MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2025-12-20 19:06:15+00:00
> As for contrails, disturbing the atmosphere is going to cause some freezing (clouds) at that altitude, at that temperature. How do you suggest we mitigate that? Fly lower and burn more fuel? Fly less and tell people to take the train or that their package will arrive next week?

See this article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/12/1089620/how-rero...

Here are some highlights, in case the paywall is a problem for some.

First, how much do contrails matter?

> This cirrus-forming phenomenon could account for around 35% of aviation’s total contribution to climate change—or about 1% to 2% of overall global warming, according to some estimates

> A small fraction of overall flights, between 2% and 10%, create about 80% of the contrails. So the growing hope is that simply rerouting those flights could significantly reduce the effect, presenting a potentially high leverage, low cost and fast way of easing warming.

Breakthrough Energy, Google Research, and American Airlines conducted a test:

> They employed satellite imagery, weather data, software models, and AI prediction tools to steer pilots over or under areas where their planes would be likely to produce contrails. American Airlines used these tools in 70 test flights over six months, and subsequent satellite data indicated that they reduced the total length of contrails by 54%, relative to flights that weren’t rerouted

Avoiding the contrail prone regions would use more fuel, so the question is how much would it cost to avoid those regions?

> A new study published in Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability explored this issue by coupling commercial tools for optimizing flight trajectories with models that simulated nearly 85,000 American Airlines flights, both domestic and international, under various weather conditions last summer and this winter.

> In those simulations, the researchers found that reducing the warming effect of contrails by 73% increased fuel costs by just 0.11% and overall costs by 0.08%, when averaged across those tens of thousands of flights. (Only about 14% of the flights needed to be adjusted to avoid forming warming contrails in the simulations.)

There are also a couple of other factors to consider, such as:

> There are also some thorny complications that still need to be resolved, like the fact that cirrus clouds can also reduce warming by reflecting away short-wave radiation from the sun.

> The loss of this cooling effect would have to be tallied into any calculation of the net benefit—or, perhaps, avoided. For instance, Shapiro says the initial strategy might be to reroute flights only during the early evening and night, which would eliminate the sunlight-reflecting complication.

Another one is the the increased fuel will add to CO2 to the atmosphere. CO2 stays in the atmosphere a lot longer than water, so it is possible that reducing contrails would be a net positive in the short term but a net negative over the long term.
by mojuba | 2025-12-20 19:06:23+00:00
> Groups of zeros can be omitted with two colons, but only once in an address (i.e. 2000:1::1, but not 2000::1::1 as that is ambiguous)

Can someone explain why it's ambiguous?

On the subject, IPv6 is one of the strangest inventions on the internet. Its utility and practically are obvious no matter how you look at it except... just one thing.

Network-related things are generally easy to remember and then type from memory: IPv4, domain names, standard port numbers. Back in the day it was the phone numbers, again, easy to remember and dial when you need it. IPv6 is just too long and requires copy/paste all the time. This is the only real reason in my opinion, why IPv6 is doomed to be second-grade citizen for (probably) a few more decades.
by sleight42 | 2025-12-20 19:06:30+00:00
Missing the point.

iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't.

Read the article. The author spells it out.

I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba.

History repeats itself because people forget.
by mlangenberg | 2025-12-20 19:07:01+00:00
> There are also still a lot of misconceptions from network administrators who are scared of or don’t properly understand IPv6

Enable IPv6 on a TP-Link Omada router (ER7212PC) and all internal services are exposed to the outside world as there is no default IPv6 deny-all rule and no IPv6 firewall. I get why some people are nervous.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-20 19:07:13+00:00
Datapoints like this really make me reconsider my daily driver. I should be running one of those $300 mini PCs at <20W. With ~flat CPU performance gains, would be fine for the next 10 years. Just remote into my beefy workstation when I actually need to do real work. Browsing the web, watching videos, even playing some games is easily within their wheelhouse.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-20 19:08:10+00:00
> Does that count as polite conversation in London?

no, because this is mostly a logical fallacy.

> It is full of things that don't need to be there

Like what specifically? Most heavy industry moved out in the 70/80s, the port moved to essex in the 80s. The fish and meat veg moved out to canary wharf, and are going to move further out soon. what else should be taken away?

> Today they need data centres as close as possible,

This is a cable replacement, but yeah, lets go with new datacentres in london (as we know planning is quick and simple, so they are popping up weekly....) However the key issue is that population density is now back to somewhere like it was in the 40s (https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/population-over-time/)

So whilst power demand is largely flat, infra doesn't last for ever, so even power cables need to be replaced.

> Modern London is all about MPs who are physically tethered to Westminster by in person voting, being surrounded by the kind of people who want direct access to MPs...

