MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mulmen | 2025-10-13 16:46:10+00:00
Natural gas is not as bad as coal but that’s an extremely low bar.

I can’t find any support for your claim that natural gas is “a few percent” of the “pollution” of natural gas.

In GHG terms natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits CO2. Web searches suggest the number is somewhere between 50% less GHG emissions to a few percent more GHG emissions for natural gas vs coal. This is because natural gas has the additional issue of widespread fugitive emissions across the supply chain which emit methane, an even more potent GHG which itself breaks down to CO2.

As with everything it’s complicated but it’s simply unbelievable that a natural gas plant is anywhere near a 90% improvement over a coal plant which is my arbitrarily generous standard for “a few percent”.

Ultimately there’s just no good way to burn fossil fuels.

I’m not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is. Do you mean CARB?
by benatkin | 2025-10-13 16:46:12+00:00
I think this is a lot like etree in python's streaming approach for XML, but with a simpler API, and incremental text parsing. With etree in python, you can access the incomplete tree data and not have to worry about events. So it's missing the SAX API part of a SAX approach, but is built like some real world libraries that use the SAX approach, which end up having a hybrid of events and trees.
by nluken | 2025-10-13 16:46:19+00:00
> So far, the biggest way Americans have leveraged AI in politics is in self-expression.

Most people, in my experience, use LLMs to help them write stuff or just to ask questions. While it might be neat to see the little ways in which some political movements are using new tools to help them do what they were already doing, the real paradigm shifting "use" of LLMs in politics will be generating content to bias the training sets the big companies use to create their models. If you could do that successfully, you would basically have free, 24/7 propaganda bots presenting your viewpoint to millions as a "neutral observer".
by triwats | 2025-10-13 16:46:22+00:00
Three projects - up one from last month!

1. https://llmstxt.studio

I really believe that we're going to see this adopted as a standard for on-demand inference specifically from low powered devices. We'll give them a guide of intent and periodically it will get scored. It just makes sense.

However, sites change and markdown is hard for a lot of people. We take that for granted as technical people.

2. https://probe.bike

Continuing working on probe.bike to allow you to tell stories as a user from your bikepacking data. See the full route, share the full route, and figure out your totals from calories to kudos. Gonna be doubling down again on this soon.

3. https://flopper.io

It's really hard to understand what 10 gigawatts actually is in terms of GPUs. Or what the individual TDP of your GPU estate is.

I've built flopper to try to act as a translation layer and calculator. Some inspiration from vantage.sh here.

AI is making it possible to moonlight on these projects. Definitely burning candles at both ends though.
Show HN: FFTN, faster than FFTW in 700 lines of C
by thomaskoopman | 2025-10-13 16:46:46+00:00
I am playing around with using arrays of arbitrary dimension as framework for designing FFT implementations, as opposed to the more classical approach of tensor products and butterflies (too complicated in my opinion).

It turns out, that with a modern compiler, you do not need much complexity to make a really fast implementation. This implementation is for powers of 2, and optimized for arrays that do not fit in cache. I do think it would be better to use a higher-level language to implement other cases (e.g. n = 2^a * 3^b * 5^c, multiple small FFTs, higher-dimensional), so I am currently working on getting the SaC-compiler to generate this code.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-13 16:47:26+00:00
China has been building robots and robotic manufacturing without AI. So why AI? Because the AI is a grift for those who can get exposure to its potential gains during the exuberance, while China builds actual capabilities. Profits and fiat are shared delusions, monetarily speaking, robots and factories are real, and will build real things.

Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563018 - October 2025

Was Made in China 2025 Successful? [pdf] - https://www.uschamber.com/assets/documents/Was-Made-in-China... - May 5th, 2025

ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker: The rewards of long-term research investment - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... - August 28th, 2024

> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023). These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.
by echelon | 2025-10-13 16:47:49+00:00
This.

Cut spending on admin staff and facilities.

Schools do not need amenities to attract students. They need lower tuition. You could teach students out of a tent and do away with all the flashy health spas and do a better job at the core mission of empowering students.

No new buildings, no land acquisitions, no taking over facilities from the state for millions of dollars.

University leadership does not need to make $300k, $600k salaries. They should make what the median professor makes.

Universities will tell you they need all of this to compete with other universities. So to get the ball started, tax all of this as a negative externality and give it to the universities that do not spend in this way. Or turn it into scholarships.

