MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-06 15:05:40+00:00
*energy

And yes, 1% of German energy is a ton of energy; but that is an incredibly optimistic forecast of if _every_ German did this. There are 85 million Germans; they could do a lot of things with their combined efforts. Backyard furnaces produced millions of tons of steel; seems like a very apt comparison.

I actually have solar of my own. It powered my entire life (off grid!) for years. That still doesn't mean I think individual small-scale solar is a meaningful solution to the climate crisis.

The biggest risk around climate, in my opinion, is the risk that people and governments think "we're doing something" when they are not. In this case, balcony solar has a very short payback time (a claimed 5 years for one guy's install! That is preposterously short for any investment!) because of the strange way that residential power is priced. If people really paid for the power and the grid infrastructure in relation to the real costs, balcony solar would never pay itself back, but essentially nobody understands that. Instead, they see the large amount they're saving and mentally that magnifies the impact of what they're doing. From the various posts I found, an ideal, un-shaded install produces between 200 and 500 kWh per year, depending on orientation and size. Obviously any sort of shading would drop that off a cliff. Compare that with the 38 MWh (38,000 kWh) per year of primary energy that the average German consumes...

In a way, it is a sort of modern indulgence.

------

Here are some yearly numbers on the Chinese steel industry at that time as a whole: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/factbox-a-history-o...
by FinnLobsien | 2025-10-06 15:05:40+00:00
That's true. Plus the question of how much security you actually need. I've interacted with many, many websites and apps that were horribly insecure (e.g. a hotel checkin tool that stored passport scans in a public firebase bucket...).

In the vast majority of cases, this doesn't actually matter (the passport thing of course is pretty bad). If someone found a vulnerability in a vibe-coded event calendar and hacked into it to change the timing of trivia at your local sports bar... who cares?

It's like home security. If you're not rich, famous or extremely unpopular, you should definitely lock your doors, but you probably don't need armed guards.
by jsrozner | 2025-10-06 15:05:59+00:00
I was saying that the seahorse emoji failure is not a tokenization issue. If you ask an LLM to do research, you will sometimes get hallucinated articles -- potentially plausible articles that, if they existed, would have been embedded at the position from which the model tried to decode. This is what we see happening with the seahorse emoji. The model identifies where the seahorse emoji would have been embedded if it existed and then decodes from that position.

In the research case you get articles that were never written. In the seahorse case later layers hallucinate the seahorse emoji, but in the final decoding step, output gets mapped onto another nearby emoji.

Admittedly, in one way the seahorse example is different from the research case. Article titles, since they use normal characters, can be produced whether they exist or not (e.g., "This is a fake hallucinated article" gets produced just as easily as "A real article title"). It's actually nice that the model can't produce the seahorse emoji since it gets forced (by tokens, yes) to decode back into reality.

Yes, tokenization affects how the hallucination manifests, but the underlying problem is not a tokenization one.
by casenmgreen | 2025-10-06 15:06:02+00:00
For a few decades there seems to have been growing development of the mechanisms of authoritarianism, but whilst retaining an essentially decent Government.

Now we have an essentially indecent Government, plus a few decades of accumulating mechanisms of authoritarianism.

This is why you strive to avoid accumulating such mechanisms, and do not let them come to be merely because you trust the Government of the day.
by Spivak | 2025-10-06 15:06:05+00:00
I mean if we're going cut back on the worst offenses of sports gambling it seems like "you can only gamble on professional sports" could be a potential easy win.

The next step would probably be eliminating betting on individual players, you can still bet on weird stuff but it would have to be $team does $thing. It wouldn't work for solo sports but given the most popular sports are all team sports it would cover a lot.
by oldandboring | 2025-10-06 15:06:12+00:00
If you look at the article, you can see that games have been getting progressively slower since records started being kept back in the 1920s. The recent rule changes have managed to cut the duration back to what they were in the early 80s.

