MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-15 11:10:37+00:00
People oppose everything.

* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds

* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too

* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values

* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values

* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back

* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption

* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values

* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values

* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary

Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.

> As a foreign influence

I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
by amai | 2025-10-15 11:10:45+00:00
Don‘t overlook the second insight:

„The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.“
by eigenman | 2025-10-15 11:10:47+00:00
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.

For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
by AstralStorm | 2025-10-15 11:11:37+00:00
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C. It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.

Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.

This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
by simul007 | 2025-10-15 11:11:41+00:00
Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real.

The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre patterns I saw and the off-the-record conversations I had with ad tech insiders. It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.

I'm curious if other developers, founders, or marketers here have seen similar discrepancies in their own data.
by ghusto | 2025-10-15 11:12:22+00:00
But he said

> then offset the lower average wind speed by increasing subsidies

If true, it means that because wind in those regions is infeasible, they have to subsidise it.

Initial (multi-decade) subsidies to kicks things off makes sense because the plan is to get them to pay off eventually. But increasing subsidies in regions where it's _never_ going to work is disingenuous and a waste.
by pflenker | 2025-10-15 11:12:26+00:00
I don’t see how your argument applies to Apple‘s transition to Liquid Glass. Apple only did incremental design changes for years, IIRC this is only the third major UI/UX iteration since the early 00s.

UX is not timeless, features emerge or go out of fashion, user behavior and expectations change, the hardware on which the UI/UX is operated changes. You only can incrementally evolve your ui/UX so far, as you can’t know what the future will look like.
by muzani | 2025-10-15 11:12:39+00:00
I've been unhappy with project management tools for over a decade now. There's nothing for personal project management and context switching.

Workflowy is cool, but it doesn't fit my workflow. It's also not profitable. Asana was great, but they started targeting teams. A lot of these tools are heavily team focused; the experience is heavily geared there. I end up using a Sublime Text plugin for personal things. Most of these tools have a terrible mobile experience, and it's still the same a decade later.

The other problem is that most tools are overly flexible. Jira is customizable but it's just terrible user experience. Linear is like Jira with the 80% main features and people use it just because it's a smoother Jira.

Basecamp, Trello, Todoist, Pivotal Tracker are heavily opinionated and don't try to do what they're not meant to do. But they're not my workflow either. So vibe coding a project management tool at this point makes more sense for me than trying to config Jira for personal use.

Specifically, there's things like priority. I think priority matters a lot, but there's no difference between Item A of medium-high priority and Item B of medium-high priority. I like having an "I'm feeling lucky button" to just pick an item of high priority instead of having to think.

My bug list are the following priority levels: emergency, requested, very important, important, fix if time, probably don't fix, can't repro/don't fix. I think it was retrofitted from FogBugz: https://webapps-support.ccts.uic.edu/help/topics/schedules/P...

Well, it's also too much work to set up FogBugz or even customize Jira to this, nor do I want to pay for either. I've already built all the above. It's all set up in Flutter, meaning it runs on mac, windows, web, ios, android just fine. A few more days of work and I can then sync it to my phone.
by immibis | 2025-10-15 11:12:49+00:00
Bunnie's Precursor? It sounds cool, but it's also expensive as fuck. If you thought $100 for a graphing calculator was a ripoff, the Precursor is a similar form factor and level of computational power, but costs $1000 and can't be used in maths exams.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2020/introducing-precurso... (currently down, might be up later)
by wongarsu | 2025-10-15 11:13:16+00:00
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
by Elena-Chen | 2025-10-15 11:13:45+00:00
BTM’s toilet paper making machine has been shipped to Kenya. This 1575-type tissue paper rewinder will run at a speed of 220 meters per minute in an industrial park on the outskirts of the capital Nairobi. BTM’s tissue manufacturing equipment will help Kenya expand its tissue production and meet Kenya’s 12% annual tissue consumption growth demand.
by reify | 2025-10-15 11:14:24+00:00
Waymo of The Alphabet Group

The Waymo-fitted self-driving I-Paces are already serving thousands of fully autonomous rides every week in the US.

Only Thousands of waymo's a in a country of 342,000,000 people. very very low adoption.

Jaguar are no longer a British company, They are owned by the Indian firm Tata Motors.

its only a trial in London and Oxford.

sales pitch:

Waymo can help achieve London’s transport priorities, including ambitious targets for reducing the number of people killed or seriously injured on the city’s roads.

https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2024/may/ne...

