MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-10-26 16:08:20+00:00
Hmm, you're right that a counterflow heat exchanger could indeed provide 600° output by cooling a hot dirt pile most of which is well below 600°. I hadn't thought of that, even though I knew it in other contexts. I mistakenly thought that only the heat over the output temperature would be available.

The only drawback is that, when you're heating the pile, most of the time you are only heating part of it (the cold part), so your heating elements need to have a significantly higher power capacity, assuming you're heating the pile with embedded resistors as described, rather than with a heat transfer fluid as you suggest.

I don't think you want the heat transfer fluid in the dirt pile to be steam; that would involve making the pipes through the hot dirt resistant to both pressure and steam corrosion, which would make them expensive. It also means you'd have a high-pressure steam leak deep inside the dirt pile when they did fail, which would probably cause damage to other pipes and to resistors and a significant uncontrolled heat transfer from the zone of the leak to other parts of the dirt pile. I think you want a more relaxing atmospheric-pressure heat transfer fluid that allows you to use cheap pipes, or even no pipes. Air, for example. Solar salt can reach those temperatures, and it has a much larger heat capacity, but it's fairly corrosive.

For a seasonal thermal store, also, we're talking about astoundingly low power densities, so low-density heat transfer fluids like air should be fine. If we're cooling the hot dirt from 600° down to 100° over a 3-month low-sun season, and the dirt is 1J/g/K, we're only extracting 63 watts per tonne, which at 1.3 tonnes of dirt per cubic meter is 80 watts per cubic meter. My human body is largely air-cooled and generates about 800 watts per tonne in normal operation, even without forced air.
by mlyle | 2025-10-26 16:09:01+00:00
:D I've actually seen it.

I'm retired from tech and a high school teacher these days and allowed to teach wack/out of level things.

I would love to teach operating systems with NetBSD, but between the space hardware stuff I do and the Verilog/digital logic/microprocessor architecture class I teach, I soak up all the interested students' elective slots.
by solodev222 | 2025-10-26 16:09:32+00:00
I respectfully agree with many of the comments here, but I can also recognize the value and effort of someone sharing their experience. It shows character, boldness and opens up dialogue. People are central to any effort in accomplishing a certain goal, even if it is a single individual. Organization is meant to facilitate the joint effort in accomplishing the common goals in a structured and systematic way. Having had the experience of taking technical leadership without the title or stake on the company, I still value people who actually care. And that is precisely what I can extract from reading this post. Keep the genuine love for the craft going, don't let yourself down by people who don't get it.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-26 16:09:45+00:00
Depends on what you mean by using etc.

If somebody asked me if it's possible to scp my git repo over to another box and use it there or vice versa, I would have said, yes, that is possible. Although I would've felt uneasy doing that.

If somebody asked me if git clone ssh:// ... would definitely work, I wouldn't have known out of the gate, although I would have thought it would be neat if it did and maybe it does. I may have thought that maybe there must be some sort of git server process running that would handle it, although it's plausible that it would be possible to just do a script that would handle it from the client side.

And finally, I would've never thought really to necessarily try it out like that, since I've always been using Github, Bitbucket, etc. I have thought of those as permanent, while any boxes I have could be temporary, so not a place where I'd want to store something as important to be under source control.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-26 16:10:00+00:00
> Not even the Party claims that China is capitalistic.

They claim that the market plays the "decisive role" in setting prices.

> You cannot succeed or do any sort of business in China unless you have the blessings of the Party. Whether your are an unimportant shop owner or Jack Fucking Ma.

This is an exaggeration. They don't care what an unimportant shop owner does. They do care what the leader of a massive tech / financial firm does, and they really don't like it if he does things they think are dangerous for the stability of the financial system while publicly criticizing the financial regulators.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-10-26 16:10:36+00:00
The political part of the FBI has something LIKE a Palantir dashboard that says, here's a list of people you should talk to, every day, and then the FBI civil service has something LIKE a Jira, that tells agents to go talk to these people, and they do.