By your logic, the games my mom grew up watching weren't slow enough, and the games my grandma watched were true blasphemy at around 2 hours flat.

Meanwhile, from my wife's perspective, I spend all afternoon watching even these sped-up games.
by ch_fr | 2025-10-06 15:06:17+00:00
Last line before you edited your reply was:

> P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.

I did notice, so am I to believe that in the writing of my comment (less than an hour ago), this number jumped from 2300 to a clean 2360 (so a conversion rate of about 2 users per minute), and yet it has not received further updates since? I'm pretty sure that I've been writing for more than a few minutes already.

Also I don't think I've ever seen "inputting false profile images from randomuser.me" as a means to protect the personal infos of your client, if they don't want their name in there, I'm pretty sure they also don't want a fake name and fake image to represent them.

Finally, it's hard to believe that a thriving community of 2360 individual users would translate to a subreddit with... 5 monthly visits. https://www.reddit.com/r/WriteItDownTemplate/ (<- official subreddit listed on your site's page)
by tim333 | 2025-10-06 15:06:19+00:00
I was watching the U9 speed record and the driver only really puts his foot down for 20 seconds or so. I doubt the car can sustain that power for a whole lap without something going wrong - overheating or flat battery or something.

The downforce to weight ratio is quite different between the U9 and Porsche also. Apparently the Porsche weighed 850kg and probably produced as much as that or more in downforce. The U9 is more like 2500kg and not especially downforce orientated.

There's another eclectic design though, the McMurty that laps thing faster than petrol cars due to having a fan up the downforce https://youtu.be/5JYp9eGC3Cc I don't think it has a Nurburgring time yet.
by feoren | 2025-10-06 15:06:50+00:00
Attributes do nothing at all on their own. It's someone else's code that does magic by reflecting on your types and looking for those attributes. That may seem like a trivial distinction, but there's a big difference between "the language is doing magic" and "some poorly documented library I'm using is doing magic". I rarely use and generally dislike attributes. I sometimes wonder if C# would be better off without them, but there are some legitimate usages like interop with unmanaged code that would be really awkward any other way. They are OK if you think of them as a weakly enforced part of the type system, and relegate their use to when a C# code object is representing something external like an API endpoint or an unmanaged call. Even this is often over-done.

Yes, the ASP.NET pipeline is a bit of a mess. My strategy is to plug in a couple adapters that allow me to otherwise avoid it. I rolled my own DI framework, for instance.

Source generators are present in all languages and terrible in all languages, so that certainly is not a criticism of C#. It would be a valid criticism if a language required you to use source generators to work efficiently (e.g. limited languages like VB6/VBA). But I haven't used source generators in C# in at least 10 years, and I honestly don't know why anyone would at this point.

Maybe it sounds like I'm dodging by saying C# is great even though the big official frameworks Microsoft pushes (not to mention many of their tutorials) are kinda bad. I'd be more amenable to that argument if it took more than an afternoon to plug in the few adapters you need to escape their bonds and just do it all your own way with the full joy of pure, clean C#. You can write bad code in any language.

That's not to say there's nothing wrong with C#. There are some features I'd still like to see added (e.g. co-/contra-variance on classes & structs), some that will never be added but I miss sometimes (e.g. higher-kinded types), and some that are wonderful but lagging behind (e.g. Expressions supporting newer language features).
by mcramer | 2025-10-06 15:07:02+00:00
> Who is using K-means for classification? If you have labels, then a supervised algorithm seems like a more appropriate choice. The generated data is labeled but we can imagine those labels don't exist when running k-means. There are many applications for unsupervised clustering. I don't, however, think that there are many applications for running much of anything on an Apple ][+.

> K-means clustering is a recursive algorithm My bad. It's iterative. I'll fix that. Thanks.

> If we know that the distributions are Gaussian, which is very frequently the case in machine learning Gaussian distributions are very frequent and important in machine learning because of the Central Limit Theorem but, beyond that, you are correct. While many natural phenomena are approximately normal, the reason for the Gaussian's frequent use is often mathematical mathematical convenience. I'll correct my post.

