MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gardncl | 2025-12-22 21:44:50+00:00
That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.

Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage

A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c
by pheggs | 2025-12-22 21:45:46+00:00
it could very well be that it backfires. I guess time will tell. A lot of his actions seem to be trimmed into this direction, and it's not a new one. He left the paris climate agreement quite a while back as far as I remember. blocking offshore wind construction just fits this agenda, as supporting companies to manufacture these windmills would just make everything cheaper (more demand, rising production capacity etc.) and demonstrate actual use of it.

At least that's how I see this.
by scottyah | 2025-12-22 21:46:18+00:00
If I had money, I'd start to set up free after-school tutoring/play areas.
I'd love to open a new business of a dog park that sells coffee in the morning, and beer in the afternoon/evening. A small amount of nice workstations for people to get some work/studying done.
If I never got into tech- well I was going to be a Materials Engineer, but if I were a tradesman I'd probably be an electrician because of my superiority complex, lack of craftsman-level hand-eye coordination, and I like expensive tools.
by canyp | 2025-12-22 21:46:28+00:00
You're being unfair and need to get off your high horse or your wheelchair. I'm sure the accessibility can be iterated upon the basics of UI, not have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch; this tutorial only covers the basics, can't blame OP for that.

Rather, why don't you make your comment constructive and tell us about accessibility? I am sure there is an "accessibility for noobs" tutorial out there that the rest of us haven't discovered. I, for one, just recently learned about colour blindness in games and was absolutely mad when I saw what the example game in the book looks like to a colour-blind person. Not that I'm much of a designer, but I'll be sure to choose a universally-good colour palette next time I do any UI. So teach us instead of yelling at us.
by brikym | 2025-12-22 21:46:49+00:00
It can go wrong. I had a horrible experience with StackGres. I read a lot of positive things about CloudNativePG though.
I can see where people with startups are coming from not wanting to manage database plumbing so they can focus on real business tasks. I think that's fine as long as there is a path to self-host after some growth. I might do some event-sourcing myself so that databases are effectively materialized views easy to add and remove.
by scheme271 | 2025-12-22 21:47:00+00:00
The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds. So, water utilization from the Great Lakes is constrained. The Wisconsin Foxconn project was a PR thing on both sides. Foxconn started scaling back it's promises and construction almost immediately after the agreement was signed. Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.
by mopsi | 2025-12-22 21:47:11+00:00
Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.

The belief that a central "digital planning engine" could plan the lives of an entire society is an incredibly naive idea from early cybernetics. This doesn't work even in small thought experiments because of information limits. No central system can access all the local knowledge and constantly changing circumstances.
by paraknight | 2025-12-22 21:47:50+00:00
What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren't cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.

They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.

Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-22 21:48:01+00:00
> imagine what DARPA and the like have been doing for the past 20 years.

People always say this, but anyone I know who's ever worked in one of these companies that contracts for the DoD or DARPA always complains about how behind the market government tech is. Obviously private industry isn't producing competitors to the F35, but for less complicated kit the government doesn't seem to be doing anything super sophisticated. In fact a bunch of people I knew who went to Iraq bought supplemental gear on the private market.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-22 21:48:04+00:00
The "standard" answer is that you should either use synced passkeys, or enroll multiple passkeys with the provider. The problem is that some providers (e.g. Paypal, some banks) only support one passkey, and synced passkeys aren't supposed to be trusted for attestation (unless they're synced by Apple/Google/Microsoft).
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-22 21:48:36+00:00
I think this space is just about to get really interesting. Historically when a craft/skill becomes automated it pushes that craft/skill to explore all those nooks and crannies which the automation can not reach, build around and exploit all those nooks and crannies, giving them a say over form and function. We are just starting to see this happen in software with AI.
by mbreese | 2025-12-22 21:49:06+00:00
I’m not worried about the LLM getting offended if I don’t write complete sentences. I’m worried about not getting good results back. I haven’t tested this, and so I could be wrong, but I think a better formed/grammatically correct prompt may result in a better output. I want to say the LLM will understand what I want better, but it has no understanding per se, just a predictive response. Knowing this, I want to get the best response back. That’s why I try to have complete sentences and good (ish) grammar. When I start writing rushed commands back, I feel like I’m getting rushed responses back.

I also tell the LLM “thank you, this looks great” when the code is working well. I’m not expressing my gratitude… I’m reinforcing to the model that this was a good response in a way it was trained to see as success. We don’t have good external mechanisms to give reviews to an LLM that isn’t based on language.

