MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-12-21 22:25:21+00:00
You don't use ponds, you run the desalination to as strong as practical and follow up with either electrolysis or distillation of the brine.

But once summer electricity becomes cheap enough due to solar production increasing to handle winter heating loads with the (worse) winter sun, we can afford a lot of electrowinning of "ore" which can be pretty much sea salt or generic rock at that point.

Form Energy is working on grid scale iron air batteries which use the same chemistry as would be used for (excess/spare) solar powered iron ore to iron metal refining.

AFAIK the coal powered traditional iron refining ovens are the largest individual machines humanity operates. (Because if you try to compare to large (ore/oil) ships, it's not very fair to count their passive cargo volume; and if comparing to offshore oil rigs, and including their ancillary appliances and crew berthing, you'd have to include a lot of surrounding infrastructure to the blast furnace itself.)

It will take coal becoming expensive for it's CO2 before we really stop coal fired iron blast furnaces. And before then it's hard to compete even at zero cost electricity when accounting for the duty cycle limitations of only taking curtailed summer peaks.
by joshka | 2025-12-21 22:25:36+00:00
A hill that I'll die on is that Apple's terminology is more correct than PC terminology for this.

Backspace makes sense if you see the computer as a fancy typewriter.

Delete makes sense if you consider the actions from first principles.

Consider the various forms of deletion (forward, backward, word, file deletion, etc.) Each of these just has a modifier key in Apple's way of thinking. (None, Fn, Option, Cmd) which makes complete sense when viewed against how consistent it is with the whole set of interface design guidelines for Apple software.

The only reason that this doesn't make sense is that it's incompatible with your world view brought from places with different standards. They will never "fix" this as there's just nothing to fix.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-21 22:25:39+00:00
Nice, that makes sense. I'm always curious when I hear about other giant Excel monoliths still in use if they're truly a huge tangled web of formulas, or more like a VB6 program stapled to some worksheets that can be distributed as a single .xlsm file like ours.

You're definitely right that 99% of Excel users have no idea that an entire IDE is lurking in the background with Alt-F11 and wouldn't even know where to begin to do a simple fix/tweak. Whereas even a complex formula can at least be mentally parsed as a math equation with some strange ALLCAPS() names scattered throughout, or copy/pasted into Google/an LLM to get started, so much more discoverable than VBA.

Not to mention that the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time while regular Excel is actively maintained.

I've explored pulling out all the critical business logic currently in VBA and having Claude Code rewrite to VB.NET that can be called from Excel to gradually phase out VBA for maintainability. But unfortunately despite VBA essentially driving everything, it's tightly coupled to the Excel spreadsheet data model. So I'd have to use a .NET library to emulate the Excel worksheet functions, or pretty much do a full rewrite to use modern .NET methods for the in-memory data manipulation stuff.

Without good visibility into the Excel side of the VBA, Claude Code/Gemini CLI were just flailing so I abandoned that idea for now until I can find a solid conversion path.
by xboxnolifes | 2025-12-21 22:26:02+00:00
LLM hate for use in art has been pretty mainstream from the start. The difference in criticism between use in code generation and use in art generation is palpable. I dont think anyone took kindly to the discourse of movie producers buying actor likeness rights and having perpetually young old actors for all future movies.

Programmers criticized the code output. Artists and art enjoyers criticized cutting out the artist.
by turtletontine | 2025-12-21 22:26:19+00:00
I’m the kind of nerd who enjoys the surprising nitty gritty details, so I enjoyed the rest of the article and I’d recommend people read it.

But I agree with you: the AARP is 100% right to be running PSAs like this. I’d be curious to hear more about how a shadow economy like this would/would not help unbanked people, which he implies but did not describe at all. But it certainly doesn’t change the point that gift cards are an effective vehicle for fraud, and anytime someone asks to pay you (or especially you to pay them) in gift cards… your scam senses should tingle.
by asdff | 2025-12-21 22:26:20+00:00
They don't want just a house though. They want a house in a "cool" area. Look at median home prices in rust belt cities. Mortgages around $2k a month or so. Very doable for a lot of people but you never hear a drum beat about this. You never hear about people moving to these cities unless they have family there already to remind them that, hey, this is in fact a great deal.
by baq | 2025-12-21 22:27:47+00:00
bit the bullet this week and paid for a month of claude and a month of chatgpt plus. claude seems to have much lower token limits, both aggregate and rate-limited and GPT-5.2 isn't a bad model at all. $20 for claude is not enough even for a hobby project (after one day!), openai looks like it might be.
by morpheos137 | 2025-12-21 22:28:24+00:00
It appeals to sophomoric modern atheists who can't comprehend that infinity and nothing exists at the same time. People seek a reason "why" not realizing the question is the answer. The universe exists because 'why not?' because Infinity seeks to prevail over nothing. Nothing strikes at the heel of infinity. The truth is not in these lines or that theory but betwixt here and there and once "you" realize it, it realizes "you." Because it is you and you are it for it is itself. This may sound like my mumbo jumbo woo but once you know it knows you know it knows you know.
by lovich | 2025-12-21 22:29:07+00:00
I only felt the empathy someone can have when they have also lived through the same events, for all the zoomers graduating into the post Covid job market.

