MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by westurner | 2025-10-26 17:37:43+00:00
NewsArticle: "Unifying physics just got harder: Study challenges fundamental test of quantum gravity" (2025) https://interestingengineering.com/science/unifying-physics-... :

> The concept at the center of this debate dates back to a 1957 proposal by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who suggested that if gravity could cause two massive objects to become quantumly entangled, then gravity itself must be quantum in nature. The idea has recently gained traction as advances in precision measurement make such tests experimentally feasible.

NewsArticle: "Does gravity produce quantum weirdness? Proposal divides physicists" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03381-1
Show HN: I built a tool to track when AI engines cite your website
by legitcoders | 2025-10-26 17:37:57+00:00
Hey HN! I built a tool that tracks when AI search engines (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI) cite your website in their responses.

*The problem:* AI search is exploding (Perplexity does 100M+ queries/month), but there's no way to know if these engines are citing your content. It's like SEO in 2005 before Google Analytics existed.

*What it does:* - Automated daily checks across multiple AI platforms - Tracks citation rate, position, and trends over time - AI-powered recommendations for queries where you're NOT cited - Shows which platforms cite you most

*Technical approach:* - Puppeteer for web scraping (no expensive APIs) - Firebase for real-time data - Groq for AI recommendations - Next.js + TypeScript frontend - Vercel cron for automation

*Why I built it:* I run llmscentral.com (a repository of llms.txt files) and noticed traffic from Perplexity was growing 50% month-over-month. But I had no idea which queries were driving it. Built this to scratch my own itch.

*Free tier:* 3 tracked queries, weekly checks on Perplexity *Paid tiers:* More queries, daily checks, all platforms, AI recommendations

Try it: https://llmscentral.com/citation-tracking

Would love feedback from the HN community! Happy to answer any technical questions.
by danaris | 2025-10-26 17:38:49+00:00
Those are two different definitions of "free market".

The definition you are using is a very strict one, and is only really useful for comparing "market economies" to "command economies". That is clearly not what we are talking about here.

The definition I am using is of an "ideal free market", which is what is required for any of the "free market theory" consequences to come into play. That includes things like revealed preferences theory. An "ideal free market" requires no friction, perfect information, perfect elasticity, etc.

Without that, the idea that you can tell what people "really want" in social media based on which networks they use is completely false.
by hinkley | 2025-10-26 17:39:21+00:00
Reminds me of the largest AJAX app I worked on, back when jquery was still hot and IE6 still existed as a problem.

The landing page in our app used jqueryUI’s drag and drop support, back around the time they declared bankruptcy on the confusing buggy code and wouldn’t even accept bug fixes because they were replacing it component by component (which was taking almost 3x as long as predicted). We had columns you could drag items between but they had a max height and scroll bars and it turned out jqueryUI would let you drag items into different rows if the overflow area for adjacent drag targets overlapped your row.

The person who found it couldn’t fix it. The other fixer couldn’t fix it. I diagnosed it but the spaghetti code was a recursive mess and I could not find a spot where I could fix it. Especially given I couldn’t send in a patch to them.

So I spent half of my free time the last day of every (2 week) sprint for almost six months before I finally found a small function I could monkey patch to wrap it in a short circuit check for clipping region. I spent maybe 20,30 hours on this, a lot of it just getting back to the same situation to debug. But it felt like it took forever to fix it.

The short circuit also made drag and drop faster, which was just getting in the edge of distracting. Particularly on a crowded page.
by edanm | 2025-10-26 17:39:47+00:00
Practically speaking, they're lumped together for a few reasons:

1. Many people who like one genre also like the other.

2. Many authors write in both genres.

3. There's a lot of similarity in the genres, and lots of things that are hard to categorize. More true lately btw.

Just as an aside though, I personally was an avid almost-only-SF reader for the first 30-ish years of my life, but lately have been reading a lot of fantasy as well. I highly recommend trying, especially more modern fantasy - I feel like the lines are even blurrier between them today, and a lot of the best work today has shifted from SF to fantasy. (I still love SF and there's a lot of great SF as well, to be clear.)
by zahlman | 2025-10-26 17:40:13+00:00
Agreed, and "definite scent" is underselling it. I didn't even attempt any deep analysis; I just skimmed a bit and found this bit and noped right out:

> The posters were typically painted on used flour sacks, sewn together and primed for colour. These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse.

