MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by myrmidon | 2025-11-28 10:54:27+00:00
This is really interesting.

I put some numbers into this, and the required power for long term storage is significantly lower than I'd have expected.

This was giving me for Germany (assuming 80GW of constant demand) under 50GW of required hydrogen turbine power (35GW of gas turbines are already installed, but only a fraction H2 ready).

Overprovisioning (wind/solar) is suprisingly high, with 180GW of wind and 440GW of solar. Currently installed capacity for those is about 30% of that.

Short-term storage capacity is a really big gap though (the model suggests 750GWh, and currently there's <30GWh installed).

In conclusion: Under pessimistic simplifications, Germany is at about 30% progress toward fully renewable electricity (but battery capacity is lagging behind).

Assuming wind/solar buildout continues at rates comparable to the last decade, this would mean zero-emission electricity in ~35 years. Could be worse. But I'm personally bracing for 2-4°C of warming, and don't think european glaciers will survive the next century...
by swiftcoder | 2025-11-28 10:54:33+00:00
Higher landing weight mostly just means you need stronger landing gear and wings (which adds weight, which reduces range...) It's an unfortunate cycle, but not insurmountable.

All commercial aircraft are capable of landing at takeoff weight (to deal with aborted takeoff, and other similar emergency scenarios). They just aren't certified to do so routinely, and doing so repeatedly may put a lot of stress on the landing gear and airframe.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-28 10:54:59+00:00
I for one welcome our new AI overlords.

(disclaimer: I don't actually, I'm just memeing. I don't think we'll get AI overlords unless someone actively puts AI in charge and in control of both people (= people following directions from AI, which already happens, e.g. ChatGPT making suggestions), military hardware, and the entire chain of command in between.)
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-28 10:55:11+00:00
Short answer is its complicated and will vary from member state to member state. My parental unit had a dispute with neighbor over where his camera is pointed and filed some motion to see what he does with it ( 'not making a database' part ), but the law was mostly toothless as the enforcement of it lacked. On the other hand, the dispute part of the real estate was handed real toot sweet, because everyone and their mother cares about outcomes in those.

tldr: I wish I could tell you there is a simple tldr
by veunes | 2025-11-28 10:55:43+00:00
OCS is indeed an engineering marvel, but look at NVIDIA's NVL72. They took a different path: instead of flexible optics, they used the brute force of copper, turning an entire rack into one giant GPU with unified memory. Google is solving the scale-out problem, while NVIDIA is solving the scale-up problem. For LLM training tasks, where communication is the bottleneck, NVIDIA's approach with NVLink might actually prove even more efficient than Google's optical routing.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-28 10:56:42+00:00
I don't "do" Thanksgiving (I'm not a USian), but I have family that do, so hope that yesterday and the short break for all was good for those who enjoyed it.

I've been here 13 years and almost 3 months, meaning I'm averaging ~44 karma a month, and it's one of the few gotos I don't consider harmful.

I think most of us here would see the damage that's happened to so many communities - all of them with their eternal Septembers - and I thought the last one that would hold out because I could curate what I saw would be reddit, but no, that's gone the way of so many before it for me.

HN is an experiment in a niche community with its own broad definition of "whatever is interesting", its own values and its own quirks. It's large enough to be vibrant and diverse, but small enough to have an uncodified but recognisable culture.

If there's one change I'm going to make in the next year though, it's relating to myself. I want most of my karma next year to come from my own Show HN posts: I want to build things and share those things, not just jump in on comment threads. Let's see how that goes.

Happy holidays to all, and may the Winter to be kind to you and yours.
by throwaway808081 | 2025-11-28 10:56:44+00:00
Do not expect this from the UK. That fight despite millions of signatures was batted down:

The UK is introducing passed legislation that citizens' digital IDs are owned by a Google or Apple smartphone.

The UK already have such laws active and in force that company directors must submit their information through an app available only from Google or Apple. It is clear 'digital IDs' will go the same way.

It's not about age or attribute verification. It's about tracking. Which Google excel at, the only alternative Apple and their opt-in.

Governments are quite happy making citizens have megacorps track their lives.
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-28 10:58:02+00:00
Isn't it the same for every country?

Of course if your organization have connections to a criminal organization, you are going to be in trouble. Same thing for refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, this is not some abstract thing, it is about following the law, for example relating to evidence tampering or search warrants.