TfL has published the 2023 road casualty data to its online dashboard, showing the number of people killed on London's roads in 2023 fell by six per cent from 102 to 95, the second lowest level on record.

I dont think we will adopt this shit.

there will be more deaths

Our roads are not wide enough for an autonomous Chelsea tractor hurtling along the street with no controls
by RIMR | 2025-10-15 11:14:32+00:00
Spoken like someone who has zero experience developing open source software.

I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.

I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
by cameronh90 | 2025-10-15 11:14:43+00:00
Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.

The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
by dobin | 2025-10-15 11:14:44+00:00
I also having a side project optimizing draw calls to french Minitel terminal. Instead of letting the generator create their own draw calls, just let them print in a buffer/array.

Drawing the array means finding out what changed, and then create optimized draw sequences: Like using delete-till-end-of-line, vertical cursor moves, or repeat-character-x. Very noticable on 1200/4800 baud.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-15 11:15:09+00:00
Personal Protection Weapons are technically still a thing, as a result of the ECHR Article 2 which says that the state has a positive duty to protect life.

I don't think numbers are published for mainland GB, but it's likely less than a thousand - perhaps even just a few dozen. The Home Secretary has to authorise the licence, and they're limited to people with a verifiable active threat against their life.

(There are more in Northern Ireland as a legacy of the troubles - 2,924 in 2012, probably closer to 2,000 now. The rules are a little more lax, with the PSNI Chief Constable being sufficient for sign-off.)

A PPW firearms certificate allows a handgun of up to 9mm/.38 calibre, and up to 50 rounds of ammunition.

But none have been used in a school shooting, of course.
by immibis | 2025-10-15 11:15:30+00:00
Think of smoking marijuana on your balcony at home. Society does not get better if we punish that more - or at all. That just shouldn't be a crime to begin with. You also shouldn't do it, because smoking is bad for you, but that's not a reason to make it a crime.

Though it may be that a better society makes fewer people want to smoke.
by natebc | 2025-10-15 11:15:35+00:00
This probably explains a lot of the problem then. IME those who are good at writing code are pretty bad at the social parts of running an organization.

This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-10-15 11:15:57+00:00
Could use an opportunistic energy load-dump like a desalination plant... Singapore had a similar situation with fresh water shortages, and had excessive waste-methane energy from Oil refineries. It eventually became a net exporter of fresh water at a profit no less. Fresh water is also easy to store off-peak hours, and distribute using existing infrastructure.

Additionally, large factory Rotary-Power-Conditioners can knock out most kinds of short-term periodic silliness on AC power lines. Some data centers use something similar with a flywheel-in-vacuum to keep things running during power fail-over to generators.

Best of luck =3
by Xelbair | 2025-10-15 11:17:44+00:00
>EU isn't ever going to have its own "tech" industry as long as US has full access to EU markets and IMHO the ChatControl thing is totally unrelated.

It's even simpler - EU does not foster any form of framework for growing any industry, they incentivize things that were already successful elsewhere and were found necessary to have in EU. It's all top-down in form of EU grants/benefits/whatevers.

And even then - those grants are are tied up with basically pre-planned prince2 style project management that makes deviating from them hard, and sometimes impossible. Purchases have to be pre-planned, for almost anything.

>ChatControl, IMHO is just some career move of some politicians from the ultra low corruption small northern countries where people trust the government way too much. They appear to believe that they can solve some issues with it. Not that different from all the governments who want control and each one wants as much control as possible.

Yes but no - it comes from Denmark, which has a lot of issues with overstepping legal bounds when it comes to data gathering and privacy. It seems more like attempt to legalize those using excuse of "EU forced us to adopt it :)".

>I think the age control attempts are much more interesting and consequential. Why? Because bots don't have age. If implemented in a way that preserves anonymity while ensuring that the things are written by a real person(or at least has someone responsible for it even if its AI written) it can actually solve the bot problem and social manipulation problems like people from other countries pushing an agenda that doesn't actually have organic roots in the society.

I think it's quite the opposite - identity fraud will become more profitable, while "open" internet will be infantilized into child-safe zone. Full of bots, but now any real form of communication will have your full doxx attached to it - doesn't matter if visible or not, just possiblity of it is enough. You will self censor yourself just in case.

Also all of those systems do not preserve anonymity, and basically are another mass surveillance tool.

It is just another step towards ChatControl, one surveils, other forces self-censorship.

