MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nis0s | 2025-11-28 04:14:18+00:00
Race has nothing to do with intelligence. The perceived differences are related to the separated societal evolution of different groups of people. People who were in densely populated areas benefited from cultural and information exchange, and culling of each other due to war. Groups of people whose societies evolved further from these central areas of cultural exchange and conflict, didn’t get the benefit of selective pressures which force societal evolution. In 2025, that doesn’t matter as much, unless you’re in an unstable or developing region of the world.

Related to that, developing and nurturing intelligence is multifaceted. You need the right nutritional resources during embryonic and early childhood development, and the right nurturing mechanisms during almost all stages of development till early adulthood. So I think it’s wrong to say that just because two families have the same socioeconomic status that the children being measured had equal chances of development.

If someone has found a correlation between race and IQ, it’s more likely related to nurture than nature. What stressors are occurring in such instances which result in these differences? I think that’s important to answer because I am unconvinced that claims about systemic racism would apply to any type of family that has attained an upper middle class socioeconomic status. Is something missing during gestation? Is it environmental? Is it some other epigenetic factor? We can’t just make assumptions about such things.

Note that two high IQ parents don’t necessarily produce a high IQ baby, and the same can be said of two low IQ parents. In 2025, people who grow up the same way, from womb to early adulthood, are more or less the same, minus their own individual behaviors. People who relate race to intelligence are intellectually incurious and shallow in their understanding.
by Spivak | 2025-11-28 04:14:49+00:00
The money quote is that it's not at all clear whether the sudden VPN usage is from kids or from adults to (I think rightfully) don't want to hand over their government id or their CC to random websites.

Because yeah, fuck that shit. The presumption should be that all content on the internet is for adults. If you want your site to be child friendly you can opt into a higher standard of moderation. How did we go from the internet is for porn to this?!
by pfdietz | 2025-11-28 04:15:26+00:00
Battery modules (not home scale, but utility scale) are around $50/kWh in China. If we assume a 20 year lifespan and 50% charge/discharge once a day, that adds (ignoring interest) $0.013/kWh to the energy cycled through the batteries (plus a small add from efficiency being not quite 100%).

This is quite cheap compared to (say) the fully loaded cost of energy from a nuclear power plant.

Smaller units will be more expensive per kWh, but not so enormously so as to render them impractical. And they will get cheaper quickly like all electronics do.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-28 04:15:55+00:00
Not a proper virologist, but H5N5 killed a person in Washington state recently.

There will likely be some cross protection on the H5 antigen, just as some regular flu shots provide cross protection against the N1 antigen of H5N1. (The H5 and N1 subtypes won't be completely matched, respectively, but you don't always need complete matching for some protection.)
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-28 04:16:20+00:00
> If some store has a local CCTV

By "everywhere" I obviously don't mean "on your private property", I mean "everywhere" as in "on every street corner and so on".

If people are OK with their government putting CCTVs on every lamp post on the promise that they are "secure" and "not used to aggregate data and track people" and "only with warrant" then it's kind of "I told you so" when (not if) all of those things turn out to be false.

> using AI to thwart proprietary lock-in is good and so shouldn't be banned.

It's shortsighted because whoever runs LLMs isn't doing it to help you thwart lock in. It might for now but then they don't care about anything for now, they steal content as fast as they can and they lose billions yearly to make sure they are too big too fail. Once they are too big they will tighten the screws and literally they have the freedom to do whatever they want as long as it's legal.

And surprise helping people thwart lock-in is relatively much less legal (in addition to much less profitable) than preventing people from thwarting lock-in.

It's kind of bizarre to see people thinking these LLM operators will be somehow on the side of freedom and copyleft considering what they are doing.
by saghm | 2025-11-28 04:16:30+00:00
At least to me, one of the most compelling parts of QUIC is that you establish a connection with TLS without needing extra round trips compared to TCP, where there are separate handshakes for the connection and then the TLS initialization. Even if it was no faster than TCP from that point forward, that seems like enough to make the protocol worthwhile in today's world where TLS is the basically the rule with relatively few exceptions rather than an occasion use case.

