MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-22 18:59:13+00:00
Per lazard, currently, merely 25% green H2 peakers would provide power for as expensive as worst nuclear project in US- Vogtle. So a mere 1/4 mix is as bad as a terribly mismanaged construction project. H2 economics for electricity are non existent. It will be used fo other sectors maybe, like fertilizers
by omneity | 2026-01-22 18:59:43+00:00
I just went through an eerily similar situation where the coding agent was able to muster some pretty advanced math to solve my problem at hand.

But while I was able to understand it enough to steer the conversation, I was utterly unable to make any meaningful change to the code or grasp what it was doing. Unfortunately, unlike in the case you described, chatting with the LLM didn’t cut it as the domain is challenging enough. I’m on a rabbit hunt now for days, picking up the math foundations and writing the code at a slower pace albeit one I can keep up with.

And to be honest it’s incredibly fun. Applied math with a smart, dedicated tutor and the ability to immediately see results and build your intuition is miles ahead of my memories back in uni.
by recursivedoubts | 2026-01-22 18:59:52+00:00
When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system.

The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And, when two wills come into conflict, the stronger simply wins. This is why this self-contradictory position is pushed so hard in our culture.
by Supermancho | 2026-01-22 19:00:17+00:00
Baby Yoda show vs Mandelorian, sure.

Even at the height of popularity, it was never the "Bart" show, it was always the Simpsons.

The specials are largely how people are introduced to Peanuts today, are from shows that are named:

* A Charlie Brown Christmas

* It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

The takeaway is that the character name is more memorable because Charlie Brown is more recognizable due to being better marketed, today.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-22 19:00:22+00:00
man it has nothing to do with American watchers.

the UK Office had fourteen (14) episodes. The US one had 201 episodes.

if you don't lean on things like inter-office romance there is nothing to put on screen.

the jim-pam thing was a direct riff on the tim-lucy interactions in the UK version, they just didn't, you know, have 100+ more episodes to build on it.

hell, you can even see when that ran out of steam in later seasons of the US version and they just start jamming celebrity guest stars in there
by iso1631 | 2026-01-22 19:01:06+00:00
I have very little knowledge of how transistors shuffle ones and zeros out of registers. That doesn't prevent me from using them to solve a problem.

Computing is always abstractions. We moved from plugging to assembly, then to c, then we had languages that managed memory for you -- how on earth can you understand what the compiler should be doing or what it is doing if you don't deal with explicit pointers on a day by day basis.

We bring in libraries when we need code. We don't run our own database, we use something else, and we just do "apt-get install mysql", but then we moved onto "docker run" or perhaps we invoke it with "aws cli". Who knows what teraform actually does when we declare we want a resource.

I was thinking the other day how abstractions like AWS or Docker are similar to LLM. With AWS you just click a couple of buttons and you have a data store, you don't know how to build a database from scratch, you don't need one. Of course "to build a database from scratch you must first create the universe".

Some people still hand-craft assembly code to great benefit, but that vast majority don't need to to solve problems, and they can't.

This musing was in the context of what do we do if/when aws data centres are not available. Our staff are generally incapable of working in a non-aws environment. Something that we have deliberately cultivated for years. AWS outputs are one option, or perhaps we should run a non-aws stack that we fully own and control.

Is relying on LLMs fundamentally any different than relying on AWS, or apt, or java. Is is different from outsourcing? You concentrate on your core competency, which is understanding the problem and delivering a solution, not managing memory or running databases. This comes with risk -- all outsourcing does, and if outsourcing to a single supplier you don't and can't understand is acceptable risk, then is relying on LLMs not?
by spicymaki | 2026-01-22 19:01:33+00:00
I think that our political class has been captured by corporate interests and both parties in the US are approaching supporting the executive class by manipulating their constituents. With social media it has become especially toxic. They have linked every possible issue to identity and now you need to perform some form of ego death to think independently in accordance to your best interests. Few people have the capacity to accomplish that.

We are all mostly voting against our interests. We need to be manipulating the political class to fulfill our needs. That manipulation should be driven by rational discourse informed by scholarly research in addition to respecting the various cultural needs of the society.

