MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Qwertious | 2025-10-26 12:54:16+00:00
Long-form storage is inherently unprofitable - a battery that's used daily will make 365x the sales of a battery that's used only once a year.

So inevitably, the first batteries will always prioritize daily arbitrage, and only once that market is capped out will some battery projects target weekly/monthly/yearly arbitrage.

In countries with cold winters, the obvious solution is heat-energy storage systems, which don't output electricity but instead store and output heat directly; they're basically just a big pile of sand/stones/bricks wrapped in a ton of insulation. Thanks to the cube-square law, they scale up unbelievably well and can easily store months worth of heat.

Due to that scale they don't make much sense without district heating, but energy storage is a numbers-game and lots of cold places already have district heating that could be quite easily retrofitted.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-26 12:54:22+00:00
> Possibly better than the original.

IIRC this was the first book in the universe that the author wrote, but publishers insisted it was a bit heavy, so he wrote Ender's Game as an easier entry into the universe. On the topic of Ender's universe, the whole Ender's Shadow thread is also a great read. The first book is covering some of the same events but from the perspective of Bean.
by orwin | 2025-10-26 12:54:24+00:00
During the middle ages, France and Spain (and probably Sicily/Southern Italy) used two numerals: Arabic and Roman. In the end, Arabic numerals gave our (western) current numbers and Romans are mostly kept in titles and names.

Some watches still use Roman numerals (XII, III, VI, IX), Swatch specify here that those are Arabic (12, 3, 6, 9).
by robviren | 2025-10-26 12:54:35+00:00
Totally valid perspective. I only became part of the industry after Fukushima. I only knew an industry by its disasters. I will say, having gone through the training programs we studied the nuclear incidents and spent a year in training before going to the plants. I just don't see parallel experiences looking back like that. The people in nuclear (at least from what I saw) want the industry to be safe and successful.
by georgefrowny | 2025-10-26 12:54:40+00:00
I know what you mean, but the boundary can get blurry in some cases.

A Canticle for Liebowitz for example mostly feels like some kind of fantasy but for the fact that the reader knows it's set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.

Big chunks of the Peter F. Hamilton Void series is basically more or less set in a slightly magical Early Modern Venice.

The Laundry Files is strongly and deliberately in the middle ground of technology and magic, despite being ostensibly set in the present-day.

Stone Spring is an alternate history set in the Stone Age, but is not substantially more ahistorical than a non-fantasy historical novel about a person who didn't exist in reality doing things that never actually happened. Perhaps there's more focus on the engineering rather than fighting, romance, politics, murder and whatever else historical novels often revolve around, but building is as valid a human thing to do as plotting a regicide, say.

Generally, the concepts in both are the same: construct an "unreal" world and set a story in there, often with a projection of real-world issues onto the hypothetical substrate. Often the only real difference is if the unreal element is driven by magic, technology or a small change in a historical event. Sometimes it's a mixture. Sometimes the technology is treated as magic because the users don't understand it. Sometimes the magic is treated as a technology. Sometimes the historical divergence was thousands of years ago, sometimes it has only just happened in the story.

It would probably be more accurate to lump the whole lot under something generic like "speculative fiction" but that's not really a well-known term and has a slightly different meaning that blends into things like historical settings which may not be generally considered fantasy.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-26 12:54:46+00:00
People gave Altman shit for enabling NSFW in ChatGPT, but I see that as a step in the right direction. The right direction being: the one that leads to less corporate censorship.

>In the same way, using gpt5 is now very unbearable to me as it almost always starts all responses of a conversation by things like: "Great question"

User preference data is toxic. Doing RLHF on it gives LLM sycophancy brainrot. And by now, all major LLMs have it.

At least it's not 4o levels of bad - hope they learned that fucking lesson.
by kasey_junk | 2025-10-26 12:54:57+00:00
It’s quite easy to argue that the October 7th attacks were terrorism. They explicitly targeted non-strategic civilian communities and events, for political purpose. They fit within the definition as clearly as any act could.

Argue what you mean. You believe those terrorist attacks are _justified_. There are lots of ways to argue that point. But one of them is ends justification. Did it work out for the people it was supposedly on behalf of?
by SJMG | 2025-10-26 12:55:05+00:00
Since we're all being exacting here… =p

> (first day of spring)

It's actually the March equinox. "Spring" is true only in the northern hemisphere. What's more it's the ecclesiastical equinox, not the astronomical equinox, whose date actually varies depending on the year.

