MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goda90 | 2025-12-31 16:04:09+00:00
Supercritical CO2 turbines:
https://energy.wisc.edu/industry/technology-highlights/super...

On a much smaller scale I've been hoping for a small solar powered CO2 compressor to exist so I could use it for mosquito traps. The state of the art for those right now is burning propane for the CO2 combined with a scent emitter for the human smell to attract female mosquitos.
by dcre | 2025-12-31 16:04:49+00:00
I see this response a lot but I think it's self-contradictory. Building faster, understanding faster, refactoring faster — these do allow skilled developers to work on bigger things. When it takes you one minute instead of an hour to find the answer to a question about how something works, of course that lets you build something more complex.

Could you say more about what you think it would look like for LLMs to genuinely help us deal with complexity? I can think of some things: helping us write more and better tests, fewer bugs, helping us get to the right abstractions faster, helping us write glue code so more systems can talk to each other, helping us port things to one stack so we don't have to maintain polyglot piles of stuff (or conversely helping us not worry about picking and choosing the best stuff from every language ecosystem).
by binaryturtle | 2025-12-31 16:05:23+00:00
A square pixel has a 1:1 aspect ratio (width is the same as the height). Any other rectangular pixel with widths different than their heights would be considered "non-square".

F.ex. in case of a "4:3 720x480" frame… a quick test: 720/4=180 and 480/3=160… 180 vs. 160… different results… which means the pixels for this frame are not square, just rectangular. Alternatively 720/480 vs. 4/3 works too, of course.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-31 16:05:36+00:00
> Huh, to what degree is this technology gatekept by battery advances?

Not too much. The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. It would have just been more expensive and heavier.

The bigger issue I believe would have been the lens and tracking capabilities. For the tracking to work you need some pretty good cameras, pretty fast computers, and pretty good object recognition. We are talking about using high speed cameras and doing object detection each frame
by hollow-moe | 2025-12-31 16:05:45+00:00
> If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don’t want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car.

Yet computer education in France has been severely lacking for so long. From middle school to even universities (except the courses computer focused obviously) people aren't taught correctly. Teachers themselves are lost to computers and lectures are bad.

The goal is obviously to have tech illiterate people knowing just enough to use computers for the job but not worrying about the digital autoristarism currently being deployed.
by einshutoin | 2025-12-31 16:05:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently shared `lazy-image`, a Rust-powered Node.js image library meant to be a drop-in replacement for Sharp in serverless environments.

Some of you asked for reproducible benchmarks. So I built a Dockerized test environment with a React frontend to compare them side-by-side.

*Repo:* https://github.com/albert-einshutoin/lazy-image-test

*How to run:*
1. `git clone ...`
2. `docker-compose up --build`
3. Open `http://localhost:3001`

*What it tests:*
- *Zero-Copy Conversion*: Where lazy-image shines (WebP/AVIF generation without resizing).
- *Resize + Convert*: Standard use cases.
- *Advanced Ops*: Where Sharp still wins (blur, crop, etc.) - included for fairness.

The app visualizes processing time (ms) and file size (bytes) for your specific hardware.
I'd love for you to run it and tell me if my claims hold up on your machines!
by mpeg | 2025-12-31 16:06:02+00:00
They use a lot of open source libraries, yes, but I think it's about how much of the end product depends on the OSS tool/library. Studios using unreal engine probably don't use that much critical OSS directly – their licensed software probably does. And the software vendors / big studios do donate to tools they depend on, for instance Epic Games donated $1.2m to Blender
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-12-31 16:06:44+00:00
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.

The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.

The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.

That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.

Other explanations sound like heavy copium to me.
by armchairhacker | 2025-12-31 16:06:49+00:00
I’m more interested in how you’d restrict speech, in a way that isn’t ineffective or corrupted.

Right now I think that free speech, like decentralization, should exist as a safety net. So most people use centralized platforms where bad content (e.g. this) is censored, but the open internet still exists, if only to keep the centralized platforms in line by providing alternatives if they degrade (e.g. if government propaganda gets so bad that it clearly and significantly contradicts people’s beliefs and real-life experiences).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-31 16:06:51+00:00
Last year I needed to get blood work done, some of which may or may not be covered.

It took me two weeks, dozens of phone calls, and multiple "escalations" to learn what would be covered and what the price would be if it wasn't

Totally insane. The kicker is that after all that, the price I was billed wasn't even the price I was given (thankfully it was less though).
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-12-31 16:07:28+00:00
I was thinking more the numeric columns which have pre-built compression mechanisms to handle incrementing columns or long runs of identical values. For sure less total data than the text, but my prior is that the two should perform equivalently on the text, so the better compression on numbers should let duckdb pull ahead.

