MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-28 16:08:45+00:00
You haven't explained what the benefit is. There aren't "spaces we haven't formalized" because of the pigeonhole principle. There are M bits. You can generate every one of those 2^M values with any max cycle permutation.

What work is being offloaded from computers to people? It's exactly the same thing with more determinism and no logarithmic overhead.
by truelinux1 | 2025-11-28 16:09:33+00:00
Linux Power User / Tech Writer here.

I wrote this because the term “vibe coding” irritates me. This meme has taken on a weird, dismissive tone that doesn’t reflect what serious AI-assisted programming actually feels like.

The piece is about how this meme obscures a genuine shift in developer workflows, especially for the many people who are actually shipping production code with aid of LLMs.

Curious how this community sees the term. Is it helpful? Misleading? Harmless? Something else?
by i_cannot_hack | 2025-11-28 16:09:37+00:00
> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"?

They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and combined it into 1 gram of water. But the fungi takes in water from the environment to grow, it does not make it's own water from pure hydrogen, and it certainly does not generate any free energy from growing larger. With some margin for error in my understanding, since I'm not a chemist (but neither are you, and neither is the chatbot).

> It was really just food for thought.

It was more poison than food, since you just parroted randomly generated misinformation from the chatbot and passed it of as authentic insight.
by joelwallis | 2025-11-28 16:09:56+00:00
SQLite is abolutely amazing as an app format! I couldn't list how many tools are available to read SQLite data, or how easy and friendly they are. Even its CLI does wonders when you're dealing with data with it. SQLite has been around for 20+ years and is one of the most heavily tested softwares in the world.

SQLite is very simple, yet very reliable and powerful. Using SQLite as file format might be the best decision an engineer can take when it comes to future-proofing preservation of data.
by mamcx | 2025-11-28 16:09:58+00:00
> Is SQL’s dominance a sign of maturity, or is something genuinely better on the horizon?

Yes to the first, and must be yes to the second or we have failed!

Sql is to query languages like JS is for the web.

That is not a good compliment.

----

Sql was from the start a poor implementation of the relational ideas, and have accumulate absurd levels of tech debt.

Enjoy:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-keywords-appendi...

Is not that hard to come with a better alternative, but just "nicer SQL" is not good enough. We need a "Rust"-like moment for this.

My bet (https://tablam.org) is that we need algebraic data type support, real GROUP-by, a low-level language (where for example, you encode that "a = b" is in fact calling a BTree) and high-level porcelain.

The low-level language (like webassembly+relational) will unlock a necessary steps where is possible to compile "normal" SQL, that is, the thing that allows typescript to be a viable alternative to JS.

There are more details, but the above is the key. Like, you can create a proxy using the postgres wire protocol that take the SQL/Nicer lang then compiles then do the magic and is the enabler for adoption IMHO.

BTW: This is what I wanna do, so happy to join forces!
by otterley | 2025-11-28 16:10:45+00:00
> As for working set size, that is always merely the height of the B+tree.

This statement makes no sense to me. Are you using a different definition of "working set" than the rest of us? A working set size is application and access pattern dependent.

> It will always be far more efficient than any other DB under the same conditions

That depends on how broadly or narrowly one defines "same conditions" :-)
by thomascountz | 2025-11-28 16:11:27+00:00
Lots of debating about the color to paint the fence in the design meetings for the nuclear reactor...

I don't know how this philosophy is applied at TigerBeetle. When I establish engineering guidelines I try to frame them as exactly that: guidelines. The purpose is to spawn defensible reasoning, and to trigger reflection.

For example, I might say this:

We use a heuristic of 70 lines not as a hard limit, but as a "tripwire." If you cross it, you are not 'wrong,' but you are asked to pause and consider if you're introducing unintentional complexity. If you can justify it, keep it—there's no need to code golf.

"Style," "philosophy," "guides," they're all well-meaning and often well-informed, but you should be in command of the decision as the developer and not forget your own expertise around cohesion, cognitive load, or any functional necessities.

There are staunch believers in gating deploys based solely on LOCs, I'm sure... I like the idea of finding ways to transparently trigger cognitive provocations in order for everyone to steer towards better code without absolutes.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-28 16:11:29+00:00
> Is this true? God I hope not, if developers don't even follow basic security practices then all hope is lost.

"Basic security practices" is an ever expanding set of hoops to jump through, that if properly followed, stop all work in its tracks. Few are following them diligently, or at all, if given any choice.

Places that care about this - like actually care, because of contractual or regulatory reasons - don't even let you use the same machine for different projects or customers. I know someone who often has to carry 3+ laptops on them because of this.

