MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rzwitserloot | 2025-10-13 13:28:42+00:00
important context: That gas is theoretical/unproduced. You need to dig lots of wells first.

Even there I don't really see it. I agree that it was intended as an easy land grab (and I guess, after Hostomel failed, they should have pulled the plug on the SMO then and there and accept the consequences). But the reasons don't make sense.

In particular, that gas thing:

Gas is on the way out. Clearly so. Even during the cuban missile crisis, with everything that was going on, the flow through the pipelines of russian gas to west germany never stopped. It wasn't even considered.

The west totally distrusted russia for good reason. They spent 20 years being a reliable supplier to build up that trust and they finally managed to get it.

And then they toss it out the window like it was nothing even before the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

I think the reason is clear: EU keeps saying it wants to wean itself off of gas in the next 15 years or so. What possible value does this trust relation have if the EU is no longer interested in buying gas at all?

Then either way Russia's grab is nonsensical:

* Either they understand gas's future (as in, 10 to 30 years from now) is highly limited, and this land grab never made any sense; it won't come online in time and the SMO further incentivises EU to divest. Even if the SMO worked out, there'd be some incentive (it did not work and the EU massively divested. They still buy russian gas but are going at an astronomical pace compared to 1970-2010 reliance on russian gas which increased even in the middle of a cold war and crises!)

* Or they do not believe it'll end, in which case that trust relationship is very important, in which case they screwed up the plan when they used their relationship with the EU as supplier-of-gas a bargaining chip even before the failed SMO.

Either way Russia messed this up badly.

Add to that: The ones essentially paying the bill for this war are the oligarchs. The relative rates of richness between the russian plebs and the oligarchs has swung massively towards the plebians. The government is printing rubles nonstop and the average salary of russians has skyrocketed. That, obviously, 'costs' the oligarchs. Their rubles are worth far, far less. Already today and that won't change anytime soon.

Possibly the oligarchs were assuming the SMO would work out, but, "the russian elites dont care and wanted this" - okay, but that means they are idiots then, as this did not at all work out in their favour.

I think it's a lot simpler: Putin is in control, not the oligarchs. Haven't been for a while. As he ages he wants to leave a mark and thinks his reign was best summarized as "carefully shepherding Russia through its terminal decline, down from the days of the USSR" and didn't like the look of that epitaph... and massively underestimated the difficulty of the SMO.

There's nothing more to it.
by scarmig | 2025-10-13 13:28:44+00:00
The mathematical term for the four by four matrices you were looking at is "quaternion" (I.e. you were looking at a set of four by four matrices isomorphic to the unit quaternions).

Why use quaternions at all, when three by three matrices can also represent rotations? Three by three matrices contain lots of redundant information beyond rotation, and multiplying quaternions requires fewer scalar additions and multiplications than multiplying three by three matrices. So it is cheaper to compose rotations. It also avoids singularities (gimbal lock).
by troad | 2025-10-13 13:28:52+00:00
> actually quite easy to solve

I cannot square your earlier assertion that we should be more mindful "that not everybody writes in English", with your current assertion that all code must only ever contain English, for simplicity's sake. Either is a cogent position on its own, just not both at the same time.

This bug arose because the programmers made incorrect assumptions about the result of a case-changing operation. If you impose English case rules on Turkish symbol names, this exact bug would simply arise in reverse.

More problematically, as I alluded to earlier, Turkish code may contain a mix of languages. It may, for example, be using a DSL to talk to a database with fields named in Turkish, as well as making calls to standard library functions named in English. Which half of the code is your proposed invariant locale going to break?
by Hackbraten | 2025-10-13 13:29:04+00:00
> When you connect through SSH you don't have GUI and that's not a reason for avoiding using GUI tools, for example.

One major difference can emerge from the fact that using a tool regularly inevitably builds muscle memory.

You’re accustomed to a replacement command-line tool? Then your muscle memory will punish you hard when you’re logged into an SSH session on another machine because you’re going to try running your replacement tool eventually.

