MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by panick21_ | 2025-12-23 09:38:21+00:00
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.

We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.

On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.

In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.

Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.

France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
by benterix | 2025-12-23 09:38:43+00:00
> When I pointed out that this is the work culture in most American corporations, I was told that is a feature, not a bug, because US government and most big tech at the time preached values in line with average white middle-class Californian.

It is a bit analogous to many of us worrying about Google and others getting so much power. The arguments were quickly dismissed with: "But these folks are responsible, don't be paranoid". The problem with this kind of thinking is, once the power balance changes, you find yourself in a situation you'd never put yourself now. You cannot make Google unlearn what they know about you. You cannot unsend the photos you privately shared on Messenger and force Meta to untrain their facial recognition models. Now all these things you considered a convenience given to you for free can be used against you, and the extend and direction of the abuse is correlated with who is in power.
by krapp | 2025-12-23 09:39:17+00:00
It only takes a few flags to be effective and there are definitely more than a few Trumpists on HN so theoretically yes. Could also be the likely much larger contingent of people who flag all "political" and "non-technical" content by default.

Like it or not Hacker News has never been (and will never be) a platform for free and open debate. It's designed around aggressive curation for quality over quantity and that makes it very easy to brigade by design.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-23 09:39:57+00:00
It's a while since I used Arch (apart from my Steam Deck, but that's a bit different as it's curated and has a read only root filesystem by default), so I've had a look around and I think I meant reading the "Latest News" at https://archlinux.org/

e.g.

> NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support; main packages switch to Open Kernel Modules

> 2025-12-20

> With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open.

> Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.

> Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

> Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.

> Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

> Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

Personally, I used to just run an upgrade and then go look for known problems if pacman threw an error. Of course, the recommendation is to have a good backup before running the upgrade and just roll it back if it has issues (then read the notes).

Edit: The warning is shown on the system maintenance page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance

> 3.1 Read before upgrading the system

> Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.
by Hikikomori | 2025-12-23 09:41:54+00:00
Some old DEC devices used to connect console ports of servers. Didn't need it per say but also didn't need to spend $3k on multiple new console routers.

Was an old isp/mobile carrier so could find all kinds of old stuff. Even the first SMSC from the 80s (also DEC, 386 or similar cpu?) was still in it's racks because they didn't need the rack space as 2 modern racks used up all the power for that room, was also far down in a mountain so was annoying to remove equipment.
by mrob | 2025-12-23 09:42:10+00:00
All wind instruments and all bowed string instruments produce a perfect harmonic series while emitting a steady tone. The most important difference between timbres of different instruments is in the attack, where inharmonic tones are also generated. Several old synths used this principle to greatly increase realism, by adding brief samples of attack transients to traditional subtractive synthesis, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_arithmetic_synthesis
by pjmlp | 2025-12-23 09:42:35+00:00
Well, it is kind of in line with company official communication anyway, so this goal is currently a business target,

> Decades of vulnerabilities have proven how difficult it is to prevent memory-corrupting bugs when using C/C++. While garbage-collected languages like C# or Java have proven more resilient to these issues, there are scenarios where they cannot be used. For such cases, we’re betting on Rust as the alternative to C/C++. Rust is a modern language designed to compete with the performance C/C++, but with memory safety and thread safety guarantees built into the language. While we are not able to rewrite everything in Rust overnight, we’ve already adopted Rust in some of the most critical components of Azure’s infrastructure. We expect our adoption of Rust to expand substantially over time.

-- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-secur...

> And, in alignment with the Secure Future Initiative, we are adopting safer programming languages, gradually moving functionality from C++ implementation to Rust.

-- https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...

> We will accelerate and automate threat modeling, deploy CodeQL for code analysis to 100 percent of commercial products, and continue to expand Microsoft’s use of memory safe languages (such as C#, Python, Java, and Rust), building security in at the language level and eliminating whole classes of traditional software vulnerability.

-- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/11/02/ann...

So naturally, there are many people that besides AI KPIs, now have to match their SFI KPIs at Redmond, including Mark Russinovich.

"Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO tells Rust Nation UK 2025 why Azure is moving to Rust from C++"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmUprpjCWjM

"Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges - Mark Russinovich"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgptLwP588

Naturally aiming at 2030 for the amount of existing C++ code is crazy, and there are groups within Microsoft, especially DirectX and Windows that most likely won't let go of their toys.
How best to use Browser/Chrome with Claude for testing and debugging
by jaigupta | 2025-12-23 09:44:21+00:00
During development or bug hunting, I would want Claude to use Chrome directly. It is very useful. Previously I used to use playwright-mcp and now using Claude Chrome extension.

However, using this eats up all the context. I tried creating an agent for this using model sonnet[1m] for it. This kind of works but agents ends up doing a lot more than just using Chrome. It forgets that it is supposed to complete the flow or view console logs, take screenshots and give complied result back but it rather starts working on the issue in hand. Maybe it is because of poorly written Agent or poorly written Claude.md.

How is everyone working with playwright-mcp/Claude Chrome?
by thinkingemote | 2025-12-23 09:44:23+00:00
These don't stick around on the front page for long. These get demoted automatically as they usually generate flame. Flame is calculated by comparing numbers of comments and voting patterns. Or users see them and flag them. Unless a moderator intervenes or the submission is Very Important (quite rare).

What often happens to not understanding how NH works is conspiracy theorising. I note that the user account age who submitted this question is only a year or so old which might indicate a gap in understanding how this place works.

Dang has a number of comments (find them using the search below) explaining all this better than I can :)
by jpc0 | 2025-12-23 09:44:51+00:00
I would guess solved but bot easy.

WebRTC makes it possible by timing is still limited to NTP who has is far above one sample, you couldn’t possibly get sample accurate playback but you could get it to within a mS or so.

Depending on how far away your sources are that might be fine, for instance two speakers in two rooms where you won’t get significant phase issues this is trivial to do(well trivial is an understatement but you can do it purely with web technologies).
by 5-0 | 2025-12-23 09:45:38+00:00
I suppose that depends on the use case.

For mash-ups specifically, using yt-dlp to download music and split into stems with Demucs, using the UVR frontend, before importing into a DAW is effortless. The catch is that you can't expect to get OK-ish separation on anything other than vocals and "other", which really isn't a problem for mash-ups.

https://github.com/Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui
by tietjens | 2025-12-23 09:45:41+00:00
You can down vote me but bump stocks are legal. The difference seems semantic.

There are many, many steps that could be taken in the USA to reduce access to weapons before reaching outright banning. Obviously.

And also the idea that banning handguns would be draconian is hilarious. Try talking to anyone from UK, ANZ, Europe, etc. No one is crying about too much regulation.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-23 09:46:07+00:00
It's damning for academia that on HN of all places, a forum filled with academics, this stuff has to be spelled out by outsiders. Once more unto the breach?

The rejection reason: "it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk."

What should scientific institutions do? Answer questions about the natural world honestly.

What should politicians do? Make policy tradeoffs informed by those answers and the preferences of the public.

What were the institutions actually doing? Hiding correct answers due to an ideological and pathologically strong preference for risk avoidance without any regard for cost.

> they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.

A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist. They never showed anything wrong with the science, they rejected it out of hand because they didn't like that it would support a libertarian conclusion. Even if they had invented such a bar, requiring weak evidence for policies you like and strong evidence for policies you dislike is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific intellectual fraud being criticized in the article.

COVID was full of this stuff. That event wasn't surprising, it was typical behavior of most "scientists".