> we can employ a more powerful algorithm: Expectation Maximization (EM) Excellent point. I will fix that, too. "While k-means is simple, it does not take advantage of our knowledge of the Gaussian nature of the data. If we know that the distributions are at least approximately Gaussian, which is frequently the case, we can employ a more powerful application of the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework (k-means is a specific implementation of centroid-based clustering that uses an iterative approach similar to EM with 'hard' clustering) that takes advantage of this." Thank you for pointing out all of this!
by MattJ100 | 2025-10-06 15:08:13+00:00
The default ports are often blocked on such networks (public wifi, corporate firewalls, etc.), but also often open. 5222 is used by e.g. WhatsApp, 5223 is used by e.g. Apple push notifications. So it's not as bad as it could be.

But it's also totally possible to run XMPP over 443, and this is a feature of many popular XMPP deployments. If you're self-hosting, there are some guides for different deployment approaches here: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tech_pages/XEP-0368
by weberer | 2025-10-06 15:08:21+00:00
While we're on the topic, Finland gets around half of its energy from nuclear. It doesn't have the luxury of fjords for hydro like Norway and Sweden, or easily tapped geothermal like Iceland.

You can see a nice live graph here. Wind isn't blowing at the moment, so the fossil fuel co-generation plants had to kick in.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/
by t0mas88 | 2025-10-06 15:08:46+00:00
If you make the prompt "Can you write a seahorse emoji" then Claude Sonnet 4.5 correct states that it doesn't exist:

> I don’t actually have a seahorse emoji to share with you. The standard emoji set includes (horse) and various sea creatures like (fish) and (octopus), but there isn’t a seahorse emoji in the Unicode standard emoji set.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 15:08:46+00:00
> Cooperation is better until it stops being better.

It was better for Russia than the present.

> You are taking last few decades, which were anomaly due to unprecedented situation of total global hegemony of US, and you extrapolate for the rest of future human history, whereas it dissolves right before your eyes.

The US has nothing to do with this.

> And invasion or occupation is hardly the only example of adversarial policy, even if most obvious.

Yes, you can make enemies out of thin air. But the facts are simple: Europe has tried to appease Russia by trading with them, in the end that trade balance was and is used to wage war. That's a dead end strategy. Russia can not survive by itself and needs trading partners more than it needs more territory. Putin and his band of mafiosi are robbing Russia blind and are the root cause of a lot of this, they will at some point be replaced and hopefully the new guard will be smarter than the old guard. And if not we'll deal with that when we get there.

You live in Poland, but your position does not strike me as typically Polish. Poland has seen first hand what it was like to live as a Russian occupied country. The same goes for the Baltics, Romania and lots of other countries in the East. Between all of them there is a solid agreement that this will not happen again. They're more than happy to let Russia be Russia, but within its own borders. Just like it would be if your country bordered Somalia or Iran.
by mijoharas | 2025-10-06 15:09:39+00:00
I think I basically agree with this, but my thoughts are more on which org is better placed now to respond to things like the recent supply chain attacks (ref for the specific recent ruby one[0][1]).

I'm unsure on who is better placed to handle that stuff now. My view is that the people that were doing that are now with gem.coop, but rubygems still has the infra (i.e. you'd email security@rubygems.org still for now).

I'm unsure about what to think about longer term (my personal approach is currently "wait and see").

Similarly, I'm perfectly happy with bundler for now, but if `rv` turns out to be like `uv`, I'd happily switch (drop-in replacement, but faster/some better features).

[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/60-malicious-...

[1] https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/08/08/malicious-gems-removal....
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-06 15:10:19+00:00
There are never economies of scale to this sort of thing. Look at other cities to see what will happen. Germany has recent experiences, London too.