I don't think France is anything special in that regard.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-28 10:58:28+00:00
Until it's taken away, of course.

Example, the Netherlands had the biggest gas reserve in forever. It's 2/3rds or 3/4ths empty now and extraction has or is stopping due to it causing earthquakes. But the income from exporting the excess gas has been used for socialist policies. Now that that income is gone, and now that expenses for gas have gone way up (also due to reliance on cheap Russian gas), people are feeling it in their bank accounts directly and the socialist policies are being dismantled one by one.
by gf000 | 2025-11-28 10:58:32+00:00
> but there's no way for a program to know how much memory is available

It usually knows the total system RAM available, and within containers it knows the resource limits. So your statement is false.

> And there is such a thing as "appropriate amount of memory for this task"

Appropriate for whom? Who to tell that I want this app to have better throughput and I don't care how much memory it would cost, or that I don't care about slightly lower throughput but I want the least amount of memory used?

> Now consider you'd be burdening every single user of the program with the above

Or you know, just set one as the developer? There is not even such a thing as a JRE anymore, the prevalent way to ship a Java app is with a "JRE" made up from only the modules that the app needs, started with a shell script or so. You can trivially set as a developer your own set of flags and parameters.
by rcxdude | 2025-11-28 10:59:12+00:00
Yeah, for example embassy-rs is an RTOS that uses rust async on tiny microcontrollers. You can hook task execution up to a main loop and interrupts pretty easily. (And RTIC is another, more radically simple version which also uses async but just runs everything in interrupt handlers and uses the interrupt priority and nesting capability of most micros to do the scheduling)
by jasonsb | 2025-11-28 10:59:21+00:00
> Could you give some specific examples of AI regulations that you think would be good?

Sure, I can give you some examples:

- deceiving someone into thinking they're talking to a human should be a felony (prison time, no exceptions for corporations)

- ban government/law-enforcement use of AI for surveillance, predictive policing or automated sentencing

- no closed-source AI allowed in any public institution (schools, hospitals, courts...)

- no selling or renting paid AI products to anyone under 16 (free tools only)
by latexr | 2025-11-28 11:01:00+00:00
Clearly it’s not all of them. Some countries voted against, and even the ones voting in favour had a few people against.

The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.

In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-28 11:01:48+00:00
The easier way of phrasing it is "you can't record in public, except in certain circumstances". Those certain circumstances just happen to encompass most things reasonable people want to do.

In Europe there is very much an expectation of privacy in public. But that expectation is not absolute, it competes with various other rights and public interests.

For example you can make street photography without blurred faces, because art trumps privacy in this instance. If you start making photos of individuals instead of areas then privacy wins out again and you need consent. A surveillance camera is not creating art, so it doesn't have that excuse going for it and needs a really good reason to be pointed at public areas (and "I fear someone's going to break into my private home" is generally not a good enough reason). And even if you can set up the surveillance camera, operating it requires complying with the GDPR, which has a lot to say on that topic
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-28 11:02:09+00:00
At the end of the day, legality is what society settles as an acceptable way of running itself when all the stakeholders reluctantly agree or at least don't protest too much. Right now the 'costs' are sufficiently low that no one cares. As with most things, I suspect that there is a threshold ( though likely much higher than I have previously anticipated ) at which normal person would be unwilling to go as if anything changed.
by lazide | 2025-11-28 11:02:34+00:00
There is a saying in wealth management - ‘the first generation builds it, the second generation preserves it, the third generation smokes it’.

It’s hard to not see that playing out in a large sense society wise right now, if we assume the first generation was the post WW2 folks, and the wealth was the post-WW2 economic benefits from the US not being bombed into the Stone Age like most of the rest of the world - and if anything, being the only major economy still standing.

Where exactly you draw the lines generationally is of course up for debate. But we’re starting to have to relearn a lot of hard lessons now that the post WW2 (and depression) generations understood as basic table stakes.

And it’s not because people today are ‘weaker’ per-se. Rather, they’ve lived a (relatively) comfortable life. That generally leads to not having to learn the hard lessons (or being so miserable) that they do the hard things required to build that society. And there is no free lunch. And it was never ideal, then, or now, and will never be ideal in the future either.

