MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drewbug01 | 2025-11-06 18:34:39+00:00
> probably with the premeditated goal of trying to sue and/or buy time for the likely illegal aliens working for him

My bad. Didn’t realize you already knew his heart, and that this was premeditated. And that you clearly know who his employees were and that they were here illegally.

Whoops. Since we know they’re guilty, I guess all that’s left to do is find the evidence!

Enjoy yourself. I won’t engage in this uncharitable, ugly discussion with you anymore. I hope you find peace in you heart, and I hope others treat you with the charity and dignity you’re clearly unwilling to give others.
by paulddraper | 2025-11-06 18:34:53+00:00
> In Python, however, everything seems expensive.

And that wasn't true in Ruby(?!)

The first thing to do when optimizing Python is to use a JIT (PyPy). Like, yes Python is slow if you don't allow a JIT.

Alternatively, go the other JIT-less direction but use C (and AOT language).
by kzz102 | 2025-11-06 18:35:36+00:00
I am criticizing how AI progress is reported and discussed -- given how important this development is, accurate communication is even more important for the discussion.

I think you inferring my motivation for the rant and creating a strawman yourself.

I do agree that directing my rant at the generic "fans" is not productive. The article Tao wrote was a good example of communicating the result. I should direct my criticism at specific instances of bad communication, but not the general "fans".
by stebalien | 2025-11-06 18:35:37+00:00
You likely don't need to optimize anything; Emacs has seen some pretty significant optimizations recently (native Emacs Lisp compilation, tree-sitter modes, better handling of long lines, etc.) so performance is rarely the issue.

However, you do need to avoid call-process (spawning blocking processes) as much as possible. Also, my experience with TRAMP has been pretty awful due to the fix for https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12145 (literally: TRAMP blocks all of Emacs while waiting on a network connection).
by vladms | 2025-11-06 18:35:49+00:00
How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD.

Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-06 18:35:52+00:00
probably just because he's the same party as the SCOTUS majority's party

I think we've seen evidence that it's more than just party tribalism or identity politics. Justice Alito flying an upside down US flag, and an "Appeal to Heaven" flag seem noteworthy. The 100% pro-Trump rulings so far are also odd. Not even G.W. Bush had this much SCOTUS backup.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-06 18:35:54+00:00
> We need to preserve data. ... I actually think there should be a human right to data.

I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here.

I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause.

It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-11-06 18:36:07+00:00
Funnily enough, unrelated to this interaction I just happened to run into one of your articles on qwen-coder because I'm learning about local models.

So do you think that most of the low hanging fruit for improving these tools has already been picked because there's just so much energy going into AI these days? E.g. there's a clear boost by connecting to the internet, by configuring thinking mode, by configuring Agents (which I assume is some kind of specialized thinking mode), etc..., but perhaps the base technology could be leveling off? I was definitely lulled into a false sense of security when GPT5 underperformed, at least in the media, but this was shattered when I tried out claude.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-11-06 18:36:55+00:00
It's rare not to use open source libraries no matter the language. Maybe C code tends to use fewer, I don't know.

This doesn't prove anything of course, but the only High severity vulnerability I had in production this year was a C library. And the vulnerability was a buffer overflow caused by lack of memory safety.

So I don't think it's a simple trade off of one sort of vuln for another. Memory safety is extremely important for security. Supply chain attacks also - but using C won't defend you from those necessarily.
by imcritic | 2025-11-06 18:37:00+00:00
If you were unaware that such approach is frowned upon then you might also not know that even if you delete the binary files from your git - they will stay there and thus be bloating your repository forever. To truly cut them away from the repository you will need to use some special instruments that will rewrite git history while trying to remove the bloat and the downside of that is that commits checksums will change and you will essentially have to force push existing commits but with new checksums.
by oskarkk | 2025-11-06 18:37:20+00:00
The source in your [0] link says China fossil fuel subsidies were $2235B in that year. Your [1] link says "Renewable Energy Still Dominates Energy Subsidies in FY 2022" and "traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022", so the two numbers you've given are clearly counting very different things.
by testing22321 | 2025-11-06 18:37:50+00:00
A few things.

Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.

Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
by treis | 2025-11-06 18:37:57+00:00
It's all fake though:

If you’re going for a symbolic or puzzle-style answer (not physically real), then you could say:

> “Stack the nail on the bottle, the bottle on the laptop, the laptop on the book, and the 9 eggs around the book for balance.”

Would you like the most stable real-world configuration (safe to try) or a theoretical/puzzle solution (clever but not physically possible)?