You have to realize, that when the universities get disestablished, it'll be because of decades of discussions like this one. The correct response to that Twitter thread is to demand the journal be immediately shut down and that heads roll at the publisher. The wrong response is to say "of course we should block research that supports policies we dislike, why would anyone be against that?"
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 09:46:42+00:00
Their answer:

> If you are interested in how well we do compared to demucs in particular, we can use the MUSDB18 dataset since that is the domain that demucs is trained to work well on. There our net win rate against demucs is ~17%, meaning we do perform better on the MUSDB18 test set. There are actually stronger competitors on both this domain and our "in-the-wild" instrument stem separation domain that we built for SAM Audio Bench, but we either match or beat all of the ones we tested (AudioShake, LalalAI, MoisesAI, etc.)

So ~20% better than demucs, better than the ones they tested, but the acknowledge there are better models out there even today. So not sure "competes against SOTA models" is right, but "getting close to compete against SOTA models" might be more accurate.
by achillean | 2025-12-23 09:46:56+00:00
Searching for ALPR was also one of the popular early queries: https://github.com/jakejarvis/awesome-shodan-queries?tab=rea...

The old PIPS ALPR devices aren't online anymore but they had horrible security as well. Just sending a newline to their UDP port would cause them to send you all images as they were being collected in real-time - no authentication needed. And the images had the license plate information encoded in the JPG metadata. I did a talk about it at some point (https://imgur.com/HHcpJOr) and worked with EFF to take them offline
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-23 09:47:56+00:00
Yeah, I stopped using it myself as I didn't really need a bleeding edge system. It's actually surprising just how reliable Arch is - I think if you want to run it in production system, you don't bother doing a system upgrade without testing it first.

I do like the Arch wiki though - probably the best source of information on Linux tools etc.
by idle_zealot | 2025-12-23 09:48:48+00:00
Yeah, all too often discussion devolves into a religious war between free markets and regulation. Like they're somehow opposing forces. Markets are super cool and useful tools. Some regulation is good, some is bad, which exactly is which depends on your values and what you want to optimize for. Framing markets like they automatically do good, or ideas like "we need more regulation" or "we need fewer regulations" are all thought-terminating.

So far the DMA seems like a partial-win for technology users. I wish it enshrined the right to run software on your own computer in less ambiguous language, because as-is there are carve-outs that may let Apple get away with their core technology fee and mandatory app signing.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-12-23 09:49:03+00:00
Forums need to make a comeback. Kids these days not only don't know what they are, but have trouble understanding them when explained. I somehow feel like forums could catch on again if there were a shiny enough platform.

To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-23 09:49:15+00:00
That's easily concievable scenario. Which doesn't make it true or overwhelmingly significant to the bottom line. Many untrue things are equally easy to imagine.

What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?

Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).

My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.
Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
by nishilpatel | 2025-12-23 09:50:31+00:00
I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that:
1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely
2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures
3. Are well-structured and readable
4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 09:50:48+00:00
Is that hyperbole or do you have actual violent threats against you at this very moment? I'm not the US, so can't really tell what's going on on the ground, but compared to other situations (namely middle-east some years ago) where people are being told "Do this or you'll end up in that grave over there", is this what is happening in the US today?
by rikafurude21 | 2025-12-23 09:51:20+00:00
Recently bought an apple watch for my mom and got it set up with her iphone. Almost instantly she notices that she cant accept WhatsApp calls on her watch, and after looking into it I found out that it was another one of those apple things where they assume youre obviously using facetime so that functionality isnt available for any other app. For context, in europe Whatsapp is the dominating messaging app and alot of people use it for calling as well as messaging. The apple watch is, as far as I can tell, a simple Bluetooth wearable with a speaker and a microphone, so the only reason its like this is that apple has a concept of how the device is "supposed" to be used and only lets you use it that way. After that experience I fully support all the regulations the EU is putting on apple to open up.
by wink | 2025-12-23 09:53:03+00:00
If I want a bespoke table crafted by a woodworker I need to pay material and labor costs and thus it ends up costing quite a lot more than grabbing one at IKEA.