But it can be better if we put in the work and take the risk.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-28 11:02:37+00:00
It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.
by veunes | 2025-11-28 11:03:01+00:00
The own shovels for own mines strategy has a hidden downside: isolation. NVIDIA sells shovels to everyone - OpenAI, Meta, xAI, Microsoft - and gets feedback from the entire market. They see where the industry is heading faster than Google, which is stewing in its own juices. While Google optimizes TPUs for current Google tasks (Gemini, Search), NVIDIA optimizes GPUs for all possible future tasks. In an era of rapid change, the market's hive mind usually beats closed vertical integration.
by timonoko | 2025-11-28 11:03:46+00:00
Finland's current energy equation according to Google Gemini:

Is Finland importing household garbage from Italy and why?

Gemini: ... In summary, Finland imports waste (mainly as pre-processed fuel) to feed its modern waste-to-energy plants, which are a key part of its heating and energy strategy, especially as domestic residual waste volumes decrease due to better recycling and as a replacement for former Russian renewable fuel imports.

Why you call it "processed"? It is raw garbage in huge mounds smelling bad and harboring flies and rats?

Gemini: ... This processing turns smelly, inconsistent "garbage" into a stable, high-quality, non-hazardous secondary fuel that is compliant with strict EU waste shipment and energy production regulations. The whole point of the import is to fuel power plants efficiently, which requires this specific, processed product.

Lets try again. Why the "processed" mound of garbage from Italy smells bad and houses flies and rats?

Gemini: ... Sometimes ....

This is not "sometimes", it makes living near Loviisa harbour impossible.

Gemini: ... It is clear that the environmental integrity and quality of life for residents of Loviisa have been compromised by the need to fuel Finland's waste-to-energy capacity with large, sometimes substandard, imports. etc etc.

===

Short summary: The Pro-Russian Green "Pedophile"-Party destroyed the existing energy infrastructure which ran on coal from Poland etc. A new system was built to use "renewable" Russian gas and Russian wood industry leftovers.

The situation is desperate; any shit from anywhere at any cost is better than using local renewable biomass, such as peat.

Finland has enormous amounts of peat, which is worth more than Norway's oil reserves.
Show HN: Z-Image Turbo Online – Free, Fast AI Image Generator
by hugh1st | 2025-11-28 11:05:31+00:00
Hi HN! I built a browser-based playground for Alibaba’s new Z-Image Turbo model and wanted to share it with the community.

Demo: https://z-img.net/

No GPU or setup required — everything runs through a hosted API. Key features:

Photorealistic image generation in a few seconds

Extremely accurate Chinese text rendering (rare among most models)

Simple, lightweight interface

Free to try; no login needed

I created this because many makers and developers want to experiment with modern image models without downloading huge weights or renting expensive GPUs. This tool aims to be a fast, frictionless sandbox.

I’d love feedback from the HN community on:

Latency / image quality

API design ideas

What features you think should exist (batch mode? upscaling? prompt templates?)

Any edge cases where the Chinese text handling breaks

Happy to answer questions and share technical details. Thanks for taking a look!
by douglascamata | 2025-11-28 11:05:39+00:00
Apparently, The Github CLI only stores its oauth token in the HOME directory if you don't have a keyring. They also say it may not work on headless systems. See https://github.com/cli/cli/discussions/7109.

For example, in my macOS machines the token is safely stored in the OS keyring (yes, I double checked the file where otherwise it would've been stored as plain text).
by lazide | 2025-11-28 11:07:40+00:00
It depends on the degree.

Completely ignoring what everyone thinks and doing your own thing is a good way to get in a very dangerous situation from a basic-life-needs perspective. And with women being a bit over half the population, saying ‘fuck it’ to what half the population wants, especially if you’re picking fights with them, is quite dangerous - even if they are not 100%.

But you know who can handle dangerous, and doesn’t need validation from the population (in that form) to get what they want and have their needs met?

The actual king.

It’s a high risk, high reward (potentially) strategy. Better be good (and actually strong) if you want to not need to be liked.

What I think we’ve been seeing play out is entire generations of men who learned that the best strategy was to be liked by women so the women would do all the work to support them. Which seems to have worked quite well for many of them for awhile.

But now people are burning out, and the ‘easy wins’ from the prior approach (or just lifestyle creep/inflation!) is causing more real and visible difficulty - and the situation is indeed getting more difficult. We even have clear predators showing up and operating in the open, with no one stopping them.

There needs to be more than just vibes and following the rules for things to work out now, and a different approach is needed.