Point being, there's a cost to all these "basic security practices", cost that security practitioners pretend doesn't exist, but in fact it does exist, and it's quite substantial. Until security world acknowledges this fact openly, they'll always be surprised by how people "stubbornly" don't follow "basic practices".
by Yokohiii | 2025-11-28 16:11:36+00:00
https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/tools/s...

I wouldn't be surprised if that's the performance issue. It seems to be used as in memory cache for all (?) collections and uses a mutex to access them, even on reads. Most (properly set up) databases are pretty good keeping things cached and with a local socket the latency is low. With this setup I'd be very careful to do my own general purpose caching. The solution here is likely very sub optimal.
by iterance | 2025-11-28 16:11:46+00:00
I'll admit this may be naive, but I don't see the problem based on your description. Split each step into its own private function, pass the context by reference / as a struct, unit test each function to ensure its behavior is correct. Write one public orchestrator function which calls each step in the appropriate sequence and test that, too. Pull logic into helper functions whenever necessary, that's fine.

I do not work in finance, but I've written some exceptionally complex business logic this way. With a single public orchestrator function you can just leave the private functions in place next to it. Readability and testability are enhanced by chunking out each step and making logic obvious. Obviously this is a little reductive, but what am I missing?
by hiccuphippo | 2025-11-28 16:12:09+00:00
Also badly named commands, `npm install` updates your packages to the latest version allowed by package.json and updates the lock file, `npm ci` is what people usually want to do: install the versions according to the lock file.

IMO, `ci` should be `install`, `install` should be `update`.

Plus the install command is reused to add dependencies, that should be a separate command.
by storus | 2025-11-28 16:12:34+00:00
Melanin is used as a solar panel, capturing gamma rays and then passing the resulting consistent flow of excited electrons over to the Krebs cycle with the help of CO2; like in photosynthesis. Humans run on electrons resulting from Krebs cycle as well, just the input is different. By using it as shielding, you'd simply decrease the amount of ionizing radiation hitting humans inside the spaceship. In other words, it would be better than some static material as it consumes part of incoming radiation for its own existence.
by satisfice | 2025-11-28 16:12:54+00:00
You are speaking of a form of socialism, sounds like. I thought we were in the realm of capitalism.

Also, you are strangely asserting that a tool operated by a group of people is an executive. People are always in charge in our world. Even if a man builds a device that kills him, we say that he committed suicide, not that he was murdered by a machine.
by snayan | 2025-11-28 16:13:26+00:00
Interesting, I think you have to consider the system as a whole and the impacted stakeholders when considering pricing.

In your example, if we consider the environment a stakeholder, and the fact that increased safari impact has a negative impact on the ecosystem, there's a stronger argument for higher price.

In the case of the Louvre, the paintings and sculptures aren't going to be harmed by having more eyeballs on them, so, there's a stronger case to maximize access.
by georgefrowny | 2025-11-28 16:13:37+00:00
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster.

In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionable material (say uranium), you could get something like the Oklo reactor going, but it would have to be a truly gigantic, probably unphysical amount of fungi to have access to that much environmental uranium in the first place and it would then have to be concentrated very strongly to get any measurable effect. You won't see anything at all if you just move a few atoms a few mm, so it would need to have very long range hyphae. You also need it to be basically one huge organism in order to collect the uranium to one place - billions of small fungi just doing a few square inches each won't work. It's unlikely the fungus could survive to become so huge on only the promise of fractionally higher future radiation, so it would need to eat something else too.

And then it would decay into daughter isotopes that don't further benefit from the concentration so it might not help a lot anyway if you're looking for cleanup. Plus you've covered your cleanup site in, presumably, millions of tonnes of fungus which might or might not be an improvement.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-11-28 16:13:41+00:00
Funny line-- but I think it's important to highlight how the Brits were able to find value and unlock a history in objects that other cultures stopped caring about.

While people like to say they "stole" things, there's no evidence they ever took something that others actually cared about or took the least interest in protecting. The Elgin marbles were just flopped around a field and no locals seemed to care at all. Some of the items were purchased directly from their owner at a price negotiated with a willing seller.

I think the British museum is proof of how scholarship and gentle care can preserve our past and create something that people love to visit and learn about.
by lisbbb | 2025-11-28 16:13:46+00:00
I don't think so about the gpus. It's a sunk cost that won't be repurposed easily--just look at what happened to Nortel. Did all those PBXs get repurposed? Nope--trash. Those data centers are going to eat it hard, that's my prediction. It's not a terrible thing, per se--"we" printed trillions the past few years and those events need a sink to get rid of all the excess liquidity. It's usually a big war, but not always. Last time it was a housing bubble. Everyone was going to get rich on real estate, but not really. It was just an exercise in finding bag holders. That's what this AI/data center situation amounts to as well--companies had billions in cash sitting around doing nothing, might as well spend it. Berkshire has the same problem--hundreds of billions with nowhere to be productively invested. It doesn't sound like a problem but it is.