Speaking of scholarships, stop putting a cap on admissions. Let everyone that wants to come in do so if they meet academic thresholds. Let them stay if they maintain a good GPA.

And make student loan debt dischargable. That might mean not everyone qualifies for a loan, but by making the system an "infinite money glitch", universities have grown into gluttons for tuition. They've taken this "free, unlimited money" to grow to obscene proportions. It's malinvestment propped up by an artificial quirk of economics.
by codybontecou | 2025-10-13 16:48:07+00:00
Haha "better" is definitely relative. It's a 1977 Toyota micromini rv that I purchased for $750.

At least 50% of the available storage is tools to fix mechanical, plumbing, and electrical issues that appear, because it is inevitable given the mileage we are putting on. Definitely living a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lifestyle at the moment.

Code review absolutely happens via voice. The voice agent has access to the pull requests and code diffs and is able to reason about the changes and explain them to me.

I'm also playing around with a tool that opens up a visual preview of the Vercel/Netlify preview deploys so I can explore the (web) changes handsfree.

Emacspeak is new to me. I'll look into it. Thanks!
by fair_enough | 2025-10-13 16:48:19+00:00
On a related note, I'm skeptical of the feasibility of their 2035 EV-only mandate. They haven't made any meaningful progress toward building up a grid that can support as much electrical power consumption as they will need. I know gasoline-powered cars are not going to disappear overnight, but the average American replaces their car about every 12-14 years according to Professor Google. Either that number is going to become 25-30 in California, or people will be heating their homes with peat and dry, fire-prone CA lumber.

I'll admit I have selfish interest in seeing nuclear power take over our electrical grids, but I don't want to see the lives of 40M people upended just because it will give the companies in my portfolio more pricing power.
by Zak | 2025-10-13 16:48:21+00:00
There is such a world, and we live in it. Banks might reduce fraud by repeatedly performing credit checks on customers, for example, but that's usually illegal.

Remote attestation doesn't check that there isn't malware; it checks that the OS is approved by one of a short list of corporations. Passing that check is correlated with a reduced risk of certain types of malware being present, but is not quite the same as checking for malware.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-13 16:49:03+00:00
Really? What is so innovative?

LLMs are just better google. In the past, you used to google shit, and copy paste from stack overflow, now you just skip the middle man and go directly to Chat GPT. Anyone that has been programming for a while can attest to that the answers aren't any better, its just more efficient to iterate on them now.

AI hasn't even begun to be solved yet. Everyone is focused on feedforward transformer architecture that is never going to replace the imperative processing of actual intelligence.

Smartphones are pretty much solved, as they have replaced a lot of the need for in person interaction (which by extension means transportation). The last decade has been all about monetizing smartphones.

Wearables aren't transforming society at all.

3d printing and home fab is still too niche and expensive for most people, and you can't really make it cheaper and more accessible.

Electric vehicles largely suck. Self driving is mediocre.

We literally went through a pandemic and people got richer because they had to stay at home and not spend money on things like daycare or gas or car maintenance, without losing any productivity.

Hell, the state the US is in currently is largely explained by the fact that most all the problems in society have been solved to the extent that people have to invent bogeymen and elect a demented felon into office on the promise of solving those problems.
by inahga | 2025-10-13 16:49:04+00:00
I don't think the software hacking side of Wrangler mods is barren. e.g. https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/jeep-hacking-..., which IIUC has been commercialized into https://www.zautomotive.com/products/z_tzr_jlm.

I don't know that anyone has broken the head unit firmware though.
by jmcqk6 | 2025-10-13 16:49:34+00:00
I own a Jeep Wrangler, and you're right the electronics are terrible. The rest of the vehicle is really solid though. The only problems I've had with it in three years are electronic in nature. And I've really pushed it to the limits: Colorado Passes, Utah Dessert, Montana backroads. I drove it to the Arctic Ocean and back on the Dempster.

Still there is no excuse for how terrible the electronics are in Jeep / Dodge (I'm assuming all Chrysler) vehicles. And it's been that way for decades.
by ReliantGuyZ | 2025-10-13 16:49:41+00:00
I'm unclear on what people see in the current AI tech advancements that makes them think it will contribute to better manufacturing. The new feature of LLMs that makes them so interesting is their ability accept input and flexibly follow arbitrary instructions, meaning they're really good for varied work, especially when there are a wide range of acceptable answers ("creative work"). Everything I know about manufacturing at scale is that you want a person or machine that follows a tiny instruction set (at least in comparison to the potential flexibilities of an LLM) and nails the execution every time. This seems to me like the complete opposite of the strengths of an AI system like the ones that Wall Street are cheering.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-13 16:49:48+00:00
The idea from the Chinese side to prevent a war by limiting the ability of the US to produce weapons.

