MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by machomaster | 2025-11-06 00:50:12+00:00
It is reducto ad absurdum, though. Because the effeciency of absurdity lies not in the universality of it (if the origin was 1 in absurdity, you would push to 11), but in the subjectivity. So that everyone could surprisingly understand how absurd the original explanation is, "this would be just absurd!". Objectively, it doesn't require to raise the antics.

Kinda like Hindus could ask beef-eating Westerners if they would eat a horse. Or pork vs. dogs. Or to suggest that we should reverse the situation and let sole parenting of children given to the same percentage of men as is currently given to women.

All these are objectively on the same level, but would be described as absurd suggestions with a huge list of explanations of why "you are absurd, they are a totally different thing".
by martinald | 2025-11-06 00:50:23+00:00
It's very location dependent fwiw.

In the UK, I think I can remember 3 power outages my entire life. One when there was significant flooding in my hometown as a child, which lasted around a day, once at university for a few hours (local substation failed) and recently 30 minutes overnight while they were upgrading something (with a lot of notice). I may be undercounting/misremembering but I don't think its far off.

I think the main difference is the UK in all but mostly rural areas has all the power lines underground. This is very different in eg North America where you can go a few blocks out of downtown areas and it is all overhead delivery.
by mbesto | 2025-11-06 00:50:47+00:00
> LLMs hallucinate because training on source material is a lossy process and bigger,

LLMs hallucinate because they are probabilistic by nature not because the source material is lossy or too big. They are literally designed to create some level of "randomness" https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
by AbstractH24 | 2025-11-06 00:50:53+00:00
While not a narcissist, I can’t tell how much he actually see this election as a stepping stone to higher office. Maybe even following in the footsteps of a one term senator…

And I do think he’s adherent to a fairly narrowly defined set of left wing principles and ideologies.

Like you, I agree there’s no harm in trying new things because there’s always what to learn. But I don’t exactly expect them to go well. Hope I’m wrong though and if nothing else it’s becoming incredibly clear we need a new generation of leaders in this country. To end this loop, like you said.
by stack_framer | 2025-11-06 00:50:54+00:00
I worked for a small, local insurance company 10+ years ago that was not interested in the cloud in any way, shape, or form. They had their servers in two locations—the basement of our office building, and an offsite location ~300 miles away. They were professional server rooms, complete with proper cooling, backup power, and the like.

At first I remember thinking they were behind the times, but now I'm certain they've avoided wasting a fortune on the cloud.
by af333fff | 2025-11-06 00:51:12+00:00
Also quoting Krugman, from today, who no longer writes for the NYT:

"Which party is out of touch, again?

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: If Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?

I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.

Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The G.O.P.

If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and yesterday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than G.O.P. apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.

And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists, and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism."

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/which-party-is-in-trouble...
by hammock | 2025-11-06 00:51:35+00:00
I wouldn’t use rinse aid. It’s not good for you - damages your gut and may contain dioxane byproducts. I also would avoid detergents with ethoxylated alcohols (AEs).

What to look for is any powder or powder-filled pod with a) no AEs and b) does contain amylase and protease , two food-eating enzymes that are often omitted for who knows why.

365 Whole Foods brand pods are my go-to
by pessimizer | 2025-11-06 00:52:22+00:00
Upper-middle class parents addicted to constant communication with their children started complaining about their kid's not being allowed to carry their phones, nearly at the level of implying it was a human rights violation. They combined this with worries about school shootings (that cellphones haven't ever helped with to my knowledge, unless having live recordings of children being murdered is help.)

After they got it, it was instantly allowed everywhere. It was another result of the "activism" of the same suburban let me speak to your manager class that has been ruining everything for the past 20 years.

edit: A lot of parents are constantly texting back and forth with their kids all day. It's basically their social media, especially if they don't have any friends, and I bet in plenty of cases a huge burden to the children.
by _pob | 2025-11-06 00:53:24+00:00
My grandfather purchased a niche customer management DOS application in 1986 or so and used that Software up until the day he died in 2012.

When he was finally forced to upgrade to a computer without a parallel port, he was a bit stuck for a bit because the software would only print to a printer connected via parallel port. I couldn’t find a card for this at the time, for whatever reason, but I eventually was able to trick the software into printing to a modern printer and I had never seen him more happy since it saved him the $3000 software upgrade fee.