I had to run a test for myself, and using sqlite2duckdb (no research, first search hit), and using randomly picked shard 1636, the sqlite.gz was 4.9MB, but the duckdb.gz was 3.7MB.

The uncompressed sizes favor sqlite, which does not make sense to me, so not sure if duckdb keeps around more statistics information. Uncompressed sqlite 12.9MB, duckdb 15.5MB
by mort96 | 2025-12-31 16:07:52+00:00
We will unquestionably reach more than twice the CO2 concentration of pre-industrial levels (which was around 280 ppm; we're at 424 ppm now, it'll increase to beyond 560 ppm in most not-super-optimistic projections).

Do you really think it's both feasible and a good idea to release so much O2 and N2 to double the mass of the atmosphere? Or even just increase it by some appreciable fraction?

For the record, the atmosphere is around 5 150 000 000 000 000 metric tons. 5 quintillion kilograms. You're talking about producing metric exatons of gas.

Wikipedia says that there's 300 000 to a million gigatons of nitrogen in the earth's crust; that's 300 teratons to a petaton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen#Occurrence). If you extracted LITERALLY ALL THE NITROGEN IN THE CRUST, converted it to nitrogen gas and released it into the atmosphere, and we use the extremely optimistic 1 petaton estimate, you'd have increased the mass of the atmosphere by roughly 1/5000. That means you'd have decreased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere ... by roughly 1/5000. From 424 ppm to 423.92 ppm.
by maccard | 2025-12-31 16:08:28+00:00
> E.g. if you have a list finding function that returns X?, then if you give it a list of MyObject?, you don't know if you found a null element or if you found nothing.

This is a problem with the signature of the function in the first place. If it's:

template <typename T>
T* FindObject(ListType<T> items, std::function<bool(const T&)> predicate)

Whether T is MyObject or MyObject?, you're still using nullpointers as a sentinel value;

MyObject* Result = FindObject(items, predicate);

The solution is for FindObject to return a result type;

template <typename T>
Result<T&> FindObject(ListType<T> items, std::function<bool(const T&)> predicate)

where the _result_ is responsible for the return value wrapping. Making this not copy is a more advanced exercise that is bordering on impossible (safely) in C++, but Rust and newer languages have no excuse for it
by lunias | 2025-12-31 16:08:57+00:00
Lots of people are calling this fraud, but I don't see it. Philosophically I don't agree. Propaganda? Sure, but no one is being defrauded. The person being served this content is on TikTok scrolling for exactly trash like this. If they weren't then it would be a simple block / don't recommend content like this.

"Gee whiz, I never thought about it that way before now, but that 15 second clip of an AI-generated woman regurgitating platitudes really changed my mind. It was so profound that I sat in stupor and thought to myself, 'Who is this woman?' I clicked on her profile and saw that her name is Anna. Thanks, Anna."

This all goes away with education. Anna doesn't harass you, you must look for Anna.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-12-31 16:09:19+00:00
If we did build it and it became popular, it would quickly be taken over by the same forces that are destroying the current internet. To get good social media sites (and a better internet as well), you would first have to change the economics of the entire system driving these forces. But as is said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism".
by ChildOfChaos | 2025-12-31 16:10:13+00:00
You are 19. Why do you care? Who gives a damn?

The problem when you are 19 is you don't realise that you are young. You are already using language like 'my entire life', your entire life is nothing right now, most of that time you were way too young to even have much of a life apart from being a child.

So my advice is just relax, it doesn't matter. The issue is you think it does and I get you, because that is what everyone thinks at that age, but trust me when you are older you will understand, the issue is not much is going to help you right now and you prob think I am being a dick. But if you somehow remember this post in ten years time, you will be like 'that guy was right'
by dustbunny | 2025-12-31 16:10:29+00:00
You likely won't need to do manual memory management nor think about undefined behavior. If your writing basic c++ to handle the simulation in a game, it's going to be pretty orthodox and these problems likely won't manifest.

The purpose of recommending c++ here is:

If GDScript is too slow, reach directly for C++.

I'm specifically recommending GDScript over C# for ease of use and c++ over C# for performance.
by mnky9800n | 2025-12-31 16:10:29+00:00
Yes.

For example:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0805794105

Peter Kelemen has written a lot of papers on this topic.

Here is a more recent paper that I wrote together with Peter and others currently in review:

https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/9651/

This is more about the mechanics of how the rock breaks to allow fluids to move around.

And here is another paper currently in review that we coauthored about how we know there’s gas moving in the system and therefore hydrogen is being produced:

https://essopenarchive.org/users/543018/articles/1363688-eni...