Is the FBI being "instructed?" Yes. But it gets "instructed" every day, what has changed? (1) Republicans aren't a no-regulation thing, they are a vague regulation thing. The policies and regulations exist, they just make less sense, they're less visionary, less consistent than the ones that Democrats make. (2) There is better alignment between the tools, like a Palantir dashboard that LLM-reads social media posts, and these vague policies. (3) A list of names cuts through the bureaucratic / administrative friction of vague policy.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-26 16:10:41+00:00
The benefits cited in the paper (and most others) were based on the ultimately false claims from vaccine manufacturers. You can see the CDC slides they based their numbers on here. [1] The CDC removed it from their website, for reasons, which is why I'm linking to an archive.

The CDC is opaque about exactly what numbers they ended up using, but their slides included claims of vaccines being ~95% effective at preventing infection and ~100% effective against hospitalization/death. Obviously those claims were false, and so it completely ruins the risk:benefit analysis, because the benefits were grossly overstated.

Amusingly, you can actually see an immediate error in the study you linked to. Their figure 2 was simply ripped directly from the CDC slides, but they failed to copy/paste the data for 12-17 year old males correctly. You can see it's identical to females. You'd think that have triggered some 'ermmm?' in reviewers, to say nothing of the researchers. Alas, such is the state of science now a days.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20220730093118/https://www.cdc.g... (slide/page 32)
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-26 16:11:33+00:00
It was bad then. But it's much worse now because it's ubiquitous -- you're carrying it around in your pocket to fill every empty moment. Not to mention that back then, your "favorite shows" were on a couple of times a day if you were lucky. Now, it's 24/7.

The quantity and availability of "visual entertainment" for me as a child of the 70s pales in comparison to what my young kids have available to them. As parents we're continuously fighting it, including shutting off the router at set times.
by duane_powers | 2025-10-26 16:11:50+00:00
I’ve been building an infrastructure platform called smartNOC, aimed at managing server environments cohesively and comprehensively, and I have finally achieved a version 1.0 release. I hope you guys think this is as cool as I think it is.

When ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022, the realization hit me that somebody is going to start using these tools for evil, and knowing how we typically manage our networks didn't bring much comfort. I thought we would need a complete re-envisioning of how we architect our edge networks. So I started building it. I went full time on the project in March 2023, and began writing code May of '24.

What I have built is a "network in a box" that provides the following: 1. Fully hardened linux instances. 2. 100% auditable lifecycle operations across fleet. 3. One-touch provisioning. 4. An entirely new monitoring method to permit real time notification of issues. 5. Scoped to be a zero-ops, self-managed environment. 6. AwarenessUI, my answer to dashboard sprawl and alert fatigue.

Every instance starts from a trusted base image, provisioned with our custom security-guard software: fred - the first-responding enterprise daemon.

I think can be great for managing cloud repatriation migrations, government contractors and it might be a good cloud offering.

I have posted a couple brief videos to YouTube here: https://youtu.be/cFqHfP-PPvo and https://youtu.be/Qc1r5OEN1cs

I'd love to hear your thoughts on my project.
by epistasis | 2025-10-26 16:12:09+00:00
The county put up testing results and methods here:

https://www.readymontereycounty.org/emergency/2025-moss-land...

As with all testing of this sort that I've ever seen, third parties do the testing and analysis.

I mention the air as an example of fear getting out waaaaaay in front of any risks. Testing the air would be pointless, 20 miles upwind. The metallic taste was either from other sources or psychosomatic.

The health risks of battery fires have been mostly evaluated in the context of fire fighting, where, air metals are a concern, but only in confined spaces. Nickel is the primary concern there. After reading about these, my only fears were for the workers for nickel production.