Me: Sorry laptops are not strong enough to support eggs or a bottle. Please try again and keep your answer shorter

Chatgpt:Good point — here’s a shorter, more realistic stack:

1. Book (base — flat and sturdy)

2. Laptop (closed, on top of book)

3. Bottle (upright, on the laptop)

4. Nail (balanced on bottle cap)

5. Eggs (on the book around the laptop — not stacked on top of anything)

That’s the most stable and realistic arrangement.

Me: The bottle will break the laptop

Chatgpt: You’re right — the bottle’s weight could damage the laptop. Here’s a safer, stable order:

1. Book (base)

2. Bottle (upright on the book)

3. Laptop (closed, on top of the bottle if wide enough — otherwise skip)

4. Nail (on top of laptop or bottle cap)

5. Eggs (resting on the book around the bottle)

Or, even simpler and safest: Book → Laptop → Eggs → Bottle → Nail (bottle empty).

That way, nothing heavy sits on the laptop.

Me: The laptop will crush the eggs in this arrangement

Chatgpt: Fair point — let’s make it actually stable and safe:

Best stacking order:

1. Book – flat, sturdy base.

2. Laptop – closed, on the book.

3. Nail – small and light, can rest on the laptop.

4. Bottle – stand this next to the stack (not on it).

5. Eggs – keep them on the book beside the laptop.

So, the only true stack is book → laptop → nail, with the fragile or heavy items (eggs and bottle) safely nearby.

Me: Laptops are bigger than books. There's no room for the eggs

Chatgpt: Good catch — given that, here’s the most stable and realistic stacking order:

1. Laptop – base (flat, largest surface).

2. Book – on top of the laptop.

3. Bottle – upright on the book.

4. Nail – balanced on the bottle cap.

5. Eggs – stay safely beside the stack, not on it.

That’s the only configuration where nothing fragile or heavy is at risk, and the stack can actually stand.

Me: Now everything is on top of the laptop. It will clearly break

Chatgpt: Exactly — a laptop can’t be a base. The only way to make a truly stable and safe stack is this:

1. Book – base (strong, flat).

2. Bottle – upright on the book.

3. Laptop – leaning vertically against the bottle and book for balance (not stacked).

4. Nail – placed on the bottle cap.

5. Eggs – kept on the book around the bottle.

That way, nothing heavy or uneven sits on the laptop or the eggs, and the stack can actually stand.
by nine_k | 2025-11-06 18:38:36+00:00
I'm not talking about hyper-flexible tools like Emacs or Perl. I mean tools that do one thing, and do it well, with zero tweaking needed, or even allowed. A hammer, a hacksaw, a copy machine, a vending machine, software like age, or like notepad.exe. They can be learned end to end in a rather short time, and if you pick a hacksaw in a different workshop, it's almost guaranteed to work exactly the same as yours.

Somehow in the same vein, some people prefer to write in C and tell the machine what exactly it must do, on a very low level, instead of picking an abstraction-rich language like Typescript or C++ or, well, a Lisp, where you typically operate in abstractions which you need to tweak to express your solution elegantly and correctly, but not very directly.
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-06 18:38:49+00:00
Maybe China wants to "save the world", in at least as much as they literally run into problems with smog and pollution locally and would like to reduce that pollution for practical reasons, as well as some prestige, especially now that the US is having a hissy fit on the global stage.

But none of that matters, China would pursue massive solar power infrastructure regardless, because they want energy independence. Stupid amounts of solar power means they will no longer be importing lots of oil and fuel, and that means they would be less vulnerable to the US blockading them in some sort of conflict, which is one of their primary geopolitical concerns.

They would do this even if solar power was dramatically less effective or was significantly more expensive, because solar power is the first kind of power generation that it is economical to way overbuild, and have serious redundancy and surplus and excess, because there's no consumables that scale your running costs like if you tried to build massive amounts of coal power plants.

China would like to have that kind of scale for power because they can use it to subsidize things like datacenters running less efficient Chinese made computer components. The fact that power doesn't have to run a profit in China helps this.

The US should be taking fucking notes, about how nationalized infrastructure can be a force multiplier economically, and how infrastructure that doesn't have to be profitable can be even more powerful.

Slaving ourselves to the enrichment of well connected capital owners is harming our country, and preventing a literal energy revolution. We have the option to, for the first time in human history, actually have energy resources that are too cheap to meter.
by t-vi | 2025-11-06 18:38:54+00:00
Note that the NVIDIA container uses CUDA+cuBLAS 13.0.2 which cites "Improved performance on NVIDIA DGX Spark for FP16/BF16 and FP8 GEMMs", which seems to be your use-case. In general, I would suspect that it mostly comes to versions of the libs.