Yup, all 8.9 million people that live there are entirely there to do lobbying. I to am a lobbyist.

> Don't lecture me on costs, while London continues to try so hard to inflate the price of the tidal mud it resides on, by sucking in the rest of the UKs wealth.

Well, as you've neatly avoided any mention of costs of tunnel vs pylons, its not really a lecture is it. I hope you come to peace with the general concept of london.
by mattypg | 2025-12-20 19:08:17+00:00
> It's unfortunate, but IPv6 doesn't really solve any problems for a home user.

CG-NAT and strict NAT in general. Newer ISPs often force users onto CG-NAT, and my consoles have had numerous issues with NAT in general over the years. ISP routers also often make fixing this an opaque or impossible problem for the user.

I don’t think IPv6 is the best thing ever, but I do think it solves the problems IPv4 did along with some annoying issues IPv4 struggled with.
by leptons | 2025-12-20 19:08:24+00:00
The levels described are actually pretty low. The "legal limit" is so low for THC that anyone who's had THC in the previous days could test positive, even if they aren't "high" at the time of driving. It isn't quite the same as the BAC legal limits for alcohol. And it doesn't account for body weight, tolerance, and other factors that definitely contribute to how a driver reacts no matter how long it's been since they consumed THC.

And the study doesn't seem to differentiate between the different types of THC either, some of which are not psychoactive at all and which people use to relieve pain and anxiety. There's quite a lot of people using non-psychoactive THC which wouldn't impair driving.
Show HN: Got tired of searching for AI news daily so I built my own AI news page
by lilsquid | 2025-12-20 19:08:25+00:00
HN is my homepage, and this site has inspired me throughout the years. I don't really know what I'm doing but I built DreyX.com from scratch as I got tired of searching for AI news all over the internet each day. Feel free to check it out and provide any sort of suggestions / feedback. Thanks!
by khufiya | 2025-12-20 19:08:30+00:00
I've been experimenting with using Claude Code and the Gemini CLI to generate OpenSCAD with the renderer in the loop.

https://github.com/rahulgarg123/openscad-mcp

It’s still strictly worse than what these models are capable of for general-purpose coding, but for simple tasks where precision isn't the bottleneck, it's surprisingly decent.The "aha" moment for me was an image-to-object workflow: found a geometric design on the web --> generated OpenSCAD to match the image --> 3D printed it. Going from seeing a JPEG to holding the physical object in a few hours.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 19:09:00+00:00
Human rights are for everyone, not just people you agree with. If you bring in censorship, surveillance and smother protest for people you disagree with, you will find it getting used against you yourself at some point. Europe has imported this false binary from the USA, and it is not benefitting it either.

The EU has its fair share of corruption, but it is is better at hiding it than developing countries. Its current president Ursula Von Der Leyen is a fraud who appears to have cheated at university, and only got to where she did due to wealth and aristocratic family connections.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-20 19:09:41+00:00
> I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC:

A lot of people are trying to debate the impairment threshold or argue about mean vs median, but 40% of deceased drivers having this much THC in their blood would be a notable result for basically any sample of people for anything other than a music festival or something.

The number of people age 12 or older who report any THC use at all, even once, in the past year is around 20% (or less depending on the survey). Having 40% of a group register levels this high is a very eye opening result.
by blincoln | 2025-12-20 19:09:44+00:00
Algorithms like AES-GCM are standards because - when used according to best practices - there are no known practical attacks against them.

If someone has an attack that would defeat the cryptographic protection in a particular piece of software, the software is likely doing one or more of the following:

* Not using a modern, well-tested algorithm (e.g. using DES, a hokey custom XOR stream cipher, AES-ECB, etc.).

* Not following general cryptographic best practices (e.g. hardcoded or predictable key/IV/nonce, insecure storage of keys).

* Not following best practices for the specific algorithm (e.g. using AES-GCM, but reusing a key/nonce combination; using AES-CBC without applying an integrity-protection mechanism).

* The software is doing something that doesn't make sense, cryptographically (e.g. using symmetric encryption to encrypt sensitive data, but the data and the keys are necessarily accessible to the same set of users/service accounts, so there's no net change in security).

If such an attack fails because a developer has made changes to the cryptographic algorithm, a motivated attacker is likely just going to look at the code in Ghidra, x64dbg, etc. and figure out how to account for the changes. It's not a strong security control. I've been decrypting content stored using that kind of software for something like 20 years.

The correct approach is to verify that the use of a particular type of cryptography makes sense in the first place, then use a well-tested modern algorithm and follow the current best practices. i.e. using code from years-old forum posts will likely result in an insecure product.
by eps | 2025-12-20 19:10:02+00:00
It's basically a form of reference-counted data access as I understand it.