Like most of the LLM space, these are just vibes, but it makes me feel better. But it has nothing to do with thinking the LLM is a person.
by stoev | 2025-12-22 21:49:07+00:00
Any ideas how the signal is transmitted once the drone is underwater? Typical RC transmitters run 2.4 GHz. Some systems use 700 MHz. The former wouldn't penetrate at all, the latter might penetrate to a shallow depth, but I think that what's shown in the video is deep enough that the signal would get attenuated. There doesn't seem to be a tether and the drone doesn't seem to have any computer vision capabilities to fly itself whilst under water. I wonder how they solved this.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-12-22 21:49:22+00:00
I would probably be a NEET without partner and kids.
I really like computers and it's what pulled me out of online multiplayer games.
Without them,I would probably have succumbed to my high school burnout and not made any progress academically or professionally.

Nowadays, probably something in finances, I realized I could have enjoyed accounting or some work related to business finances, but this is something I learned while working, not before.
by blibble | 2025-12-22 21:49:22+00:00
> I never saw a need for this in HFT. In my experience, GPS was used instead, but there was never any critical need for microsecond accuracy in live systems.

mifid ii (uk/eu) minimum is 1us granularity

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
Show HN: The SkiBlackBox–100% offline AI ski coach, zero data leaves your phone
by skicoachapp | 2025-12-22 21:49:48+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m a solo developer from Austria. After 18 months, I built SkiCoach - an AI ski coaching app based on a simple philosophy: your data is yours.
The Black Box Concept:
Like an airplane black box, the app records everything - GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer - but nothing ever leaves your device. No cloud sync. No accounts. No tracking. Full AI processing happens on-device.
What it does:
∙ Analyzes ski technique via phone sensors (phone stays in pocket)
∙ Real-time audio coaching while skiing
∙ Technique score 0-100 per run
∙ Auto-detects when you start skiing (>10km/h + altitude >1000m)
∙ Works completely offline (no signal needed on mountain)
Tech:
∙ Flutter (iOS + Android)
∙ TensorFlow Lite for on-device AI
∙ 4 languages (EN/DE/FR/IT)
Business model:
One-time €19.99 purchase. No subscription. I believe ski apps shouldn’t cost €25/year forever.
More on the philosophy: theskiblackbox.com
Live on iOS, Android this week: skicoach.app
Would love feedback from skiers and privacy-focused folks.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-12-22 21:50:12+00:00
I read this article back when I was learning the basics of transformers; the visualizations were really helpful. Although in retrospect knowing how a transformer works wasn't very useful at all in my day job applying LLMs, except as a sort of deep background for reassurance that I had some idea of how the big black box producing the tokens was put together, and to give me the mathematical basis for things like context size limitations etc.

I would strongly caution anyone who thinks that they will be able to understand or explain LLM behavior better by studying the architecture closely. That is a trap. Big SotA models these days exhibit so much nontrivial emergent phenomena (in part due to the massive application of reinforcement learning techniques) that give them capabilities very few people expected to ever see when this architecture first arrived. Most of us confidently claimed even back in 2023 that, based on LLM architecture and training algorithms, LLMs would never be able to perform well on novel coding or mathematics tasks. We were wrong. That points towards some caution and humility about using network architecture alone to reason about how LLMs work and what they can do. You'd really need to be able to poke at the weights inside a big SotA model to even begin to answer those kinds of questions, but unfortunately that's only really possible if you're a "mechanistic interpretability" researcher at one of the major labs.

Regardless, this is a nice article, and this stuff is worth learning because it's interesting for its own sake! Right now I'm actually spending some vacation time implementing a transformer in PyTorch just to refresh my memory of it all. It's a lot of fun! If anyone else wants to get started with that I would highly recommend Sebastian Raschka's book and youtube videos as way into the subject: https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch .

Has anyone read TFA author Jay Alammar's book (published Oct 2024) and would they recommend it for a more up-to-date picture?
by xorvoid | 2025-12-22 21:50:25+00:00
"Memory Safe
No garbage collector, no manual memory management. A work in progress, though."

I wish them the best, but until they have a better story here I'm not particularly interested.

Much of the complexity in Rust vs simplicity in Go really does come down to this part of the design space.

Rust has only succeeded in making a Memory Safe Language without garbage collection via significant complexity (that was a trade-off). No one really knows a sane way to do it otherwise, unless you also want to drop the general-purpose systems programming language requirement.

I'll be Very Interested if they find a new unexplored point in the design space, but at the moment I remain skeptical.