It's also something I just find fascinating because it's one of the few practical cases where I feel like the compositional approach has what seems to be an insurmountable disadvantage compared to making a single thing more complex. Maybe there are a lot more of them that just aren't obvious to me because the "larger" thing is already so well-established that I wouldn't consider breaking it into smaller pieces because of the inherent advantage from having them combined, but even then it still seems surprising that that gold standard for so long arguably because of how well it worked with things that came after eventually run into change in expectations that it can't adapt to as well as something with intentionally larger scope to include one of those compositional layers.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-11-28 04:16:59+00:00
It might arise from necessity, but what I see in practice that even senior developers deprioritize consistency on platforms and backends apparently just because the scalability and performance is so fashionable.

That pushes the hard problem of maintaining a consistent experience for the end users to the frontend. Frontend developers are often less experienced.

So in practice you end up with flaky applications, and frontend and backend developers blaming each other.

Most systems do not need "webscale". I would challenge the idea that "eventual consistency" is an acceptable default.
by mjb | 2025-11-28 04:18:12+00:00
When does AP help?

It helps in the case where clients are (a) able to contact a minority partition, and (b) can tolerate eventual consistency, and (c) can’t contact the majority partition. These cases are quite rare in modern internet-connected applications.

Consider a 3AZ cloud deployment with remote clients on the internet, and one AZ partitioned off. Most often, clients from the outside will either be able to contact the remaining majority (the two healthy AZs), or will be able to contact nobody. Rarely, clients from the outside will have a path into the minority partition but not the majority partition, but I don’t think I’ve seen that happen in nearly two decades of watching systems like this.

What about internal clients in the partitioned off DC? Yes, the trade-off is that they won’t be able to make isolated progress. If they’re web servers or whatever, that’s moot because they’re partitioned off and there’s no work to do. Same if they’re a training cluster, or other highly connected workloads. There are workloads that can tolerate a ton of asynchrony where being able to continue while disconnected is interesting, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Weak consistency is much more interesting as a mechanism for reducing latency (as DynamoDB does, for example) or increasing scalability (as the typical RDBMS ‘read replicas’ pattern does).
by rstuart4133 | 2025-11-28 04:20:14+00:00
> Utility scale solar is easily half the cost of residential.

If it's only half, the problem it's not going to stop residential installs. By the time that utility power gets to them here in Australia it costs about 3 times as much, so they are going to install their rooftop systems anyway.

I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in Australia residential installs tend to be over provisioned. A small'ish install is 5kW. That generates about 20kWh per day. Typical household consumption is 1/2 that. Newer builds like mine tend to have far more - upwards of 20kW of panels. That's to cater for charging EV's. The result is grid solar installs are getting hammered by roof top solar: https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-solar-hit-record-share-...
by JojoFatsani | 2025-11-28 04:20:18+00:00
Not sure how old you are but in the advent days in the 00’s it was wonderful staying connected to the people you care about in a somewhat insulated space with no algorithm suggested content/engagement-driving rage bait or ads.. within 7-8 years it all went to shit in the name of monetization.

Nowadays, i don’t have time or mental energy to moderate my reactions to rage bait, i know that nobody important would give a fuck about my 120 character takes (since i’ve seen enough to know that i don’t care about others’), and I don’t need current or future employers and/or potential state actors foreign or domestic to form preconceived notions about me.
by mjb | 2025-11-28 04:20:18+00:00
I spoke about this exact thing at a conference (HPTS’19) a while back. This can work, but introduces modal behaviors into systems that make reasoning about availability very difficult and tends to cause meta stable behaviors and long outages.

The feedback loop is replicas slow -> traffic increases to primary -> primary slows -> replicas slow, etc. The only way out of this loop is to shed traffic.
by hirsin | 2025-11-28 04:20:33+00:00
Yep, I saw the cat and mouse ending at ever increasingly invasive verifications involving more parties, that could ultimately still be worked around by a state actor. We already get asked for "block access from these country ip ranges please" as a security measure despite it being trivially bypassed, so it is easy to predict a useless but strong demand for blocking users based on their verified country.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-28 04:20:55+00:00
I believe the rationale is that during the process of infecting a flock of birds the virus would be exposed to pressure that would encourage its mutation, especially as these birds begin to successfully fight it off. The current avian H5N1 only needs a couple of mutations to spread human-to-human pretty well.

So the current culling of entire flocks is seen as a means of nipping any of these mutations in the bud.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-28 04:23:21+00:00
Cards on the table, I actually like Scott's ideas. The general sentiment in the field is that they're interesting, but they haven't borne out as a general theory.