We’ll see what ends up shaking out, eh?

One thing is clear though - if society won’t accept someone stepping up and punching someone in the face or worse (even if it is to protect them), you’ll eventually end up with a bunch of predators who will do whatever they want without fear taking advantage of society.
by tpm | 2025-11-28 11:07:53+00:00
Oslo each year since 2019 I think? Helsinki in some years too. Maybe others.

> Zero. But I also don’t understand why you conflate “logistics” with capitalism.

I don't conflate anything with anything. Logistics is perfectly capable to operate safely, but it is more expensive than unsafe operation, because it needs higher investment into technical equipment, more money for people that operate it and also lower speeds which means less 'effective' use of capital. Which means safety stands in the way of driving costs lower, which is a conflict with capitalism.
by permo-w | 2025-11-28 11:08:55+00:00
>the not-jumping-out experiment

you mean cooking a frog? I'm not aware that the phrase refers to an experiment, rather a cooking pot, and anything with its brain removed is dead anyway?

anyway, the same can equally be said for flies. if you swat fast at a landed fly it will notice and fly away; however if you bring the swatter close slowly and evenly the fly will allow it close enough that there's no escape
by p0w3n3d | 2025-11-28 11:09:12+00:00
democratic values maybe more, because that's what I said. I'd say that every person is equal in law, every one can defend themselves and is not punished for not incriminating themselves.

You know, I live in Poland, where up to 1989 when you were captured by police (which was called militia back then) they would beat the shit out of you or nag your family unless you incriminate yourself. And these were not democratic values. Basically the ruling system was authoritarian at that time. And I can see some similarities here between Poland pre 1989 and France nowadays.

-- EDIT --

Chat Control which was accepted by France is also really good connection to those times when your packages were being opened in the post office, if you were suspected by the one-party government. Also there was a time that all the phone calls were eavesdropped by security service.
by gf000 | 2025-11-28 11:09:27+00:00
https://lobste.rs/c/vq3zn0

Here is a thread discussing it, but there are multiple posts/comment threads on the topic. In short, slices are fat pointers in the language, and data races over them can cause other threads to observe the slice in an invalid state, which can be used to access memory it shouldn't be able to.
by roenxi | 2025-11-28 11:09:53+00:00
Well obviously they want it, they voted for it. They probably see the situation in terms of something like class war. There are a bunch of people they don't like in society and they want to identify and marginalise them.

As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
by Macha | 2025-11-28 11:09:59+00:00
Partly it's because the Danish have the rotating EU presidency at the moment so they have the job of pushing things forward (which also means receiving the most lobbying). In the previous wave earlier in the year, it was the Polish for the same reason.

Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.

People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
by snvzz | 2025-11-28 11:10:01+00:00
Business, eh. Maybe it's time to go open source and fully distributed peer-to-peer. Something like Tox[0] or SimpleX[1].

The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next.

But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing.

0. https://tox.chat/

1. https://simplex.chat/
by tuyiown | 2025-11-28 11:11:00+00:00
While it's very legitimate question, the answer is between the lines in the README, and it mostly means that there is a user space binary compatibility for everything that is implemented.

It might seem obscure, but syscalls to get access to kernel requires a tight integration on compilation and linking. So this is their approach and this is where the compatibility really means something : since you can cross compile on another machine, they don't need the full toolchain right away. Just compile your code on a linux machine, and run it there. You're at the mercy of all missing kernel API implementations, but it looks like a very good strategy if you aim is to code a kernel, as you only have to focus on actual syscalls implementation without getting distracted by toolchain.
by Hackbraten | 2025-11-28 11:11:37+00:00
I think you’re correct. Your file descriptor may represent an end of a pipe, which in turn is backed by a buffer of limited size. Ruby’s I/O API specifically warns that reading lop-sidedly from e.g. stdout and stderr without `select`ing is dangerous [0].

I’ve experienced deadlocks in well-known programs, because developers who were unaware of this issue did a synchronous round-robin loop over stdout and stderr. [1]

[0]: https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/Open3.html#method-c-pop...

[1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/pull/21665
by cbeach | 2025-11-28 11:11:47+00:00
In the UK we've had an authoritarian Conservative government for 14 years, followed by an even more authoritarian Labour government, which we'll have until 2029.

In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...

Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.

https://www.ft.com/content/886ee83a-02ab-48b6-b557-857a38f30...