MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by holowoodman | 2025-12-16 17:12:28+00:00
No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever.

But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.

Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).

That's why it's 4kEur...

And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-16 17:12:53+00:00
You're taking the meaning of the word "inevitable" too literally.

Something might be "inevitable" in the sense that someone is going to create it at some point whether we like it or not.

Something is also not "inevitable" in the sense that we will be forced to use it or you will not be able to function in society. <-- this is what the author is talking about

We do not need to tolerate being abused by the elites or use their terrible products because they say so. We can just say no.
by danaris | 2025-12-16 17:13:06+00:00
There is a divide here between "is" and "ought".

What "is", right now, leads us to the suggestion of int32_64, which would actually be a good metric to keep track of.

You are right about what "ought" to be, but until and unless we can get there, maybe we can at least base our information on what "is" in the moment, not on what we would like to be the case?
by umanwizard | 2025-12-16 17:13:26+00:00
"Frontend" as used by mainstream compilers is slightly broader than just lexing/parsing.

In typical modern compilers "frontend" is basically everything involving analyzing the source language and producing a compiler-internal IR, so lexing, parsing, semantic analysis and type checking, etc. And "backend" means everything involving producing machine code from the IR, so optimization and instruction selection.

In the context of Rust, rustc is the frontend (and it is already a very big and complicated Rust program, much more complicated than just a Rust lexer/parser would be), and then LLVM (typically bundled with rustc though some distros package them separately) is the backend (and is another very big and complicated C++ program).
by matty22 | 2025-12-16 17:13:43+00:00
If you were gunshy about trying out VR. You'd never even worn a pair before and you wanted to give it a shot. Would you be more willing to spend $300 on a Quest or would you rather spend $3500 on an Apple Vision Pro? Now let's pretend we're in an alternate timeline and the $300 Quest never existed. The only option available to you was the $3500 option. Are you still interested in trying out VR?

MSRP might not be the only factor, but it's pretty damn important. Not a lot of people can "risk" $85,000.
by rolph | 2025-12-16 17:14:11+00:00
we are not the doomed ones

Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was SVP of Firefox from 2004 to July 2005 and then from July until now was the GM of Firefox at Mozilla. He's written a public message today in his first day serving as the new chief executive for Mozilla.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
by bmenrigh | 2025-12-16 17:15:03+00:00
There are so many problems with this article and the previous one it references (How weak passwords and other failings led to catastrophic breach of Ascension).

Specifically, RC4 is a stream cipher. Yet, much of the discussion is around the weakness of NTLM, and NTLM password hashes which use MD4, a hash algorithm. The discussion around offline cracking of NTLM hashes being very fast is correct.

More importantly though, the weakness of NTLM comes from a design of the protocol, not a weakness with MD4. Yes MD4 is weak, but the flaws in NTLM don't stem specifically from MD4.

Dan Goodin's reporting is usually of high quality but he didn't understand the cryptography or the protocols here, and clearly the people he spoke to didn't help him to understand.

EDIT: let me be more clear here. MS is removing RC4 from Kerberos, which is a good thing. But the article seems to confuse various NTLM authentication weaknesses and past hacks with RC4 in Kerberos.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-16 17:15:37+00:00
I know Netflix, Amazon’s Kindle app and DuoLingo have outside links.

Apple and Amazon made a deal years ago where you can buy digital videos within Amazon Prime Video using your Amazon account.

But let’s be real, the only apps making money directly from in app purchases are pay to win games. It came out in Apple vs Epic that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games.

The other companies making money are mostly selling subscriptions to SaaS apps/services that you can use one subscription anywhere and have always been paying outside of the App Store.
by gweinberg | 2025-12-16 17:16:15+00:00
I read the page on Lindsey's paradox, and it's astonishing bullshit. It's well known that with sufficiently insane priors you can come up with stupid conclusions. The page asserts that a Bayesian would accept as reasonable priors that it's equally likely that the probability of child being born male is precisely 0.5 as it is that it has some other value, and also that if it has some other value that all values in the interval from zero to one are equally likely. But nobody on God's green earth would accept those as reasonable values, least of all a Bayesian. A Bayesian would say there's zero chance of it being precisely 0.5, but it is almost certainly really close to 0.5, just like a normal human being would.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-16 17:16:22+00:00
Hello, author here :)

I originally chose to go with axis-aligned blocks and hard axis-aligned normals because I liked the aesthetic. I've since slightly course-corrected; each voxel has bent normals which follow the surface. How much the normals are bent is artist configurable. This has the effect of smoothing out the look of the surface when viewing from a distance, but still gives the distinct blocky look when up close.