If the code here operates with a bit of data from some container, the container will ensure that this bit will persist until all references to it are gone even if the bit is removed from the container.

Depending on the datamodel this may be handy or even required. Consider some sort of hot-swappable code when both retired and new code versions running in parallel at some point. That sort of thing.
by boob | 2025-12-20 19:10:02+00:00
> Can someone explain why it's ambiguous?

Because you don’t know how many zeroes are on each side around the 0001 in the middle.

It can be 2000:0000:1:0000:0000:0000:0000:1 or 2000:0000:0000:0000:0000:1:0000:1 etc.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-12-20 19:10:36+00:00
the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty. In most of the country, you are completely dependent on a car to hold down a job, get groceries and pretty much anything else. In most other countries, not having a car is a mild to moderate inconvenience you can work around.
by porkloin | 2025-12-20 19:11:14+00:00
Commenting off of you since I wrote all of this and then realized it's basically exactly what you're saying. But to +1 everything you just said in my own words:

I love OpenSCAD. I've been 3D printing for a while, but I never really got to a place where I could design interesting parts until I started to get the precision of doing models in code. Sometimes it is slower, for sure.

Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it. The input devices lack precision for that kind of task, and having to repeat the operation dozens of times (or bulk select) gave me a terrible sinking feeling, and I'd often just step away and give up on the design at that point out of frustration. I try to approach everything in OpensSCAD in a way that means I never have to experience that feeling again.

I will also say that doing everything from scratch in OpenSCAD would be it's own special kind of hell. Libraries like [BOSL2](https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2) provide a good set of core ideas and preferences that help set you on a good path. A good example: BOSL2 shapes tend to have a "center origin" by default, which is different than the OpenSCAD default, but makes doing transforms later way easier.

Anyway, happy to see OpenSCAD getting some attention here :)
by startupsfail | 2025-12-20 19:12:15+00:00
Wow, I'm looking at current "Open Shuttles", a license to use 4KB of SRAM in the project is $2500. But it comes with Wishbone Bus interface!

> 1024x32 Commercial SRAM > CF_SRAM_1024x32 > Commercial SRAM: 1024 words x > 32 bits (4KB) with Wishbone Bus interface > Area: 0.17mm² > GPIOs: 0 > License: Commercial - $2500 per project
by archargelod | 2025-12-20 19:12:27+00:00
> Nim "cheats" in a similar way C and C++ submissions do: -fno-signed-zeros -fno-trapping-math

I don't see these flags in Nim compilation config. The only extra option used is "-march=native"[0].

[0] https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/9681e8e...
by lamontcg | 2025-12-20 19:12:47+00:00
> Since COVID ...

I was noticing driving getting worse before COVID.

It is the plague of narcissism and individualism out there (which doesn't just affect "boomers" but also every millennial and zoomer that dreams of doing nothing other than becoming an "influencer" and posts their life on their Instagram).

Social media, low attention spans, cellphone and driving distractions, narcissism, and "fuck you, got mine" culture is going to wind up being to blame. It is a population-wide axis II personality disorder.
by laterium | 2025-12-20 19:13:07+00:00
The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response.

That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are

1) Don't ask, rely on yourself, definitely worse than asking a doctor

2) Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

3) Google it and spend hours sifting through sponsored posts and scams, often worse than relying on yourself.

The hallucinations that happen are massively outweighed by the benefits people get by asking them. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and LLMs are good enough.

Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests. Their mistakes are not intentional. They're fiduciaries in the best sense, just like doctors are, probably even more so.
by masswerk | 2025-12-20 19:13:15+00:00
Also, warnings for ambiguous results.

For example, when a process implies a conversion according to the contract/convention, but we know that this conversion may be not the expected result and the input may be based on semantic misconceptions. E.g., assemblers and contextually truncated values for operands: while there's no issue with the grammar or syntax or intrinsic semantics, a higher level misconception may be involved (e.g., regarding address modes), resulting in a correct but still non-functional output. So, "In this individual case, there may be or may be not an issue. Please, check. (Not resolvable on our end.)"

(Disclaimer: I know that this is a very much classic computing and that this is now mostly moved to the global TOS, but still, it's the classic example for a warning.)
by scott_w | 2025-12-20 19:13:31+00:00
A Django+Celery app behind Nginx back in the day. Most maintenance would be discovering a new failure mode:

- certificates not being renewed in time

- Celery eating up all RAM and having to be recycled

- RabbitMQ getting blocked requiring a forced restart

- random issues with Postgres that usually required a hard restart of PG (running low on RAM maybe?)