This paper is not a good argument in support of Scott though. The methodology relies far too heavily on the notoriously lacking independence of SCCS cultures and language, then fails to fully consider whether the assumptions underlying the rest of the methodology hold. I'm pretty certain they don't.

I can see why the authors took the steps they did, but they really should have noticed some red flags at multiple points in the process, based on what's in the paper.
by gpm | 2025-11-28 04:23:33+00:00
The storage needed to turn solar into a reliable (as any comparable fossil fuel power plant) dispatchable source of power, plus the cost of the solar in the first place, costs less than other sources of dispatch-able power (like gas) in sunny places per kwh.

It also scales down better (though not perfectly).

Either you can afford it (both storage and solar), or you can't afford power at all, or you don't live in a sunny place.

Ignoring sunk capital costs into other energy infrastructure of course. If you already have a working nuclear power plant you're not going to save money by randomly turning it off and switching to something else, for instance.
by faxmeyourcode | 2025-11-28 04:23:46+00:00
There are many misconceptions of the GPL, gnu, and free software movement. I love the idealism of free software and you hit the nail on the head.

Below are the four freedoms for those who are interested. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-28 04:24:00+00:00
The UK government is facing calls to restrict children’s access to VPNs.

VPNs aren't capable of harming kids. They aren't content and even the usual imagined harms can't be caused by a VPN.

The Gov's entire argument seems to be 'We aren't getting our way".

Imagine if Gov officials cared about Gov officials trading law for favors - like they do about popular hysteria.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-28 04:26:24+00:00
I may have seen it here, but there's a new article out on childhood fluoride exposure: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz0757

"Whereas most prior research has estimated effects of exposure to extremely high levels of fluoride, we consider exposure to levels of fluoride within the range typical in most places and of greatest relevance to policy debates about government water fluoridation. We use data from the nationally representative (United States) High School and Beyond cohort, characterize fluoride exposure from drinking water across adolescence, adjust for confounders, and observe cognitive test performance in both secondary school and at age ~60. We find that children exposed to recommended levels of fluoride in drinking water exhibit modestly better cognition in secondary school, an advantage that is smaller and no longer statistically significant at age ~60."

I'm very much overweight, though not morbidly obese. I have been at my best weight when I did "get out and move". The problem, of course, is that schools, jobs, and modern infrastructure don't make that as easy to do as in prior decades. You can't just tell people to do something that has been made difficult to do and expect them to do it.
by zeroq | 2025-11-28 04:26:40+00:00
Oh sweet summerchild.

When OG games were released we were playing on LAN with BNC terminators. That's why the Q1 netcode is so bad.

When we moved to online we didn't had the infra we have today.

Bonus point: CS at one point just halved the ping in the UI so players would think it was more responsive.
by bruce511 | 2025-11-28 04:26:50+00:00
"Disclose" is kinda ambiguous here.

One of the hindrances to getting a patent is prior art. Meaning that the thing you're trying yo patent already exists.

After a patent is issued lots of people typically say "but that's obvious". Ok, so let's capture the obvious before someone patents it.

Equally, I might be doing something which is patentable, but I have no interest in patenting it. By registering it somewhere I make it easy for the patent office to search, thus turning down a patent application. Thus preventing me being sued by some new patent holder.

But to answer the question, no I wouldn't use a service like this. Partly because I wouldn't spend the money and partly because (in isolation) the service doesn't work. Unless the patent office is involved and actively using it, bad patents still get granted.

Yes, it might add some weight to a court case where I'm being sued, but honestly if I get there I've already lost. And my code backups show the same thing anyway.

Plus, which of the thousands of things I am doing, should I register? Am I supposed to trawl through my code deciding on each line if it's novel? If I do all this work I might as well just get a patent. That can at least be used in cross-licencing agreements.

Yes, software patents are a blight, but I'm not sure this is really a solution.
by supernova87a | 2025-11-28 04:27:02+00:00
I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."

and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.

But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.

"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."
by rigrassm | 2025-11-28 04:27:08+00:00
> Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work.

Shit, I think you are now personally responsible for 3-4 home projects I've neglected investing time into actually getting some attention. I too am much more productive and oddly enough, find the work more interesting when It's someone else asking and waiting for me to deliver it.

I haven't tried the Gemini CLI yet and creating an agent that acts like a customer I have to answer too about projects progress sounds like a perfect project idea for this weekend.

