MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diegof79 | 2025-10-06 11:09:08+00:00
Claude Opus 4.1 gave me the right answer. First, it said “yes” and immediately corrected the answer, enumerating all the emojis that are closer to ending with the message “While seahorses are popular and recognizable creatures, they haven’t been included as a standalone emoji in the Unicode standard yet.”

GPT-5 was interesting. When I use it from Raycast AI, it ends with the correct answer after some wrong answers in the same message. The response wasn’t so well formed as Opus. But then when I tried with the OpenAI client (in auto mode) something interesting happened: it started an “endless” loop showing the octopus emoji
by account42 | 2025-10-06 11:10:09+00:00
> the whole thing seems like a conflicted struggle between "I want to make a game" and "I need to get my points across", often to the detriment of the game-part.

This seems to be a common issue with mediocre video game writers and designers, especially those politically motivated. If you can't trust your audience to make up their own mind about the subject matter then maybe the interactive medium isn't the right one for you.
by vu3rdd | 2025-10-06 11:10:16+00:00
My friend and former colleague has built a bunch of stuff over magic-wormhole like fowl[0], shwim[1] and so on. There is a lot of nice work on "dilated" wormhole.

[0] <https://github.com/meejah/fowl>

[1] <https://github.com/meejah/shwim>
by commandersaki | 2025-10-06 11:10:30+00:00
Where do you see the centered around AI?

From https://www.mathacademy.com/how-it-works:

> Math Academy is an AI-powered, fully-automated online math-learning platform. Math Academy meets each student where they are via an adaptive diagnostic assessment and introduces and reinforces concepts based on each student’s individual strengths and weaknesses.

What is edutech and why is it unsuitable?

I don't want a computer in the loop when I learn math, plain and simple. My preferred style of learning is instructor led with a mix of Socratic method and hand holding. But bar that, reading texts and using a pen and paper.

Finally, have you _used_ MathAcademy at all?

Nope, doesn't look like my cup of tea.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-06 11:11:39+00:00
> This supply abruptly stopped, but instead of using the remaining nuclear power plants to mitigate the supply shock

There was nothing to mitigate. The nuclear plants deliver electricity, which was never a problem in Germany.

> he even accelerated the shutdown and sold it as inevitable.

That's a lie. They even prolonged the usage for some months to appease the fearmongers. But without fuel, there was a limit on how they could run anyway.

> unless he wanted to hurt German industry on purpose, which is not even unthinkable.

Ah, you're from the conspiracy-bubble...
by waste_monk | 2025-10-06 11:12:22+00:00
>Can halon systems not put out lithium fires?

As the other commenter said, Halon hasn't been a thing for a fair while, but inert gas fire suppression systems in general are still popular.

I would expect it wouldn't be sufficient for a lithium ion battery fire - you'd temporarily displace the oxygen, sure, but the conditions for fire would still exist - as soon as enough nitrogen (or whatever suppressant gas is in use) dissipates, it'd start back up again.

Also as I understand thermal runaway is self-sustaining, since the lithium ion batteries have a limited capacity to provide their own oxygen (something to do with the cathode breaking down?), so it might continue burning even while the area is mostly flooded with inert gas.

I believe it would be similar to an EV car fire, that is, you'd have to flood the area with water and wait for it to cool down enough that thermal runaway stops. Maybe they can do better these days with encapsulating agents but I'd still expect the rack housing the UPS to be a write-off.
by sunshine-o | 2025-10-06 11:12:36+00:00
Interesting, I only knew who he was through his "Leaving the cloud" serie of posts.

I am just trying to draw a parallel between the two to try to understand its broader ideology. So some might say both big cities like London and hyperscaler like AWS are:

- very expensive and have become unaffordable for many actors

- limit your freedom to scale and accommodate a very broad range of guests

- under massive surveillance and control

where the comparison stops is:

- AWS offers pretty good security but London is not (and hasn't for a long time)

- It is pretty easy to get kicked out of AWS if you do not follow the rule or pay
by Jensson | 2025-10-06 11:12:48+00:00
You are wrong, there can be a circuit to count letters because it can easily normalize them internally, as we know it can transform text to base64 just fine. So there is no reason there can't be a circuit to count letters.