> And the designs? Let’s just say they didn’t rely too heavily on accuracy.

LLM writing tropes that are so bad, they're good.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-26 17:40:38+00:00
You’re in a thread about California adding record amounts of battery storage. These batteries charge at noon a discharge in the evening while demand is peaking. This smooths out the supply across the day so it can meet the demand.

California did struggle with the duck curve but it’s less of a problem now. When the next heatwave comes, evening aircon demand won’t be a problem.
by lou1306 | 2025-10-26 17:41:52+00:00
I think a big issue with this approach is that the initial and last steps are prone to sycophancy: the machine wants you to believe it's getting the job done, which may lead it to do something correct-looking over something correct. The middle steps (correct-by-construction transformations) do not need an LLM at all. It's what a certified compiler does.

I think the way forward, for the immediate future, is to feed AI agents with a mixture of (hand-written) natural language and formal blueprints, then use as many mechanized analysis methods as possible on the generated code (from unit/regression testing to static analysis, and possibly more powerful software verification procedures). Potentially feed the output of these analyses back to the agents.
by danans | 2025-10-26 17:42:15+00:00
> PG&E must serve every yokel in California no matter how far out, while SVP and other MUDs contribute nothing to rural electrification mandates

You can both be right about this. PGE is subject to rural electrification mandates.

However, the way those mandates get satisfied can vary tremendously in cost, and because by regulation investor owned utilities are compensated as a % of their capex spend, there is an incentive to use more expensive solutions, especially when those solutions induce greater dependency on their transmission infrastructure.

Furthermore, apart from expensive bespoke off-grid setups, there is inherently no competition in transmission in distribution. It's a natural monopoly.

AFAIK, municipal utilities do not have any say over how IOU monopolies deploy capital, so why should they be subject to those costs?

If we feel that rural communities deserve electrical service (don't we all deserve it?), then perhaps those should be publicly owned/financed through taxes and a competitive bidding process by private entities, not shunted into uneven electricity rates.
by cm2187 | 2025-10-26 17:43:10+00:00
That's not what dfawcus is saying, he is talking about installed capacity, not consumption. If you build 1GW of wind, you need to also build 1GW of gas to make up for when there is no wind (and as you can tell from gridwatch, it's a common occurence). Otherwise blackouts.

[edit] and we might be talking at cross purpose here. I think most of the new capacity built now is to expand the production, rather than to reduce other forms of productions (in which case you might just keep around existing gas capacity if it was there, to your point).
by markus_zhang | 2025-10-26 17:44:36+00:00
I mean you don’t need to take a stranger’s advice so I’m glad you asked the q.

I just think the time and energy anyone owns is a very limited amount, so if you are really really passionate about something that is not family or kid, I just can’t see the logical argument that you want a big chunk of that time and energy taken away by something else.

But you do what you want to do.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-26 17:44:44+00:00
> still not a peace deal. It does look more akin to surrender of fighting

Sure, whatever, it’s an armistice. Practically, it means Palestinians aren’t dying at hundreds or thousands a clip. And it means Trump can think he’s in line in Oslo.

> Moral of the story is that collective punishment works, I suppose

Moral is we’re in a multipolar world. America is no longer world cop, which means we’re back to 19th century great power dynamics.

> no logically-consistent definition you can provide that would make that raid a terrorist attack without also capturing Israel's actions as terrorist attacks

Granted. But Israel also waged a military campaign against Hamas infrastructure (and allegedly the Gaza population).