Never mind that all this is descriptive of dating in countries that grew up with Western Christianity. Countries where Eastern traditions dominate often date it differently.

All good will to you both = )
by t_mahmood | 2025-10-26 12:56:00+00:00
My way used to be in the past, put bare repos on Dropbox, clone the bare repo to a real path. Done.

That way, I

1. didn't have to worry about sync conflicts. Once complete, just push to origin 2. had my code backed up outside my computer

I can't exactly remember, if it saves space. I assumed it does, but not sure anymore. But I feel it was quite reliable.

I gave that way up with GitHub. But thinking of migrating to `Codeberg`

With `tailscale`, I feel we have so much options now, instead of putting our personal computer out on the Internet.
by razodactyl | 2025-10-26 12:56:17+00:00
Opinion: a lot can change over such a span of time and knowledge goes in and out of relevance - I think the natural progression of models shrinking in parameter count goes to show it's better to know how to use knowledge than to attempt to remember everything.

That said, optimising for capability of maximal learning seems to be a natural occurrence in nature.

I think the non-obvious emergent effects are something to look into.

Culling bad models in favour of the A/B version and check pointing is a kind of combination of the two and the feedback loop of models trained on new snapshots of Internet data that are written with humans and AI.

There's an unintended long-form training loop which I think is going to get weirder as time goes on.

The wave of models being able to manipulate Cursor / Windsurf etc., being trained to be smarter and more efficient at this and then being retrained for other purposes, even though the model is deleted, the pattern of data can be saved and trained into more advanced models over time.
by louthy | 2025-10-26 12:57:21+00:00
[EDIT: I’d only read up to: “So why aren’t these errors better? “Password is incorrect, try again.” or, “No account exists for this email.” Is that so hard?” — then I bailed, my bad, I should have kept reading. So my response below isn’t fair]

This ignores the security risks from being too verbose and/or specific with error messages, especially if they’re coming from a server. You’ll usually fail security/pen-test audit.

I agree that doing a better job of helping the user is laudable, but you need to know which battles to fight.

Giving a unique error number that can be referenced by a support team (who could look up the event, look at stack traces, etc.) is the best way to deal with truly exceptional events. Otherwise, if it comes to authentication or authorisation, you have to extremely careful what information you share.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-26 12:58:56+00:00
> if he's that bad the people on his team will leave and his behavior will be that much more obvious.

Often not true: while such people don't do great (programming) work, they are very political adept (which also includes being good at bullying outsiders), so often being a "disciple" of them is very useful for your career. So, while many people may not particularly "like" such a person, they often become "disciple" of him for such a self-interest.
Show HN: Difficulty-based SAT score calculator using official and community data
by WanderZil | 2025-10-26 12:59:21+00:00
I built a SAT score calculator that estimates your total and section scores based on question difficulty rather than just raw accuracy. The model uses recent College Board data and aggregated student-reported results from social platforms to better reflect real scoring curves in the Digital SAT. It also shows percentile estimates based on the latest official distributions. I’d love feedback on how to improve the weighting or visualization logic. https://www.satscorecalc.com
by ssenssei | 2025-10-26 13:00:12+00:00
I was looking to add a few posters to my room, and this came at the right time. The only one that interested me was: Colossus: The Forbin Project, as I love Michael Colombier's OST in that. Other than that, it's hard for me as a 23-year-old to find movies I've seen here. The earliest I can think of is Indiana Jones, and The Rocketeer, and those are in the 90s.
by billyp-rva | 2025-10-26 13:00:27+00:00
> I guess they just feel "rough in the hands" somehow to me.

I'd be curious to know if Ilograph is among the languages you've tried and if you feel the same way (I'm the author). Making it feel good to edit (the opposite of "rough in the hands"?) is an explicit goal, and to that end there is an IDE with context-aware autocomplete.
by sisizbzb | 2025-10-26 13:01:04+00:00
There’s hundreds of billions of dollars behind these guys. Not only that, but they also have institutional power backing them. The laws don’t really matter to the worst offenders.

Similar to OPs article, trying to find a technical solution here is very inefficient and just a bandaid. The people running our society are on the whole corrupt and evil. Much simpler (not easier) and more powerful to remove them.
by tetris11 | 2025-10-26 13:01:07+00:00
John C Wright wrote a nice short story set in William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land"

Awake in the Night

https://web.archive.org/web/20090524012412/http://www.thenig...