The training just is too dumb to create such a circuit even with all that massive data input, but its super easy for a human to make such a neural net with those input tokens. Its just a kind of problem that transformers are exceedingly bad at solving, so they don't learn it very well even though its a very simple computation for them to do.
by KronisLV | 2025-10-06 11:13:30+00:00
> Looking back, I realized I had worked on a lot of low-impact projects — tasks that made no impact on users and no impact on the team, like updating outdated libraries. The old library worked fine without any updates. Updating it took weeks of my time but delivered zero value to the team or business. I did it simply because my manager told me to.

It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.

You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.

> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”

At that point:

* if it's not a golden handcuffs situation, might be easier to find another company to prosper in * if it is, then yeah, you have to play their game if you care about promotions * or just do good work where you're at, no matter what their myopic incentives say
by bob1029 | 2025-10-06 11:13:45+00:00
I moved to a neighborhood where a surprising majority of the residents do not outsource their lawn care and I think this makes the biggest difference. The noise reduction of simply not having beaten up landscaper trucks with muffler deletes driving through the streets every day is a massive help.

Letting your landscapers blow nutrients off your property is insane when it's difficult to find good quality top soil. The stuff you buy at Home Depot is essentially trash and rocks now. What comes out of the mower bag each spring can yield an incredible amount of dirt after it's had a full summer to cook in the pile.
by 100721 | 2025-10-06 11:14:54+00:00
Wow, thank you for this detailed reply! I’ll be checking out some of those resources at lunch today :)

I didn’t take your comment as a dig at all. I’m honestly a little surprised myself that I’ve made it this far with such a flawed understanding.

> Did you think they could do it anyway so trying to pass a law to force backdoors to be made is a cover for existing capabilities, or what?

I had to do some quick reading on the ChatControl proposal in the EU.

I see it along the lines of, if they really needed to target someone in particular (let’s not get into who “deserves” to be targeted), then encryption would only be an obstacle for them to have to overcome. But, for the great majority of traffic - like our posts being submitted to HN - the effort of trying to break the encryption (eg, dedicating a few months of brute force effort across multiple entire datacenters) simply isn’t worth it. In many other scenarios, bypassing the encryption is a lot more practical, like that one operation where I believe it was the FBI waited for their target to unlock his laptop - decrypting the drive - in a public space, and then they literally grabbed the laptop and ran away with it.

The ChatControl proposal sounds like it aims to bypass everyone’s encryption, making it possible to read and process all user data that goes across the wire. I would never be in support of something like that, because it sounds like it sets up a type of backdoor that is always present, and always watching. Like having a bug planted in your apartment where everything you say is monitored by some automated flagging system, just like in 1984.

If a nation state wants to spend the money to dedicate multiple entire datacentres to brute forcing my encrypted communications, achieving billions of years of compute time in the span of a few months or whatever, I’m not a fan but at least it would cost them an arm and a leg to get those results. The impracticality of such an approach makes it so that they don’t frivolously pursue such efforts.

The ability to view everyone’s communications in plaintext is unsettling and seems like it’s just waiting to be abused, much in the same way that the United States’ PRISM was (and probably is still being) abused.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-06 11:15:13+00:00
> so a single data center on the same electrical grid or geographic...

Yes, but your backup DC's can have diesel generators and a few weeks of on-site fuel. It has some quakes - but quake-resistant DC's exist, and SK is big enough to site 3 DC's at the corners of an equilateral triangle with 250km edges. Similar for typhoons. Invading NK armies and nuclear missiles are tougher problems - but having more geography would be of pretty limited use against those.
by phil21 | 2025-10-06 11:15:21+00:00
I don't see how? It's much more reasonable to state "all electrical consumers are paying a proportionate amount to operate the grid based on their usage rates". This is typically spelled out by the rate commissions and designed to make sure one power consumer is not "subsidizing" the other.

In the case of your quoted article - taking it at face value - this means "everyone" is paying .02/khw more on their bill. A datacenter is going to be paying thousands of times more than your average household as they should.

I don't see a problem with this at all. Cheap electricity is required to have any sort of industrial base in any country. Paying a proportionate amount of what it costs the grid to serve you seems about as fair of a model as I can come up with.

If you need to subsidize some households, then having subsidized rates for usage under the average household consumption level for the area might make sense?