My humble take on AGI is that we don't understand consciousness so how could we build something conscious except by accident? It seems like an extremely risky and foolish thing to attempt. Luckily, humans will fail at it.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-11-28 16:13:46+00:00
The comment that started the thread was : I have installation media for MS Office 2010 in my desk drawer. If I lose the disc, I wouldn't expect Microsoft to replace it for me.

We are talking about physical media to compare and contrast the differing expectations around responsibility for backing up a digital download (what the linked complaint was about), and physical install media (what this thread is about).

> I'm pretty sure the business was very clear that I'm only buying the license though.

Microsoft in 2010 was very clear that your were buying physical install media for Office 2010 along with your license. They did this by making the physical install media part of the license purchase transaction.
by svat | 2025-11-28 16:13:54+00:00
Maybe my brain has rotted from paying a bit more attention to privacy language than the average person, but IMO in this case it's fairly clear to me that using your activity “to personalize your experience across Workspace” does not mean using it for training Gemini. The “personalize” means it's for training the recommendation/categorization systems for you, like which emails get marked as "important" or not (the settings at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/inbox).

(In some very broad sense I guess critics could call this “training AI” as there's an ML system somewhere whose parameters associated with your account get updated, but I think we can all agree this is not what we think of as “training AI”, i.e. going into a cross-user dataset for training Gemini or whatever.)

(I guess what Google should do, and should have done years/decades ago, is create a fixed set of categories of how your data can be used (aggregate statistics, training Gemini, personalization…) and use the same language across products, legal, everything.)
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-28 16:15:42+00:00
The irony is that this is all because the EU was specifically designed to not supercede its member states. In other words, they repeated the same mistake[0] the US did. Fixing it - i.e. ditching all the appointed positions that are responsive to nation states only - would amount to federalizing the EU.

"But why can't we just leave the EU to stop this" - too late. Most EU countries have enough intra-EU migration and trade to make leaving unthinkable. The UK was a special case - and, ironically enough, actually responsible for some of the EU's worst decisions.

Furthermore, this isn't exactly an EU exclusive problem. Every supranational organization that is responsive to member states and not individual voters is a policy laundering mechanism. Ask yourself: where's your representation in the WTO, and when did you vote for them? The sum of democracy and democracy is dictatorship. Any governing body that does not respect all of its voters equally is ripe for subsumption by people who do not respect them at all.

[0] Originally, US senators were appointed by state governors. This eventually resulted in everyone voting for whatever governor promised to appoint the senator the voter wanted. Which is sort of like throwing away your gubernatorial vote for a senatorial one. This is why we amended the constitution to allow direct election of senators, and I hold that any sovereign nation that makes the mistake of appointed politicians will inevitably have to either abandon it or fail.
by afavour | 2025-11-28 16:16:10+00:00
I’m grateful for those who do visit /newest because it’s a cesspit of spam and uninteresting links that, justifiably, never make their way to the home page.

/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.

You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active
by parpfish | 2025-11-28 16:16:13+00:00
i think there's two main flavors of linkedin slop.

there's the founder/ceo trying to brand themselves as a "thought leader" slop. stupid made up inspirational stories. grind/hustle motivational stuff. etc.

then there's the slop from employees. this is usually a multi-paragraph missive where they announce that they've made the hard to decision to leave company X for company Y but they learned SOM MUCH and everybody at company Y are ABSOLUTE ROCKSTARS and on and on and you just wonder "if all that's true, why are you leaving"
by lisbbb | 2025-11-28 16:16:19+00:00
What exactly are they doing? I've seen a lot of hype but not much real change. It's like a different way to google for answers and some code generation tossed in, but it's not like LLMs are folding my laundry or mowing my lawn. They seem to be good at putting graphic artists out of work mainly because the public abides the miserable slop produced.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-28 16:16:20+00:00
Any time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem.

The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama

In a situation like this you can’t assume that the set of people and the type of work being submitted will remain the same as before the incentive appears.
by walletdrainer | 2025-11-28 16:16:43+00:00
I think Miyazaki films are cool, but I seriously doubt most people who aren’t film buffs will really recognise them.

I think many if not most people will have negative associations when they think of adult anime enthusiasts, therefore most people with good social skills would not put anime on their LinkedIn.