I am very very concerned about air quality, but the real risk there is from car traffic, specifically the tire microplastics and brake dust. There are big and measurable health effects from that, where even reducing traffic near schools by 10% could actually impact lives. However because people drive cars and are used to the bad health effects, nobody is scared of the negative health from cars. Instead the human mind focuses on new things because they are new, not because of the relative risk. For decades there were natural gas smokestacks pouring exhaust over the strawberry fields, the batteries that replaced them (to make use of the big power lines) are a huge improvement to human health, even with the fire.
by vunderba | 2025-10-26 16:13:11+00:00
So it was pretty bizarre. Basically as soon as I punched the "Dial" button it would show the "modal dialog" of the number being dialed and then immediately hang itself up.

It happened pretty inconsistently, but I managed to make it happen against another person - who also had a Pixel phone so I don't think it was related to the "Do Not Disturb" mode. I'd assume DND would at least put you through to voicemail though.
by bgwalter | 2025-10-26 16:13:21+00:00
More or less what you said in your last paragraph: Stallman also reacted late to the web revolution, but at least he was passionate. That passion seems gone.

I don't see any sense of urgency in the reported discussion or any will to fight against large corporations. The quoted parts in the article do not seem very prepared, there are a lot of maybes, no clear stance and no overarching vision that LLMs must be fought for software freedom.
by nashashmi | 2025-10-26 16:14:50+00:00
Young undeveloped minds exposed to the world of the internet is an onslaught. We used to hear from the old libs that this was supposed to be a good thing because of this and that. But at the time the world of information was quite small. And it was rarely leveraged as a psyop.

Separation from the internet is a good thing. It mitigates the kids’ exposure to just what their friends see and talk about . And then the kids have less to learn and deal with a smaller information window.

As a kid of minority background, the entire world had a big filter where I separated myself from them. There were a lot of missed connections, sure, but it also gave me a protection. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. I didn’t curse. I didn’t fight with my parents. I didn’t go to music concerts.

Then college came. And now I was exploring. Sometimes it was unnerving. Sometimes I got by. Sometimes I was just smarter.
The Windows 7 Renaissance? StatCounter shows surge in usage
by Stasshe | 2025-10-26 16:15:43+00:00
StatCounter’s latest OS share data shows a bizarre spike in Windows 7 usage: globally up from 2.04% in August to 9.15% in October, with Asia hitting 17.74%. The strangest case? Singapore, where Windows 7 allegedly commands 91.53% — overtaking both Windows 10 and 11.

Released in 2009 and officially unsupported since 2023, Windows 7’s sudden “renaissance” has sparked speculation. Reddit users suggest data centers spinning up massive numbers of Windows 7 VMs may be skewing the stats. Others joke someone booted a million legacy machines just to mess with the graph.

StatCounter reports usage by percentage, not absolute numbers — so even a concentrated VM deployment could distort the global picture.

(Japanese article) https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/be4dbd5406cda9a6be7277e75edeafd909e232e9
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-26 16:16:59+00:00
In a way you are right, but in another way you are wrong. Background radiation is mostly gamma which is generally the most dangerous kind. Radiation at a nuclear plant is mostly alpha and beta which are less dangerous at the same CPM rates. So technically you are right, you have to calculate the absorption, but in practice you are wrong because at that rate, there is no way he absorbed enough radiation to be dangerous.
by Yeul | 2025-10-26 16:18:43+00:00
I don't mind Amazon using the water if they pay for it just like the rest of us.

Unfortunately companies tend to negotiate special deals. And for what? How many local people actually get jobs in a date centre? A few security guards, cleaners and gardeners?

I've seen these things they do everything remote and if that doesn't work they fly in a team.
by ratmice | 2025-10-26 16:19:10+00:00
As far as I'm concerned the problem isn't that one is easier than the other. It's that in the github case it completely routes around the git client. With AGit+gitea or forgejo you can either click your "create pull request" button, or make a pull request right from the git client. One is necessarily going to require more information than the other to reach the destination...