Miss you, Grandpa!
by peteforde | 2025-11-06 00:55:12+00:00
Can someone offer an explanation of why this is popular? I don't mean this in a crass way, I'm actually genuinely baffled to see geeks lining up for a Costco-like experience to get stuff that you can easily get online without needing to get into a car.

For me, big box stores just mean markups + staff that know less than most tech reviewers on YouTube. All in an introvert's nightmare. What's the upside?
by Master_Quant | 2025-11-06 00:55:19+00:00
They say the pursuit of happiness is a right, but for me it became a compass. Through storms and revelations, through invention and loss, that phrase always kept me aligned with something larger than ambition: the pursuit itself. Happiness was never a finish line. It was a movement — the quiet joy of asking why when others stop at how. It is curiosity that kept me alive long after reason told me to rest. There were times that same curiosity led me into darkness — sleepless nights, broken algorithms, questions too vast for a single mind. Yet every time I stood at the edge of doubt, I felt the same pull, the same whisper saying: CONTINUE They say curiosity killed the cat, but I believe it resurrects the soul. It gives meaning to repetition, light to struggle, and direction to uncertainty. Without it, life becomes a flat line. With it, even pain becomes part of the design. Today, as I look back — an old man, coffee in hand, an AI softly humming by my side — I see that all my discoveries were only reflections of one truth: To wonder is to live. The Black Box, the equations, the architecture of time — all of it was merely the expression of the same instinct that built civilizations and painted the stars: to understand, to create, to reach beyond the visible. If I have learned anything worth passing on, it is this: The pursuit of happiness is not joy without pain, nor success without failure. It is the courage to remain curious — to ask, to build, to imagine — even when the world insists it cannot be done. Because somewhere, between the question and the answer, we meet the divine spark that makes us human. And that, I believe, is happiness itself.
by deterministic | 2025-11-06 00:55:23+00:00
I have friends in the games industry. Stunningly bad and arrogant leadership seems to be the norm.

Make a random dude (it is usually a dude) a manager in a games company and suddenly he thinks he is a brilliant game designer with all the right answers overruling more experienced people.

Until the game flops and he is fired (or not if a good friend of the CEO).

Rince and repeat until bankruptcy.
by Steven_Vellon | 2025-11-06 00:55:39+00:00
14 hours of battery (~40 TWh for China) with the hydrogen storage or without? Because the calculator was reporting ~78,000 GWh battery storage with China's weather selected, and 2030 technology assumptions. I changed the spatial capacity factor from 1 to 2 and the battery storage requirement dropped down to 68 TWh, but still well above 40 TWH.

Regardless, 14 hours of China's electricity demand is a whopping 40,600 GWh. By comparison, 2024's lithium ion battery production figure was 1.5 TWh [1]. Even assuming 100% of this went to EV's we're still talking about roughly 25 years worth of global battery production to fulfill only China's demand for storage in this model. As you point out, we still have loads of battery demand for EV adoption, so nowhere near 100% of production will be able to be diverted to grid storage.

The scale of storage required to make intermittent sources viable without being backed by a dispatchable energy source really is tremendous, and this often gets overlooked in pushes for a fully renewable grid.

1. https://www.argusmedia.com/ja/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
by _heimdall | 2025-11-06 00:55:44+00:00
Why should your premium be tied to someone else's risk? There will always be some level of connection, the insurer has to stay in business, but that's very different.

Without preexisting conditions your premiums go up only because they can't charge the higher risk individual for that risk. That is no longer insurance at least at the individual level - you're effectively being asked to vouch for, and pay for, someone you never met.
by fa3556 | 2025-11-06 00:55:52+00:00
You can (now?) create profiles from the account icon in the toolbar [1] and at least on my firefox install, you can also do it from the hamburger menu.

I use firefox via flatpak and had no issues so far accessing profile data (in one of the folders in ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/ - I keep a regular archive of the entire folder as backup).

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
by celsoazevedo | 2025-11-06 00:56:07+00:00
Finally. I know that profiles have been supported for a long time, but about:profiles wasn't that user friendly and on macOS, profiles could also mess your dock icon, wouldn't open in the foreground, etc. It wasn't a good experience.

I think the new profiles will cause some confusion (at least initially) because these profiles are not listed on the old about:profiles page and the old profiles are not listed on the new UI.

Still, a good improvement for me. I no longer need to use the dev/nightly channels or 3rd party browsers based on FF just to have different bookmarks/settings/extensions. I'll need a way to add old profiles to the new UI though.
by mvx64 | 2025-11-06 00:56:32+00:00
I found out about profiles recently and I just couldn't believe that that's the standard way to access them. Also, it's not obvious which profile you are currently on, so there are some silly but necessary workarounds like having a dummy bookmark with the profile name on each or something like that, while it could just be a string next to the address bar.