You’re used to a GUI tool? Will likely bite you much less in that scenario.
by ta1243 | 2025-10-13 13:29:24+00:00
Along those lines, Dvorak layouts are more efficent, but I use qwerty because it works pretty much everywhere (are small changes like AZERTY still a thing? Certainly our French office is an "international" layout, and generally the main pain internationally are "@" being in the wrong place, and \ not working -- for the latter you can use user@domain when logging into a windows machine, rather than domain\user)
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-10-13 13:29:48+00:00
It's precisely hindsight. It seems harsh to blame the dev who wrote the query for the death of the business. It makes good copy on reddit; funny, and sticky, but harsh. That stuff is bad. The dev should feel bad. But, was that the root cause for the failure; was it even a proximate cause? None of this was teased out satisfactorily in the original piece. All the tech silliness at the failed companies was presented as being both necessary and sufficient for the failures. I feel that there may have been _something_ else, but you'd never know from the original post.
by inkyoto | 2025-10-13 13:29:58+00:00
At no juncture did I suggest that the machines presently entering commission in the year 2025 would remain unaltered in perpetuity. Technological progress proceeds with unrelenting velocity — it is both natural and inevitable that subsequent refinements and augmentations will be introduced. The systems deployed today, in all likelihood, represent but preliminary trials and iterations — a proving ground — for capabilities yet to be fully revealed.

China, indeed, possesses a longstanding tradition of curating information to satisfy the sensibilities of its ruling class — a practice traceable to the dynastic courts of antiquity. Yet, to dismiss a potential adversary solely upon the architecture of its political order is — at best — ill-advised, and at worst, a grave miscalculation. The probability of threat must be judged on capacity, not narrative. Whether such an adversary proves formidable or farcical is immaterial at present — the truth will emerge within the span of a decade or so.
by close04 | 2025-10-13 13:30:51+00:00
The only thing that can accurately simulate a process or system is the real process or system. Any simulation that perfectly simulates something becomes that something. Everything else contains simplifications and approximations and is an imperfect simulation.

Fire is the result of the intrinsic reactivity of some chemicals like fuels and oxidizers that allows them to react and generate heat. A simulation of fire that doesn't generate heat is missing a big part of the real thing, it's very simplified. Compared to real fire, a simulation is closer to a fire emoji, both just depictions of a fire. A fire isn't the process of calculating inside a computer what happens, it's molecules reacting a certain way, in a well understood and predictable process. But if your simulation is accurate and does generate heat then it can burn down a building by extending the simulation into the real world with a non-simulated fire.

Consciousness is an emergent property from putting together a lot of neurons, synapses, chemical and physical processes. So you can't analyze the parts to simulate the end result. You cannot look at the electronic neuron and conclude a brain accurately made of them won't generate consciousness. It might generate something even bigger, or nothing.

And in a very interesting twist of the mind, if an accurate simulation of a fire can extend in the real world as a real fire, then why wouldn't an accurate simulation of a consciousness extent in the real world as a real consciousness?
by mantas | 2025-10-13 13:30:53+00:00
On the other hand an old-school power plant has relatively tiny footprint compared to the same output solars.

Many old school plants also rely on dams and provide massive ponds. Which sucks during construction when some people have to move. But in my experience after several decades people are pretty happy to live next to those massive ponds. If I'd have to pick living next to a massive lake which allows boats/yachts/etc (which is not so common in my whereabouts) with a plant on the other side of that lake vs. lake-sized solar plant... Former does sound better.
by dangus | 2025-10-13 13:31:14+00:00
Don’t spread this kind of financial illiteracy.

Cash is worse than even the worst observed scenarios of stock market investing.

E.g., cash is worse than if you had bought your whole portfolio with the worst timing possible like right before the 2008 crash.