In the side panels are users/readers who drew up their own maps on what they think the Nightscape is.

It has all the romantic mystery of a fantasy tale, whilst still being firmly grounded in reality.

I remember when London's Shard was going up, and I'd see it lit up slightly at night, glowing and ominous and thinking, "this is it: this is the last holdout of humanity."
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-26 13:01:17+00:00
It's obvious as soon as you consider that your push will overwrite a ref that's currently checked out in the target's repo workdir. The exact same thing happens when pushing to local repos. You don't have to make a repo bare to avoid this issue, but it's certainly the easiest way to avoid it altogether when you don't need a workdir on the server side.
by BoxFour | 2025-10-26 13:01:27+00:00
I don't think this is a really convincing argument: There are plenty of leaders who haven't "done the job" in decades, and we don't question that. It's incredibly common in professional sports, for example.

Mike McCarthy hasn't played a down of American football in 40 years, and never played at a very high level. But we don't question his ability to get others to perform complex motions.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-26 13:02:04+00:00
"LLMs judged by LLMs" is the industry standard. Can't put a human judge in a box and have him evaluate and rate a set of 7600 responses on demand.

Now, are LLM judges flawed? Obviously. But they are more shelf stable than humans, so it's easier to compare different results. And as long as you use an LLM judge as a performance thermometer and not a direct optimization target, you aren't going to be facing too many issues from that.

If you are using an LLM judge as a direct optimization target though? You'll see some funny things happen. Like GPT-5 prose. Which isn't even the weirdest it gets.
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-26 13:02:06+00:00
Whether or not specific regulations exist for a particular danger, if a company or individual can be found to be aware of the negative consequences of their use of certain compounds and they don't publicly document those dangers they can (in the US anyway) and should absolutely be held legally accountable for failure to warn.

History is rife with companies/industries who were well aware of the dangers they were creating to people for decades while actively suppressing the evidence of such that they themselves discovered.

Which companies this applies to for Asbestos in particular, I couldn't tell you, but it would be shocking if there weren't lots of bad actors who knew they were bad actors considering there has been research on the dangers of Asbestos since 1927 -- nearly a full century ago.
by coldpie | 2025-10-26 13:02:35+00:00
Are you disliking the big honking watches with like 3 subdials? I don't like those either.

I lean to the minimal style, so I recently got one from Obaku. The one I got is technically in their women's line; women's watches tend to be simpler, and I have small wrists so women's watches tend to fit me better. Skagen also makes nice minimal stuff.

I also sometimes dig around used watch forums like WatchUSeek. You can find dozens of cool watches from the 60s-80s, many mechanical, for like $50-200.
by orblivion | 2025-10-26 13:02:41+00:00
One of my favorite tools available for Linux is called gitolite. It's in the Debian repo.

https://gitolite.com/gitolite/

If you think the bare bones example is interesting and want something simple just for you or a small group of people, this is one step up. There's no web interface. The admin is a git repository that stores ssh public keys and a config file that defines repo names with an ACL. When you push, it updates the authorization and inits new repositories that you name.

I put everything in repos at home and a have multiple systems (because of VMs) so this cleaned things up for me considerably.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-10-26 13:03:08+00:00
This seems like another article where they never define the acronym they use and expect everyone to have seen it already.

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents directly in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concurrency control and namespace operations, thus allowing the Web to be viewed as a writeable, collaborative medium and not just a read-only medium.[1] WebDAV is defined in RFC 4918 by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV
by tetris11 | 2025-10-26 13:03:39+00:00
I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes.

Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed.

SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions.

Don’t tell me to be excited Andy just because you wrote “THAT’S SOO COOL!” after revealing some tidbit. I’m not a fucking child.
by razodactyl | 2025-10-26 13:04:45+00:00
It's this take on the situation which I think needs more emphasis.

Whether anyone likes it or not, these systems have co-evolved with us.

Hundreds of researchers contributing and just like English for example, it's ever-changing and evolving.

Given this trend, it's highly unlikely we won't achieve ASI.

It's not like hardware engineers stop innovating or venture capital stops wanting more. There might be a massive dip or even another AI winter but like the last one, eventually it picks up momentum again because there's clearly utility in these systems.