Millennials and younger are all fucked for the same reasons and are going to continue getting fucked over unless some revolutionary change happens.

We’ll also be in this together as we watch our boomer/genx parents burn up the last of any existing generational wealth sitting comatose in a nursing home because they refused to accept that they will actually die some day, and so made no plans for it
by nemothekid | 2025-12-21 22:29:46+00:00
Ignoring the fact that the assumption that you will automatically have as good or better uptime than a cloud provider, I just feel like you just simply aren't being thoughtful enough with the comparison. Like in what world is payroll not as important as your DBMS - if you can't pay people you don't have a business!

If your payroll processor screws up and you can't pay your employees or contractors, that can also affect your bottom line. This isn't a hypothetical - this is a real thing that happened to companies that used Rippling.

If your payroll processor screws up and you end up owing tens of thousands to ex-employees because they didn't accrue vacation days correctly, that can squeeze your business. These are real things I've seen happen.

Despite these real issues that have jammed up businesses before rarely do people suggest moving payroll in-house. Many companies treat Payroll like cloud, with no need for multi-year contracts, Gusto lets you sign up monthly with a credit card and you can easily switch to rippling or paychex.

What I imagine is you are innately aware of how a DBMS can screw up, but not how complex payroll can get. So in your world view payroll is a solved problem to be outsourced, but DBMS is not.

To me, the question isn't whether or not my cloud provider is going to have perfect uptime. The assumption that you will achieve better uptime and operations than cloud is pure hubris; it's certainly possible, but there is nothing inherent about self-hosting that makes it more resilient. The question is your use case differentiated enough where something like RDS doesn't make sense. If it's not, your time is better spent focused on your business - not setting up dead man switches to ensure your database backup cron is running.
by subdavis | 2025-12-21 22:30:05+00:00
> And you expect that this whole process will have saved you time, while you play games?

The topic in question is “Can AI tools do a task that would take a human 4 hours”. Not whether it can do that in a way that leads to maintainability or sustained learning. I’m noodling on a hobby project as leisure time. I got what I wanted. I had fun.

> incur future costs for not understanding it as it fails to act as you expect

That is your stronger argument. I’ve seen quality problems with the search results that come from using a smaller embedding model than I should. I don’t know yet if that’s a blocker or tolerable.

But I think that argument would be wrong too, because I’m very glad I chose Claude. The biggest limitation might be that I don’t have the compute locally to run an embedding model good enough to achieve decent results. It would have been a huge waste of my time to build it by hand and discover that at the end. I’m not about to pay for a sass vector DB or run this in AWS. At that level of effort I’d just scrap it.
by asdff | 2025-12-21 22:30:07+00:00
Everytime someone says something like "how can I bring a kid into this world" I assume they know absolutely nothing about history at all. Be thankful your ancestors didn't think that when they were faced with actual life and death on the line, versus these people today being miffed that their apartment isn't as large as they'd like or they have to commute a little farther in or live in a city not featured in mass media.
by rmoriz | 2025-12-21 22:30:40+00:00
afaik that's +VAT and also for LIRs only. LIRs apply markup, see https://www.lir.services/lir-sponsoring/ they charge 200€ per resource, so ASN + PI would be at last 400€/year that's way above the price of ARIN and you have a middleman.

You must have a sponsoring LIR for your resources or become a LIR yourself. The only exception is LEGACY resources (IPv4, no ASN) but that's a different story.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-21 22:30:54+00:00
This is a project between me and Claude, so yeah :)

It's a fun project for me right now. I want to just explore compiler writing. I'm not 100% sure where it will lead, and if anyone will care or not where it ends up. But it's primarily for me.