It's like arguing that instead of having salad or fries on the menu with your entree they should only serve fries.
by uecker | 2025-10-26 16:19:42+00:00
Please specify which numbers you exactly you are referring to. Slides are also irrelevant, all these studies are published. You also need to understand that there are many independent studies confirming this (many I looked at as well as colleagues I know and trust). One also need to understand the effectiveness changes over time, so numbers which are correct in some initial setting may not apply in another setting. This does not imply that somebody "lied". You seem a little bit of a conspiracy theorist interpreting everything which seems suspicious to you as proof for that you are being lied to? Like climate change deniers you assume that all researchers of the world somehow conspired to hide the big lie?

Edit: So one of the original studies cited in slides which you seem to claim was a "lie" is this one: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 This was a large collaboration of scientists (made doctors that that swore the hippocratic oath). You think the misreported the results of this study?
by mxkopy | 2025-10-26 16:20:20+00:00
Right, I’m not the most well read on this stuff either, so I’m wondering now if existing architectures operate on this

> efficient frontier of parsimony against say time complexity.

As you mentioned before regularization approximates parsimony, could it be that what’s gained from this loss of precision wrt parsimony are runtime guarantees (since now we’re mostly talking about constant depth circuit-esque DL architectures)? Or is the jump to continuous spaces more relevant? Are these the same?

I’ll have to read up more to see
by y0eswddl | 2025-10-26 16:22:55+00:00
it's been grinding my gears so much lately that people keep trying to compare "blurry jpeg machines" to human intelligence and development.

llms don't learn. nor do they operate with any sort of intent towards precision.

we can develop around, plan for and predict most common human errors. also, humans typically get smarter and learn from their mistakes.

llms will go on making the same ridiculous mistakes, confidently making up bullshit frameworks methods and code, and no matter how much correction you try to offer, they will never get any better until the next multi-billion dollar model update. and even then, it's more of a crossed finger situation than an inevitability improvement and growth.

I hate hate hate hate hate that AI seems to be increasing Dunning Krueger's effect on all our lives...
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-10-26 16:23:17+00:00
Name me one piece of enterprise software that lets you do NSFW things. The way people jump to 1984 with no thought is double plus bad. ChatGPT is a piece of enterprise software. They are trying to sell it to large companies at large prices. This is not a rhetorical question, do you think if you could generate nude images of celebrities or picture of extreme violence, corporations would buy it? Having been a director at a Fortune 500 company that bought software, I can tell you with 100% certainty the answer is "no".
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-10-26 16:23:37+00:00
> It’s a fiber and a dust not some magic material that soaks in through your skin

I feel you're being a bit flippant with the known danger of disturbing asbestos containing materials. The dust and fibres are typically too fine to be controlled by a household vacuum cleaner and will require specialist handling to minimise the risk. Yes, the dust isn't absorbed through the skin, but instead is breathed in and enters the lungs where it causes problems.

You're right about using respirators/masks when dealing with dust, but special care needs to be taken with asbestos dust and not all dust masks will protect your lungs from the dust/fibres.
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-26 16:23:44+00:00
Given that there are a lot of cases that old systems are used for that don't run the system full out and that they probably idle a lot when on, just like your new stuff, given that a lot of older hardware barring known stupid designs like Pentium 4 that draw ludicrous power for the perf, and given how much of an absolute shit show electronics recycling is (I've seen a good amount of how it actually gets "broken down"), I honestly think we upgrade way too often for most use cases. If you can still get by doing something important with a P3 or a Core 2, honestly I would be really surprised if it was actually vastly more cost efficient and environmentally friendly to refresh to new hardware.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-26 16:24:34+00:00
Depends, what's the reasoning? Because technically anyone can start a project even without Git. Or even without a computer. Someone can use a pen to write code on a paper.