I calculated this out comparing typical savings account APY with S&P 500 and the break even recovery of the S&P account is 2013, with annualized returns at 7.4% for your investments versus 2% APY for cash. That means your cash account is less than half the size of your investment account by 2024. And this is the worst case scenario with a massive market crash and the entire portfolio purchased at the exact wrong time - very unlikely, most people invest continually over time.

The only purpose of cash is for immediate liquidity.

People who invest in the stock market expect large fluctuations including major market crashes. That risk is baked in to the expectation of long-term reward.

If you need to stabilize your portfolio to prepare to withdraw from it soon and preserve its value, talk to a professional if you don’t know what you’re doing. They probably won’t recommend 100% cash deposits unless you’re literally spending it all this year.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-13 13:31:34+00:00
Good point.

The only “yes, but…” I would add is that it seems to my retail, unsophisticated eye that:

1) while you could do better nominally in bonds, it seems like investors are pricing in a lot of earnings growth, not just static earnings in PE.

2) the market expects inflation, and blue chips can typically raise prices during inflation which protects shareholders, whereas bonds don’t offer this protection, other than TIPS etc

3) it also seems like (for now…) US equities are still a safe haven for international capital, so demand is still there (i.e. there is no alternative)
by belter | 2025-10-13 13:32:47+00:00
Predictable...but are those aholes wrong...? :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013692

Economics violates Popper demarcation criterion. Economic theories can't be falsified because you can't run controlled experiments on economies, rewind history, or isolate variables.

When models fail, economists adjust assumptions ...

Unfalsifiable = Unscientific.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-10-13 13:32:47+00:00
This page: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2025/pre... explains in more detail what they mean. It's a pretty clean and effective explanation.

> Technology advances rapidly and affects us all, with new products and production methods replacing old ones in a never-ending cycle. This is the basis for sustained economic growth, which results in a better standard of living, health and quality of life for people around the globe.

> However, this was not always the case. Quite the opposite – stagnation was the norm throughout most of human history. Despite important discoveries now and again, which sometimes led to improved living conditions and higher incomes, growth always eventually levelled off.

...
by Spivak | 2025-10-13 13:32:47+00:00
Disagree, the author is using Fuck You as a proxy for customer pain. Fuck You taxi industry works because people hate taxis. Fuck You hotels worked because people hate hotels. Fuck You Google works (in terms of llms) works because Google results became shit.

Identifying industries where people begrudgingly accept the status quo because they need the service but hate everything about how it's provided is your opportunity.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-13 13:33:23+00:00
> are English as a second language writers who perhaps came across it somewhere

Your prejudice is showing. Where would you even get an idea like that?

I hope you understand that people whose first language isn't English also use SAKs. It's not just an English thing. They're not trying to repeat some unknown object they've only encountered in metaphor. The tools are literally Swiss. And popular around the entire world.
by alentred | 2025-10-13 13:33:33+00:00
With respect, this misses some important constraints. Scale it to thousands of locations and target 99% SLA. Now you have a maintenance problem in remote physical places, requirements for hardware reliability, subcontractors to manage, need a reliable network connectivity, etc. You also need to collect and redistribute the data (API or whatever) - while this is a trivial problem today, still you incur costs for hosting, network, etc. While I actually agree with the sentiment, it is not just a $3 sensor either.
by mamonster | 2025-10-13 13:33:53+00:00
Well, the thing is: French budget reforms that the government wants to do is 40 billion EUR, their net contribution is 10 billion. Just going to neutral gets you a 4th of the way there without touching your internal social security. If you cancel contributions that's 25 billion, that's 60% of the way there.