It works really well though. Does exactly what I would expect and hope from such a feature.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-11-06 00:56:58+00:00
Because cities felt the devastating effects when industrial factories staffed with good union jobs went away, and yearn for their carbon copy replacement. These factories had ripple regional advantage effects beyond the factory workers. Armies of teamsters have to drive in and out of town to deliver inputs and outputs for industrial factories, and they all need to eat. Corporate and R&D types used to need to spend more time at the industrial factory. Put a factory in a region and a corporate office often follows. Put enough of them in the same region and you start to get an innovation hub as they all hang out and see each other at third spaces. Universities and innovation hubs mutually benefit and expand when distance matters.

So the industrial factory tax break model often did pay off. Data centers are selling the same story: give us tax breaks for big expensive capital investment and regional prosperity is yours. They often lie about even the direct number of jobs. But the implied regional advantage is definitely dead when it is all cloud and zoom, rather than widgets and happy hours.
by ajross | 2025-11-06 00:57:36+00:00
Only if you take as a prior that he's somehow more objectionable than the like 20% of the electorate that I'm painting as "drunk uncles". And he's... not. He's just rich. Musk doesn't say or do anything you can't see on Fox every day. He doesn't spout opinions you can't read expressed right here on HN in every politics thread (in fact he's a pretty pure distillation of the HN self-righteous libertarian jerk, honestly).

And you don't like that. And I don't like that either. But I'm not going to judge him any more severely than I do anyone here. And yeah, I think the cars are pretty great, and the people that make them (to first approximation, none of them are Musk!) deserve to have jobs making successful cars.

At the end of the day you need to share society with people you hate. And some of them make products you need or want. This isn't a winnable fight you're engaging in.
by k310 | 2025-11-06 00:57:37+00:00
The author is Australian, and may or may not be familiar with the usage of the word Democrat in the U.S.

It is common in American politics to redefine names. So, the Term Democrat is properly a noun. Using it as an adjective i.e. The Democrat Machine rather than The Democratic Machine is only done by the GOP, and as a slur.

Other words with transformed meanings include Patriot and Truth. Compare with Orwell: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein [0]

> It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well as language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

PDF download:

https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-olig...
by drdeca | 2025-11-06 00:57:41+00:00
This seems like it would be a copyright violation? The result bears substantial similarity to the input, even though it doesn’t have the particular words in common, right?

Like, if you translated the Spanish version to English, you’d have different words than the official English version, but it would still be a copyright violation to sell that, right? Likewise if you first had someone do a translation from English to Spanish before you translated it back to English?

If it is based on an existing copyrighted work, bears substantial similarity to it, and competes with the original in the market, I thought copyright handled that?
by Groxx | 2025-11-06 00:58:14+00:00
the normalization doc is interesting too imo: https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/

in particular, the differences between NFC and NFKC are "fun", and rather meaningful in many cases. e.g. NFC says that "fi" and "ﬁ" are different and not equal, though the latter is just a ligature of the former and is literally identical in meaning. this applies to ﬃ too. half vs full width Chinese characters are also "different" under NFC. NFKC makes those examples equal though... at the cost of saying "2⁵" is equal to "25".

language is fun!
by autoexec | 2025-11-06 00:58:29+00:00
I never claimed that companies can't fail or change, only that bloat and inefficiencies aren't a death sentence. Even several of your examples are still alive and well and it's telling that their major declines took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Companies have gotten a lot better at abusing government and law to protect their profits over the last 40 years.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-06 00:58:56+00:00
That was about the amount in both cases. Slightly more in the no-hydrogen case than otherwise. Hydrogen contributed only marginally.

Yes, it's a lot of batteries. So what? It's not like the current battery production is some firm limit. If anything, the very large future demand ensures batteries will be driven down their experience curve, so the cost will be even lower than assumed.

The world spends something like $10T per year on energy. Any replacement energy system is going to be a big thing.

You need to make an argument that is more than you expressing fear of large numbers.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-06 00:59:09+00:00
I thought the same, then I ended up spending >$10k there this year because the pricing was great and I didn't have to wait for shipping. It really is a great place.