I’m not making a moral argument. Just a practical one. Killing a kidnapping civilians is a goading into war. Sinwar was explicit about his expectation of war with Israel.

He thought Iran and its proxies would be more capable. That’s a fair miscalculation. But after being faced with evidence of that fuckup, he didn’t sue for peace or attempt to return the hostages.

At the same time, Israel could have absolutely prosecuted this war more precisely. (They didn’t, and that has and probably will cost them a great deal until someone realises turning Netanyahu over to the ICC is a get out of jail free card.)

In the end, since October 7, the best Gaza could hope for was ceasefire and international occupation. The idea that an independent Palestine was ever on the table from anyone relevant, i.e. Israel and Palestine’s geographic neighbors and defence and trading partners, was always wishful. (I mean independent as sovereign. A demilitarized Gaza that is independent on paper but in practice bordered by the region’s most powerful military is the West Bank all over again.)
by chuckadams | 2025-10-26 17:45:03+00:00
Doable. It would basically be ssh but without encryption. You'd have to bang out login by hand, but "username\npassword\n" will probably work, might need a sleep inbetween, and of course you'll have to detect successful login too. Oh, and every 0xff byte will have to be escaped with another 0xff

At that point, may as well support raw serial too.

Supporting rlogin on the other hand is probably as simple as GIT_SSH=rlogin
by somewhereoutth | 2025-10-26 17:47:19+00:00
1. Understand that code that has been wholly or partly LLM generated is tainted - it has (in at least some part) been created neither by humans nor by a deterministic, verifiable, process. Any representations to its quality are therefore void.

2. Ban tainted code.

Consider code that (in the old days) had been copy pasted from elsewhere. Is that any better than LLM generated code? Why yes - to make it work a human had to comb through it, tweaking as necessary, and if they did not then stylistic cues make the copy pasta quite evident. LLMs effectively originate and disguise copy pasta (including mimicking house styles), making it harder/impossible to validate the code without stepping through every single statement. The process can no longer be validated, so the output has to be. Which does not scale.
Show HN: CVE Daily – fast, vendor-neutral CVE briefs for triage
by TopSecretHacker | 2025-10-26 17:48:06+00:00
I built CVE Daily to cut CVE triage time. It pulls from NVD and OSV, puts vendor advisories up front, and adds short guidance on what to patch or mitigate now. There’s also a Transitive Upgrade Assistant that uses deps.dev graphs to suggest the minimum safe host version when a vulnerable dependency is pulled in transitively.

Highlights:

NVD + OSV aggregation

Vendor advisories first

Concise, neutral “what to do now”

KEV badges and prioritization notes

Tags/filters (vendor, product, CWE)

EOL/EOS context for impacted products

Would love feedback from SecEng/SRE/IT admins: If this helps, share it with your team; if not, tell me why.
by bgwalter | 2025-10-26 17:48:07+00:00
The PSF could reject donations from Microsoft and Google. Deb Nicholson was previously at the OSI, which is widely thought to be ... industry friendly, so that is unlikely to happen.

They could also have done research in 2018 before accepting the award, which is standard procedure for politicians etc. But of course they wanted the award for their career.
by remus | 2025-10-26 17:48:18+00:00
I've had some luck with this in other contexts. Get the initial transcript from STT (e.g. whisper), then feed that in to gemini with a prompt giving it as much extra context as possible. For example "This is a transcript from a youtube video. It's a conversation between x people, where they talk about y and z. Please clean up the transcript, paying particular attention to company names and acronyms."
by westurner | 2025-10-26 17:49:16+00:00
On gravity;

Gravity from QFT:

> This says that the standard model actually does describe the n-body orbits of the planets:

> "Perihelion precession of planetary orbits solved from quantum field theory" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14447 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220460

> There's also this:

Fluid models also predict gravity:

> "Fluid vacuum yields exact solutions to Pioneer anomaly and Mercury's perihelion (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45220585
by mzajc | 2025-10-26 17:49:36+00:00
> “origin” is also just the default name for the cloned remote. It could be called anything, and you can have as many remotes as you’d like.