The USA and it's allies won WWII mainly due to superior production capacity. This advantage now works in China's favor. And the USA no longer has allies.

Bottom line: If China decides to take Taiwan, the USA will have to choose between either doing nothing or mutual annihilation.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-10-13 16:49:54+00:00
4. Those who intend to re-invest all returns in to the stock, who avoid a taxable event when their ownership of the company goes up without having to first pay tax for the dividend.

A stock buyback rewards all stockholders equally. Those who sell, get their reward in cash. Those who do not sell, get their reward in the proportion of their ownership of the company going up.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-13 16:49:56+00:00
Not only did SpaceX make breakthroughs considered impossible by the "experts" in the industry, they did it by hiring a guy who literally built rocket engines in his garage to design the engines. The key here is personality. And the type of person who actually wants to build things and get things done absolutely recoils at bureaucracy and the type of people who like it.

When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.
by hollowonepl | 2025-10-13 16:50:20+00:00
Although I don’t like pascal notation in C (I’m conservative snake style forever kind of guy myself) I agree with others who praise clarity.

I have done something similar some time ago but more like a production ready ExpressJs alike framework in C++ using only STL and Boost.

Definitely C/C++ can be considered as a very productive environment free of all the “modern web” dependency hell many other coding platforms introduce by default.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-10-13 16:50:23+00:00
>That's a pretty recent definition

It's actually one of the oldest definitions. I recommend you look up the works of H. A. Simon. This idea is quite ancient to people who are working AI research.

Anyhow, your more vague definition is still pretty much in line with my assumptions above in terms of the applicability to this issue. I.e. an AGI by your standard also will not bring a solution to this.
by abuani | 2025-10-13 16:50:52+00:00
Can it though? Everything I've seen and experienced is that LLMs are very good at making it appear to do those things, but the amount of times I've gotten stuck on "you're absolutely right!" When correcting the LLMs suggests that it can not reason by any means, nor does it learn. Otherwise, an LLM would never get stuck in a loop.
by clusterhacks | 2025-10-13 16:51:42+00:00
> tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields

This is not true at my state flagship R1 institution. Tuition and fees make up a little over 10% of the institution's total revenue. General funding provided in our state budget provides a larger percentage of the total revenue to the university and federal research funding provides an even larger percentage than the state.

The essential takeaway here is that our state taxes subsidize the actual cost of providing education to in-state students. In-state students are mandated to be at least 80%-ish of students.

The professors in the STEM fields are required to raise a significant percentage of their salary via research grants ("soft" money), teaching, and service work. The non-STEM professors are more often funded via "hard" money - eg, the institution has committed to pay the salary of history professors.

I googled and apparently a little more than 70% of undergraduate students in the US attend public schools. I don't know much about how funding works at the private universities that have the other 30% of undergraduate students.
by stavros | 2025-10-13 16:51:48+00:00
Jj uses git's data model, that doesn't mean it uses git commands for everything under the hood. Creating a commit with jj doesn't move the branch tag automatically, whereas git does. That's what confused me with git, it didn't expose the internals enough, so even though I had read about the data structures, it never clicked what was changed when, because git did it under the hood.
by _flux | 2025-10-13 16:52:08+00:00
Surely the basic flashing mechanisms used nowadays will first check checksum (and hopefully a device magic), and then you have a relatively short time window when it actually does the flashing after which it reboots? Even small devices nowadays seem to have the memory for it. So there is a window of failure, but it's not a very long one.

Well, in addition to flashing the incorrect or buggy firmware.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-10-13 16:52:10+00:00
In case anyone gets confused, PDFTk Server is just the name for the CLI tool, which hasn't been updated in 10y+ (and annoying to compile due to newer GCC versions removing GCJ). The pdftk provided in various distros (incl. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS) is pdftk-java, a 3rd-party pure Java port of the original tool.
by detectivestory | 2025-10-13 16:52:23+00:00
From a quick glance at /r/GooglePlayDeveloper/ it looks like Google is just as interested in killing playstore apps! It seems that they only want to support the existing larger apps now. I think they are giving a clear message to developers that its not really worth developing for that platform anymore. I think we will all agree that the playstore needed a purge but they seem to be making it impossible for any new solo devs at this point.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-10-13 16:52:24+00:00
It did see a lot of use. I forgot to say, but the majority of 3G UMTS and 4G LTE radios (operator level and even down to tiny things like femtocells) required it to connect back to the $(core network) and encapsulated a mix of control and user data through it (though often also encapsulating SCTP in a VPN). That is to say, there were a lot of devices out there that used it in anger. If you made a call or used a cellular data session for over a decade, your traffic was likely getting encapsulated through it.
by umvi | 2025-10-13 16:52:42+00:00
Well then articles should focus on that if they want to convince people who use git as a daily driver. Currently the impression I get from jj is that it's "git for people who have a hard time understanding/using git", therefore since I don't have a hard time understanding/using git, jj is not for me.

