MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gpm | 2025-11-28 00:16:11+00:00
Absolutely true.

I don't know why you're even talking about nuclear when that's not something an individual can do at their scale. It's not relevant to this conversation. But everything you've just said about it is wrong.

LCOE, when LCOE is calculated correctly, is absolutely the right measure and absolutely includes the true system cost including storage to bring it up to a similar level of availability and decommissioning (incidentally decommissioning is way higher cost for nuclear than batteries so it's weird that you try to cite it).

Even if we switch gears from talking about individual generation to grid scale generation nuclear done safely is simply too expensive. Solar and battery storage are cheaper than it in sunny places today, they were cheaper than it in sunny places a year ago, and their price is and has been consistently falling exponentially while nuclear's price stays about constant.

Those prices are including the absolutely massive subsidies that are given to nuclear, in every form from government investment in the technology to government absorbing the vast majority of the insurance cost by not requiring they are insured to anywhere close to even a small fraction of the full amount of damage they could cause in a worst case disaster.

The only fantasy here is that nuclear is somehow going to suddenly buck the trend of staying at about constant price and start falling in price even more exponentially than solar and batteries have been to catch up. Spending money on nuclear only serves to prolong the climate crisis by taking away money from actual scalable solutions like solar that can outcompete with fossil fuels on cost.

You don't build storage for yearly cycles, you build it for daily cycles (which is affordable today) and overbuild solar to account for seasonal variation in generation and demand. Note that even things like nuclear have to be overbuilt for seasonal variation in demand, and to account for the fact that there is maintenance and sometimes some of your plants are down.
by k310 | 2025-11-28 00:16:31+00:00
It's within range because it works, but requires some twisting and arm waving to get it to work from one room to the next, no Faraday shields in the home.

Then again, I transferred 4 iPhone photos to the imac 2 feet away and it failed. Worked on the next try. It's flakey as hell, and this is a 3rd generation iPhone SE and M2 mac mini. Not exactly old. I really hate bluetooth.

I got an old Time Capsule at the thrift store, that checked out but I haven't made use of it. It might be time. FWIW, I got PhotoSync app (not free) long ago so as to share photos with "everything" and it runs in the background on the mac, but I stupidly hold to the notion that whatever comes with the operating system otta work.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-28 00:16:37+00:00
You want to get a pulse in the market, or need to clean up the backlog of recruiters invitations because you're a bit OCD and feel bad about not answering people who probably used AI to send you this apparently so personal message, and you also were born poor, so even all those years living a comfortable life your first instinct towards people who could maybe want to hire you is being a nice agreeable folk, as old survival instincts never really die.

Then, it is like, things that are not good for you, but you do anyway like drinking sugary beverages, staying awake too late in the night, drinking that last couple beers that you didn't need to drink and didn't enjoy but then give you this morning headache.
by komali2 | 2025-11-28 00:16:57+00:00
I'm interested in people that still have faith in the USA court system.

I just checked, Disney's market cap seems to be around $140,000,000,000. If you were to be forced into arbitration, lose, and then attempt to demonstrate that the arbitor was biased and challenge such in court, do you really think that would work before you ran out of money? How many people in America do you think have enough money to bring that case to trial?
by decimalenough | 2025-11-28 00:16:59+00:00
_Weeks_ old! What a fossil!

Slightly more seriously: what you say makes sense if and only if you're projecting Sam Altman and assuming that a) real legit superhuman AGI is just around the corner, and b) all the spoils will accrue to the first company that finds it, which means you need to be 100% in on building the next model that will finally unlock AGI.

But if this is not the case -- and it's increasingly looking like it's not -- it's going to continue to be a race of competing AIs, and that race will be won by the company that can deliver AI at scale the most cheaply. And the article is arguing that company will be Google.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-28 00:17:26+00:00
Then you need an Intel or AMD laptop as a frame of reference. M1 is implemented as-is with much of the silicon's onboard accelerators entirely dark. Hardware accelerated video encode/decode is a lost cause, Thunderbolt will likely never happen, NEON is your fastest SIMD accelerator and cpuidle is still not really figured out.

Those are all perfectly acceptable limitations for a POC. And the GPU drivers are particularly well-made. But it doesn't really come close to how seriously AMD and Intel take Linux.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-28 00:17:39+00:00
> while not mentioning the failings of American politics as a whole

I've never seen that mentioned by the left, right or anybody else, wherever they might be - nothing but spotty and one-sided critics. Do you really think your idea about that is of superior quality?