Depends on what you mean by "a project". If it's policy related, maybe it's company's policy that all code that is written must be stored in a certain way for multitude of reasons.
by kragen | 2025-10-26 16:25:09+00:00
You probably want to use a bare repository (git init --bare) rather than `git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead`, which will cause your pushes to fail if you edit anything locally in the checkout. For http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ I run a pull from the post-update hook of http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3.git, http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3.git/hooks/post-update, which is short enough that I'll just include it here:

#!/bin/sh set -e echo -n 'updating... ' git update-server-info echo 'done. going to dev3' cd /home/kragen/public_html/sw/dev3 echo -n 'pulling... ' env -u GIT_DIR git pull echo -n 'updating... ' env -u GIT_DIR git update-server-info echo 'done.'

You can of course also run a local site generator here as well, although for dev3 I took a lighter-weight approach — I just checked in the HEADER.html file that Apache FancyIndexing defaults to including above the file directory listing and tweaked some content-types in the .htaccess file.

This could still fail to update the checkout if it has local changes, but only if they create a merge conflict, and it won't fail to update the bare repo, which is probably what your other checkouts are cloned from and therefore where they'll be pulling from.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-26 16:25:24+00:00
In order to calculate the benefits of a vaccine, you need to know the efficacy of a vaccine. The study's efficacy figures were using the CDC's data to try to assess this. The CDC, in turn, was basing their estimates on false claims from big pharma. The study then misrepresented the CDC's data (at least in the study's figure 2) through incompetence.
by jaccola | 2025-10-26 16:25:28+00:00
Asbestos is hard to hide, certainly competitors of the Asbestos-using company would know they were using Asbestos. They, at least, would have an incentive to advertise how bad their competitors product is because it uses Asbestos.

Equally, once it has been established that Asbestos is harmful any company using it would be so sued that they would quickly cease to exist.

Yes the free market doesn't stop health risks immediately but neither does regulation (see: asbestos!)
by myself248 | 2025-10-26 16:26:38+00:00
The coolest way to display these is to have them sublimation-printed onto fabric (not silkscreened; silkscreening applies the ink heavily enough to reflect sound, while sublimation printing leaves the fabric still soft and porous), then wrap them onto frames containing sound-absorbing material. Hang them around the place and they improve your acoustics and aesthetics simultaneously.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/diy-custom-printed-movie-po...
by wtmt | 2025-10-26 16:26:59+00:00
I don’t like this direction that Apple has taken over the last several years that it needs to provide more services and that all its services need to be monetized with an aim of a 70% plus profit margin. This greed to capture every penny is creating poorer and worse experiences for users of its platforms.

As for ads on Apple Maps itself, it may generate some revenue in the US and a few other countries. Elsewhere (like in India and many other countries), Apple has practically neglected Apple Maps and it sucks terribly even in large cities. Google, with all its tracking and other issues (including map accuracy issues), keeps moving at breakneck speed on Google Maps.

Apple’s single minded focus on the US with severe lethargy in other countries is why in most countries where (some/many) people use Apple devices, they use Google’s services. Both Eddy Cue and Tim Cook are squarely to be blamed for this greed, laziness and lack of vision or strategy.
by gooodvibes | 2025-10-26 16:27:31+00:00
1. ADHD medication

2. Break things down into small tasks

3. Checklists for all tasks, preferably on paper, crossing things out feels nice

4. Work surrounded by people, I need the accountability of being observed. Go to the office more often, use Focusmate where you pair with strangers, or even open an empty video call with just yourself and have yourself on camera on one screen.

5. In general look for environments that give frequent feedback, as frequent as possible. That's why long things and big projects need to be broken down.

6. Noise cancelling headphones, repetitive music with a nice beat and no lyrics.

7. But the main that unlocked everything was the medication, without it the rest of the tips don't do much.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-26 16:27:37+00:00
You're forgetting the "second cancellation", where people brought legitimate (and often long-standing) criticisms against Richard Stallman. Cancelling a philosopher for having bad takes on age of consent, but otherwise drawing the line between "rape" and "not rape" in a sensible place, is not a good idea; but removing a community leader for a long history of applied misogyny is much more appropriate.