Zurich especially has no improvement potential here because it already does everything possible to force people onto public transport e.g. parking is heavily throttled, driving through the city is extremely slow. Transit is already saturated at peak times. There aren't armies of people driving cars around who would take the train or bus every day instead if a yearly Abo was only cheaper. Maybe a small number but not many.

> Indeed if it leads to less infrastructure investment it might worsen, but it's not obvious that this is what will happen

Of course it will lead to less investment! Not just of public transport but everything. This decision opens up a 185M CHF/year financial hole in a city of ~300,000 residents. It's already one of the most expensive cities in Switzerland, and the most expensive in terms of corporation tax. A full 25% of companies were already considering relocating out due to the high taxes.

Look at it like this. This decision is so bad that even public transit advocacy groups are criticizing it!

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/public-transport-critic...

> The public transport information service (Litra) and the public transport industry organisation Alliance Swiss Pass are also critical of general discounts. Public transport always costs the same, even if customers pay less – in the end, the taxpayer pays more, they said.

How bad does a decision have to be for the subsidized services themselves to tell you it's a mistake?

It comes on top of other catastrophically expensive recent socialist decisions like the 13th AHV, buying up so much housing in prime real estate and restricting it to low earners, etc. Where will the money come from? It will come from higher taxes on "high earners" like tech workers (ordinary tech workers). It will come from us. This vote increases the cost of public transport for us, and probably by a lot. It just won't show up on the ÖV bills.
by Arubis | 2025-10-06 15:10:54+00:00
Strong recommend. When I’m bouncing around getting onboarded on new client/customer machines that disallow syncing (justifiably), magic wormhole is a fabulous way to get my dot files and local env set up in a jiffy. Works well for secure transfer of _large_ files ad hoc, too, so a great fit for db dumps.
by t43562 | 2025-10-06 15:11:03+00:00
Thank you for offering to look. I hesitate to supply the example because I have tried so many things and get so many different errors depending on what approach I try to take.

I don't want to waste your time. What I'm doing now is just trying to make global variables with builtin data types like String. This takes away some of the options for error. My idea is to get this working before I try to do it with my own data structure:

So with a simpler case where I'm making a global string instead

// .... static mut HEAP_INSTANCE : OnceLock<String> = OnceLock::new(); #[rocket::main] async fn main() -> Result<(), rocket::Error> { HEAP_INSTANCE.set("blah".to_string()); ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ use of mutable static let _rocket = rocket::build() .mount("/", routes![min,create_heap]) .launch() .await?; Ok(()) }

As you can see it's an error to use a static mut. I realise that this thing isn't safe in a multi-threaded program but I had hoped that I might ignore that in my single-threaded program or add some kind of locking container that would make it acceptable to the compiler.

If I try to use my heap data structure then I start having a multitude of issues, the most common being that I create something which is owned by a scope that disappears too soon. IOW I need to initialise the global with a structure that has a 'static lifetime and I'm doing that in a context which definitely isn't static. i.e. I get "creates a temporary value which is freed while still in use" or something similar

While writing this reply I might have solved my issue:

//static mut HEAP_INSTANCE : OnceLock<String> = OnceLock::new(); static HEAP_INSTANCE : OnceLock<Box<Heap<String>>> = OnceLock::new(); async fn main() -> Result<(), rocket::Error> { let heap = Box::new(Heap::new(100)); let _ = HEAP_INSTANCE.set(heap); // .... }

I don't fully understand why I don't need the mut and I don't know if I really need a Box or not but at least this compiles.

Thank you for helping me to duck debug! :-D
by bogwog | 2025-10-06 15:11:20+00:00
I have this setup, but I haven't tried using a self signed cert. I just have a public domain with the DNS pointing to the ejabberd internal IP. Setting up LetsEncrypt with DNS auth isn't that difficult, and I'm using Digital Ocean for their free DNS API to automate renewals.

Although the big issue with this is that clients need to have wireguard enabled at all times, otherwise they can't even receive notifications. It's kind of a PITA for non techies to understand, and also kind of a PITA for techies who may already be using wireguard for something else, as Android/iOS don't let you have multiple VPNs active at once.