In terms of performance, there is a cost to having fully 3D normals per voxel, but it's certainly manageable. There's a lot of other, more expensive, stuff going on.
by overfeed | 2025-12-16 17:16:33+00:00
> I'm sorry but I refuse to believe some unelected, anonymous bureaucrat has my best interests in mind or can even know me anything about me such that I want to allow them to make health decisions for me.

I'm sorry to tell you that this is, but unelected bureaucrats are constantly making health decisions on your behalf. You may not want government bureaucrats, but bureaucrats already work in your employer's HR department, deciding on which insurer to partner with, and with what benefits. They are at your insurance company, doctors office, and hospital administration, negotiating and deciding which procedures and drugs are available to you without ever asking for your opinion. Bureaucrats you didn't vote for infest drug company's research and finance offices, determining the availability and cost of your present and future care. None of these even pretend to act in your interests.

I'd rather have some government bureaucrat preside over all the other predatory bureaucrats. I sure as hell wouldn't be make well-informed decisions in the ER, or after getting a cancer diagnosis. Further, it is impossible to compare provider quality and final costs for elective, cosmetic procedures when I'm under no time pressure or stress.
by deepsun | 2025-12-16 17:16:35+00:00
Naah, I'm pretty sure history can find an example of pretty much anything. Here's another example (just less researched) -- Slavic dispersion in Europe. And I'm 100% sure there a lot of other examples of peaceful expansion or assimilation, because for the most history land was abundant, but shortage of hands to tend to it. There was just no reason to fight (and record it).

It doesn't mean some kings declared that land their own (some declared everything), but they couldn't enforce it. So usually it boiled down to main argument whether something is "yours" -- collecting taxes (aka tribute). As long as someone's can enforce collecting tribute, then they deserve to have the title of "owning" it.

Btw, One of the ways historians determine whether migration was mostly peaceful is by looking at archeological gender structure -- if there's a lot of female immigrants (e.g. Slavic expansion), then they are more likely to be moving by whole families. But if there are few females -- more likely it was invasion (e.g. Huns). Not absolute signal of course, as nothing is in history.
by kraquepype | 2025-12-16 17:16:36+00:00
You seem to be conflating natural beauty and the arts.

Just because something beautiful can be created without emotion, that doesn't mean it's art. It just means something pleasing was created.

We have many species on earth that are "alien" to us - they don't create with emotion, they create things that are beautiful because that's just how it ended up.

Bees don't create hexagonal honeycomb because they feel a certain way, it's just the most efficient way for them to do so. Spider webs are also created for efficacy. Down to the single cell, things are constructed in beautiful ways not for the sake of beauty, but out of evolution.

The earth itself creates things that are absolutely beautiful, but are not art. They are merely the result of chemical and kinetic processes.

The "art" of it all, is how humans interpret it and build upon it, with experience, imagination, free will and emotions.

What you see in the night sky, that is not art. That is nature.

The things that humans are compelled to create under the influence of all this beauty - that is the art.
by thesuitonym | 2025-12-16 17:16:37+00:00
> What’s Firefox target user?

It seems as if you ask Mozilla, the answer would be "Not current Firefox users."

I really don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if Mozilla has defined it internally, which probably leads to a lot of the problems that the browser is facing. Is it the privacy focused individual? They seem to be working very hard against that. Is it the ad-sensitive user? Maybe, but they're not doing a lot to win that crowd over.

It kind of feels like Firefox is not targeted at anyone in particular. But long gone are the days when you can just be an alternative browser.

Maybe the target user is someone who wants to use Firefox, regardless of what that means.
by coldpie | 2025-12-16 17:17:13+00:00
> A piece of software, open source, written in Rust is equivalent to proprietary software from my perspective.