Most people would agree that for many criteria the more expensive one would be better than the mass-produced one, and yet we've long passed the age of "ask a local woodworker or do it yourself".

Maybe software is the same and shareware and indie software was just an outlier in the first place. spend a month building it, then make free copies and try to sell (labor costs) / (copies) because no one would pay just the labor costs.

But now where does FLOSS software come into the picture, competing with indie software on price (free), often quality (sometimes best in show), less of a bus factor (traditionally small indie teams) and repairability (the source code is there).

So yeah, maybe call me pessimistic or jaded or just an asshole, but there's a reason I have earned money writing software for about 25 years and never even thought about making and selling an indie product because I never felt it was feasible. Happy for all the people for whom it has worked so far.
by jwr | 2025-12-23 09:54:38+00:00
Yes! I forgot about this. The EU Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) effectively eliminated the high fixed minimum fees that previously made small-value card transactions unprofitable for merchants.

The net effect of this is that in Poland, for example, you can carry your phone and no wallet, because you can pay literally for everything using your phone. And I do mean everything, I've recently been to a club in Warsaw and the cloakroom had a terminal mounted on the wall, people just tapped their phones.
Show HN: White Collar Agent = a computer-use AI agent with TUI interface
by zfoong | 2025-12-23 09:56:17+00:00
Happy to announce that we have just launched White Collar Agent — an open-source general computer-use AI agent that helps you automate computer-based tasks with a TUI interface (https://github.com/zfoong/WhiteCollarAgent).

The agent can autonomously interpret your instructions, plan actions, and execute tasks to achieve a wide range of automation goals. The code also serves as a foundation for building your own AI agents. It can perform web tasks and automate OS operations like high-volume repetitive work and batch processing.

Want to translate a whole directory of documents into Japanese? Organize a messy folder of files based on what is inside each file? Scan a folder of images and auto-generate captions for each one? These are tasks that can be easily automated by White Collar Agent.

P.S. You are free to use, host, and even monetize White Collar Agent. If you are an AI engineer or builder, there is a custom agent layer that lets you create a specialized agent you can host. All you have to do is inject the agent’s identity and custom tools.

The GUI mode is still in the experimental phase. If you have any experience developing a GUI agent, we invite you to work together (please reach out to us!).
by neya | 2025-12-23 09:56:32+00:00
Yesterday, I was trying to get a voice memo out of my Apple watch - on which the recording was made. I switched from Apple last year. My cousin had an iPhone. Apple would not let me transfer the voice memo out of their eco-system. It's not on my iCloud and the watch can no longer be paired with any other iOS device (even temorarily with authentication to transfer a file)...unless the iPhone is registered to me. This is malicious compliance in the name of security.

And mind you, I own 3 Apple devices - 2 Macs and 1 iPad and the watch can't connect to any of those. I must be forced to buy a $1000 device just because I made the mistake of recording something on their watch. We need more regulation because of things like this and I would absolutely hate to live in a society where this is the norm.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-23 09:57:21+00:00
I did not say tomorrow. It will definitely take time.

What I'm opposing is flippantly relegating a new technology with real benfits, that the largest manufacturer of lithium batteries is significantly betting on, to the 0.01% of the market.

You say 0.01%, largest manufacturer of lithium batteries says 50%. If you meet half way it's still about 25% which is significant.

https://undecidedmf.com/why-the-biggest-battery-company-is-b...
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-23 09:57:21+00:00
Every piece of USA tech has a data path back to USA -- who are actively threatening a bunch of countries right now.

The obvious corollary is that Canada, Greenland & Denmark (Panama, Venezuela, etc. too) and all their allies should get rid of all Windows computers, all Apple phones, all Tesla, etc, etc.

It's hard to imagine USA are not planning attacks right now using these tech vectors, given this threat model is being defended against in this way.

It was as equally clever as it was evil to put pressure on us to ditch Chinese tech, so USA can now attack us.