I've described it as "higher than Rust, lower than Go" because I don't want this to be a GC'd language, but I want to focus on ergonomics and compile times. A lot of Rust's design is about being competitive with C and C++, I think by giving up that ultra-performance oriented space, I can make a language that's significantly simpler, but still plenty fast and nice to use.

We'll see.
by 9dev | 2025-12-21 22:31:34+00:00
> With TPM enabled you finally give up the last bit of control you had over the software running on your hardware.

The overwhelming majority of users never had any kind of control over the software running on their hardware, because they don’t know (and don’t want to know) how the magical thinking machine works. These people will benefit from a secure subsystem that the OS can entrust with private key material. I absolutely see your point, but this will improve the overall security of most people.
by tombert | 2025-12-21 22:31:49+00:00
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.

An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
by SiempreViernes | 2025-12-21 22:32:11+00:00
If Mullvad could bother to link to this supposed "Presidency outcome paper" that would be great, after extensive searches on Concilium and eur-lex I have no idea what that is supposed to reference.

In any case here's the actual "ProtectEU" text the Comission sent on the first of April which contains most of the text Mullvad is quoting from the "presidency outcome paper": https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

As a bonus, here's input report listing the problems that are supposed to be solved: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/document/download/05963640...

This is from the introduction:

> Access to this data is understood as access granted to law enforcement subject to judicial authorisation when required, in the context of criminal investigations and on a case-by-case basis. As a rule, in the cases where such judicial authorisation is necessary due to the sensitive nature of the data in question, it represents an integral part of the applicable legal and operational framework for facilitating access to this data by law enforcement. Access to data on behalf of law enforcement authorities must be achieved in full respect of data protection, privacy, and cybersecurity legislation, as well as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) case-law on these matters and applicable standards on procedural safeguards.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-21 22:32:24+00:00
Rue author here, yeah I'm not the hugest fan of "low level vs high level" framing myself, because there are multiple valid ways of interpreting it. As you yourself demonstrate!

As some of the larger design decisions come into place, I'll find a better way of describing it. Mostly, I am not really trying to compete with C/C++/Rust on speed, but I'm not going to add a GC either. So I'm somewhere in there.
by abe_m | 2025-12-21 22:33:16+00:00
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
by muzani | 2025-12-21 22:33:22+00:00
On one hand, analytics is similar to astrology. You observe real phenomena and draw lines. A lot of inaccuracy comes from the exclusion of delays.

Like if I removed the logout button, how would that affect churn? This is a question better answered by instinct than analytics.

On the other hand, analytics acts as a form of QA. I think this is the true value. But it should be in the form of flagging when quality drops, not being used to decide which corners to cut.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-21 22:33:27+00:00
> I miss the days when personal computers were simply tools, akin to pencils and handheld calculators.

> System 7 and Windows 95

If Windows 95 was the complexity level of a pencil to you, Win 10/11 is merely a color pencil. You should be fine getting rid of the nagging and adapting it to your needs, it hasn't become 10x or 100x more complex, merely incrementally more.

> Microsoft [...] not exploiting their platforms.

That's a phrase I didn't expect. What part of Microsoft do you feel was leaving money on the table, as they were sued by basically the whole globefor their business practices ?
by defrost | 2025-12-21 22:33:33+00:00
Simon Dean did a 14 minute break down:

Is This Australia’s Most Easily Hacked Gift Card? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBarXDL23hs

of how thieves were abusing gift cards by imaging them in stores, waiting until purchased and "holding" value, then extracting that value with a little bit of cracking bad security
by Nasrudith | 2025-12-21 22:34:05+00:00
There would need to be some form of punishment towards them for their failure to deter them.

The most 'accessible' options to a disgruntled populace (or a small portion of it, down to N=1) are generally recognized as extreme things that very few sane people are on board with, because they are recognized widely as bad precedents for societies. Things like issuing death threats, assassinations, or burning down parliament buildings. To state what I hope is already obvious - this is not an endorsement of violence. For one Japan's history of 'government by assassination' was incredibly ugly and helped lead to extremism which helped lead to Imperial Japan's conduct becoming notorious as they did.

There are other far more peaceful options to be considered but they would require high degrees of coordination and agreement. For an example, the classic Amish shunning - if legislatures faced utter social ostracism for their attempts then they would be unlikely to attempt it again.