Question is, will I actually see this one through our will it too wind up in homelab project purgatory!
by saghm | 2025-11-28 04:27:20+00:00
> Somewhere around 100 people, the ground shifts underneath you, as you realize you don’t know everyone anymore. You just can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, and honestly, there aren't enough slots in your brain

This is definitely a rare exception, but at my first job, my boss's boss's boss (basically the #2 in the engineering organization, although probably only like 2/3 of it was under his purview) somehow seemed to have an unfathomable ability for knowing not only everyone under him the org tree, but details about what they were working on. I think it must have been at least 150, maybe even 200 people, and as far as I could tell he could recall every single person's name, project, and the general status of their work without needing anyone to remind him before talking with them. Maybe he did just really studiously review notes or something before any meeting or even chance of an ad hoc conversation in the halls, but I never really saw him typing at meetings or writing stuff down to keep track of later, so at the very least he'd need to have been able to retain a lot of information long enough to accurately record it later. Witnessing this firsthand for a few years was easily one of the most impressive mental feats I've ever observed.
by xboxnolifes | 2025-11-28 04:28:00+00:00
> But society will eventually become less ageist as it ages more and more.

Society is hundreds to thousands of times older than you or I. The US is a gerontocracy. I don't think the age of society has any relation to how agiest it is. The current and next culture regarding age will die with it's population and the next young generation will come with their own culture surrounding age.
by pksebben | 2025-11-28 04:28:40+00:00
It'll be alright. We've dealt with manic authoritarians who dream of planetary control before. Just another quick world war and the development of an even more sinister superweapon and we'll be right back to thinking in sane, evenhanded terms. Or dead.

Or, you know, we could huck our failed systems out with the trash instead. Reinvent democracy to be more direct and flexible. Could be nice.
by kafkaesque | 2025-11-28 04:30:05+00:00
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.

Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.

Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
by leo_e | 2025-11-28 04:30:12+00:00
Impressive numbers on paper, but looking at their site, this feels dangerously close to vaporware.

The bottleneck for inference right now isn't just raw FLOPS or even memory bandwidth—it's the compiler stack. The graveyard of AI hardware startups is filled with chips that beat NVIDIA on specs but couldn't run a standard PyTorch graph without segfaulting or requiring six months of manual kernel tuning.

Until I see a dev board and a working graph compiler that accepts ONNX out of the box, this is just a very expensive CGI render.
by k310 | 2025-11-28 04:32:18+00:00
Formerly RStudio

> RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2009 with the vision of creating high quality open-source software for data scientists. We’ve grown exponentially over time but our culture remains unchanged. We invest heavily in open-source development, education, and the community with the goal of serving knowledge creators 100 years from now.

> We want Posit to serve a meaningful public purpose and we run the company for the benefit of our customers, employees, and the community at large. That’s why we’re designated as a Public Benefit Corporation. As a Certified B Corp, we must meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. Our directors and officers have a fiduciary responsibility to address social, economic, and environmental needs while still overseeing our business goals.
by nrclark | 2025-11-28 04:32:42+00:00
Awesome, that's great to hear. Now if Qualcomm would only relax the walls between their business units, their other customers could benefit as well.

Who benefits from having separate BUs maintain fully separate software stacks? It's duplicated, wasted effort on Qualcomm's part. Maybe it lets them double-charge their customers for this duplicate effort, but that feels short-sighted. It leaves a bad taste in their customers' mouths. And there's certainly no benefit in delivered software quality.

Qualcomm should be making it easy for everybody to buy and use their chips, not artificially segmenting every single customer. They could sweep the market so hard if they were just a little less greedy.
by glompers | 2025-11-28 04:33:20+00:00
Did having such a person in charge make a qualitative difference in the atmosphere of how work proceeded among people there?

If so, do you think it would have played out similarly if the organization had had an equally effective "glue person" who wasn't in charge (therefore didn't have any authority to delegate or divide most tasks) and was required to manage upward [sic] to coordinate things for people?
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-28 04:33:21+00:00
>Look, the leap from “a human in a lab coat mixed some chemicals and got something that grows and divides” to “therefore no God (or no transcendent intelligence) is necessary for life to exist”

That is not my chain of reasoning, nor has lab created life has ever been created. So what you're saying can never be used as valid proof of creationism. And I certainly did not use that evidence to make such a claim. Additionally I never said god does exist or does not exist.