Unlike a project's license, this situation is entirely in your control. Rust is just a programming language like any other. It's pretty trivial to pick up any programming language well enough to be productive in a couple hours. If you need to hack on a project, you go learn whatever environment it uses, accomplish what you need to do, and move on. I've done this with Python, Bash, CMake, C++, JavaScript, CSS, ASM, Perl, weird domain-specific languages, the list goes on. It's fine to like some languages more than others (I'd be thrilled if C++ vanished from the universe), but please drop the drama queen stuff. You look really silly.
by goku12 | 2025-12-16 17:17:28+00:00
Even if the military aircraft could read the ADS-B from the commercial plane, they were flying with their night vision goggles on. It's very unlikely that they would have seen all the instruments and could very well have missed the display. And since the two aircrafts were flying approximately at right angles to each other, the warning may have been degraded. (I'm not very sure about this point though. Needs confirmation.)
by shishy | 2025-12-16 17:17:54+00:00
Hi - the opportunity space page is meant to be broad; a more specific and targeted programme thesis within that is going to come out in the coming months. I should mention that it's not just a call for technical solutions because, as you note, a lot of this is deeply rooted in social systems and requires design solutions (i.e. it's not just building more tech). But that is good feedback!
by nostrademons | 2025-12-16 17:17:54+00:00
Game theory is still inevitable. Its application to humans may be non-obvious.

In particular, the "games" can operate on the level of non-human actors like genes, or memes, or dollars. Several fields generate much more accurate conclusions when you detach yourself from an anthrocentric viewpoint, eg. evolutionary biology was revolutionized by the idea of genes as selfish actors rather than humans trying to pass along their genes; in particular, it explains such concepts as death, sexual selection, and viruses. Capitalism and bureaucracy both make a lot more sense when you give up the idea of them existing for human betterment and instead take the perspective of them existing simply for the purpose of existing (i.e. those organizations that survive are, well, those organizations that survive; there is nothing morally good or bad about them, but the filter that they passed is simply that they did not go bankrupt or get disbanded).

But underneath those, game theory is still fundamental. You can use it to analyze the incentives and selection pressures on the system, whether they are at sub-human (eg. viral, genetic, molecular), human, or super-human (memetic, capitalist, organizational, bureaucratic, or civilizational) scales.
by throwaway613745 | 2025-12-16 17:18:02+00:00
Mozilla for the love of God I do not want “AI features” in the tool I use to do my online banking. Stop this madness.

Nobody is switching away from Firefox because it’s not agentic.

But there might be a small amount of people willing to switch away from Chromium slop browsers BECAUSE IT ISNT.

Why do you think Waterfox and Librewolf leave this crap out?
by w10-1 | 2025-12-16 17:18:09+00:00
Any theory of how people behave works so long as (key) people follow it.

It's not really game theory but economics: the supply curve for nicely contended markets, and transaction costs for everything. Game theory only addresses the information aspects of transaction costs, and translates mostly only for equal power and information (markets).

The more enduring theory is the roof; i.e., it mostly reduces to what team you're on: which mafia don, or cold-war side, or technology you're leveraging for advantage. In this context, signaling matters most: identifying where you stand. As an influencer, the signal is that you're the leading edge, so people should follow you. The betas vie to grow the alpha, and the alpha boosts or cuts betas to retain their role as decider. The roof creates the roles and empowers creatures, not vice-versa.

The character of the roof depends on resources available: what military, economic, spiritual or social threat is wielded (in the cold war, capitalism, religion or culture wars).

The roof itself - the political franchise of the protection racket - is the origin of "civilization". The few escapes from such oppression are legendary and worth emulating, but rare. Still, that's our responsibility: to temper or escape.
by CrazyStat | 2025-12-16 17:18:13+00:00
> Both parties can get 3 times as much money as they did previously.

Increased productivity shifts the supply curve which will (unless demand has zero elasticity, which is unrealistic) lower the market price of the good. So tripling productivity does not triple the amount of revenue per hour worked.

> Why does one party get 10x and the other party get 0.7x?