While reverse would make sense - make children only internet that's actively monitored, accessible only via government issued smartcard/e-sim/thingy, while leaving it up to parents if their child should or should not access real internet.
by arghwhat | 2025-10-15 11:18:01+00:00
Russia is a well known authoritarian state arbitrarily penalizing anyone not aligned with and assisting their ideals, with no expectation of any kind of fair process.

The UK is a misguided democracy within the usual group of countries considered "the west", enforcing stupid and broken laws in a highly questionable fashion that presents fundamental questions about jurisdiction in the modern world.

However, it is acting against an entity is cancerous enough that even the defendent is purely challenging (and getting support on) the technical legal grounds in a search for precedent.
by scrlk | 2025-10-15 11:18:24+00:00
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:

> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.

> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.

> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.

https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
by IshKebab | 2025-10-15 11:19:28+00:00
And the public. Look at this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj07ley3jnpo

> "Oh my goodness, it worked, it's amazing it's finally been updated," she tells the BBC. "This is a great step forward."

She thinks someone noticed the bug about not being able to show one-armed people, figured out why it wasn't working and wrote a fix.
by srameshc | 2025-10-15 11:19:47+00:00
Everytime I read something like this, I question myself, what I am doing wrong ? And I tried all kinds of AI tools. But I am not even close to claiming that AI writes 50% of my code. My work which sometimes include feature enhancements and maintenance is where I get even less. I have to be extremely careful and make sure nothing unwanted or addition that I am unaware of has been added. Maybe it's me and I am not good yet to get to 100% AI code generation.
by coldtea | 2025-10-15 11:20:36+00:00
So rarely than don't even register in most EU countries. And when they happen, they're more likely than not, by people inspired by the media exposure of the 10x-30x more frequent US cases.

There is an emerging and more frequent problem with religious terrorism though (people driving cars into crowds, shooting up concerts, etc). A problem created for absolutely no reason by stupid encouragement of mass immigration.
by ragebol | 2025-10-15 11:20:37+00:00
To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.

The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.

I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day

[0] https://www.homewizard.com/energy-socket/
by Phil_Latio | 2025-10-15 11:20:55+00:00
I wrote aggressively expanded. It doesn't make sense to build wind in a region where it's only profitable due to subsidies.

> Wind power is so cheap

Germany has the highest energy costs in the world. The alledged price points for wind and solar do not account for the total cost: Negative electricity prices when there is too much demand, increased costs managing the grid (redispatch), the need for a double-infrastructure (because when there is no wind or solar produced, someone else has to produce)

France has lower electricity prices than Germany, while emitting only 16% (!!!!!) Co2 compared to Germany. Conclusion: Germanies "clean energy" way is a total failure. Electric cars in Germany are "dirtier" than gasoline cars due to the energy mix.
by shomp | 2025-10-15 11:21:08+00:00
I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
by jostylr | 2025-10-15 11:22:29+00:00
Crime is often hyper localized. In some areas of some cities, crime may be going up while the overall rate of the city or country is going down. These intensive areas can also change over time. I am not aware of any analysis of the localization of crime and how it changes over time. There are a lot of choices to be made in doing that analysis, but if a reasonable local analysis across a country did that and found that in all localities crime went down, then that would seem reasonable to dismiss that guy's actual experience. The localization should probably on the neighborhood level, maybe on the order of 1000 people instead of 10000 or more.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-15 11:22:51+00:00
I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.

The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.

I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
by Xelbair | 2025-10-15 11:23:33+00:00
>the EU would be a great place to build software companies if the governments weren't hostile to the idea of large tech companies which is where the market wants to go.

All unregulated markets over time tend to strive for monopoly, as it takes just a short period in which a dominant faction emerges - which kills the capitalist system. Your statement is pure tautology.

EU is hostile to tech and innovation due to top-down approach and working against market forces for sure, but market forces aren't morally good, they just exist - there's no virtue in them.

What needs to change is a shift from top-down approach to one where they setup a framework for competitive AND profitable industry. But this will never happen - EU is too rife with internal conflicts of interest between countries as they are also competing with each other.

It is stuck in-between trade union and federation, and reaps downsides of both.
by kijin | 2025-10-15 11:24:56+00:00
If a browser is too old to send either the Sec-Fetch-Site header or the Origin header, it will probably ignore Referrer-Policy and always set the Referer header, which contains the origin.

So I wonder why the author didn't consider falling back to the Referer header, instead of relying on an unrelated feature like TLS 1.3. Checking the referrer on dangerous (POST) requests was indeed considered one way to block CSRF back in the day. Assuming all your pages are on the same https origin, is there an edge case that affects Referer but not the Origin header?