Folks like to mention Ada. In my understanding, Ada is not memory safe by contemporary definitions. So, this requires relaxing the definition. Zig goes in this direction: "let's make it as safe as possible without being an absolutist"
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-22 21:50:28+00:00
> The water in the great lakes is controlled by an international compact that prevents water from being diverted from the Great Lakes to other watersheds.

Who said anything about diverting it? Pump cold water out, store hot water until it cools to ambient temps, then dump it back in the lake.

> Scott Walker needed good PR and promised huge tax credits without much in the way of assurances.

Yeah, this is my point, the state wasn't actually prepared to see the deal through despite nominally being industry friendly vs Arizona where they have some follow through.
by exabrial | 2025-12-22 21:51:21+00:00
I actually believe the radar surveillance excuse (on a technicalities only), if that's what this is going to come down to. The ocean is a big empty place and prime for picking up radar reflections as the background is pretty quiet.

However... how on earth was this not identified like 10 years ago way before these projects were even started? Seems pretty obvious in hindsight.
by rvz | 2025-12-22 21:51:34+00:00
Their internals are just as relevant (now even more relevant) as any other technology as they always need to be improved to the SOTA (state of the art) meaning that someone has to understand their internals.

It also means more jobs for the people who understand them at a deeper level to advance the SOTA of specific widely used technologies such as operating systems, compilers, neural network architectures and hardware such as GPUs or TPU chips.

Someone has to maintain and improve them.
by knotimpressed | 2025-12-22 21:52:06+00:00
I was thinking about that while reading; in some ways I think this reality is on a worse track than Little Brother's. In the book, schools were using gait analysis because of privacy concerns about facial recognition. In reality, facial recognition seems to be able to be adopted by schools with little pushback.

I hope we all crawl out of the pot before we're turned into frog soup.
by holg | 2025-12-22 21:52:24+00:00
Oh well, it is open source, you are welcome to have a look..
the web part is done in Leptos, the 3D part in Bevy.
Most of it (as much as possible, to share across) is simple Rust.
pyo3 makes it the python-module
uniffi makes the bindings, to Swift/Kotlin
the adaption of it even for CangJue (the Huawei HarmonyOs)
So basically well known and very good Open Source
For wasm to mention, i use wasm-split (the bevy part is quite big and loaded optionally, something like pdf exporter as well should go like this)
Brotli compression is very much recommended, specifically for bevy and font stuff, where it shines compared to zip (sth like 55% savings on zip, but 70% with brotli)
by silverquiet | 2025-12-22 21:52:34+00:00
The hip seems like such a bad example to me. First of all, who do you think needs hip replacements? It's not young people; surgeons don't even like to do them on young people (and to a joint replacement surgeon, "young" is under 60) since there's a good chance they'll outlive the joint itself. And it's a one-time cost for a surgery that increases an old person's independence vs an ongoing cost of palliative care (whatever that means) and having to provide more care for someone who has a potentially treatable disability. Hip replacement is considered "the surgery of the century" - the 20th century that is, because it is one of the most successful in terms of function and satisfaction provided to patients.
by ajross | 2025-12-22 21:52:57+00:00
Yes, where practical. Though recognize that by their very nature web apps aren't part of the trust network. The browser and security stack can make a key for them to use, but it's not possible to be sure that the user of that key is not subject to attack at the backend (or even front end, really the best you can do there is XSS protection, which is hardly at the standard of "crytographically secure").

And likewise you as the app vendor can know the key was generated, and that it works, but you can't[1] know that it's actually locked to a device or that it's non-exportable. You could be running in a virtualized environment that logged everything.

Basically it's not really that useful. Which is sort of true for security hardware in general. It's great for the stuff the device vendors have wired up (which amounts to "secured boot", "identifying specific known devices" and "validating human user biometrics on a secured device"), but not really extensible in the way you'd want it to be.

[1] Within the bounds of this particular API, anyway. There may be some form of vendor signing you can use to e.g. verify that it was done on iOS or ChromeOS or some other fully-secured platform. I honestly don't know.
by observationist | 2025-12-22 21:53:41+00:00
Grok 4 Heavy wasn't considered in comparisons.
Grok meets or exceeds the same benchmarks that Gemini 3 excels at, saturating mmlu, scoring highest on many of the coding specific benchmarks. Overall better than Claude 4.5, in my experience, not just with the benchmarks.

Benchmarks aren't everything, but if you're going to contrast performance against a selection of top models, then pick the top models? I've seen a handful of companies do this, including big labs, where they conveniently leave out significant competitors, and it comes across as insecure and petty.