Tbh I have no idea why we didn’t submit these to arXiv instead of these other preprint servers.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-31 16:10:50+00:00
I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"
by jmward01 | 2025-12-31 16:11:40+00:00
I am not against doing research in this area, please do, it is interesting and likely has many applications but global CO2 removal isn't one of them. Nothing proposed, including this, is within any orders of magnitude of a viable solution. The only solution we have is put less in the air in the first place. This tech looks interesting for transporting CO2 but that doesn't mean it sequesters it and even if sequestration was solved the scales here are massive. If we don't have the political will to reduce the amount going into the air then what makes anyone think we would have the political will to build out some system to capture and sequester? We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.
by anotherpaulg | 2025-12-31 16:12:03+00:00
I like the unconventional approach. A few minutes with GPT raises two issues:

1. We've raised CO2 from 280ppm to 420ppm, about a 50% increase. To dilute it back down would require 50% more total atmosphere. This would also raise the surface air pressure 1.5x.

2. How much heat is trapped is related to the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, not the fraction. So the diluted atmosphere would retain just as much heat.
Show HN: Circuit Artist –Circuit simulator with propagation animation and rewind
by rafinha | 2025-12-31 16:12:20+00:00
Hello,

Circuit Artist is a game about drawing digital circuits as pixel art — like MS Paint, but pixels are wires and little triangles are NANDs. Hit play and the simulation runs in real time. It's fully white-box: every wire's state is visible.

I launched it last year with a unit-delay simulation that ran until convergence on each update. It worked, but I realized it had some fundamental problems:

(i) It hid what was actually happening. Players couldn't tell the difference between a ripple carry adder and a look-ahead adder — everything just resolved instantly.

(ii) Design bugs became "game bugs." When players had non-converging wires (like A = not(A)), the game couldn't explain why or where the error was.

(iii) Layout didn't matter. A NAND on one side of the map would instantly propagate to the opposite side, making spatial decisions meaningless. Unit delay probably works better for schematic-based simulators like Logisim, not a layout-focused game like this.

(iv) Propagation visualization couldn't be added on top of the unit-delay engine — there was no notion of direction or distance.

So I rebuilt the engine with variable-delay event-based simulation using an adaptation of Elmore delay. The delay for each wire depends on distance and fanout — longer wires are slower, higher fanout adds delay, branching wires are faster.

For the implementation: I compute Elmore delay over wire trees. Each pixel has resistance and capacitance, with NAND inputs as nodes to account for fanout. For non-tree wire graphs, I build a Dijkstra-based spanning tree (driver as root) and interpolate for edges outside the tree. I calculate the delay for each node and project it back to the image so every pixel has a distance.

This lets me animate propagation with a glow effect during simulation. The shader knows when each wire was triggered, the current time, and the Elmore distance of each pixel, so it resolves state per-pixel in real time.

On top of that:

- Time rewind: the simulation is now delta-based, so players can freeze and scrub backwards to debug. Super useful for cyclic circuits.

- Layers: since timing matters now, I added up to 3 layers. NANDs only go on the bottom layer, upper layers propagate faster (lower capacitance). Lets you route wires above dense NAND areas.

The game has a campaign for learning from scratch, though it's still incomplete and in progress. I'm working toward Steam Workshop support so people can create their own campaigns to teach different concepts or cover more advanced topics.

GitHub (full source): https://github.com/lets-all-be-stupid-forever/circuit-artist

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139580/Circuit_Artist/
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-31 16:12:47+00:00
Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and doctors are free to charge by the medicine, by the night, and by the minute.

For example, this place does it:

https://surgerycenterok.com/surgery-prices/

Insurance companies do not force the sellers to use complex billing practices, they would benefit from more transparent pricing (since they are seeking to pay less).

The root cause is healthcare is inherently complicated and complex, it has a problem of supply being nowhere near demand, and since prices for things are so high (including liability), there is a lot of cover your ass and fraud prevention going on.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-12-31 16:12:54+00:00
Epic Games has a program called MegaGrants where they give a bunch of money to various projects.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants

For example they gave $250k to the Godot game engine project in 2020.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-31 16:13:42+00:00
“Paying” is a relative term here.

Anyone that works for startups knows that it’s not really “compensation” until it’s cash in your bank account. Until then it’s just a theoretical number on paper, which tends to end up being worth a lot less than originally advertised/hoped.

I’ve lost track of the number of times that someone’s startup got acquired for (insert what sounds like a big number) and everyone is like “wow the employees must all be rich” only to find out later that after preferred cap tables and other terms the employees got very little.