It's also great for items likely to be scalped. It doesn't guarantee they'll have stock, but it sure is easier to beat scalpers to checking the store that day than bots to an online cart. I even got a Switch 2 bundle the day after launch at MSRP while there for something else. Edit: shit, prices are worse all around now. Glad I didn't wait :D.
by ericmay | 2025-11-06 01:00:00+00:00
I’ve been to the one in Hiroshima. The volume and variety of products is jaw-dropping and fun. Though I was disappointed, although admittedly wasn’t looking to hard, to see the prices were comparable to American prices for the same products - at least for new lenses.

It was also great that it was basically attached to the rail line. Such a better development pattern for business and moving people than airlines and airports.
by hattmall | 2025-11-06 01:00:06+00:00
ART with HVGIC has basically solved dental caries since the 80s. But you aren't likely to get it in the US or most western nations because there is a massive industry around drilling and filling with resins and then solving the multitude of problems that such a destructive process creates. Crowns, root canal, periodontal disease etc.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03005...
by riderist | 2025-11-06 01:00:09+00:00
I’m a dentist. If cavities vanished tomorrow, it would definitely change things, but not as much as you might guess. Cavities and crowns make up a decent slice of what most general practices do, but there’s still gum disease, cracked teeth, teeth wear, implants, bite issues, cosmetic work, and so on. A lot of what keeps people coming in isn’t just sugar, although from the outside I understand why it might look like sugar is the whole game.

Financially, there’d be a short-term hit for offices that rely heavily on fillings, but the field would adjust. Most of us would focus more on prevention, maintenance, and elective care. Dentistry has already been slowly shifting that direction for years with better materials, scanners, and aligners.

So if everyone suddenly stopped getting cavities, I’d still have plenty to do. It would just look a little different.
by mastazi | 2025-11-06 01:00:09+00:00
Ironically the reason why it's popular is that it's got many items that otherwise you can only get online, which is also the reason why you find it useless since you prefer the online experience.

Speaking as an Australian, to me it would be a dream to be able to drive to a place like that and getting those things in store as opposed to ordering online then waiting days or sometimes weeks for delivery.

There is also the factor of being able to see the item in person, and perhaps hold it in your hands, might not be very relevant for something like RAM sticks, but it certainly is for something like a gaming controller for example.
by skrlet13 | 2025-11-06 01:00:38+00:00
Author is like "all things that are not specifically directed to me and who I consider fellows are useless". Also he was Not All Gays vice-president, one of the transphobic orgs. Also, transphobic website.

"They can mobilise vast PR machines around ‘trans genocide’. But when gay men are overdosing week in, week out, across Europe’s capitals? Nothing." You can care about multiple things at the same time. And a lot people want trans people to drop dead.

I totally get being concerned about gay men being consumers and victims of the predatory and cruel drug market. Sharing info about how different drugs hurt you, how to do harm reduction and how these drugs markets is only interested to keep you barely alive to keep you as a client, and offering safe places to deal with symptoms and withdrawal actually help.

But I cannot trust the author. He thinks helping trans people is a disgrace by itself.
by caturopath | 2025-11-06 01:00:47+00:00
Would be interested to hear a legal expert weigh in on what 'advice' is. I'm not clear that discussing medical and legal issues with you is necessarily providing advice.

One of the things I respected OpenAI for at the release of ChatGPT was not trying to prevent these topics. My employer at the time had a cutting-edge internal LLM chatbot for a which was post-trained to avoid them, something I think they were forced to be braver about in their public release because of the competitive landscape.
by viraptor | 2025-11-06 01:01:42+00:00
> No self-judging: GPT-5 scored the other 5 models but couldn’t evaluate its own output - I used Claude Opus 4.1 as judge for GPT-5’s submissions to avoid bias.

That's a bit silly, especially since all openai models will share some elements. The points lost meaning there. They could for example use glm for all judging instead. Or go all the way and do a full matrix of everything judging everything else.
by brandon272 | 2025-11-06 01:02:06+00:00
> I'm actually genuinely baffled to see geeks lining up for a Costco-like experience to get stuff that you can easily get online without needing to get into a car.

"Why go to a fine restaurant when you can just stick something in the microwave? Why go to the park and fly a kite when you can just pop a pill?" - Kramer, Seinfeld
by ostensible | 2025-11-06 01:02:18+00:00
I agree. Microcenter seems to sell a lot of flashy shiny garbage and not enough or at all of what matters — like cables or adapters.

It’s more a best buy than fry’s electronics.

We had a recently opened one here in the Bay Area — I went there once, having heard good things. Never again. It’s a bullshit emporium.