This particular situation we are in is grave and needs immediate correction.
by anonymous344 | 2026-01-22 19:01:55+00:00
you seem like you know your stuff, so
adam and eve=first people. only people? we all descent from them.
kain killed abe.
kain went exile.
but somehow kain had built a city.
1. how and why he built a city when all alone. surely the grandchildren didn't follow him far away into his place of living?
2. how he know how to build a city, people in africa still don't know how to build anything than a simple hut.
by banannaise | 2026-01-22 19:02:02+00:00
> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

I've found that this is also true of American engineers, particularly those fresh out of college. So many people have internalized that open curiosity will yield no result at best and direct punishment at worst.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-22 19:02:11+00:00
> They were arguably right. Pre literate peole could memorise vast texts (Homer's work, Australian Aboriginal songlines). Pre Gutenberg, memorising reasonably large texts was common. See, e.g. the book Memory Craft.

> We're becoming increasingly like the Wall E people, too lazy and stupid to do anything without our machines doing it for us, as we offload increasing amounts onto them.

You're right about the first part, wrong about the second part.

Pre-Gutenberg people could memorize huge texts because they didn't have that many texts to begin with. Obtaining a single copy cost as much as supporting a single well-educated human for weeks or months while they copied the text by hand. That doesn't include the cost of all the vellum and paper which also translated to man-weeks of labor. Rereading the same thing over and over again or listening to the same bard tell the same old story was still more interesting than watching wheat grow or spinning fabric, so that's what they did.

We're offloading our brains onto technology because it has always allowed us to function better than before, despite an increasing amount of knowledge and information.

> Yes, it's too early to be sure, but the internet, Google and Wikipedia arguably haven't made the world any better (overall).

I find that to be a crazy opinion. Relative to thirty years ago, quality of life has risen significantly thanks to all three of those technologies (although I'd have a harder time arguing for Wikipedia versus the internet and Google) in quantifiable ways from the lowliest subsistence farmers now receiving real time weather and market updates to all the developed world people with their noses perpetually stuck in their phones.

You'd need some weapons grade rose tinted glasses and nostalgia to not see that.
by gregsadetsky | 2026-01-22 19:02:12+00:00
amazing work!

gemini 3.5 pro reverse engineered it - if you use the code at the following gist, you can jump to any specific lat lng :-)

https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/c4c1a87277063430c26922b...

also, check out https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/?debug=true ..!

---

code below (copy & paste into your devtools, change the lat lng on the last line):

const calib={p1:{pixel:{x:52548,y:64928},geo:{lat:40.75145020893891,lng:-73.9596826628078}},p2:{pixel:{x:40262,y:51982},geo:{lat:40.685498640229675,lng:-73.98074283976926}},p3:{pixel:{x:45916,y:67519},geo:{lat:40.757903901085726,lng:-73.98557060196454}}};function getAffineTransform(){let{p1:e,p2:l,p3:g}=calib,o=e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng);if(0===o)return console.error("Points are collinear, cannot solve."),null;let n=(e.pixel.x*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.pixel.x*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.pixel.x*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng))/o,x=(e.geo.lat*(l.pixel.x-g.pixel.x)-l.geo.lat*(e.pixel.x-g.pixel.x)+g.geo.lat*(e.pixel.x-l.pixel.x))/o,i=(e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng*g.pixel.x-g.geo.lng*l.pixel.x)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*g.pixel.x-g.geo.lng*e.pixel.x)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*l.pixel.x-l.geo.lng*e.pixel.x))/o,t=(e.pixel.y*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.pixel.y*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.pixel.y*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng))/o,p=(e.geo.lat*(l.pixel.y-g.pixel.y)-l.geo.lat*(e.pixel.y-g.pixel.y)+g.geo.lat*(e.pixel.y-l.pixel.y))/o,a=(e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng*g.pixel.y-g.geo.lng*l.pixel.y)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*g.pixel.y-g.geo.lng*e.pixel.y)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*l.pixel.y-l.geo.lng*e.pixel.y))/o;return{Ax:n,Bx:x,Cx:i,Ay:t,By:p,Cy:a}}function jumpToLatLng(e,l){let g=getAffineTransform();if(!g)return;let o=g.Ax*e+g.Bx*l+g.Cx,n=g.Ay*e+g.By*l+g.Cy,x=Math.round(o),i=Math.round(n);console.log(` Jumping to Geo: ${e}, ${l}`),console.log(` Calculated Pixel: ${x}, ${i}`),localStorage.setItem("isometric-nyc-view-state",JSON.stringify({target:[x,i,0],zoom:13.95})),window.location.reload()};
jumpToLatLng(40.757903901085726,-73.98557060196454);
by slekker | 2026-01-22 19:02:35+00:00
The problem is that how do you review code if you don't know what it is supposed to look like? Creativity is not only in the problem solving step but also when implementing it, and letting an LLM do most of it is incredibly dangerous for the future, more so on juniors are gaining experience this way. The software quality will be much worse, and the churn even higher, and I will be in a farm with my chickens
by NAR8789 | 2026-01-22 19:03:15+00:00
I'm curious why you didn't do something like generate new tiles one at a time, but just expand the input area on the sides with already-generated neighbors. Looks like your infill model doesn't really care about tile sizes, and I doubt it really needs full adjacent tiles to match style. Why 2x2 tile inputs rather than say... generate new tiles one at a time, but add 50px of bordering tile on each side that already has a pixel art neighbor?
by 0hw0t | 2026-01-22 19:03:16+00:00
Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.

SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!

Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.

Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.

Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.

As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.

Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-01-22 19:03:19+00:00
Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response.

Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose.

It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice.

And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread.
by rishabhaiover | 2026-01-22 19:03:23+00:00
As a student who has used these tools extensively, I can confirm that AI-assistance in learning does more harm than benefit. The struggle to learn, backtracking from an incorrect assumption and reflection after completing the objective are all short-circuited with agentic tool use. I don't have to say that these tools aren't useful, but I wish they wouldn't sell such an utopian dream of productivity. It's good for some, bad for most.

Earlier, I had to only keep my phone away and not open Instagram while studying. Now, even thinking can be partially offloaded to an automated system.
by jkh99 | 2026-01-22 19:03:25+00:00
I posted about this also on linkedIn. I actually tried to do a bunch of agentic coding in Clojure but found that the parser really got in my way - it continuously fooled the LLM on what line number the errors actually occurred on!

This is why I made nanolang always report line numbers accurately and also have a built-in "trace mode" where, with an environment variable set, it would tell you exactly what line number was producing which C code and which behaviors were being exhibited (state changes). The LLM uses this aggressively for debugging!
by andai | 2026-01-22 19:03:48+00:00
I heard that most papers in a given field are already not adding any value. (Maybe it depends on the field though.)

There seems to be a rule in every field that "99% of everything is crap." I guess AI adds a few more nines to the end of that.

The gems are lost in a sea of slop.

So I see useless output (e.g. crap on the app store) as having negative value, because it takes up time and space and energy that could have been spent on something good.

My point with all this is that it's not a new problem. It's always been about curation. But curation doesn't scale. It already didn't. I don't know what the answer to that looks like.
by feznyng | 2026-01-22 19:03:53+00:00
LSPs rely on a parser to generate an AST for a given language. This parser needs to be error-tolerant because it needs to return usable ASTs despite often parsing incomplete, incorrect code and fast enough to run on every keystroke so it can provide realtime feedback.

Most of the time they rely on their own hand-rolled recursive descent parser. Writing these isn't necessarily hard but time-consuming and tedious especially if you're parsing a large language like C++.

Parser generators like yacc, bison, chumsky, ANTLR etc. can generate a parser for you given a grammar. However these parsers usually don't have the best performance or error reporting characteristics because they are auto-generated. A recursive descent parser is usually faster and because you can customize syntax error messages, easier for an LSP to use to provide good diagnostics.

Tree-sitter is also a parser generator but has better error tolerance properties (not quite as good as hand-written but generally better than prior implementations). Additionally, its incremental meaning it can reuse prior parses to more efficiently create a new AST. Most hand-written parsers are not incremental but are usually still fast enough to be usable in LSPs.

To use tree-sitter you define a grammar in JavaScript that tree-sitter will use to generate a parser in C which you can then use a dynamic or static library in your application.

In your case, this is useful because you can compile down those C libraries to WASM which can run right in the browser and will usually be faster than pure JS (the one catch is serialization overhead between JS and WASM). The problem is that you still need to implement all the language analysis features on top.

A good overview of different parsing techniques: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2020/which_parsing_approach.ht...
LSP spec: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/overvie...
VSCode's guide on LSP features: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/language-extensions/progra...
Tutorial on creating hand-rolled error-tolerant (but NOT incremental) recursive descent parsers: https://matklad.github.io/2023/05/21/resilient-ll-parsing-tu...
Tree-sitter book: https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/
by fsckboy | 2026-01-22 19:04:06+00:00
(i pick mackerel at random)

A female Atlantic mackerel typically lays between 200,000 and 450,000 eggs during a spawning season. However, larger, healthier individuals can sometimes produce up to a million eggs, often in multiple batches over several weeks.

it is the mackerel themselves who consider baby mackerel lives to be industrial in scale. they produce that many in anticipation of consumption. Each foodfish humans consume has already slaughtered untold thousands of other fish to grow themselves to size.
by gogopromptless | 2026-01-22 19:04:24+00:00
Size of your personal corpus is a rough signal of usefulness. If you've been using it a while and you have 500 facts, thats very different from 5000 facts.