One remote can also hold more URLs! This is arguably more obscure (Eclipse's EGit doesn't even support it), but works wonders for my workflow, since I want to push to multiple mirrors at the same time.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-26 17:51:18+00:00
> So first let it translate natural language to a formal language, from there allow it to use a logic engine to make verifiable transformations (correctness-preserving), and finally translate back to natural language.

Linguists in the Richard Montague tradition have indeed attempted to use tools like formal logic, lambda calculus, continuations, monads, modalities etc. to try and understand the semantics of natural language in a way that's both logical/formal and compositional - i.e. accounting at least partially for the "deep" syntax of natural language itself, such that a fragment can be said to have a semantics of its own and the global semantics of a broader construction arises from "composing" these narrower semantics in a reasonably straightforward way.

This is pretty much the same as trying to take the "let's translate natural language into formal logic" proof-of-concept exercises from a text like OP (or from your average logic textbook) seriously and extending them to natural language as a whole. It turns out that this is really, really hard, because natural language mixes multiple "modalities" together in what looks like a very ad-hoc way. We only barely have the tools in formal logic to try and replicate this, such as continuations, modalities and monads. (Linguists actually talk about many phenomena of this kind, talking about "modalities" is just one example that's both general enough to give a broad idea and happens to be straightforward enough on the logical side. You have quantification, intensionality, anaphora, scope, presupposition, modality proper, discourse-level inference, pragmatics, ellipsis, indexicals, speech acts, etc. etc. etc.)

And because the semantics of natural language is both so general and so hard to pin down, it doesn't seem useful to "reason" about the logical semantics of natural languages so directly. You can of course use logical/mathematical modeling to address all sorts of problems, but this doesn't occur via a verbatim "translation" from some specific language utterance.
by rstephenson2 | 2025-10-26 17:51:23+00:00
It was hard to tell if he means he doesn’t do meetings at all, though it’s kind of implied. There are lots of high leverage activities around advocating for engineering’s perspectives among the other executives and bringing the business context to engineering, both of which don’t involve directly managing reports.

But I’m also surprised to see so many comments advocating for the CTO disconnecting from the code in favor of doing more people management. As soon as they stop writing code their skills start decaying, their advice and technical direction is reduced to platitudes and thought leadership. It may seem like a CTO who doesn't code will stop making technical decisions and just delegate, but I’d posit that they make decisions regardless, just worse ones.

It seems like this sentiment relates closely to the ideas around dual track career progression, and having technical leadership tied to hiring and managing people. Hiring engineering talent is certainly important to the company, but is quite orthogonal to technical decision making and it seems like a natural place to split the role.
by riordan | 2025-10-26 17:51:59+00:00
This absolutely rocks: like an open and usable version of the once beloved and now deprecated Echo Nest Audio Analysis api [0]. There used to be a tool to use this data to manage your own (Spotify-only) music library and while it wasn’t magic, it sure felt like it.

Super excited to try AudioMuse

[0]: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
by jonesjohnson | 2025-10-26 17:52:15+00:00
I really love newpipe[1]. No ads, continue playing with screen switched off, download option, and i appreciate the lack of recommendations (This way I only see news from the channels I'm subscribed to and don't get drawn into a recommendation-loop).

I'm not sure what will happen to it once google enforces their developer registration thing [2]. I assume that f-droid and newpipe will still work on rooted phones, but in general I don't like the direction in which this is going...

[1] https://newpipe.net/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
by nharada | 2025-10-26 17:53:05+00:00
You're right, I can't find any primary sources for this number. Yahoo[1] reports this number and attributes it to Bloomberg NEF but I can't find an actual article from Bloomberg with this number, or any actual target number in it.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-10-sodium-ion-battery-16505...
by nharada | 2025-10-26 17:53:09+00:00
You're right, I can't find any primary sources for this number. Yahoo[1] reports this number and attributes it to Bloomberg NEF but I can't find an actual article from Bloomberg with this number, or any actual target number in it.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-10-sodium-ion-battery-16505...
by Xorakios | 2025-10-26 17:54:00+00:00
>A chargeback can be started in minutes.