Because the people purchasing labor (capital) are able to get the labor they need at that price. Automatic weaving machine operators are trainable, and if they were getting paid 3 times what weavers were paid then people would rush into that space, driving down labor prices—in other words, the supply of automatic weaving machine operators has high elasticity. The demand for automatic weaving machine operators (i.e. the supply of factories full of automatic weaving machines) has much lower elasticity, so capital (demand for labor) gets most of the economic surplus.
by stuffn | 2025-12-16 17:18:27+00:00
This is definitely a stallman-esque shitpost.

Casual thinking, as the author implies is necessary, would make you realize all of this was inevitable. The whole reason the tech boom existed, the whole reason the author is typing on what I can only guess is a 2005 T-series, the whole reason the internet made it, the whole reason all of this works, is STRICTLY because they wrenched control from us.

If FOSS was gonna work it would've by now. I love FOSS, but FOSS enthusiasts are so obnoxiously snobby about everything. In 30+ years linux has wrenched all of 1-2% more of the desktop market away from the giants.

This was all inevitable.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-16 17:18:30+00:00
Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus. Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.

So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less than 50% popular support.
by danaris | 2025-12-16 17:18:58+00:00
The monetization of attention was a side effect of TV, not the primary purpose.

TikTok and other current efforts have that monetization as their primary purpose.

The profit-first-everything-else-never approach typical in late-stage capitalism was not inevitable. It is very possible to see the specific turns that led us to this point, and they did not have to happen.
by always_smiling | 2025-12-16 17:18:58+00:00
> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable.

Just objectively false and assumes that the path humans took to allow this is the only path that unfolded.

Much of this tech could have been regulated early on, preventing garbage like short-form slop, from existing.

So in short, none of what you are describing is "inevitable". Someone might come up with it, and others can group together and say: "We aren't doing that, that is awful".
by aanet | 2025-12-16 17:19:07+00:00
Great.

Now let's do the same to AI slop, what many (including Haidt and co., Australia, etc) have done to lessen kids social media usage.

FWIW, I gave up on FB/Twttr crap a while ago... Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with WhatsApp and LI (both big blights) for now.

YMMV
by ghc | 2025-12-16 17:19:13+00:00
New Englander here. Gotten is normal vocabulary. If it's not used in British English, then it's probably a feature of North American English, since most North American linguistic differences are snapshots of common features of 16th-17th century British English that somehow ossified over here.

Edit: It appears my conjecture was correct: https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/on-the-use-of-the-word-gotten/
by petcat | 2025-12-16 17:19:14+00:00
> rather than allowing an aging population to hoard their wealth and shirk their responsibilities.

Middle-class Baby Boomers hoarding their wealth is exactly what we've been teaching them to do for decades. Save save save. I've been hearing it since the 1980s. Social Security is not going to be there for you.

And yet still a large part of them have no meaningful retirement, and no plan.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-16 17:19:15+00:00
At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-16 17:19:29+00:00
We are on a fairly technical thread and me coming here, I expect to see interesting technical arguments and counter-arguments.

You started your comment with "I don't like the language". I can't find any technical or even legal-like argumentation (there is zero legal encumbering for using Rust AFAIK).

Your entire comment is more or less "I dislike Rust".

Question to you: what is the ideal imagined outcome of your comment? Do you believe that the Rust community will collectively disband and apologize for rubbing you the wrong way? Do you expect the Linux kernel to undo their decision to stop flagging Rust as an experiment in its code base?

Genuine question: imagine you had all the power to change something here; what would you change right away? And, much more interestingly: why?

If you respond, can we stick to technical argumentation? "I don't like X" is not informative for any future reader. Maybe expand on your multiple levels of disagreement with Rust?
by bdcs | 2025-12-16 17:19:34+00:00
Looking to the Chinese market is insightful, IMO. There's one platform for a luxury sedan, and it gets ~200mi on EV mode (~100MPGe) and then ~400mi on gas. It works out to about 70mpg purely on gas. I'm not sure how it's so high, but I'm guessing a combination of low drag (Cd), efficient small turbocharged engine (you really only need enough power maintain high speed, not accelerate up to it), and lots of regen braking.

BYD and Geely have similar systems. Their ICE are around 47% thermal efficiency so like ~double what you'd expect in a pure ICE car + regen and other bonuses.

https://carnewschina.com/2025/08/02/im-motors-launches-stell...