You seem to like populism but that term has as many meanings as people talking about it, which makes talking about it entirely pointless. In other words, the devil is in the details.
by pl4nty | 2025-11-28 00:17:46+00:00
I had to scroll too far for someone to mention third-party CI. GitHub Actions free runners have always sucked, but the third-party runner ecosystem is really strong for those who can afford it. imo the APIs are far better than the rest of the product - I suspect enterprise customers are strong-arming GitHub to keep them reliable. and there's always third-party CI like tekton if Actions' yaml is too annoying
by umanwizard | 2025-11-28 00:17:51+00:00
I don’t doubt that you speak French. French people tend to have difficulty distinguishing those sounds because they are not distinguished in French. In English, they are: English has a much larger inventory of distinct vowel sounds than French (or indeed most European languages). In typical French-accented English, “bit” is indeed pronounced like the French word “bite”, but in native speaker English, it is not.

I am a native speaker of American English and also speak French quite well. If you neither accept personal experience, nor what is written on Wiktionary, what evidence would you accept?
by yodsanklai | 2025-11-28 00:18:13+00:00
I have a friend who behaves similarly on linkedin and in real life, and he's very blunt. I like how he calls out some crap on linkedin posts, and nobody dares to like his comments, even though I'm sure everybody approves.

Overall, I don't see anyone I know being a cringe bootlicker on LinkedIn. These people are very visible, but probably a small minority of users.
by lobito25 | 2025-11-28 00:19:05+00:00
FileZilla refused to give me a copy of the version I purchased for 'security reasons,' even though they were already updating the version installed on my system, so it makes little sense to deny me access to the app. It is also worth noting that in the first email I received from them, they had already offered me a discount coupon to buy a new version. I strongly believe the decision to withhold a copy of the software is driven by financial motives rather than security concerns.
by modeless | 2025-11-28 00:20:18+00:00
His point seems to be that we haven't yet seriously tried optimizing for energy efficiency of producing antimatter. It's a call to action. If we actually tried it's plausible that we could get to a level that, while still fantastically inefficient in an absolute sense, would still be worthwhile for spaceflight propulsion, where energy density is vitally important. As far as I know, antimatter is the most energy dense fuel possible in known physics by many orders of magnitude.

Also he proposes a few ways that antimatter could be practically used for propulsion, including as a catalyst for fission which seems interesting.
by tim-- | 2025-11-28 00:20:24+00:00
So then you didn't buy a lifetime subscription? Why would you get access to the software for lifetime, if you ordered only a 1, 3 or 5 year license?

Your right to receive updates is limited to the time that you selected when you ordered FileZilla Pro.

If you have, infact, ordered a "Perpetual License", then you would have agreed to the Terms and Conditions when ordering FileZilla (here's a random old copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20211128083132/https://store.fil...)

It clearly says in the T&C that you agreed to:

> All risk of loss for the Products shall pass to You upon delivery of the Products to the location specified in Your Order (even if no signature is required for delivery). For the avoidance of doubt, the delivery of downloaded Products occurs when the Products are downloaded.

What you are saying is that you ordered FileZilla (agreeing to the T&C as part of payment). The T&C said once you downloaded the product, you were required to keep the software yourself.

FileZilla's Terms and Conditions are a mess. https://filezillapro.com/terms-and-conditions/

It does say:

> In a one-off purchase you will have a right to receive services or other rights for the maximum period of time indicated in the package you have purchased or ‒ missing that indication ‒ for up to five years.

It also says:

> Unless registered, your copy will not receive updates and will not exploit the services of the Software.

So, I would assume that if you purchased the Lifetime license, and you registered the software within the 4 required weeks, then they are infact breaking their contract with you.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-28 00:20:47+00:00
Google does not sell them, but you can rent them:

https://cloud.google.com/tpu

As you note, they'll set the margins to benefit themselves, but you can still eke out some benefit.

Also, you can buy Edge TPUs, but as the name says these are for edge AI inference and useless for any heavy lifting workloads like training or LLMs.

https://www.amazon.com/Google-Coral-Accelerator-coprocessor-...
LLM agent workflows fail silently. Here's the reliability layer we wish existed
by AJ1313k | 2025-11-28 00:20:54+00:00
For the past few months my co-founder and I have been building complex agentic workflows, and we kept hitting the same recurring reliability issues: inconsistent shared state, silent failures, agents diverging from each other, and no clean way to recover without restarting the entire workflow.

It became clear that most failures weren’t “LLM problems” but classic distributed-systems problems showing up in multi-agent setups.

Since nothing in the current ecosystem addressed this properly, we started building a reliability layer for agent workflows — something that adds structure, safety, and predictable recovery to multi-agent systems without forcing developers to rewrite their stack.

We’re looking to connect with people who have run into similar issues or are building production-grade agent workflows. The goal is to understand how others think about reliability, failure recovery, and workflow consistency in these systems.

If you’re working on this space or want to try the early access, here’s the link: https://tally.so/r/LZDb0j

Would appreciate any thoughts or experiences others have had around agent reliability, especially failure cases or pain points.
by D13Fd | 2025-11-28 00:21:07+00:00
It’s true though, it’s very risky for men in America to have any kind of interactions with other people’s children.