- configs having issues

- running out of inodes

- DNS not updating when upgrading to a new server (no CDN at the time)

- data centre going down, taking the provider’s email support with it (yes, really)

Bear in mind I’m going back a decade now, my memory is rusty. Each issue was solvable but each would happen at random and even mitigating them was time that I (a single dev) was not spending on new features or fixing bugs.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-20 19:13:43+00:00
I've never taken much of an interest in the chemtrail thing, but it does seem funny that governments are proposing to do more or less the same thing they denied doing!

I can't see this being the answer though. Maybe I'm wrong, but it wouldn't be the first time environmental measures have proven destructive. Some of the most invasive pests have been brought in to control a less invasive ones e.g. cane toads in Australia. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
by danaris | 2025-12-20 19:13:54+00:00
Well, yes. If the cable falls out of the server (or there's a power outage, or a major DDoS attack, or whatever), your users are going to experience that before you are aware of it. Especially if it's in the middle of the night and you don't have an active night shift.

Expecting arbitrary services to be able to deal with absolutely any kind of failure in such a way that users never notice is deeply unrealistic.
Show HN: SceneSynth – Text → scene graph → AI render, recursively
by lywald | 2025-12-20 19:13:56+00:00
Hey HN! I was frustrated from not being able to make my own RPG because level design is hard, so I built this 100% free tool to explore hierarchical worldbuilding with AI.

The key idea: every node in a scene graph can be expanded into its own detailed sub-graph, infinitely. Then Gemini's image model (Nano Banana) renders each level as actual artwork (you pick your style).

Requires a GCP account for image rendering — I know it's friction, but Vertex AI was the only way to get reliable image generation.

Feel free to use for your own projects or implement the concept better than I did.
by reactordev | 2025-12-20 19:14:17+00:00
Sadly, I tend to agree with you.

Anecdote, I'm a user, by choice, and by habit/addiction. I was first exposed to it through, oddly enough, martial arts as a young teen. The punk rock scene of the 90s didn't help much either. Both me and my ex-wife were what you would call "techno-hippies". We would smoke as much weed as we could, and I would code and she would do her thing (she was a biologist so I have no clue, something genes). We had a rhythm and we liked the high grade one hit and you're good kind of marijuana.

When 2018 came around, The Farm Bill (tm) passed and it loosened the terms of what "hemp" was. The budding cannabis industry saw this as an opportunity to mess with genetics. They discovered that if you harvest early, immediately freeze it, D9-THC doesn't convert from it's precursor - THC-A. So then they started shipping "hemp" in the form of THC-A all over the states. All you have to do to "finish" the process is to decarboxylate it into D9-THC. However, there's also D8-THC which doesn't get you nearly as "high" and only lasts minutes. It, too, can be frozen to prevent it from converting from it's precursor - THC-A... What?!? So you really don't know whether it's D8 or D9 from the dispensary (and neither do they) and the quality is all over the charts.

I think this is why it's affecting driving so much. People who are used to the smoke shop D8 weed get their hands on some real D9 and it blows their minds.

God I wish we had a breathalyzer test for D9-THC. Without it, it's going to get legislated to the point where you're on the disabled "can't drive or operate any machinery, ever" list. You already give up your right to own a gun when you sign up for medical marijuana. (and when buying one, it asks you if you use...)

I'm definitely for making the roads safer, but I'm also pro-rights and liberties so this one is hard for me. Yes, there should be some legislation around marijuana, no it shouldn't be a schedule I-III but looked at like hops and barley. Tax the shit out of it. Like you do cigarettes. Don't prevent me from driving because I smoked a cigarette.
by schrodinger | 2025-12-20 19:14:19+00:00
I see your point, but disagree on a practical level. Libraries are being used while you’re in “developer” mode, while programs are used in “user” mode (trying awkwardly to differentiate between _being_ a developer and currently developing code around that library.

Usually a program is being used by the user to accomplish something, and if logging is meaningful than either in a cli context or a server context. In both cases, errors are more often being seen by people/users than by code. Therefore printing them to logs make sense.

While a lib is being used by a program. So it has a better way to communicate problems with the caller (and exceptions, error values, choose the poison of your language). But I almost never want a library to start logging shit because it’s almost guaranteed to not follow the same conventions as I do in my program elsewhere. Return me the error and let me handle.

It’s analogous to how Go has an implicit rule of that a library should never let a panic occur outside the library. Internally, fine. But at the package boundary, you should catch panics and return them as an error. You don’t know if the caller wants the app to die because it an error in your lib!
by pests | 2025-12-20 19:14:30+00:00
That is basically what it is tho.

One difference is the model might have been trained/fine-tuned to be better at "read all the front-matters from a given folder on your filesystem and then decide..." compared a model with those instructions only in its context.

Also, does your method run scripts and code in any kind of sandbox or other containment or do you give it complete access to your system? #yolo