I also probably wouldn’t want to hire someone who’s holding a gun in their LinkedIn photos (unless it was related to their work), even though I’m a hobbyist shooter myself. I think shooting is a cool hobby, but I understand that for many people it’s a weird enough hobby that it would be downright stupid to advertise it in an unrelated professional context.

The problem isn’t anime (or guns), it’s the poor judgement demonstrated by adding pointless question marks on what might otherwise be a good profile.
by adam_arthur | 2025-11-28 16:17:33+00:00
Probably it's "operationally profitable" when ignoring capex, depreciation, dilution and other required expenses to stay current.

Of course that means it's unprofitable in practice/GAAP terms.

You'd have to have a pretty big margin on inference to make up for the model development costs alone.

A 30% margin on inference for a GPU that will last ~7 years will not cut it
by atn34 | 2025-11-28 16:18:15+00:00
> If you wrote a function that takes a PRNG and generates a random object, you already have a function capable of enumerating all objects.

Something often forgotten here: if your PRNG only takes e.g. a 32-bit seed, you can generate at most 2^32 unique objects. Which you might chew through in seconds of fuzzing.

Edit: this is addressed later in the article/in a reference where they talk about using an exhaustive implementation of a PRNG interface. Neat!
by gpm | 2025-11-28 16:18:16+00:00
You understand that fossil fuel and nuclear plants are typically less reliable (have a lower availability factor) than that right? Every form of power generation has downtime, and needs balancing with other types or accepting that downtime. Solar tradeoffs low mechanical complexity for higher environmental dependence, but ends up with similar (in fact less) downtime here under unfavorable assumptions (100% of energy coming from a single point source of solar, constant energy load not your typical lower energy from consumption energy at night, no ability to shed load with price signalling or curtailment).

The last 3% is left alone because it's the fair comparison to other energy sources... tilted in the direction of favoring the other energy sources.

> It’s the only thing that is interesting, considering you just hand-wove that last 3% of reliability

The 3% issue doesn't come from seasonal variation, it comes from short term weather patterns where you might have a week of heavy cloud cover. Seasonal variation is trivially solved by simply increasing the multiplier on nameplate capacity (and the 6x for Los Vegas includes that increase). It's always going to be easier to generate an extra 25% energy than to store 25% of your energy produced in summer and use it in winter.

> “backup generators” and “transmission lines to other places”. Both immensely expensive items if they are idle 97% of the time.

On the contrary both things that exist anyways. Every place that cares about consistent power already has backup generators for when nonsense happens like power poles being blown over. Transmission lines exist to allow sale of excess production. It's only at tiny scales where these things aren't pre-existing and at those tiny scales overbuilding solar and batteries even more is so much cheaper than the alternatives (like building redundant gas plants disconnected from the grid, or even just redundant diesel generators) that they win by a mile.

An understated win of the storage model here is that these generators don't have to be able to supply the entire load, they just have to be turned on in advance when the weather forecast says there might be a problem to slow the drain on the batteries.

PS. I don't know what country you're from, but it seems a bit crazy to me that you apparently used to have a nuclear industry but apparently don't have a national grid... If you have actual weeks where the sun doesn't shine and no grid... you aren't in a sunny place... so you can still brute force it of course but done efficiently a lower percentage of solar makes sense.
by roflmaostc | 2025-11-28 16:19:27+00:00
This is good news.

At EPFL we observe worrying trends that all services are moved to Microsoft (e-mails, cloud).

What happened to universities to host elemental services themselves?

EPFL also partnered up recently with Omnissa Work Space One to strengthen security of IT on campus. Mandatory (American) software which EPFL IT office wants to install on machines...
by mapmeld | 2025-11-28 16:19:43+00:00
Humans have two copies of each chromosome. Plants in nature can have many more, and some can be induced to duplicate their chromosomes which sometimes gives them larger seeds and resilience to environmental conditions. Similar to hybrid crops but somehow containing the full genomes of both parents. Bread wheat is hexapoloid (containing sub-genomes from three varieties of wheat) and quinoa is tetraploid (containing two different species). There have been projects for ~100 years to make polyploid rice with heavier grain-weight, but they haven't been able to reproduce.
by blibble | 2025-11-28 16:20:29+00:00
that ICC sanction that turned off that judge's outlook will be seen as the trigger point for the US reliquinshing its total domination of services (cloud and otherwise)

prior to that the risk of the US regime turning off its allies IT systems was purely theoretical

national data protection agencies will now ban their companies from storing data in AWS, Azure on GCP (eagerly egged on by their local competitors)