I’m a father of six. One of my oldest kids’ friends wrote me a great little letter out of the blue. I wrote her a short, heartfelt, and funny (IMO) reply, but after I talked with my wife, we decided I really just could not send it. There are too many risks. She thought the only safe thing to do would be to ignore the girl’s letter. And she’s right. That’s what I ended up doing. But it still makes me sad that that’s where society is these days.
by decimalenough | 2025-11-28 00:23:53+00:00
This is a bizarre argument to make for AI, since Google started working on TPUs in 2013 (12 years ago) and Sundar started publicly banging on about being an AI-first company in 2016. They missed the first boat on LLMs, but Google has been invested in AI for way longer than any of the competition.

https://aibusiness.com/companies/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-we...
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-11-28 00:24:46+00:00
So I get confused when I read things like "feedback doesn't scale". Because what am I, if not a self-organizing collective of a trillion cells. That seems like feedback which scales right there.

This seems like a concrete example of why this logic is flawed.

To me I believe it more useful to start with the premise of: I'm already communicating and leading trillions, how do I actually do that?

A common issue is that we hold thoughts, logic and language as a type of universal gold standard, while ignoring that most of our communication isn't even verbal to begin with. It's context, observation, pattern recognition, a self-serving goal which aligns with the collective, because we're all wanting the same things. What feels good, what's expansive, what's beautiful etc. These are the reward functions for healthy communication in the human body, the more that we align and work with these, the better the results.
by anonymouskimmer | 2025-11-28 00:24:58+00:00
Did you read the article past the first two paragraphs? Serious question.

Otherwise I think you make good and interesting points. Genuine economics has a host of measuring sticks, but we, the non-economists, really only talk about, hear about, or even basically understand a handful. I had an economist effectively point this out to me when asking a question about GDP versus the broken window fallacy.
by gpm | 2025-11-28 00:25:53+00:00
> Are there extant succesful examples of pumped hydro in cold regions?

There's some pumped hydro at Niagara falls in Canada, which is far enough North that it should see a bit of a that/freeze cycle but is still a relatively mild climate.

Don't know anything about what issues this does/doesn't present to them, just happen to know it exists.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-28 00:26:57+00:00
> Where are you planning on getting the elevation delta from?

Elevation delta is not hard to find in Norway! A typical pumped storage facility uses 100m of delta; I imagine Norwegian ones would use more.

> but this is a field where capex + opex/KWH is everything.

And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.

The original post is efficient for heat storage, but converting low grade heat to electricity is not efficient.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-28 00:27:05+00:00
Think about how little it costs to be a free hosting provider for a handful of 15MB downloads, maybe one per major version, and just for people that paid you in the past. It's next to nothing. In particular, cloudflare will give you 10GB of free object storage with unlimited bandwidth and 10 million downloads a month. So yes, they should host the installer forever.

To put it another way, the cost to provide downloads forever instead of just once is less than a penny. It should be built in to the purchase.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-11-28 00:27:08+00:00
Twitter/X: I'm smart? Seriously? That's not how I think of it at all.

I mean, yes, there are some people trying to use Twitter to show that they're smart. But my impression is that the overall vibe of it is trying to show that you're influential. People follow you. They retweet your posts. That's the "success metric".

Note well: I'm not actually on Twitter. This is my impression from outside.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-28 00:28:32+00:00
People live mostly by convention, not reason (including those who think they don’t). When social sensibilities change, people move with them regardless of whether they are good or bad, because people in general are cowards. They fear life outside the crowd. For most, majority opinion - whether manufactured or not - is God. Most float downstream (including those who think they don’t); few swim upstream.
by komali2 | 2025-11-28 00:29:08+00:00
Author here.

It has nothing to do with app permissions, thank you for noting that, I'll update the article later. It works like this: as soon as they get your credit card information, they have enough information to go to a data broker and buy every bit of data on you that exists. Now they know who you are, and so now they know when you get paid, your net worth, your buying habits. Likely they're selling data back to brokers do as the other person mentioned even if you're paying less for burgers maybe now you're paying more for airplane tickets or something.

Second, these apps may not have a tickbox TOS but they seem to have one of those implicit TOSs that I'm still not sure how they are legal, e.g. "by using this service you agree..."

Here's the one for the McDonald's app: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/terms-and-conditions.html

First line: > Important: Please carefully read and understand these terms and conditions (“terms”). They contain an arbitration agreement, jury and class action waivers, limitations on McDonald’s liability and other provisions that affect your legal rights.

The arbitration agreement: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/terms-and-conditions.html...