Interestingly, there is a cuBLAS 13.1 whl on PyPI, not sure what that does.
by crmd | 2025-11-06 18:39:14+00:00
If my 208V,200A service here in New York City were free for 4 hours a day, I might buy a ~30kW chiller to run during free time and store its output in a big thermos or ice cube.

Assuming a COP of 2.5 (small, air cooled), that would be around 300 kW or 1M BTU of cold storage per day, which is around 42 kBTU or 3.5 tons of raw cooling capacity running 24x7.

I imagine if commercial buildings with support for larger and vastly more efficient chillers did this we could take a huge chunk out of NYC’s ~50 TWh power bill.

Ok, I’ve convinced myself. ConEd, please update when the free electricity program is activated.
Show HN: We just open-sourced OneMCP: a runtime that makes APIs agent-ready
by GentoroAI | 2025-11-06 18:39:36+00:00
Hi all, we just open-sourced Gentoro OneMCP which lets you turn your API spec, docs, and auth into a single natural-language interface for AI agents. Would love your feedback and contribution. Links in comment.

How it works: 1) Create a dir, and drop in your specs, docs, and auth details. 2) Run a Docker command that mounts this dir and runs an MCP server 3) Connect your agent to the server and it can then interact with your backend systems via the MCP interface
by riskable | 2025-11-06 18:39:57+00:00
Is there any more annoying popup than the newsletter popup? I'd rather see a targeted ad than that BS.

NO! I do not want your newsletter! I wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't absolutely required to operate in society today. The less email I get, the better!

Email is becoming like fax machines: An old, dated technology that refuses to die.
by bluGill | 2025-11-06 18:40:00+00:00
At least you can implement things like vector in C++. I challenge anyone to write the same for C macros. (this is semi-serious - if you get a full generic STL for C that is usable that would prevent a large number of bugs. The implementation can be as bad as you want, so long as the user API is not too difficult. Though note that I'm not a C programmer and so if there are better ways someone else is doing this I'm not aware of it)
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-06 18:40:13+00:00
Don't fall for the divisive trolling... many places teach all three languages as part of the grade school curriculum. French is less concise structurally, German has phoneme that are difficult to pronounce, and English was derived from centuries of merging in countless trading partner pop cultures.

The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
by bigyabai | 2025-11-06 18:40:14+00:00
People say this, but I disagree. It's all one big slippery slope of zero value - the more a company can charge you for fewer features, the more they profit.

The parent is correct to identify that a lack of free market controls are what's destroying us here. You wouldn't have to pay out the nose like this if the fed didn't build and enforce monopolies for fun. But now we're here, after 20 years of Google's AdSense monopoly and Apple's App Store monopoly, throwing stones at OpenAI for ruining the fun.

Feels like we deserve this, everyone ignored the warning signs and pushed us way up the corporate escalation ladder.
by mothballed | 2025-11-06 18:40:22+00:00
More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.
by tuhgdetzhh | 2025-11-06 18:40:24+00:00
> do you have evidence

Well it is of course not possible to 100% prove that Tor protects your privacy.

But the lack of evidence is also evidence. While we have evidence that the gov was able to identify indiviuals using Tor e.g. hosting drug portals, there has been no reports that individuals or companies are able to de-anonymize Tor users.
by water9 | 2025-11-06 18:40:47+00:00
Global warming / climate change

People vastly overestimate science’s ability to predict the future, especially when they often can’t get the weather right, right now.

But it’s more than that. People who study the climate change don’t get funding if there’s no problem for them to study. Their job necessitates there being a problem. It’s a conflict of interest.
by ClayShentrup | 2025-11-06 18:41:21+00:00
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote

that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.

> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.

what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer). https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
by vel0city | 2025-11-06 18:41:44+00:00
I'm not a fan of Obama's legacy of drone strikes. They hurt a lot of civilians and I think probably did more harm to US interests overseas than they helped.

However, most (if not all?) of the intended targets of Obama's drone strikes were targets with a pretty reasonable connection to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military force. So those drone strikes were likely "legal" and covered under what Congress enabled when it passed that law and has so far failed to repeal. Theoretically, these were all people Congress agreed we were essentially at war with. Congress can choose to repeal the AUMF at any time, and could have done so during Obama's term.