It may be better to expose my ejabberd service to the internet directly. Even if it gets hacked, messages are E2EE at least.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-06 15:11:29+00:00
To be fair, most developers I’ve worked with will have a meltdown if I try to start a conversation about Unicode.

Why are we being "fair" to a machine? It's not a person.

We don't say, "Well, to be fair, most people I know couldn't hammer that nail with their hands, either."

An LLM is a machine, and a tool. Let's not make excuses for it.
by aanet | 2025-10-06 15:11:49+00:00
Oh man, this is sad to hear.

Parker guitars is new to me. Saw some pics. They look absolutely gorgeous!!

As a profession, luthiery is quite niche. I feel it’s one of those professions, like all craftsmanship, that is timeless.

Looking at these pics makes me feel like I want to learn the art.

(Bassist here)
by madaxe_again | 2025-10-06 15:12:01+00:00
Perhaps you shouldn’t shoot your mouth off on shit you don’t know about and resort to calling people liars.

You can only use authenticao.gov if you have a citizen card. This is a fact. The offline process involves physically going to the office in Porto, which is 200km from me. There are no forms you can just mail. I have been through this. Shit, go try the process yourself if you’re so sure.

You also evidently know nothing about EU law. The EU issues directives. Member states implement them. They are national pieces of legislation, not transnational.

As for chargebacks, the last time I did one, over a hire car that didn’t materialise, my bank put me through the wringer, and I no longer bank with them.

Anyway, thank you for your enlightened fucking comment.
by kingstnap | 2025-10-06 15:12:18+00:00
I'd like to add to this that in the recent Y combinator podcast with Anthropic head of pretraining the bugs issue is brought up as a major issue[1].

It is so easy to have good ideas broken by random bugs everywhere...

[1] https://youtu.be/YFeb3yAxtjE?t=2919
by gpm | 2025-10-06 15:12:38+00:00
You do not, ever, need base load power. Base load power is by definition power generation that does not follow the demand curve because it is uneconomical to do so. In this way it is entirely similar to solar and wind in that it cannot, by definition, fill the entire demand for power and it needs to be completemented by dispatchable power sources.

You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.

The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.
by kharak | 2025-10-06 15:12:47+00:00
He has been well received among left-green voters, civil servants and alike. He communicated without the usual empty political phrases, that alone brought him sympathies. He also managed the Ukraine crisis well, for instance, he was involved in quickly finding alternative gas sources after one of the Nord Stream pipelines had been destroyed. I'd say he embodied the values, policies and mannerism of his electorate better than anyone else.

And yet I agree with you. Economically, he disappointed through and through. Same for climate change, which ironically is at the heart of the Green party he belongs to. For example, to more conservative voters, he's will mostly remembered as the politician who wanted to bring a central planning approach into their homes, forcing everyone to install costly heat pumps, with their own money, without much regard to their specific household situation. All to achieve no effective carbon emission reduction.

But to his left-green electorate, he remains sacrosanct, his critics are dismissed, often as far-right.
by triceratops | 2025-10-06 15:13:21+00:00
RIM would disagree. It plenty profitable before the iPhone came out. And Apple already knew building computers was profitable. They cracked how to build a computer the size of a phone.

There aren't any RIM-like companies in the car industry right now. And cars aren't really very useful as computers. Or at least not more useful than phones and tablets and laptops.
by tanya-donska | 2025-10-06 15:13:25+00:00
After designing eleven mobile apps that made everyone miserable, I figured out which clients are worth the headache.

Five years ago, I’d take any mobile UI UX design services project that walked through the door. SaaS dashboards crammed into phone screens, e-commerce apps with seventeen-step checkout flows, “productivity” apps that required a PhD to understand.

I was hungry, optimistic, and completely clueless about what makes mobile projects succeed or fail spectacularly...