It's a binding arbitration agreement that covers disputes outside of the app:

> any claim or dispute (whether in contract, tort, or otherwise) that McDonald’s or any Member of the McDonald’s System may have with you, or that you may have with McDonald’s or any Member of the McDonald’s System, arising from or related to the online services or these terms will be resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) and conducted before a single arbitrator using the AAA’s Consumer Arbitration Rules and, if applicable, its Mass Arbitration Supplementary Rules (“rules and procedures”);

Anyway Cory Doctorow is way smarter and well sourced than me, I recommend reading his take on it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/
by sieep | 2025-11-28 00:29:33+00:00
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here about the actual app itself but I'm surprised that people aren't seeing LinkedIn for what it is, a tool. If you're a founder, LinkedIn is a great place to find talent & drive inbound sales, at minimum.

If you're not using it, I bet your competition is. Sure, the feed is terrible but look at it purely as a talent & sales pipeline. There isn't anything else like it out there.
by jbm | 2025-11-28 00:31:11+00:00
I have to disagree.

In Calgary, the streets are numbered and it's super easy to navigate between "16th St NW" and "18th St NW". Certainly easier to understand than "Go from St. Catherine's Street to Peel" in Montreal.

Where they are not numbered, they at least have the name of the community. Edgemont, for example, has no numbered streets but the name usually starts with "Edge", making it clear what part of the city you are going to.

I don't think it is perfect but I have also lived in Tokyo where the system is literally impossible without a GPS because the locations are not as neatly arranged as here.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-28 00:31:18+00:00
> the state functions much like an aged, institutionalized mafia

Which happens to prevent immature, dumb and cruel mafias from taking over, the latter are the wet dream of Anarchists, that's why they hate governments.

> not fundamentally different from the predatory groups it claims to suppress

"Fundamentality" is in the eye of the beholder. The objective qualitative and quantitative differences are enormous however, the rest is mud in the eyes.
by shadowpho | 2025-11-28 00:32:43+00:00
> the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined.

Are your drives spun? 70w is a pretty low bar. The nas by itself is probably 40w with drives, Mac mini is another 7-10w (especially at wall) and now we are at 50w, so 20w left for 4 AP and cameras
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-28 00:34:30+00:00
> The original post was about how he was angry that his friend was messing around with his phone during a movie. Why does this bother him? He feels his friend was not respecting the integrity of art, that he is missing important things in life, that meaning and value is lost as his friend treats his screen time as a flood of dopamine.

I love how you ask why this bothers me (a woman btw, your reading comprehension seems shaky) and then go on to explain perfectly why this bothers me. I think "missing important things in life" is a bit strong phrasing, I would say: you're missing a lot of the emotional value the art you're consuming has by way of consuming too much at once to beat dopamine out of your brain vs. having a genuine, personal experience with an art object. But this is solely a situation where you're harming your own experience, not me.

The only sense it would really bother me is that I would throw a soda at you if you were watching instagram reels in a theater.

> What I was trying to tell him (really just talking into the social media void) is that it's all meaningless anyway. When you're young you care, but as you mature, that feeling of the perfectness of your screen time becomes a childish thing. It is much like the difference between two lousy fast food burgers, the metaphor he partially understood but reduced to "they are both lousy" which wasn't my point.

I mean I still don't really understand your point. If you divide your attention, you have a less cognizant experience of... anything. If you text while driving, your odds of getting in a car wreck go up astronomically.

If anything as you get older, you should learn to slow down and do one thing at a time, because your attention span gets weaker as your cognitive abilities decline.

> But his behavior was a little too immature for me, with the brinksmanship and oh-so-daring insults to my intelligence

I didn't insult you. I said you were being insufferable and you were. You're absolutely right, I didn't understand your point, and I seem to be far from alone in that. So I asked you to explain it, and you acted like I was an idiot for not parsing your word salad correctly.

> so I probably got sidetracked in my response and it wasn't very good.

Yeah maybe just answer the question next time.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-28 00:35:32+00:00
The answer in almost all electrical production boils down to spinning a turbine with steam (or wind). Nuclear does it, all the fossil fuels do it and ultimately heat batteries do it too. The alternative is photovoltaic or directly nuclear to electron production and then storage with chemical batteries or massive capacitors.

Most of our electrical production is based on a solution found several hundred years ago, we just made it really big and worked out how to control the heating and pressure of the steam well.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-28 00:36:32+00:00
> This is like people who think $5 is too much for an app. We've become entitled to think software is free because giants pour lots of ad-riddled software in our laps.

Your complaint is misplaced. Software takes work, and updates take work. Hosting <100MB installers doesn't take work.

It basically is zero cost to keep those files available somewhere.

> You bought the car. You can use the car forever. If you lose it, that's on you.

If the manufacturer had a button that could summon the car I lost, and refused to press it, that would reflect extremely badly on them.