is just rotation_matrix * translation_matrix * point_vector if you construct your matrices properly. Multiplying a 4x4 matrix with another 4x4 matrix yields a 4x4 matrix result, which means that you can store an arbitrary chain of rotations and translations accumulated together into a single matrix...
by encom | 2025-10-13 15:28:00+00:00
Sure it is. A subscription's defining trait is continuity of access contingent on periodic renewal, whether manual or automatic. People subscribed to things way before online payments or even credit cards were common. A modern, if niche, example is Tarsnap.com. Once in a while, I get an email from Colin telling me to pay up if I don't want my backups deleted.
by righthand | 2025-10-13 15:28:12+00:00
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.

I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.

[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/881418283
Show HN: I made games so boring the fun part is guessing your score
by chris_r_123 | 2025-10-13 15:28:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I love building small games (as Pong, Wordle, Tetris, etc.), but they're never quite unique enough to justify their own site. So I built boring.game - a daily "boring" game where the social mechanics (predicting your score, challenging other users) is more interesting than the game itself.

I started a HN team if you want to compare your results: https://boring.game/invite/SRhyUStjin

You can also play all daily games without signing up, if that is what you prefer.

Built with SvelteKit (first time using Svelte - loved it!). Would love feedback on both the concept and execution.
by dkyc | 2025-10-13 15:29:26+00:00
It's not even clear that the premise is true. There's lots of 'research' done in the big tech companies.

The biggest reason why companies don't seek to emulate "Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE", is probably that it reads like a list of textbox examples of "companies that failed to execute on their research findings", so clearly there was something wrong with this approach.