I've been coding for 25+ years and only a couple of days ago did it hit me that my profession has changed in a very dramatic way - I'm very critical of AI output, but I can read and comprehend code much quicker than I can write it relative to these systems.

Of course, that creates a barrier to holding a system in your head so going slow is something that should be pushed for when appropriate.
by ryukoposting | 2025-10-26 13:05:01+00:00
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but my parents and my whole extended family are from an area in eastern Michigan, about 2 hours north of Detroit.

Especially back then, the local economy was heavily dependent on Dow Chemical, who has a massive facility in the area. My grandfather worked there. He was one of the first people to ever handle Saran wrap. He also recalls hilarious stories, like a time when someone pranked the foreman by dumping some stuff in the soap dispenser that turned into a sticky, snotty goo when exposed to water. He also worked in an area that used lots of iodine for a couple years. His whole body was sunflower yellow when he came home from work, but he says he never got a cold!

Some stories are more harrowing. There were air raid sirens to warn people when Dow was venting something into the atmosphere. If you heard the sirens, you went inside ASAP.

And then there was the dioxin plant (aka agent orange). He says men in their 40s who worked in the dioxin plant looked like they were in their 80s. Many hard-working people died young there.

Luckily, he was never in the Dioxin plant on a daily basis - he was a diesel mechanic and a welder. Had he been in the dioxin plant, he probably wouldn't be alive today to share those stories. I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.

https://www.michiganlcv.org/case/no-compensation-victims-tox...

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2023/01/30/705...
by dgacmu | 2025-10-26 13:05:20+00:00
We had our first when I was 37 and our second when I was 43. It wasn't so bad - it's tiring but I'm also a lot more emotionally mature than I was in my 20s and early 30s. And I have an absolute ton more money and stability (which also helps pay for things like nannies and school).

The thing I'm a little sad about is that I'm unlikely to be there for too long when my kids have kids.
by d99kris | 2025-10-26 13:06:59+00:00
On a vaguely related note, two accomplished film poster artists passed away in the past month: Renato Casaro [1] and Drew Struzan [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Casaro

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Struzan
by bdangubic | 2025-10-26 13:07:24+00:00
I have seen 30 years of human fuckups, it is infinitely worse than AI fuck ups so you are right, cannot be compared, humans are so much worse

there are roughly 2.09% of SWEs that actually know what they are doing so this 97.91% generally prodces garbage (after 30 years doing this shit I have once experiencing being brought it to a project (I have been working as a consultant for a long time now) and went “wow, now this is beautiful codebase!”
by rpdillon | 2025-10-26 13:07:33+00:00
I think me mentioning a list of responsibilities sort of derailed the conversation a little bit.

It's not about them avoiding what they enjoy. It's about empowering and scaling a human organization to take on larger and larger scope over time. And at a technical company, the CTO is uniquely positioned to understand organizational scalability and technical scalability. So the risk I see with a CTO that focuses predominantly on coding is that they may be neglecting higher impact work that they could be doing that would set the organization up to empower more people to do the kind of work that they think is necessary.

The other risk I observed with a CTO that predominantly codes is that they become a bottleneck and are not actually able to ship the really experimental and product-altering features that they envision, and so they end up handing off essentially half-done ideas to teams who are then responsible for picking up the half-done mess and getting it to something that's suitable for production. I think this is probably avoidable in some way, but I do think it's an intrinsic risk of taking on large projects as a single coder while having other responsibilities to the company.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-26 13:08:46+00:00
The happy medium that the CTO did at the company where I worked where I was the architect guiding the technical direction, he would do non production level experimental coding as research - integrations with third party APIs, see if an AWS service was suitable - to take some of the load off of me hand the code over to me and I cleaned it up and made it production ready and championed it to the rest of the teams.

He still helped accelerate efforts, got his coding fix when he had time, wasn’t in the critical path of any work, and he made the entire org better.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-26 13:09:10+00:00
On the example animation not all paths are taken, so that is one bit of extra information that the animation does provide. Though even if it was fully identical, I do find it considerably easier to see where the data is moving based on dots tracing out a path than I do by scanning for small arrows in a massive diagram, hence my confusion on this. Fair point though.
by lazyasciiart | 2025-10-26 13:09:28+00:00
> Usually these materials are fine if left in place

Maybe in Norway you need to tell people to chill over it. But the current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK is far away from that, and a lot closer to “yea go on just tear it out yourself, you’ll be fine if you put on an n95 and spray some water first”.