I don't really blame the last watt added to the grid for incremental uptick in costs. It was coming either way due to our severe lack of investment in dispatchable power generation and transmission capacity - datacenters simply brought the timeline forward a few years.

There are plenty of actual problematic things going into these datacenter deals. Them exposing how fragile our grid is due to severe lack of investment for 50 years is about the least interesting one to me. I'd start with local (and state) tax credits/abatements myself.
by exitb | 2025-10-06 11:15:26+00:00
If you want to meaningfully cut your energy usage, you need to identify its biggest sinks. 8 Wh per day is about as much as an idle charger you don't bother to remove from the outlet. I've yet to hear about anyone evaporating lakes with a charger, yet we almost all leave them plugged it.

It would be better to not use this energy, but it won't move the needle either way.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 11:16:33+00:00
Because there is no upside for them. Nobody cares or wants to invade russia, that's mostly in their heads. But if they keep going like this at some point it might actually be on the table. There was a point in time where what you just wrote could have been said for Amsterdam and Utrecht, which were regularly at war. But cooperation and collaboration are a much better way to run the world. Russia should move out of 1905 and get to 2025 if they want to continue to be a factor in the long term.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-06 11:16:35+00:00
Should it?

Take a look at the statistics for Minecraft and Fortnite, both games I would consider typical PC games, both massively successful. Mobile is always between 45% and 50%. PC has between 25% and 30% roughly on par with console.

PC gaming is mostly an Asian thing nowadays entirely propped up by esports. The market sure is big enough for GPU still making sense as a product (my incredibly small comment is admittedly a bit too extreme) but probably not for someone to go try to dislodge the current duopoly unless they have a product "for free" as an offshoot of something else.
by crazybonkersai | 2025-10-06 11:16:48+00:00
Do you have any proof for that except the usual drivel of European politicians of blaming Putin for any domestic problems? The rise of the "brown wave" is natural considering politicians in power have been constantly ignoring domestic problems in favour of pursuing geopolitical agenda. If you want to see a concrete example of election interference, look no further at recent elections in Moldova, Romania or Georgia and lengths EU has gone in keeping pro Russian politicians to get elected.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-10-06 11:16:50+00:00
It depends how you answer the question.

1. Has there been an emoji defined in the Unicode standard, that represents a seahorse? No

2. Has there been an emoji defined in the Unicode standard, that was represented by a specific operator as a seahorse? Maybe?

3. Has there been an emoji added by a mainstream operator (i.e. Slack), that was represented by a specific operator as a seahorse? Maybe?

4. Has there been an emoji added by a community, that was represented by a specific operator as a seahorse? Definitely.

We can be definitive about 1 based on the actual standard and standardisation work. Emojipedia allows us to be fairly confident about 2 being No. 3 is much harder. And 4 is definitely yes.

The existence of 4 and maybe 3 pollutes the training data for LLMs and humans alike.

(The fact that it was proposed makes it possible it was added and then replaced by an operator)
by clausecker | 2025-10-06 11:17:16+00:00
ARM64 has a trick up its sleeve: many instructions that would be longer on other architecturea are instead split into easily recognisable pairs on ARM64. This allows for simple inplementations to pretend it's fixed length while more complex ones can pretend it's variable length. SVE takes this one step further with MOVPRFX, which can add be placed before almost all SVE instructions to supply masking and a third operand.
by TillE | 2025-10-06 11:18:12+00:00
People really really want LLMs to output a highly reliable finished product, and I suspect we're probably never gonna get there. Lots of progress over the past couple years, but not on that.

I think it's much more interesting to focus on use cases which don't require that, where gen AI is an intermediate step, a creator of input (whether for humans or for other programs).
by fabian2k | 2025-10-06 11:18:13+00:00
These discoveries are old enough to be in the textbooks already.

Not sure what would be good popular science books. There is quite a lot on the immune system in the Alberts (Molecular Biology of the Cell), but that is maybe too much without solid biology background knowledge. The typical textbook is the Janeway (Immunology), but that's certainly too much.

What I liked as an introductory textbook in general was Campbell Biology, but that covers essentially all of Biology. There is a chapter on the immune system as well.