My crappy personal system is a telegram channel "Today I Learned" that grows at roughly 5 messages per day. The search is obviously much worse than your tool.

The design of no rewrites for facts storage was an approach I have not seen from any of my friends' agent memory setups, so that difference struck my curiosity for how well its working in practice.
Show HN: Checkout Flow for credit-based billing
by ShreyaChaurasia | 2026-01-22 19:04:29+00:00
Hi HN,

We’ve been working on credit-based billing systems, and one recurring issue we kept running into was how messy credit purchases become once real payments are involved.

Credits are easy when they’re manual or promotional. Things get complicated when customers need to:
- buy credits through a proper checkout,
- receive an invoice,
- complete payment asynchronously,
and only then have credits become usable.

Most teams end up stitching this together manually:
Invoices in one system, payment links in another, wallet balances updated via scripts or cron jobs, and reconciliation handled later.

We built a checkout flow where credit top-ups, invoices, payment links, and wallet state transitions are part of a single workflow:
- an invoice is generated,
- a payment link is created automatically,
- credits stay on hold until payment succeeds,
and are applied immediately once the payment clears.

Docs here if you want to see how the flow works end-to-end: https://docs.flexprice.io/docs/wallet/top-up-wallet

Would love feedback from folks who’ve built usage-based or credit-driven billing, or thoughts on edge cases we should be thinking about.

Happy to answer questions or feel free to join our community : http://bit.ly/4huvkDm
by skybrian | 2026-01-22 19:04:52+00:00
I'm moving all my development to a remote VM so I can use a coding assistant without worrying too much. I use VS Code's "Remote - SSH" plugin to connect.

I'm wondering if that helps. If I "trust" a remote directory, is there an exploit that can get to my laptop?

There's enough complicated machinery that I'm thinking the answer is likely yes, but perhaps this has been vetted.
by indigoabstract | 2026-01-22 19:04:58+00:00
I'm not sure how this is accomplished, but I like the "poetic" translation a lot more than the "optimal" one.

Which reminds me, do you think it's possible that the stories in the Bible are actually mystic symbolism and "veiled truth" (like the sort of stories that you might get in a dream) and people have mistaken it for actual physical history (with which it's obviously incompatible)?

The parables of Jesus come to mind. They weren't meant to be taken literally but to teach, to get a point across.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-22 19:05:16+00:00
The US doesn't have a free market in either health care or electricity generation. An actual free market in solar power would probably result in more or less what we are seeing with the actual highly regulated market in electricity, namely extremely cheap prices for additonal solar energy in the middle of the day when the sun is shining, higher prices for additonal solar energy in the evening when demand is high and the sun has gone down, and some fixed cost to pay for physical electric grid infrastructure that needs maintenance regardless of whether it is being used at any particular moment.

Oil and gas don't buy polticians more than any other industry does, but voters do get particularly angry at politicians when the price they pay for energy suddenly spikes.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-22 19:05:54+00:00
I had some interesting luck with the generic approach to unzip the DOCX/XLSX/ODT/etc, then to the contents recursively apply other filters like XML and JSON formatters/prettifiers.

(My work [1] in this space predated git so it wasn't written as a git diff filter, instead it automated source control. But the same principles could be used in the other direction.)

Not the highest level diffs you could possibly get, but at least for a programmer even ugly XML and JSON diffs were still nice to have over binary diffs.

[1] https://github.com/WorldMaker/musdex
by margalabargala | 2026-01-22 19:05:59+00:00
You absolutely do not want them sharing the excess with neighbors during a power outage, this is how you get dead linemen.

Solar panel grid tied inverters generally will refuse to function if there's no external power coming in.

The benefit from the distributed generation means that if your local area has large loads added you don't necessarily need to upgrade the HVDC lines from the power plant to accommodate.
by order-matters | 2026-01-22 19:06:09+00:00
there is also the unspoken alignment of those people from being of the same age / time period.

humans additionally have a spectacular ability to use absurdity and loose definitions of things in ways that play with this unspoken alignment to communicate other ineffable ideas and/or build community. I'd go as far as to say we play with this unspoken alignment more so than we say exactly what we mean.

I would think this behavior, although often seen in meme culture nowadays, would be highly relevant to religious communication and documentation of the past. I think actually trying to write down an exact meaning is a modern phenomenon and is observed in the over articulation and general structure of "legalese", for which I dont think the bible resembles very much in spirit in any way.