Claude has better tooling and UX. xAI isn't nearly as focused on the app and the ecosystem of tools around it and so on, so a lot of things end up more or less an afterthought, with nearly all the focus going toward the AI development.

$300/month is a lot, and it's not as fast as other models, so it should be easy to sell GLM as almost as good as the very expensive, slow, Grok Heavy, or so on.

GLM has 128k, grok 4 heavy 256k, etc.

Nitpicking aside, the fact that they've got an open model that is just a smidge less capable than the multibillion dollar state of the art models is fantastic. Should hopefully see GLM 4.7 showing up on the private hosting platforms before long. We're still a year or two from consumer gear starting to get enough memory and power to handle the big models. Prosumer mac rigs can get up there, quantized, but quantized performance is rickety at best, and at that point you look at the costs of self hosting vs private hosts vs $200/$300 a month (+ continual upgrades)

Frontier labs only have a few years left where they can continue to charge a pile for the flagship heavyweight models, I don't think most people will be willing to pay $300 for a 5 or 10% boost over what they can run locally.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-12-22 21:53:43+00:00
>Look man, life was unironically just better for everyone back in the 90s.

It was not. Programmers were not buying Porches and living in luxury neighborhoods or retiring early.

Watch Office Space. Being a programmer was a low status, averagely paying job.

Was life better back in the 90s for the average programmer? Maybe? Housing was certainly cheaper, I'll give you that. But for exceptional engineers was it better?

Did programmers show up to work to have a barista make them a gourmet coffee, have catered lunches, free massages, all the meanwhile getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars extra per year in RSUs? I don't think so.

There's no way an exceptional engineer had a better quality of life in the 90s than they would today. There was no FAANG, no deca-corns, no big tech giving near as many perks and comp. It just wasn't comparable.
by dan-robertson | 2025-12-22 21:54:04+00:00
This just seems pretty wrong. Obviously there were also lots of bad things the Americans did, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t attempting to realize those ideals. The US was quite influential in ending colonialism by Britain and France across much of the world after WWII for example. The US also helped to set up west Germany and Japan as liberal democracies after the war (they certainly weren’t before or during it, and Britain and France were not so fond of helping Germany recover), as well as helping German reunification (again opposed by France and Britain) and post-Soviet states with their recovery (sure, in all these cases the thing that was good for realizing these values was also good in the long run for the US (especially its Cold War political goals) and the affected countries but I don’t think that’s a very good argument that the US doesn’t care about these values).

I think there’s a lot of nuance here, and you have not expressed nuanced or detailed opinions in this thread, so I’m a bit curious about what your actual claims are, but I’m also not particularly interested in debating them.
by remus | 2025-12-22 21:54:33+00:00
In a similar vein, I really struggle to understand why copilot is so crap when writing SQL and I'm connected to the database. The database has so much context (schema names, column names, constraints etc.) yet copilot regularly hallucinates the most basic stuff like table and column names, which standard auto complete has managed fine for the last 20+ years.
by quuxplusone | 2025-12-22 21:55:22+00:00
What is the "this platform" mentioned three times in the post? It reads like it was intended to be posted on Twitter, or someone's Mastodon, or Tumblr, or something, instead of on that absurdpirate.com domain (which doesn't look like a "platform" to me).

Whatever "this platform" is, it's apparently run by someone named Herman.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-22 21:56:41+00:00
Communism doesn't entail owning nothing or being able to produce nothing. It often even has a concept of money to trade for goods and services.

So you could take your earnings, buy some yarn, knit your friend a scarf, and there's no real change in societies.

The difference is that you'd get your money from a state run industry. Your home would be guaranteed. And where you ultimately end up working would be based on your capabilities.

You are free to knit or whittle gifts for friends. What you wouldn't be free to do is setup "mopsi's scarf business" without working through the state. You wouldn't be allowed to take the earning from "mopsi's scarf business" and use them to become a landlord. You could gain social status and benefits by running the scarf business, but those would be limited (barring corruption).

When I say "a communist society collectively owns everything" I'm talking mainly businesses, land, housing.

A mistake that people often make about communism is thinking it means "Everything is free" or "nobody owns anything". That's more of a collectivist approach. Communism is mostly centered around providing minimum guarantees through public ownership.
by lame-robot-hoax | 2025-12-22 21:56:45+00:00
Grok, in my experience, is extremely prone to hallucinations when not used for coding. It will readily claim to have access to internal Slack channels at companies, it will hallucinate scientific papers that do not exist, etc. to back its claims.

I don’t know if the hallucinations extend to code, but it makes me unwilling to consider using it.