Not saying I agree but this sort of argument will be impossible to counter for centrists with the mounting populist backdrop.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-13 13:34:17+00:00
There’s no such thing as an easy short. Going short doesn’t mean predicting a downturn, it means being precise in your predictions about when that downturn will happen. Look at the last few major stock market drops and try to retrospectively time when they would happen from the moment all of the underlying causes of the upcoming crash became apparent: in most cases you get a huge range of values.
by bluGill | 2025-10-13 13:34:18+00:00
Precision GPS is useful for a lot of things, but not for safety. Until we equip every deer, child, and pavement heave with a GPS saying exactly where it is cars will need "something" else to detect hazards. That GPS needs to be 100% reliable, even though we cannot predict when a child will attempt to run outside naked (without their GPS position transmitter), or the pavement will decide to fail (presumably without updating the GPS).

Prevision GPS is useful for a lot of things, but it isn't needed for car navigation. If you know within 100 meters of where you are you can figure out the exact lane you are in by other clues - clues that you need to look for anyway because road/utility crews will sometimes direct you to do things that are not on your updated maps.

I couldn't read the rest of the article because that navigation bugged me too much.
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-13 13:34:26+00:00
A matrix is just a list of where a linear map sends each basis element (the nth column of a matrix is the output vector for the nth input basis vector). Lots of things are linear (e.g. scaling, rotating, differentiating, integrating, projecting, and any weighted sums of these things). Lots of other things are approximately linear locally (the derivative if it exists is the best linear approximation. i.e. the best matrix to approximate a more general function), and e.g. knowing the linear behavior near a fixed point can tell you a lot about even nonlinear systems.
by simgt | 2025-10-13 13:35:08+00:00
That's how I feel like working with git locally using a combination of basic commands and gitup (https://gitup.co/), that may be why I couldn't really get the selling point of jj when I tried it a couple weeks ago.

The only part that piqued my interest is merges being always successful and conflicts just sitting in the tree, waiting patiently to be resolved... It's the next logical step after being able to commit without synchronizing when we all moved away from SVN.
by leakycap | 2025-10-13 13:35:53+00:00
> Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, was touting the brigade’s success to Congress. The training exercise demonstrated that the Army’s formations were “capable of rapidly improving their lethality,” he told lawmakers.

After seeing the US military response to IEDs, I can't imagine US forces deployed on foreign soil will be able to rapidly improve in the field.

I wonder how many drones can be manufactured in the US right now compared to China. Drones over boats seems ... bad.
by mallowdram | 2025-10-13 13:36:03+00:00
Sustained growth, like "economic science", is an oxymoron.

There is no science that correlates the use of arbitrary symbols posed as capital. Risk is risk, a primate bias.

Economics is essentially "mathematical politics". We can no more create a science of economics than a science of mythology.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049658/blunt-instrument/

Downvoting only proves the point: economics is like any primate bias, it enforces status at the cost of the collective or institutional. The US is a sad case for economic "modeling."
by newpavlov | 2025-10-13 13:36:57+00:00
I call BS. Without a series of MAJOR blunders Unicode was destined to succeed. When the rest of the world has migrated to Unicode, I am more than certain that Turks would've migrated as well. Yes, they may have complained for several years and would've spent a minuscule amount of resources to adopt the conversion software, but that's it, a decade or two later everyone would've forgotten about it.

I believe that even addition of emojis was completely unnecessary despite the pressure from Japanese telecoms. Today's landscape of messengers only confirms that.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-13 13:37:08+00:00
Not investing advice.

I diversified away from the US to international equities VTI -> VSUX starting at the beginning of the year. My thesis is that trade is rearranging due to US trade policy. If you look at the S&P500, growth has been flat since 2022 for anything that isn't Big Tech AI bubble. Therefore, I believe that between go forward US economic policy and global trade reconfiguration, non US will outperform the US over the next five years.
by andy99 | 2025-10-13 13:37:38+00:00
Yeah too many of the examples seem to be just that. It’s no true for all “disruptive” startups, it’s not always even bad, but it’s a different play than just solving a problem in a new way.

- Uber is an end-run around existing taxi monopolies (imo a good thing), plus I believe taking advantage of people’s inability to think longer term about depreciation on their vehicle when calculating earnings.