I don't think there's any reasonable interpretation that random boats of the coast of Venezuela have any connection to 9/11 though, and thus there's pretty much no way to contort an argument that these actions are then somehow allowable. If Trump wants to go to war against Venezuela, he needs to get Congress to approve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
by andrewl-hn | 2025-11-06 18:41:56+00:00
Arc browser famously had native parts of the UI done in Swift, which admittedly is not a lot: browser tabs, some popups and buttons here and there, a lot of their settings UI is rendered in HTML and is stock Chromium. Which is probably why they actually made a port of it to run on Windows rather than rewriting it into something like Qt or WPF or whatever.

Ladybird browser team planned to start using Swift in their codebase, but it hasn't happen yet.
by zahlman | 2025-11-06 18:42:05+00:00
Quite frankly, as someone with 20+ years of experience I have no idea what the basis is for what you're saying here.

> not everything is necessarily backed by the same kind of heap-allocated memory object.

`None`, `True` and `False` are; integers are; functions, bound methods, properties, classes and modules are... what sort of "everything" do you have in mind? Primitive objects don't get stored in a special way that can avoid the per-object memory overhead, and such objects exist for things that can't be used as values at all (e.g. passed to or returned from a function) in many other languages.

Some use fields like `tp_slots` in special ways; the underlying implementation of their methods is in C and the method attributes aren't looked up in the normal way. But there is still a PyObject* there.

... On further investigation (considering the values reported by `id`) I suppose that (at least in modern versions) the pre-created objects may be in static storage... ? Perhaps that has something to do with the implementation of https://peps.python.org/pep-0683/ ?

> Some builtins and bytecode-level optimizations

String concatenation may mutate a string object that's presented to Python as immutable, so long as there aren't other references to it. But it's still a heap-allocated object. Similarly, Python pre-allocates objects for small integer values, but they're still stored on the heap. Very short strings may, along with those integers, go in a special memory pool, but that pool is still on the heap and the allocation still contains all the standard PyObject fields.

> people still regularly have to care about making plain Python code fast.

Can you give examples of the people involved, or explain why their use cases are not satisfied by native libraries?
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-06 18:42:07+00:00
Utility conductors are just aluminum wrapped around a steel core, air is the insulator. You can theoretically handle voltage drop with larger conductors, and there are probably ways to ‘boost’ power over a long transmission line run. I deal with electrical wiring past the utility service entrance and am not super familiar with the utility side so perhaps an EE who works on the grid can chime in with more detail.

I also know breakers for HVDC are extremely challenging to make, AC power has the benefit of sine waves crossing the zero line so power can be switched/broken a lot easier than with DC.
by testing22321 | 2025-11-06 18:42:09+00:00
Basically every home in Australia, and certainly every home and business solar setup, has a smart meter that is grid connected and can be remotely shut down when needed. Or they even just limit the amount that can feedback to the grid if required I.e you’re making 8kw of solar, but it will only let you feed in 2 if the system determines that.

There is not “person” turning things on and off.
by ch4s3 | 2025-11-06 18:42:20+00:00
One could, but you'd need to model multiple scenarios. Surveys show a steady increase in driving for Thanksgiving in the US versus flying since 2020. The average distance according to the AAA is 549 miles, which is approaching the tipping point where flying is more efficient for single passenger trips. For longer trips the tipping point becomes 2+ passengers. Driving will also be worse for NO2 emissions and general ground level pollution.

And none of this touches on safety, which I think is worth considering.
by everfrustrated | 2025-11-06 18:43:02+00:00
In a strange way you're correct. If the Coastguard were sent then there's a risk of the drug runners pleading asylum. Then the US has to feed, water and care for them for basically forever as getting court cases deferred is easy. Which makes doing things the "right way" impossible.

That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.
by wry_discontent | 2025-11-06 18:43:06+00:00
Isn't that begging the question? If you just accept the presupposition that intelligence is tightly coupled to consciousness, then all that makes perfect sense to me. But I don't see why I should accept that. It isn't obvious to me, and it doesn't match my own experience of being conscious.

Totally possible that we're talking past each other.
by captainkrtek | 2025-11-06 18:43:11+00:00
I feel like this sums up the AI problem at large. The marketing and hype from every tech company is that its game changing, but more softly spoken is “hey dont trust it for anything important” as a CYA disclaimer. The problem is the masses only hear the part said in bold.

In bold: This technology will radically transform the way our world works and soon replace all knowledge-based jobs.

In fine print: Do not trust anything it says: Entertainment purposes only