A lot could happen here, but history says “watch this space” on this stock-based comp. Some options on the secondary markets but that only works as long as OpenAI can convince more people to dump money on the burning pile of cash they have going at the moment.
by jstanley | 2025-12-31 16:14:04+00:00
There plainly was intent.

The train operator deliberately drove the train, with passengers on it, to places they knew the passengers didn't want to go, and did not allow them a chance to get out sooner.

If a taxi driver were to do the same thing we would say he kidnapped his passengers.

The fact that trains are operated by big corporations does not absolve them of responsibility. If anything they should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

(I can't believe I had to type this down.)
by wolvoleo | 2025-12-31 16:14:17+00:00
I've used in-ears since they came on the market what 30 years ago and I've never sterilised them :) I just rub the wax off. Also dropped them on the street and reinserted them many times.

I do have some hearing loss but it was from being a live audio technician for a while when I was young. These days I don't go partying without my loops (which are also in-ear but for protection)

And my ears are pretty clean of wax, I have one of those Chinese camera sticks so I can check them myself. Sometimes I scrape some wax out but it's usually not needed.

Anyway n=1 but not everyone is sensitive there.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-12-31 16:14:21+00:00
It's really a shame that the early history of Smalltalk-80 was such that it remained too locked up in licensing and $$ implementations and so didn't get a broader penetration. That and it was about a generation or two ahead of the extant microcomputing hardware at the time, so wasn't going to be shippable in a performant way on a general consumer class machine even by the time the Lisa and Mac shipped in the mid-80s.

I was very excited by Squeak in the late 90s (and even more excited by Self), but it was clear that the time of Smalltalk being able to make any kind of broader splash was done, and Java was where people's attention switched.

Imagine if a consumer focused machine like the Macintosh had shipped, but based fully on Smalltalk, with an authoring environment built on it for "regular people". The closest we got to this was Hypercard.
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-31 16:14:39+00:00
AAA usually goes with AAA-tools and frameworks. So Unity, Unreal Engine or even their own engine. OSS might be used, but for smaller parts or as tools for producing their stuff (like browser, editor, etc.). So while they sometimes donate, there is not much reason to give a big sum to a single project. They might be even donating more overall, but separated on multiple different projects.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-31 16:14:57+00:00
As intrinsically social animals, we have general obligations toward other people that precede our consent. How these play out in practice will be determined by the limitations and conditions of the situation. But in general, such obligations radiate outward based on proximity of relation.

Our first obligations are toward our immediate families. As the human race is essentially a large extended family, the obligations dissipate the further out we go. We do have a general obligation to help those in need, but this obligation is prioritized. In classical texts, this is called the ordo amoris or "order of love" (in the older, more technically accurate terminology, order of charity, where "charity" - from caritas - means willing the good of the other).

Now, to address your comment specifically...

> There's already a lot that the US taxpayer is on the hook for that's a lot less valuable than a best on the next big thing in software, productivity, and warfare.

For example? Whatever the benefits of LLMs, I find this relative exuberance unreasonable.

> It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work,

In someone able-bodied and of sound mind refuses to work, then we don't have an obligation to support someone like that. This is true. In fact, it would be uncharitable to enable their laziness, because it harms the character and virtue of that person. Of course, in practice, if someone you have determined is able to work is found starving and in danger of death, for example, then it is unlikely they are merely lazy. Would a man of sound mind allow himself to starve?

The manner in which we deal with such cases is a prudential matter, not a matter or principle. We need to determine how best to satisfy the principle in the given circumstances, and there is room for debate here.

> it absolutely shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed another country's citizens half a world away.

If there is a humanitarian crisis somewhere in the world, for example, then there is a general obligation of the entire world to help those affected. How that happens, how that is coordinate, is a matter of prudence and implementation detail, as it were. Naturally, several factors enter the equation (proximity, wealth, etc).
by crazygringo | 2025-12-31 16:15:11+00:00
Oof. Sorry it's so insecure.

Anyways, I'm sure you can understand why a political event, where many of them do rely on RFID access badges for certain personnel to enter certain areas, would not want someone with a device that can clone badges.

If you go to a political event like that... just take your actual key. Not a device that spoofs your actual key. What you're proposing is essentially saying you have a legitimate reason for carrying around a lockpicking set, because you use it to enter your apartment when you forget your keys. It's pretty understandable there are high-security places that won't let you in.
by gruez | 2025-12-31 16:15:23+00:00
>Maybe drugs, or these drugs, aren't the most efficient solutions. Shouldn't we direct resources toward more efficient ones?

Turns out all the low hanging fruit have already been picked, so the only "more efficient ones" left are stuff like gene therapy, which are absurdly expensive, but still theoretically cheaper than a lifetime of care. Unsurprisingly the high sticker price draws much backlash from the public and politicians.