Alas, on my Social Security mandated USDirectExpress card it requires hours to start the process through 3 levels by phone, then documentation that the vendor refused to process a reimbursement, then a physical form received and returned by US Postal Service within 10 calendar days. Everything changed last year when the outgoing administration changed the rules and chose a new bank as the provider for Social Security payments.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-26 17:54:17+00:00
The major problem with relying on YouTube content for general automotive diagnosis and repair is that it doesn't tend to be general purpose. It's always "how this one guy fixed this one problem on this one car." A video could have a title like "Fixing a 2002 Toyota Corolla that won't start" but all it shows is the guy jumping right into replacing his fuel pump. There can be many other reasons that a 2002 Corolla won't start, but you're going to have to search through 100s of other videos to find the one that exactly matches your car's root cause, which you don't know until you diagnose it yourself.

The repair steps tend to range from so-so to excellent. The diagnosis steps are almost always very lacking.
by mpweiher | 2025-10-26 17:54:21+00:00
France does not have any new reactors currently under construction because until March 2023, expansion of nuclear generating capacity was forbidden by law.

So even to build the one Flamanville 3 reactor, they had to shut down two older reactors in Fessenheim in order to not have an illegal increase in capacity.

Now that the law has been rescinded, they are planning 6 simplified EPR2 reactors, taking lessons from the fairly catastrophic EPR project FV3.

(Of course, even that catastrophic reactor will be more profitable than any intermittent renewable projects in, for example, Germany, but hey, the standards for what counts as "success" and what as "failure" are different for nuclear and for renewables).

France also currently does not need to urgently expand their nuclear fleet, so the schedule for the EPR2s matches those needs and the need to fully account for the problems with FV3. Instead, they are increasing the production of their existing fleet, both by operational upgrades and also by increasing use of intermittent renewables to cover variations in demand, allowing the nuclear fleet to run closer to fully rated capacity instead of having to load-follow.
by rootnod3 | 2025-10-26 17:55:20+00:00
T480 can hold 2 batteries. A swappable and an internal one. At least under FreeBSD the swappable alone gives about 10-11 hours on low brightness. The internal one carries the rest of the way.

I did replace the screen with a low power screen, which easily had the biggest impact on battery life.

I haven't tested the T480 under OpenBSD in a while, but my guess is that if I ran it with "apm -L", it would get close to the same numbers.
by wltr | 2025-10-26 17:55:23+00:00
But how is it draw less power comparing to Raspbian? I’m not arguing, just curious how you measured that, and why NetBSD that much more efficient. I have a RPi2 with Raspbian, and another one with DietPi, I expect them to sip power similarly, considering they’re mostly idle anyway. Would love to read some blog on this though, if you happen to have one.
by jonahx | 2025-10-26 17:56:06+00:00
Out of pure curiosity, is all the actual programming work for the foundation provided free of charge by volunteers? And the foundation expenses are mostly legal and administrative?

It wasn't clear to me based on the financials: https://www.netbsd.org/foundation/reports/financial/2023.htm...

Maybe the consulting section includes payments for programming work? Presumably at cheap rates, if so?
by dekhn | 2025-10-26 17:56:22+00:00
A lot of us grew up in the time of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Combined with a lot of media about radioactivity's dangers (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/nyregion/babies-teeth-and...). I think that has strongly affected people's perception of risk.

I used to work at UC Berkeley, and one of the buildings on campus previously held a research nuclear reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Research_Reactor). There's a sign there now "Nuclear Free Zone"; (https://www.dailycal.org/archives/the-berkeley-nuclear-free-...).

Note that they did have to do extensive decontamination on Gilman Hall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formerly_Utilized_Sites_Remedi...) where plutonium was first isolated.