All those books are horribly expensive in the US, and still quite expensive in other countries, though.
by whstl | 2025-10-06 11:19:57+00:00
> Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters ("humans in the loop"), which won't work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job

This hits home. A lot of the supposed claims of improvements due to AI that I see are not really supported by measurements in actual companies. Or they could have been just some regular automation 10 years ago, except requiring less code.

If anything I see a tendency of companies, and especially AI companies, to want developers and other workers to work 996 in exchange for magic beans (shares) or some other crazy stupid grift.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-06 11:20:07+00:00
I think also a century of margin squeeze has trimmed off basically all the fat. Get rid of finials, cornices, non-standard windows, and then look for the next victim. It's like in the 60s everyone decided that more modern means more simple and we've only stripped back from then on.

Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.

Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.

And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.

Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
by srean | 2025-10-06 11:20:23+00:00
Just the thought that I have to (i) find a doctor and then (ii) speak at length about myself and symptoms, is a massive deterrent.

Then there are worries that I might get dependent on the medicines and /or my tendency to form whacky spontaneous connections between things (a trait that I find amusing and unwilling to lose).

I know. I know, these are excuses. Thanks for the push.
by quantumwoke | 2025-10-06 11:20:39+00:00
I think it's more like Sam's condition did not clearly fit into a checklistable entity. Our heart rate and temperature go up when we have the flu, but we don't all go in to hospital for antibiotics or die at home. Probably they should have done more work-up the second time he came in but as the article points out that could also have been negative. He was probably just too young for checklists built for older people to pick up on his condition.
by philipallstar | 2025-10-06 11:20:48+00:00
> The kind folks at SÜLgear pointed out that the waterproof liner was simply a 4" x 6", 4 mil ziploc bag (or, for those of the metric persuasion, 102 x 152mm).

Waterproof liner: £0.04.

Branded bag minus liner cost: £27.95.
by phil21 | 2025-10-06 11:21:04+00:00
Plenty of bets being placed on nuclear, but they are moonshot style bets.

From where I'm standing, the immediate capital seems to be being deployed at smaller-scale (2-5MW) natural gas turbines co-located on site with the load. I haven't heard a whole lot of battery deployments at the same scale.

Of course turbines are now out at 2029 or something for delivery.

Only marginally at the edge of this space these days though, so what I hear is through the grapevine and not direct any longer.
by waleedk | 2025-10-06 11:23:32+00:00
We’re still learning how to integrate chat interfaces in existing web apps. A lot of big companies are getting this badly wrong (including Google and Meta). I posit 4 principles of successful chat integrations:

- Must be able to operate on the core primitives of the app

- Must take advantage of the powerful characteristics of natural language

- Allow the user to fluidly mix and match between the traditional UI interface and the chat interface

- Must maintain context across the user’s entire experience.

I discuss each of these with concrete examples of existing products, and also with a simple idea of a chat interface-enabled todo list manager. I also discuss some litmus tests. But if you want the short take-away: imitate Notion, and avoid the mistakes that Google Docs has made.
by perilunar | 2025-10-06 11:24:01+00:00
MWh per day? TWh per year?

In what world are these sensible units of power? Why can't we just use Watts FFS?

Btw:

1 MWh per day ≈ 42 kW

1 TWh per year ≈ 114 MW

Or:

All Chat GPT users: 850 MWh / day = 310 GWh / year ≈ 35.4 MW

All AI users: 15 TWh / year ≈ 1.7 GW
by wheels | 2025-10-06 11:26:05+00:00
Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.

I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-06 11:26:24+00:00
There's a funny comment downthread that says "It's like the backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward."

Everyone replying disagrees, but I think it's a perfect analogy: just like the backyard furnaces, these small-scale installations are inefficient, provide a negligible portion of total energy needs (<1% of total energy needs if everyone in Germany did it, from TFA), look ugly and - this is the most important - provide the feeling of doing something about a serious problem without actually doing anything substantial.
by sigilis | 2025-10-06 11:26:55+00:00
There are various links in the article that have more information. Clicking these references will give the evidence for bad unit economics claims and whatnot.

As for predicting the moment, the author has made a prediction and wants it to be wrong. They expect the system will continue to grow larger for some time before collapse. They would prefer that this timeline be abbreviated to reduce the negative economic impacts. He is advising others on how to take economic advantage of his prediction and is likely shorting the market in his own way. It may not be options trading, but making plans for the bust is functionally similar.