I'm not sure what policies could even provoke such extreme responses as those listed (violent or otherwise) in the first place, but for better or worse Chat Control isn't one of them. My most realistic guess would be that trying to abolish the pension/retirement system altogether.
by asdff | 2025-12-21 22:34:17+00:00
My advice would be to keep up with a schedule that still keeps you pretty busy and ideally waking up early at regular hours. Once you hit actual rock bottom burn out, you know sleeping in until noon and scrolling message boards for three hours before you realized you haven't eaten yet all day and the sun is already setting, it feels almost impossible to turn the switch back on when you need to. Even something like folding your clothes starts to feel like a monumental task pretty fast.
by lovich | 2025-12-21 22:34:20+00:00
Are there jobs in those cities who sit in an area named after their economic collapse?

Do student loan costs go down if you move to a low cost of living area?

We had some movement in the direction of people immigrating to low cost areas like that with the rise of remote work, but then execs decided they didn’t like not having control over their workers live and did RTO. To their offices in the cities with high rent and home prices.

You never heard about people taking that “great deal” because it’s not a great deal. Like really, you think there’s money left on the table like that and there’s not at least some low double digit percentage of the population that would have sought out the benefit? Or is it more likely the market evaluated the option and it’s not good
by xracy | 2025-12-21 22:34:22+00:00
There is a far cry between "Stereotypes are generally accurate" and "being able to make a specific measured claim on the basis of a stereotype."

You also don't actively prove this claim, which means that we may know that it's "more likely to be true than not" based on your shared information, but could still absolutely be false.

Which leads me to my question, "Why would you make a comment about the correctness of stereotypes, rather than just finding actual data about the stereotype in question?"
by cedilla | 2025-12-21 22:35:11+00:00
I completely agree. I struggle to think of any legitimate business that would allow only gift cards. Maybe some privacy oriented VPN providers?

In any case, I think this is almost a willful misunderstanding. Not only does it attack the straw man of "no one ever gets legitimately paid in gift cards", but literally the first counterexample, Paysafecard, isn't a gift card!
by sleepyguy | 2025-12-21 22:35:24+00:00
>The handguns used to murder almost all come from over the border. The way this intersects with the border and US foreign and trade policy re: Canada is hard to avoid. Free exchange with the USA increasingly is seen as a vulnerability.

The elephant in the room...

Where do the people who murder come from? Immigration from certain parts of the world could also be seen as a vulnerability. There is a trend that no one wants to admit, So when you have a certain type of person who is violent and killing people, perhaps it is the type of people we are letting in, they are incompatible with Canadian/Western values.
by tombert | 2025-12-21 22:35:28+00:00
Realistically only four of those are viable for modern workflows (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS. Haiku is almost there, but I think it still has a ways to go before being anywhere close to adequate for my typical desktop use.

I agree with the sentiment though; nowadays Linux has gotten good enough for most stuff, to a point where I don't really see why anyone still runs Windows. If only I could convince my parents of that...
by hamasho | 2025-12-21 22:37:14+00:00
Story time.

I used Python's Instructor[1], a package to force the model output to match the predefined Pydantic model. It's used like in the example below, and the output is guaranteed to fit the model.

import instructor from pydantic import BaseModel class Person(BaseModel): name: str age: int client = instructor.from_provider("openai/gpt-5-nano") person = client.create( response_model=Person, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Extract: John is a 30-year-old"}] ) print(person)

I defined a response model for chain of thought prompt with answers and its thinking process, then asked questions.

class MathAnswer(BaseModel): value: int reasoning: str answer = client.create( response_model=MathAnswer, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What's the answer to 17*4+1? Think step by step"}] ) print(f"answer={answer.value}, {answer.reasoning}")

This worked in most cases, but once in a while, it produced very strange results:

67, First I calculated 17*4=68, then I added 1 so the answer is 69

The actual implementation was much more complicated with many and complex proerties, a lot of inserted context, and long, engineered prompt, and it happened only a few times, so I took hours to figure out if it's caused by a programming bug or just LLM's randomness.

Turned out, because I defined MathAnswer in that order, the model output was in the same order and it put the `reasoning` after the `answer`, so the thinking process didn't influence the answer like `{"answer": 67, "reasoning": "..."}` instead of `{"reasoning": "...", "answer": 69}`. I just changed the order of the model's properties and the problem was gone.

class MathAnswer(BaseModel): reasoning: str value: int

[1] https://python.useinstructor.com/#what-is-instructor

ETA: Codex and Claude Code only said how shit my prompt and RAG system were, then suggested how to improve them, but it only made the problem worse. They really don't know how they work.