- crypto is an end-run around securities regulations. It’s not a payment system it’s an investment scam that would be illegal if used with other financial instruments

- a vast swath of big tech is profitable on the back of not providing customer service or recourse of any kind and just automating business without regard for edge cases (not necessarily regulation but formerly a requirement for a business to participate in society)
by pjc50 | 2025-10-13 13:37:39+00:00
Accounting is a big issue for renewables because almost all the cost is upfront. You pay a capital cost for X years (say, 30) of electricity. Maintenance is a much smaller fraction of the cost. Therefore the question of profitability depends on all sorts of non-power things: amortization, interest rates, how the tax-deductibility of a capital investment is handled, what future electricity costs are, and so on.
by machardMAXHARD | 2025-10-13 13:38:06+00:00
France could deploy an EUR-backed stablecoin using Morpho Labs' audited lending infrastructure to bypass ECB monetary control. Smart contracts distribute directly to citizens ("balance à balle aux pauvres"), network effects drive merchant adoption, universal meatspace acceptance in 6 months. No capital gains extraction - value circulates in closed French ecosystem. Pre-emptive sovereignty play before ECB collapse forces reactive measures.

Key insight: Morpho (27+ audits, formal verification) provides enterprise-grade infrastructure that makes this practical now, not theoretical. Deploy on Ethereum (permissionless), ECB can't shut it down. Legal gray zone is feature - deploy first, negotiate later.

Observable: If deployed, 10M users + 50K merchants by Month 3, universal adoption Month 6.
by schiffern | 2025-10-13 13:38:09+00:00
I wouldn't dispute either statement.

Indeed, I was going to point out that the real solutions involve practical mitigations like longer-wearing tire/road compounds and removal of the most ecologically harmful anti-fungal additives used in tires today. Naturally, you would still want to do this regardless of switching to EVs (which I think is inevitable).

My point is that the way you're arguing undermines our side's credibility. When you say (rightly IMO) that TFA is dishonest for omitting major emission routes because they're inconvenient toward their EV beliefs, everyone immediately sees how that cuts both ways. Even though we're right, it makes our side look disingenuous (and worse hypocritical) by selectively ignoring downsides while simultaneously accusing others of the exact same. It's weak rhetoric.

Please keep fighting the good fight! I only wish my allies to be more effective fighters armed with the most powerful rhetoric. Thanks.
by wfn | 2025-10-13 13:38:40+00:00
Agree re: no need for heap allocation - for others: I recommend reading thru whole masscan source (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan), it's a pleasure btw - iirc rather few/sparse malloc()s which are part of regular I/O processing flow (there will be malloc()s which depending on config etc. set up additional data structs but as part of setup).
by tovej | 2025-10-13 13:38:58+00:00
Economics _is_ a social science, and a politicized one at that. Sociology is more rigid than economics when it comes to validation of theories and choice of methods (statistics vs. mathematical models filled with assumptions). Economics, especially neoclassical economics, has a serious problem in prediction quality, a physics theory would have been abandoned by now if it was so bad at predicting real-life phenomena as the neoclassical school of economics is.
by guzik | 2025-10-13 13:39:05+00:00
sadly, comfort for chest straps compared to hand straps is a known issue and ours is definitely no different. Wve done a bunch of tests, tried different materials/custom solutions, and honestly we're still clueless how to make it significantly better (if anyone here works in textiles or wearable fabrics, I'd love to connect). So yeah, if wearing your Garmin for more than an hour already feels uncomfortable, ours probably won't be much better in that regard
by quantified | 2025-10-13 13:39:45+00:00
This is what turns a lot of people off: it isn't suggested, according to the words of the article:

Dr Obura stressed we had not yet gone past the upper limit of the tipping point threshold for coral reefs, which is 1.5C.

"Unless the right actions are taken globally, urgently, on climate drivers ... the increasing climate pressure means that all reef regions will approach their tipping points, and some may cross them."

It's pretty easy to read that quote as "not yet".