Maybe more articles showing galaxy brain SCM workflows that are difficult under git but possible under jj and are killer for productivity is a better marketing strategy for jj.
by SigmundA | 2025-10-13 16:52:44+00:00
I really want a 4XE Wrangler to replace my aging JK at some point, on paper its amazing, lots of torque and power, decent economy for a brick with large tires, and can actually run a pure electric enough to get around town, plus still takes all the standard Wrangler parts.

However in classic Jeep style they just can't get reliability down, and the PHEV part seems too complicated for them.

If it was just reliable it would still be the best selling PHEV in America, they let that go.

There is no sign of the 2026 Wrangler 4XE it might be canceled like the Gladiator version...
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-13 16:53:07+00:00
> Now my PRs are split into human-sized commits that each contain a set of changes that make sense together, and I keep moving changes around during development to keep the history tidy, until it's time to send the pull request. If a commit introduces a typo, the typo fix should go into that commit so the typo never happened in the first place and you don't get reviews like "please fix this" and then "oh wait I see you fixed it in a later commit".

That's my workflow in Git. It is sometimes painful, but only because other people don't do that.

It is less work, if you use git --fixup=old-commit-hash and then use git rebase --autosquash. The --fixup step can even by automated, by using git-absorb, but this needs to be installed separately.

> You just switch to that commit, fix the typo, and switch back to where you were. Or fix the typo where you were and squash the fix, and only the fix, into the commit that introduced it.

That sounds the same in Git?

> No more deleting the checkout and pulling it clean because things went sideways in a way that would be hell to fix manually

When do you need to do that? The only case in which I messed up my repo, was when I had a harddrive crash and recovered commits manually from git objects, because the other files were corrupted.

> rolling back is easy.

Yes, that seams a bit easier, but reflog still exists.

> No more squashing on merge to sweep the messy commit history under the carpet.

This is just as well a stupid idea in Git and I hate that. This seams to be cultural and is not suggested by the tool itself.

> No more juggling index and staged files and stashed files

I find these useful, but you can also use Git without them. Just always use commit -a and commit instead of stashing.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-13 16:53:18+00:00
If we start to have huge amounts of it spread through house objects, than yeah, we can increase people's exposure by a large multiplier and get the known harmful effects we already know about.

That said, I don't think we will ever have large amounts of it in house objects. Graphene doesn't seem to be useful that way. We may have it embedded in some material, but that will limit exposure to waste management and manufacture.

Also, differently from asbestos, graphene is not chemically stable. So very small pieces of it have a limited half-life.
by rhdunn | 2025-10-13 16:54:00+00:00
For one-to-one I was thinking of the Unicode Character Database single-character upper, lower, and title case entries in the UnicodeData.txt file [1] -- i.e. the simple case mappings [2].

The one-to-many mappings are specified in SpecialCasing.txt. Some are locale independent (like my German sharp/double S example) and others are locale aware (like the Turkish example). For the locale aware mappings you need to ensure you are setting the language/locale correctly in your language of choice, or that the language is doing the right thing.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/UnicodeData.tx...

[2] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#Casemapping

[3] https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/SpecialCasing....
by nyeah | 2025-10-13 16:54:19+00:00
There is supply and demand to consider. Buybacks create a tendency toward higher share prices, but only while they continue. That demand cuts off when the buybacks stop.

If the buybacks are at a discount to whatever the stock turns out to have been worth at the time, then that benefits all the shareholders. That can be a great use of money for all shareholders.

But buybacks at inflated prices benefit only exiting shareholders. Exiting shareholders tend to include hired management. Of course nobody really knows the valuation that well, so obviously there's a guessing game.

This is pretty hard to argue against for anybody who agrees that valuation is a thing at all.